In the Himalayan foothills in the early 1970s, villagers—especially women—formed circles around trees and hugged them to stop loggers from cutting them down. Faced with threats that included soil erosion and water scarcity caused by large‐scale logging, the villagers asserted local rights over the land and forests that sustained them, linking their survival to forest conservation under the banner of the Chipko Movement. Their tactic grew into a wider campaign that reshaped forestry policy, embedding the act of tree-hugging as a potent symbol of ecological and community resilience.