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searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds.

This is the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Viv Jones.

Today we head to the Indian Himalayas, where in the 1970s, rural women started a powerful movement to stop deforestation.

I am a child of the Himalaya. I grew up in the forests of the Himalaya. My father was a forest

conservator. I was leaving for Canada to do my PhD. I wanted to carry a bit of the forests with me. I had rushed

off to the Himalaya to do a little trick.

Environmentalist Dr Vandenashiva was a young student when she first heard about the Chippko movement.

I went to visit this familiar oak forest and a stream that flew from it,

and the oak forest was gone. And was disturbed I felt like part of me had got

amputated I was waiting for a Chai at a T-shop on the roadside waiting for the bus. The Chai Wala says to me after I told him about the pain I was feeling.

He said, but now there is hope because Chippko has started and I asked him what's Chippko and he told me women had started a movement to say they will not let the loggers cut the trees. They will hug the trees.

Chippko was a social and ecological movement. It was started in 1973 and when Vandina made

her trek a few years later, it was already spreading quickly from village to village through the Indian Himalayas.

The villages relied on local forests for a subsistence livelihood, so when government-backed companies

began logging in the region, they took them on. The movement got its name from its trademark tactic of hugging the trees.

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