Chipko@50: A Legacy Scorned, The Telegraph

On the 27th of March 1973, a group of peasants in Mandal, a village in the upper Alakananda Valley, stopped a group of commercial loggers from felling a patch of ash trees by threatening them to hug them. These innovatively non-violent methods used in Mandal were emulated by villages in other parts of the Uttarakhand Himalaya, likewise seeking to protest forests in their locality.

It is now fifty years since the birth of what we know as the Chipko Andolan. Chipko was followed by a ...