Environmentalism

The modern environmental movement in India is perhaps the most robust and diverse outside the West and was launched a decade or more before similar movements in Asia.59 Although the foundations of it were laid by the

The doyen of Indian environmental history, Ramachandra Guha, observes that since the strongest forces of environmental destruction lie not in premodern societies nor in religions – whatever they may say or do – it follows that the relationship between religion and environmentalism will be tested only after industrialization has proceeded.

Policy was weakening at exactly the time that scientific concerns about the impact of deforestation on global warming were multiplying. During the 1990s, and especially from the beginning of the twenty-first century, policymakers had come to worry about deforestation in the Amazon mainly because of the way that it directly released large amounts of