On an 80-degree day in Rock Creek Park, an urban national park in Washington, D.C., a dozen children as young as four dug in creek mud, found crayfish under rocks, and picked grass from their hair. The session was run by Brown, 55, founder of ForestKids, a nature immersion program aimed at helping children connect with the outdoors. Brown has been passionate about environmentalism since the early 2000s, when it was dismissed as a “weird fringe thing.”
“‘Oh my gosh, you’re a tree hugger,'” she recalled people saying then, meant as an insult. Now the phrase evokes pride.
Nine-year-old Orla McClennen, wearing a Joshua Tree National Park T-shirt, doesn’t recall hearing “tree-hugger,” but loved walking across a “big, fat tree” in the creek. “I mean they give us oxygen, which is pretty like, you really need it,” she said.
Today “tree-hugger” generally means environmentalists who protect woodlands, but the term’s origins go back centuries and across continents. In this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, the phrase is traced from Himalayan protests to American political discourse.
The term’s modern origin is linked to the 1973 Chipko movement in India. Chipko means “to hug” or “to stick to” in Hindi. Villagers in the Himalayas resisted commercial exploitation of hornbeam trees—essential to the local economy and crucial for preventing landslides and floods—after the government granted logging rights to an outside company to make items like tennis racquets. Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha says the movement was as much about social and economic rights as it was about nature. Protesters claimed the forests were necessary for their survival and practiced nonviolent resistance inspired by Gandhian methods, threatening to embrace trees to stop loggers.
Photographs of women hugging trees, widely associated with Chipko, were staged later, Guha says, though women were central to the activism. Between 1973 and about 1980, dozens of peaceful rallies pressured authorities and eventually led to bans on tree cutting in parts of the region. Guha compares the movement’s significance to the impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the United States: both served as wake-up calls linking social justice with environmental sustainability.
Some connect Chipko to an older story about the Bishnoi community in northwest India. Vandana Shiva recounts a 1730 episode in which members of the Bishnoi faith allegedly sacrificed themselves to protect sacred Khejri trees when soldiers came to cut wood for a ruler’s palace. The tale speaks of Amrita Devi and her daughters, and of hundreds who died defending the trees, after which the ruler outlawed tree-felling. Guha calls the Bishnoi account a popular myth lacking strong historical evidence, but the story endures culturally; India observes Sept. 11 as National Forest Martyrs Day in honor of that legacy.
In the U.S., “tree-hugger” appears in print as early as the 1960s. A 1965 Associated Press item about opponents of a highway through Chicago’s Jackson Park ran under the headline “Saws Buzz Around Tree-Huggers.” The label gained wider political traction in the 1990s and carried a predominantly negative tone. Jay Turner, an environmental studies professor, notes that as debates over logging, energy and climate took shape, “tree-hugger” was used to dismiss environmentalists and marginalize their concerns.
The term reached national political chatter when conservatives labeled Newt Gingrich a tree-hugger in the lead-up to a presidential bid in the early 2010s, after he co-starred in an advertisement with Rep. Nancy Pelosi calling for bipartisan attention to climate policy. Gingrich quickly shrugged the label off, but activists during the 1990s and 2000s resented how the term could erase public-health and stewardship arguments they advanced.
For some observers, the term’s mockery reflects a human-centered culture uneasy with close bonds to nonhuman life. Roger Gottlieb, a philosophy professor, requires students to pick a campus tree, visit it regularly, and journal—an exercise that often transforms initial skepticism into affection. “What did he become? A tree-hugger,” Gottlieb said of a student who grew attached to his tree.
A new generation has reclaimed the term. Leah Thomas, founder of Intersectional Environmentalist, says Gen Z has embraced “tree-hugger,” associating it with ecofeminism and figures like Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a thousand-year-old California redwood for 738 days in the late 1990s. “I love calling myself a tree-hugger,” Thomas said.
Back in Rock Creek Park, trees shape everyday scenes: people resting in shade, cyclists leaning bikes against oaks, readers lying under elms, and frisbee players skirting trunks. Brown’s campers soon moved from examining leaves to shrieking about crayfish in the creek, their excitement echoing through the trees.
Whether used as an insult or a badge of honor, “tree-hugger” today reflects a long history of environmental defense—from Himalayan villagers standing before loggers to contemporary activists and children learning to love the natural world.