On a warm, 80-degree morning in Rock Creek Park, an urban national park in Washington, D.C., a dozen children, some as young as four, squelched through creek mud, pried rocks apart to find crayfish and emerged with blades of grass caught in their hair. The outing was led by Brown, 55, who founded ForestKids, a nature-immersion program that aims to reconnect children with the outdoors. Brown says she has been devoted to environmental causes since the early 2000s, a time when many treated that commitment as eccentric.
“Oh my gosh, you’re a tree hugger,” people told her then, she recalled—meant as an insult. Today, for many, the phrase has been reclaimed as a point of pride.
Nine-year-old Orla McClennen, wearing a Joshua Tree National Park T-shirt, may not remember the insult but she remembers the fun: balancing along a “big, fat tree” in the creek. “I mean they give us oxygen, which is pretty like, you really need it,” she said, summing up the simple, practical logic that draws kids to trees.
The label “tree-hugger” now commonly points to people who defend forests, but its backstory spans continents and centuries. Historians often trace the modern usage to the 1973 Chipko movement in India. “Chipko” means “to hug” or “to cling” in Hindi. In the Himalayan villages targeted by outside loggers, residents resisted commercial cutting of hornbeam and other species—trees that villagers relied on for fuel, fodder and to stabilize slopes against landslides and floods. After the government granted logging rights to a company making items like tennis racquets, villagers used nonviolent, Gandhian-style tactics, at times placing themselves between loggers and trees to prevent felling.
Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha emphasizes that Chipko was as much about social and economic survival as it was about conserving nature. Although some iconic photographs of women hugging trees were staged later, women played a central role in the protests. Between 1973 and roughly 1980, sustained peaceful resistance helped persuade authorities to impose local bans on tree cutting. Guha likens Chipko’s wake-up effect to the way Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped spark environmental awareness in the United States.
Some link Chipko to an even older tale about the Bishnoi community in northwest India. Activist Vandana Shiva recounts a 1730 incident in which Bishnoi people, led by Amrita Devi and other women, are said to have died defending sacred Khejri trees from woodcutters sent by a ruler. Guha calls that narrative a popular myth lacking robust historical documentation, yet the story persists culturally; India marks Sept. 11 as National Forest Martyrs Day in memory of that tradition.
In the United States the term shows up in print as early as the 1960s. A 1965 Associated Press headline about opponents of a proposed highway through Chicago’s Jackson Park read “Saws Buzz Around Tree-Huggers.” Over subsequent decades, especially during the 1990s, “tree-hugger” became a political taunt used to trivialize environmental concerns amid fights over logging, energy and climate policy.
The term even entered national political banter when conservatives labeled Newt Gingrich a “tree-hugger” in the run-up to a presidential bid in the early 2010s, after he appeared in an advertisement with Rep. Nancy Pelosi calling for bipartisan attention to climate issues. Gingrich largely shrugged off the label, but activists in the 1990s and 2000s complained that the epithet flattened complex arguments about public health, conservation and stewardship.
For some observers, the sneer behind “tree-hugger” reveals a culture uneasy about intimate bonds with the nonhuman world. Philosophy professor Roger Gottlieb assigns students to choose a campus tree, visit it regularly and keep a journal; many begin skeptical and wind up attached. “What did he become? A tree-hugger,” Gottlieb said, describing a student transformed by the exercise.
A younger generation, however, has embraced the term. Leah Thomas, founder of Intersectional Environmentalist, says Gen Z uses “tree-hugger” with pride, linking it to ecofeminist activism and high-profile actions like Julia Butterfly Hill’s late-1990s vigil in a thousand-year-old redwood—738 days spent living in the tree to protect it.
Back in Rock Creek Park the presence of trees shapes everyday life: people nap in the shade, cyclists rest bikes against trunks, readers sprawl under elms and frisbee players dodge around oaks. Brown’s campers migrated from leaf examination to ecstatic shrieks over creek-dwelling crayfish, their excitement ricocheting through the branches.
Insult or emblem, “tree-hugger” today carries a long history—from Himalayan villagers physically standing between trees and loggers to contemporary activists and children discovering how much the natural world matters.