The first “tree huggers” were 294 men and 69 women belonging to the Bishnois branch of Hinduism, who, in 1730, died while trying to protect the trees in their village from being turned into the raw material for a palace. The villagers literally clung to the trees while being slaughtered by foresters in what is known today as the Khejarli massacre, but their actions worked, leading the Maharaja of Marwar to prohibit the cutting of trees in any Bishnoi village. Today those villages are a wooded oasis in the Thar Desert of western India
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