In a thoroughly readable post, Aviram takes us on a journey through time :from the earliest conservation movements in India to the Appiko Chaluvali movement in Uttara Kannada district in present day Karnataka:

Long before Al Gore began sharing the inconvenient truth about the environment, villagers in India understood it and were performing their own form of environmental activism. About 276 years ago, a group of villagers in India were protecting their forests from felling. The story begins with Amrita Devi, a woman with three daughters who belonged to the Bishnoi sect of Hinduism and lived within a forest in the desert state of Rajasthan. The Bishnois believe in living as one with nature and understand the importance of the forests around them. When the Maharajah (king) of Jodhpur needed lumber to burn lime for the construction of his new castle, he sent his men to the forest. Amrita Devi and her daughters gave up their lives to the cause of protecting the trees in that forest.