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NON-VIOLENT direct action in defence of the environment is not entirely
a holiday pursuit for relatively well-heeled First World rebels. The Chipko
movement in Northern India – chipko translates roughly as ‘to hug’ – has
for decades protected forests against indiscriminate cutting.

In the years after independence in 1947, several of Gandhi’s followers
founded ashrams in Uttar Pradesh, Himalaya, promoting female education and
rural selfsufficiency. By the 1960s overcutting of the trees for cattle
fodder, and the Indian government policy of replanting with inappropriate
single species only, had led to serious economic and erosion problems.

In 1973 a confrontation over the allocation of trees to distant industry
instead of local Gandhian woodworking cooperatives erupted into nonviolent
action. In Thomas Weber’s account: ‘Twenty-seven women and little girls
rushed after the labourers . . . The matronly Gaura Devi pushed herself
forward, in front of the gun, and challenged the men to shoot her . . .
She compared the forest with her mother’s home.’ The trees were not cut.

In 1978 hundreds of women pledged to save trees, at the cost of their
own lives if necessary. A forest officer protested that the forests bore
‘resin, timber and foreign exchange’. The women replied, ‘What do the forests
bear? Soil, water and pure air! Soil, water and pure air are the very basis
of life!’ Villagers pursued loggers for days, hugging any tree they threat
ened to cut.

The campaign has gained a measure of government protection for the trees.
It now faces difficult social and political questions. The women need new
forests for firewood and fodder. The village men want fruit trees for cash
income. On occasions the women have disrupted development deals the government
made with the men, and have even uprooted government replanting and replaced
it with their own saplings.

Other environmental protests have also shown more wit and style than
Earth First!’s tree-spikers.

In Australia in 1986 dozens of people objecting to the clearing of primeval
forests buried themselves up to the neck in the loggers’ roadways and stopped
all movement.

Protesters against the building of a new airport at Narita near Tokyo
constructed two towers obstructing the projected runways. They registered
these to a limited company with shareholders all over the world. Under Japanese
law the government should contact every shareholder before expropriating
the company’s property.

On at least one occasion the farmers taking part in the Narita protest
threw the contrast between city and country ways into sharp relief. When
police were due to remove protesters from the towers, students confronted
them with crash helmets and baseball bats. The farmers covered themselves
in manure and dared the police to come near them.

For the whole of the 1970s the peasant farmers of the Larzac plateau
in central France staged imaginative – and ultimately successful – protests
against their land being taken over by the Army. They occupied and rebuilt
farms taken by the Army. They got the cheese they produced there recognised
officially as an ‘appellation controlee’. When the authorities withdrew
telephone services from the plateau they built their own. The most striking
image of their action is the occasion when they drove a flock of sheep to
graze on the Champs de Mars beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris: if the God
of War wanted their land, they would have to take his.

Further reading Hugging the Trees by Thomas Weber, Penguin 1988.