Vandana Shiva, born on November 5, 1952, was trained as a theoretical physicist. Before leaving for Canada to pursue her PhD in the foundations of quantum theory, she decided to visit the places from her childhood in the Himalayas. She was shocked to see that the forests and trees had disappeared, and oak trees had been cut down, with a rush to build dams and roads everywhere. She was traumatised but was able to recover from it when she joined the Chipko movement as a volunteer. Every time she visited India on holiday between 1974 and 1981, she became part of this movement in Tehri Garhwal, led by Sundarlal Bahuguna. It was in 1981 that the Indian government recognised the wisdom of the Chipko movement – the primary products of the forest are soil, water, and pure air, not timber, resin, and revenue. The government also banned logging in the Himalayas above one thousand metres. She was a child of the mountains, and it was the Chipko movement that awakened her ecological consciousness. With all humility, she declared that she studied ecology at Chipko University and that ordinary peasant women were her teachers.
Wangari Maathai, from Kenya, also recalled a childhood marked by extensive deforestation, like Vandana Shiva's. In her Nobel Lecture delivered in Oslo on December 10, 2004, she discussed these early experiences with nature. Her inspiration partly stems from her childhood observations of nature in rural Kenya. Her perspective has been shaped and enriched by her formal education across Kenya, the United States and Germany. Growing up, she saw forests being cleared and replaced by commercial plantations, leading to a loss of local biodiversity and impairing the forests' capacity to conserve water. She and her volunteers in the Green Belt Movement have planted more than 51 million trees. Like Vandana Shiva, she has emphasised the importance of women in addressing deforestation-related issues. She states that women are usually the first to become aware of environmental damage as resources become scarce, and they are unable to sustain their families.
Today’s Hindu featured an article about the Green India Mission (GIM), which aims to protect, restore, and enhance India’s forest cover as a key strategy to combat climate change and promote sustainable development. The authors, C.K. Mishra, former Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, and Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and Suryaprabha Sadasivan, Senior Vice President at Chase Advisors, recommend that India’s renewed Green India Mission aims to restore 25 million hectares of degraded land by 2030, linking forest growth with climate goals. The real challenge lies in ensuring ecological restoration that involves communities, local expertise, and site-specific planting. Forests, the article reminds us, are not just environmental assets but India’s future capital for resilience and sustainability.
As an academic deeply aware of the need to raise awareness about the importance of trees and climate change among faculty and students, I propose that universities and colleges take steps to develop campus forests within available space and work with local communities to raise awareness and partner with resident associations to plant more trees in the immediate neighbourhood of the campus. Let’s create more tree huggers than tree cutters.
References
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2004/maathai/lecture/
Shiva, Vandana. The Vandana Shiva Reader. Foreword by Wendell Berry, University Press of Kentucky, 2014.
Mishra, C. K., and Suryaprabha Sadasivan. “India’s Forests Hold the Future.” The Hindu, 5 Nov. 2025, https://www.thehindu.com.
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