Hindu Dharmic Ecology

Historical development

The tradition’s oldest institutions are the sacred groves protected across India for centuries, and the Bishnoi community of Rajasthan. Its fifteenth-century founder, Jambheshwar, forbade cutting green trees and killing animals. In 1730, 363 Bishnoi died defending khejri trees.

Gandhi is the modern source, through his constructive programme, his village economy and his criticism of industrial civilisation in Hind Swaraj (1909). The Chipko movement of the 1970s drew on both. In it, Himalayan villagers, many of them women, hugged trees to stop logging. Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive (1988) joined Chipko to ecofeminism and the criticism of development, and Anil Agarwal’s Centre for Science and Environment joined it to policy.

Scholarship from the 1990s organised the sources, including Christopher Key Chapple and Mary Evelyn Tucker’s Hinduism and Ecology (2000) and the work of O. P. Dwivedi and Vasudha Narayanan. The campaigns to clean the Ganga, and the Uttarakhand High Court’s ruling in 2017 that the Ganga and the Yamuna are legal persons, later stayed, carry the sacred-river tradition into law.

Principal claims

• The divine is present throughout nature. Rivers, trees, mountains and animals are sacred and should be revered, not merely used.
• Dharma includes duties to the earth and to all creatures, and ahimsa extends beyond humans.
• Simple living and few wants are spiritual ideals and ecological necessities.
• The proper scale for human life is the village and the local economy, not industrial development.
• Women and the poor who depend directly on nature are its first protectors. This is the reading of Chipko and of ecofeminism.

Policy implications

The tradition supports protecting sacred groves, rivers and forests, legal personhood for rivers and community rights to forests. It favours organic farming, seed saving and traditional agriculture. It supports cow protection and animal welfare, although the political uses of cow protection are contested. It wants village-level, decentralised development, limits on dams and industrial projects on sacred and inhabited land, and Gandhian economics of sufficiency and self-reliance.

Internal disagreements

Adherents disagree about the gap between textual ideals and the pollution of sacred rivers. Hindu nationalism has taken up cow protection and sacred geography for its own politics, and most ecological thinkers in the tradition reject that use. Some question whether Gandhian localism fits India’s need for development. Dalit and feminist scholars ask whether the tradition’s hierarchies, caste above all, can be separated from its ecology.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics note the gap between reverence and practice: the Ganga is among the most polluted rivers in the world. Some argue that “Hindu ecology” is a modern invention, and others warn of its nationalist uses. Dalit critics observe that traditions of sacred nature have coexisted with caste rules that shut people out of land and water. Development economists dispute Gandhian localism.

Supporters argue that the sources are deep and genuine, and that the movements, Chipko above all, have achieved real things.

Relationships to other traditions

Hindu dharmic ecology is the root of Gandhian economics, and through it of appropriate technology and much degrowth thought. Through Shiva it is a source of ecofeminism. It is a close relative of Buddhist and Jain ethics on ahimsa, and a partner of food sovereignty and of eco-spirituality that treats nature as sacred. Deep ecologists drew on it as well. It stands against industrial development and against turning nature into a commodity.