From the Himalayas to Newt Gingrich, ‘tree huggers’ are rampant

On a recent 80-degree day at Rock Creek Park, an urban national park in the heart of Washington, D.C., a dozen children as young as 4 dipped their hands into the mud of a stream, discovered crawfish hiding under rocks and pulled grass from their hair.

Brown, 55, runs ForestKids, a nature experience program aimed at helping children connect with nature. But she’s been obsessed with environmentalism since the early 2000s, when it was “a weird fringe thing.”

“‘Oh my god, you’re a tree hugger. You’re probably one of those tree huggers,'” Brown recalled being told by someone else. “I didn’t mean that as a bad word.”

Now, she says, the word brings “pride.”

Next to Brown is 9-year-old Orla McClennen, who is wearing a hat with a palm tree on it and a Joshua Tree National Park T-shirt. She doesn’t know if she’s ever heard of a tree hugger, but her favorite part of Brown’s program so far is walking across “big, fat trees” to get to the other side of the stream.

“So they give us oxygen, which is like, you really need it,” Orla said.

Today, the term “tree hugger” usually refers to environmentalists and forest conservationists, but the term has a much longer history.

This edition of NPR’s Word of the Week traces the word treehugger from 1700s legend to modern-day environmentalism in 2026.

This term originated in the Himalayas

The original tree hugger didn’t actually hug trees.

According to environmental historian Ramachandra Guha, the term “tree hugger” was coined by India’s Chipko movement in 1973. Chipko means “to hug” or “to cling to something” in Hindi.

At the time, Guha said, rural Himalayan villagers were fighting the “commercial exploitation” of hornbeam trees, which were the basis of the local economy. Trees also prevented catastrophic landslides and floods, so locals made sure to cut down trees in a sustainable manner, he said. But before the first protests, the Indian government owned the rights to the forest and allowed international companies to use the trees to make tennis rackets.

Mr. Guha who wrote this book Talking to Nature: The Origins of Environmentalism in India, He said that the initial movement was not just about villagers’ love for nature, but also “an assertion of their economic and social rights.”

“They also brought up the idiom of class solidarity. They said, ‘We need these trees and forests to survive,'” Guha said.

Rural villagers, inspired by Gandhi’s nonviolent social activism, threatened to hug trees to protect them. Mr Guha said the fact that around 300 men, women and children were threatening to take action was enough for the government to back down. Photos of women hugging trees were then taken, which many people associated with the movement, but Guha said they were staged after the fact. But women took center stage in the movement as key activists, Guha said.

Guha said there were dozens of peaceful rallies against clear-cutting between 1973 and 1980. And eventually, in response to this movement, the government banned the felling of trees in the area.

Guha compared this moment in India’s history to the Rachel Carson incident. silent springspurred a national reckoning over pesticide use in the United States. Both were “warning bells” that “wake up.”[d] Both social justice and environmental sustainability,” Guha said.

“Tree huggers were part of a broader community,” he says. “This is not an individual act of heroism.”

According to Vandana Shiva, a prominent environmental activist and author, the Chipko movement is associated with the early Bishnois of northwestern India. According to Lord Shiva’s book, in 1730, a Bishnoi devotee of Khejari died protecting the sacred Khejari tree, a flowering tree native to Western Asia and India. Oneness vs. 1%: Shatter illusions, sow freedom.

In the story, Lord Shiva is the ruler of Jodhpur, a popular tourist destination located in the Thar Desert in northwestern Indiana. Firewood was needed for the construction of the new palace. When the soldiers arrived in the forest, they first discovered Amrita Devi, a woman who had offered her head in exchange for saving the tree, and her young daughters. When this story spread to other Bishnoi villages, 363 people sacrificed their lives for the tree. When the king heard about the killing, he issued an edict making it illegal to cut down trees, a precedent that still stands today.

Guha said there was no historical evidence to support the Bishnoi legend other than the story being a “myth”. However, to honor the legacy of sacrifice of the Bishnois, the Indian government designated September 11 as National Forest Martyrs Day in 2013.

“How to be negative”: American tree hugger

In the United States, the term “tree hugger” appeared in documents as early as the 1960s, even before the Chipko movement made the term mainstream.

In Chicago, a group of conservationists tried to block the construction of a freeway through Jackson Park, a 551.5-acre park currently on the shores of Lake Michigan. An Associated Press article captured the moment in September 1965, boasting the headline, “Buzz Grows Around Tree Hugger.” The beginning of the article reads, “The battle was between Treehugger and the city. The city won.”

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the term became widely used in American politics, said Jay Turner, a professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College. And at the time, it had overwhelmingly negative connotations.

“The debate around logging, the early concerns about energy and climate change, all of that was starting to gain momentum,” Turner said of the 1990s. “This ‘tree hugger’ label was actually mobilized as a way to be negative.”

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich was briefly labeled a treehugger by conservatives in his party in the early 2010s, just before the presidential election, after he co-starred in an ad with Representative Nancy Pelosi about the need to find common ground on climate change policy.

Mr. Turner said that although Mr. Gingrich quickly ignored the name, the name seemed to be “pushed” by environmentalists in the 1990s and early 2000s. They resisted, he said, because they believed their work in public health and good governance was “all about justice.” [got] Throw away the word tree hugger and it will disappear. ”

Roger Gottlieb, a philosophy professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, said that in human-centered cultures, it’s easy for people to laugh at connections to non-humans. But for him, trees can bring all people together.

Gottlieb asks students to find a tree on campus and visit it several times a week. They write a short diary each time they visit.

“I had a kid who started saying, ‘This is stupid,’ and then after three weeks I was like, ‘Oh, I named my tree. His name is George,'” Gottlieb said. “The last entry was, ‘George doesn’t look very well today.’

“What has he become? A tree hugger.”

New era tree hugger

Gen Z has embraced the term “tree hugger,” says Leah Thomas, a 31-year-old environmental writer and founder of Intersectional Environmentalists.

For her, it is tied to ecofeminism, a political movement that emphasizes the historical connection between the plight of women and the environmental revolution. Thomas immediately thought of Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a 1,000-year-old sequoia tree in California for 738 days between 1997 and 1999.

“I love this word so much,” Thomas said. “I love to call myself a tree hugger. There’s nothing like hugging a tree.”

Back at Rock Creek Park, I saw an appreciation for trees in every corner. Camila Agui-Mejias enjoyed a shady spot with her daughter and husband in lawn chairs between two American elms. In Toriko made a quick pit stop midway through the roughly 50-mile bike ride to rest the bike in an oak tree and refill water bottles. Across the street from the Tricho tree, Katie Ward was reading a book, lying on a picnic blanket under another American elm tree. On the large grassy area next to Ward, a group of Frisbee players also focused on and avoided the trees as they sent orange discs into the air.

Along the banks of the stream, Brown and a group of campers explored fallen leaves, but the trees alone didn’t hold their attention for long. Soon they were back at the stream.

“Crayfish!” one of the campers shouted, sticking his hand in the water.

Shouts of excitement echoed through the trees.