The images were evocative, exotic and intriguing. Gandhian, non-violent and extremely moving. Deep in the Himalayan mountains of Uttar Pradesh, the poor women of Reni village, led by Gaura Devi, were giving the government an environmental lecture. This was 1974 -- at a time when hardly anyone had heard about the importance of the environment. And, to boot, the women were telling the government that it could cut the forests only over their dead bodies. They would hug the trees to protect them from the axe.

Officialdom was totally confused. Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, the then chief minister of the state, himself a mountain man, had rushed to set up a committee to look into the scientific validity of the rustic claims. The committee had supported the villagers.

For journalists like me who came to espouse the Chipko cause, the women of Reni had many subtle messages. And incredibly important ones. They were saying loud and clear that they were not greenies of the western kind. For them the environment was much more than pretty trees and tigers. Their cause had entirely to do with themselves. Their own lives were so intertwined with the existence of trees that their very culture and survival was at stake without them.

Just two years before the Reni protest, I had heard prime minister Indira Gandhi tell the world's first international environment conference in Stockholm that "poverty is the biggest polluter". In other words, that poor countries must concentrate on becoming rich before they could start caring about their environment. But here in Reni the poor women were saying that when economic development comes with environmental destruction, it leaves them even more impoverished. That in poor countries, environmental destruction and social injustice are two sides of the same coin.

The powerful social message of Chipko galvanised the existing civil society in India working with poor tribals, women and other marginalised groups like those displaced by dams to incorporate the environmental cause within their own work. It was not ecology but socioecology at work.

As there were hardly any environmental movements in the entire developing world in the '70s, the Chipko movement stood out, attracting worldwide attention. Adding to the global green cause with the argument that the poor and poor nations, too, must be careful to take care of their environment. That environment and development must go hand in hand. It began to force Third World intellectuals overwhelmed by the western economic success to think afresh. By the late '80s Norway's prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland was to run with the humble message of Reni women worldwide -- sustainable development. And it was to be endorsed by all nations at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, some 20 years after Stockholm.

The Chipko movement itself was never an organised protest. It was largely a series of discrete protests by separate Himalayan villages like Reni, Gopeshwar and Dungari-Paitoli. In some cases it was villagers fighting the government and in some cases it was village women fighting their men who would rather cut the trees and see some money without worrying where the firewood would come from. But this amorphousness of the movement was given a unified vision and leadership by the Gandhian social worker, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, a resident of Gopeshwar, who had seen trees disappear, local village industries erode, and women's work burden go up.

Bhatt worked closely with the village women and encouraged them to assert their environmental rights. He organised them to take up aforestation work in the degraded Alakananda Valley. "How many trees are you going to leave behind for your daughter-in-law," he would repeatedly ask the elder women trudging along the mountain slopes. A question that still needs to be asked in thousands of villages.

Anil Agarwal is director, Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi.

Sunderlal Bahuguna
If work on the Tehri hydel project in the Tehri Garhwal region in Uttar Pradesh has not made much headway, it is largely because of this man's anti-dam campaign. For him, the struggle has a mystical dimension, the thought that the Ganga could be dammed hurts his religious sentiments.

But long before he undertook his marathon fasts to save those displaced by the project, he was part of the Chipko movement, walking barefoot from village to village, mobilising public opinion. He travelled round the year, covering even Nepal and Bhutan.

On behalf of the Save Himalaya Movement, he is currently fighting for some 2,000 school- children who have to travel a distance of 44 km each day since their schools have been shifted from Tehri to New Tehri.