Reclaiming the Forest: How India's Ancient Environmental Wisdom Can Shape Modern Governance
In 1973, women of the Garhwal Himalayas wrapped their arms around trees marked for logging. Their bodies became shields - ‘We will sacrifice our lives, but those trees can’t go’. Their actions were more than protest or resistance – but a reawakening of India’s centuries-old consciousness that human and nature are a sacred, inseparable whole. Chipko — "to embrace"— responded to the axe of the loggers which had devastated their home into landslides, disappearing streams and arduous walks for water and fuel with a knowledge that rejected the dichotomies of development and protection as a mistaken paradigm that understands neither human nor nature. What these women knew intuitively was what Western science would spend decades confirming: cut the Himalayan forests and hundreds of miles away, Bengal floods. Life operates as one body.
As India faces escalating pressures of development, environmental degradation and energy security, its power to respond lies in reintegrating the knowledge systems and traditions that were once the beating heart of its thriving civilisation. The Atharvaveda – ‘the knowledge storehouse of the procedures of daily life’ declares “Mata Bhumih Putroham Prithivyah” – ‘The Earth is my mother, I am her son’. This is no poetry – but a way of knowing that gives us a governance paradigm that actually works. Take the van panchayats of Uttarakhand – villages collectively managing harvest rights – that regulated grazing and protected regeneration zones in a model of community forest governance. These systems were built on principles of collective ownership, seasonal regulation based on ecological cycles and intergenerational equity. They evolved through generations of empirical observation and adaptation, from locals who knew their very bodies were built of the soil and food of the land.
The systems-thinking inherent in these knowledge traditions has already shown its efficacy even in modern India’s developmental context. One such example is South India’s ancient irrigation knowledge in the form of cascade systems – intricate networks of tanks and channels that sustained agriculture through 8-month dry seasons by capturing every drop of monsoon rain and distributing it across elevations. In the 1980’s, the local community of Rajasthan’s Alwar district began rebuilding hundreds of johads (earthen check dams) to recharge aquifers that kept wells flowing year-round. The results were dramatic: villages previously dependent on water tankers achieved water security, agricultural productivity increased with reliable irrigation, and migration from villages declined as livelihoods stabilised. The five seasonal rivers became a perennial source of water not through invasive and destructive damming but traditional infrastructure requiring minimal inputs.
The ingenuity of these systems is often missed by the models of Western science because of a misunderstanding of the nature of technology in the first place – these traditions emerged out of a culture that recognised ‘dharma’ - the way of all things, with human activity as a relationship with life. In this tradition, environmental degradation is not an externality to be managed but a violation of the dharmic order itself – the disbalance of the mutuality and reciprocity that is inherent in life. Attention and reverence is as intrinsic in seeing what an appropriate practice is as much as scientific analysis and investigation. The Arthashastra and Manusmriti – seminal texts on statecraft and ancient social, ethical and legal codes maintained violation of natural order as ‘adharma’ – sin, introduced fines and punishment for cutting trees without necessity, differentiated between commodity forests and sacred forests and outlined detailed rules from wildlife protection to resource governance. In
India’s traditional culture, science was always an expression of devotion towards one’s environment, not control.
Ancient India’s wisdom built commonality and reciprocity into every level of relationship – gramdan lands, grazing commons and forest areas were managed through locally-evolved rules, and village councils directed seasonal closure and protection. In the gramdan model of local governance that lives on in modern gram sabhas - communities were self-governed, self-reliable and
self-responsible. The environmental degradation that India faces today – rapid soil erosion, mass crop failure, groundwater depletion, is still framed in the dichotomy of developmental needs vs environmental needs that its own ancient traditions squarely rejected. It is the false dichotomy that came on the wings of a colonisation which first separated people from their land, then painted them as the enemies of nature to justify a patronising policy of total state ownership of resources.
India’s forests demonstrate the battleground of this colonial developmental paradigm – when the East India Company marched onto the shores of Bharat – it began a campaign of large-scale timber extraction for a ship-building empire that would rule the world. The Forest Act of 1865 set the legal infrastructure for a pervasive model where nature as life died and nature as profit was born – traditional practices like shifting cultivation to allow the land to rest were banned and replaced with heavy monoculture plantations replacing diverse forests, areas not under plough were deemed ‘wastelands’ and thus exploitable, the state declared a monopoly over forests and forest dwelling communities were criminalised making traditional rights holders ‘encroachers’ on their own lands. Water systems suffered the same death - Punjab and Sindh were devastated by water logging and salinity as traditional water communities lost authority. The British couldn’t profit from community tanks - so they got rid of them. Between 1800 and 1947, Madras saw the decline of its irrigated area from 40% to 12%. The death of true relationship with nature marched hand in hand with the death of people’s relationship with each other – as the van panchayats were marginalised by colonial bureaucracy, new intermediaries created patron-client relations and people became dependents of the state, rather than each other’s keepers.
