ECOLOGY ECONOMIST

Sundarlal Bahuguna was the bridge between our freedom struggle and today’s ecology movement

- VANDANA SHIVA

I first met Sundarlal Bahuguna at his ashram in Silyara village, after I volunteered for the Chipko movement.

It was in the early 1970s when I was preparing to leave home for Canada to pursue a PhD in quantum theory. As the daughter of a forest officer, I had grown up in the Himalayan forests, and before leaving, I wanted to go on a short trek to a favourite forest and take the memory with me.

It was a dense oak forest in the hills between Chamba and Mussoorie, and it had a forest house above a stream. During my trek, I found that the oak forest was nearly gone, and the stream it birthed had been reduced to a trickle. I felt as if I had lost a part of me. The forests and streams had shaped me and made me who I was.

To return to Delhi, I waited for a bus near a roadside Dhaba at Chamba in Garhwal. The chaiwala and I struck up a conversation, and I told him how sad and painful it was to see the woods disappear. “Now there is hope, though,” he replied. “Chipko has started.” And that was how I first heard of the movement. I heard of women stopping logging in Reni and other villages. I heard of Sundarlal Bahuguna.

I had to catch my flight to Canada and join the university, but I vowed to return, find “Chipko”, and volunteer for the movement during my summer and winter vacations.

The first time I came home, I went to the Silyara ashram that Bahuguna and his wife, Bimla, had founded. Since that day, he has been teaching me and my generation about how nature’s economy is the real economy that supports all economies, including the market economy.