Inspired by Chipko movement, students call for ecofeminist climate activism

Classical Indian music trickled through Faculty Glade where more than a dozen students, faculty members and Berkeley residents gathered Friday for a midday rally. 

Passing students paused to admire red and orange threads wrapped around the trunks of redwoods. 

The threads, known as “rakhis,”are traditionally symbols of commitmentand protection tied around the wrists of family members. However, these sacred threads symbolize a commitment to environmental preservation and grassroots mobilization. 

“This protest and this demonstration is an honoring of the different communities of color that continue to resist environmental injustices, especially in the face of Trump’s current executive orders,”said Shreya Chaudhuri, who alongside co-organizer Keshwanth Puligulla, runs the Student Environmental Resource Center’s Decolonial Environmental Network. 

This rally comes amid a wave of student actions against the Trump administration — including the mid-April protest against threats to higher education funding, and a march through campus against the cuts to the National Institutes of Health. 

Recent executive orders that have been opposed nationally by environmental activists include directives to reduce National Park staffing and removing protections for national forest land. 

Friday’s rally featured poetry readings, a tree-hugging demonstration, speeches by organizers and the display of a banner reading, “cut carbon, not forests.”

The organizers were inspired by the historical Chipko movement, which stems back to an act of resistance in Uttarakhand, India, during the 1970s. Tribal women prevented the removal of a local tree grove near a commercial logging company by spending months hugging the trees to protect them. 

Considered one of the primary actions of the ecofeminism movement, the success of this act inspired the modern Chipko movement of nonviolent environmental action. The name “chipko” means to hug or cling to, invoking the term “tree-huggers.”   

“One of the things that we really wanted to highlight with this event, especially with tying the fabric around the trees, was commitment that lasts beyond the two hours that we’re here for,” Puligulla said. “Something that can continue even past this semester and next semester.” 

Puligulla added that the rally was meant to inform students of the lack of environmental resources centered on BIPOC and Indigenous practices present on campus. 

Chaudhuri and Puligulla teach a Decolonizing Environmentalism DeCal course that aims to offer students an understanding of Indigenous environmental history to better inform future environmentalist solutions.

“We really want to make sure that students have those resources available to them, especially with the current climate and the threat of those resources going away,” Puligulla said.