This state-led control framework continues to permeate India’s approach to environmental governance, much like the rest of the world that has learnt its modern economics from the West’s developmental framework. Park nationalisation policies aimed at protection of land in the 70’s displaced indigenous communities and tribes and severed them from traditional management – under the notion that environmental stewardship is the monopoly of the state. Yet modern India has demonstrated a remarkable difference in outcomes in models of community environmental governance whose stewardship has been based on spiritual unity with land. Take India’s Sacred Groves – ancient forests protected through cultural paradigms rather than legal fences. For centuries these groves have been preserved as dwelling places of deities, serving as rich genetic reservoirs for plant and animal species that have gone extinct elsewhere. These biodiversity hotspots exist because local communities manage their land through cultural meaning and deep involvement - rather than the cold technocratic hand that sees land as utility, not life system. The simplistic narrative of ‘exploit or protect’ misses the nuances of how deeply human life is embedded in the flourishing of its environment. In community ownership models, this balance is a lived experience, not a top-down regulatory directive.
These examples point to a simple truth: environmental governance is not about control – it is about relationship. The challenge for a nation of 1.4 billion is for wisdom to become practical reality that can meet the needs of a rising Bharat. Precedent has already been set: the Forest Rights Act of
2006 was a paradigm shift on paper, recognising community forest rights and requiring community consent for large project clearance. But implementation has barely reached 5% for eligible communities and millions of claims remain pending as forest bureaucracies, institutionally committed to centralised control, have resisted genuine devolution to gram sabhas. A fundamental shift in values would recognise that placing management authority with those who have the most intimate knowledge of their ecosystems and the greatest stake in its survival is common sense, for environmental protection should be an investment in livelihood, not power. Reviving van panchayat models by giving communities binding authority over extraction decisions in their forests is the only sustainable way for developmental needs of the country to remain in harmony with and within the limits of local ecologies.
Integration of traditional knowledge in district planning should be mandated, with water and agricultural management incorporating indigenous practices specific to each geography. The loss of these knowledge systems would cripple generations to come, and where their efficacy has been shown they must become foundations for how we organise our activities in nature. This is no replacement for modern science but a new level of its implementation - that pays attention to the knowledge that has been refined over centuries of community practice, matching specific rainfall patterns and soil types in each locality - a much longer scientific trial period than that of any industrial solutions. Modern technology can be a platform for the scaling, implementation and efficiency of these systems, allowing modern India to evolve rooted in the authenticity and ingenuity of its culture.
Remaining colonial paradigms that classified 55+ million hectares of land as ‘wasteland’ must be shed, instead turning these areas to regeneration zones that could become livelihoods for rural communities. These lands once classified as unproductive were blind to the logic that kept Indian agriculture sustainable for millennia before the Green revolution and intensive farming depleted soils - for land that is alive, rest isn’t idleness, it is regeneration. Granting rights to local communities to use traditional rotation practices could stimulate a wave of rural regeneration, self-sufficiency and agricultural abundance.
The power of reviving India’s ancient ecological knowledge in its governance framework goes beyond better environmental outcomes - it will begin recalibrating a social structure where poverty goes hand in hand with lack of self-sufficiency. India’s great privilege is that this knowledge is still alive and practiced - and requires only the intellectual courage of its politicians to become an entirely different way of organising community and society as extensions of the abundance of their lands and waters, not dependents of a developmental policy that distributes the crumbs of exploiting the lands they once thrived off themselves. The question is not about a return to the past - but whether governance can embody the same principles that once made these ancient practices work - local knowledge, collective ownership, intergenerational thinking and the recognition that human and ecological health is inseparable.
For the women who embraced trees in the Garhwal Himalayas, they were protecting not just forests but a way of knowing - the understanding that to destroy the forest is to destroy yourself. India’s governance can either continue colonial extraction wearing a modern face, or revive the consciousness that one sustained one of the world’s great civilizations. The women of Chipko showed which path leads to survival. The question is whether India’s institutions have the courage to follow - and reclaim India’s place as a model of civilization for the new world.
