Illegal logging is robbing Indians of food, medicine and even saffron to dye monks’ robes. Now local people are fighting back
n the pitch dark, the volunteers walk for hours along roads surrounded by dense forest. They patrol in near silence, listening hard for the thump of a trunk hitting the ground, a cracked twig in the dirt. Hunting down timber smugglers is a dangerous undertaking.
From 9pm to 1am, four days a week, they patrol the forest, splitting routes into various areas to hunt the timber smugglers. They are unpaid and have no equipment, not even a raincoat. Over the past decade, those who went foraging deep in the forests noticed that the trees used to makes dye for women’s clothes and the robes of Buddhist monks were disappearing. Salu Shyam, a woman in her 80s, remembers how she would cut and roll up leaves of indigo and soak them in vats until the leaves turned soft. Then she would add musk mallow to the black water and add the cloth to soak, before hanging it to dry.
“Their disappearance sparked the conservation movement in the community,” says Manas Shyam, who started thein 2018 with Pyoseng Chowlu to stop locals felling the endemic trees. There are concessions for gathering firewood for the communities. Manas Shyam says villagers collect dead wood or branches. Pyoseng, a teacher, says only commerical-scale logging, rather than foraging, destroys diversity.
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