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Sundarlal Bahuguna
Sundarlal Bahuguna (born 1927[1]) is an Indian environmentalist[2] known for his leadership of the Chipko movement,[3] which was one of the world's first major environmental movements.[4]
Sundarlal Bahuguna was born in 1927 in a village named Marava in the princely state of Tehri Garhwal. His father was a forest officer who died young and his mother worked hard to feed her family.[1] Bahuguna, against the wishes of him family members,[1] joined the Indian independence movement at the age of 13[5] after coming into the contact of Gandhian freedom fighter Dev Suman. It was Suman through whom Bahuguna became familiar with Gandhian philosophy. At the age of seventeen, Bahuguna was imprisoned for approximately five months. After being released from prison for health reason, he was placed on police watchlist. At the age of eighteen, he decided to go to Lahore where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree. During this time, he lived in poverty, faced police harassment and studied Gandhi's writings. In 1947, he returned to his native home, entered politics on a full-time basis[1] and became Congress Secretary of Uttar Pradesh in 1947. In 1954, he married Bimla Behn.[5]
In 1978-79, Bahuguna organized a movement against logging in the Himalayan region. He went on a hunger strike and was imprisoned.[6] Sundarlal Bahuguna helped bring the movement to prominence through a 5,000 kilometer trans-Himalaya footmarch in 1981-83.[7] He walked long distance across the Himayas from northwestern Kashmir to northeastern Kohima, through the desert of the Indian state Rajasthan and through the rain forests of the Western Ghats. Everywhere Bahuguna traveled, he activated the local population to campaign against the destruction of their forests.[8] He met the then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi. The meeting resulted in green-felling ban by Gandhi.[7] Bahuguna was inspired by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and modeled his action on Gandhian ideas about building communities in which people bound themselves into an organic whole.[9]
Bahuguna still lives on the banks of the Bhagirathi River and opposed the construction of the Tehri dam out of the fear it will displace many people and could be an ecological disaster.[4]
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Thomas Weber, Gandhi as disciple and mentor, pp 184, Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 9780521842303
- ↑ `My fight is to save the Himalayas' The Hindu
- ↑ Rosi Braidotti, Ewa Charkiewicz-Pluta, Ewa Charkiewicz, Sabine Hausler, Saskia Wieringa, Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development, pp 85, Zed Books, 1993, ISBN 9781856491846
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Earth Heroes Sanctuarycub.com
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Vandana Shiva, Consciousness and Survival, pp 70, Zed Books, 1988, ISBN 0862328233
- ↑ Roger S. Gottlieb, Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology, pp 179, Oxford University Press US, 2006, ISBN 9780195178722
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Chipko Movement, India International Institute for Sustainable Development
- ↑ Ponna Wignaraja, Akmal Hussain, The Challenge in South Asia, pp 85, United Nations University Press, 1989, ISBN 9780803996038
- ↑ Ananda M Pandiri, Dennis Dalton, A Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography on Mahatma Gandhi, pp vii, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007, ISBN 9780313302176
