📌 WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY 2026: WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE CELEBRATING?

Today is WorldEnvironmentDay. A day for speeches, hashtags, photo-ops with saplings, solemn pledges and carefully crafted messages about our love for nature.

But forgive me for asking - what exactly are we celebrating?

The environment that we are systematically destroying? The forests we are cutting down for mining? The rivers we are poisoning with industrial waste and sewage? The mountains we are blasting in the name of infrastructure development? The biodiversity we are driving to extinction? Or the tribal communities we are uprooting from lands they have protected for

generations?

Nothing captures the hypocrisy of this annual ritual better than what is happening in the Hasdeo Forests of Chhattisgarh, one of India’s richest forest ecosystems, often called the 'Lungs of Central India'.

I’m not against generating energy or against development, but the question is why the easiest solution always seems to be sacrificing forests, biodiversity and indigenous rights.

Year after year, governments assure us that environmental protection is a priority. Prime Ministers and assorted others speak passionately about climate change, sustainability and green growth. Yet on the ground, forests continue to disappear under excavators and mining clearances.

World Environment Day has increasingly become an exercise in collective self-congratulation and is reduced to mere tokenism that allows governments, corporations and even citizens to feel virtuous for a day while the destruction continues uninterrupted for the remaining 364.

For decades, the scientists, environmentalists, and everyone concerned have been warning that the climate crisis is no longer a future threat. It has already entered our homes: the heatwaves, floods, droughts, crop failures and disappearing water sources are real-life

manifestations.

I am pained to say that while leaders plant ceremonial saplings and deliver speeches on sustainability, an estimated 5 lac trees are proposed to be slaughtered in Hasdeo forests; over 15000 Adivasi families will be impacted, whose lives depend on these forests for their livelihoods, for their very survival. Let that sink in. If this is environmental protection, what does environmental destruction look like?