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 four sank their hands into the creek mud, discovered crayfish hiding beneath rocks, and picked grass out of their hair.
Brown, 55, runs ForestKids, a nature immersion program with the goal of helping kids connect to nature. But she's been obsessed with environmentalism since the early 2000s when it was a "weird fringe thing."
"'Oh my gosh, you're a tree hugger. You're probably one of those tree huggers,'" Brown recalled hearing from others. "It was meant as a bad word."
Now, she said, the word brings "pride."
Next to Brown, 9-year-old Orla McClennen wears a hat with palm trees and a Joshua Tree National Park T-shirt. She doesn't know if she's ever heard the word tree-hugger, but her favorite part of Brown's program so far was walking across a "big, fat tree" to get to the other side of the creek.
"I mean they give us oxygen, which is pretty like, you really need it," Orla said.
Today, "tree-hugger" usually describes environmentalists and advocates for the preservation of woodlands – but the word has a much longer history.
In this installment of NPR's Word of the Week, we trace the word tree-hugger from a legend in the 1700s to modern-day environmentalism in 2026.
The term was born in the Himalayas
The original tree-huggers did not actually hug trees.
In 1973, the Chipko movement in India coined the term "tree-hugger," according to Ramachandra Guha, an environmental historian. Chipko means "to hug" or "to stick to something" in Hindi.
At the time, rural villagers in the Himalayas were fighting "commercial exploitation" of hornbeam trees, Guha said, which were a cornerstone of the local economy. The trees also prevented devastating landslides and floods, so locals made sure to cut them down sustainably, he said. But before the first protest, the Indian government owned the rights to the forest and allowed an international company to use the trees to make tennis racquets.
Guha, who wrote the book Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, said the original movement was not just about the villagers' love of nature, "it was an assertion of their economic and social rights."
"They also invoked an idiom of class solidarity. They said, 'we need these trees and these forests for our survival,'" Guha said.
The rural villagers were inspired by Gandhian nonviolent social action and threatened to hug the trees to protect them. Guha said the fact that around 300 men, women and children were threatening to take action was enough for the government to back off. Later, photographs were taken of women hugging trees, which many people associate with the movement, but Guha said those were staged after the fact. Women, however, did take center stage in the movement as the main activists, Guha said.
From 1973 to around 1980, there were dozens of peaceful rallies against clear-felling, Guha said. And eventually, in response to the movement, the government banned cutting down trees in the area.
Guha compared the moment in Indian history to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which spurred a nationwide reckoning over pesticide use in the US. Both were a "wake up call" that "invoke[d] both social justice and environmental sustainability," Guha said.
"The tree hugger was part of a wider community," he said. "It's not an individual act of heroism."
The Chipko movement is connected to the earlier Bishnoi people in northwest India, according to Vandana Shiva, a prominent environmentalist and author. In 1730, members of the Bishnoi faith in Khejarli died to protect the sacred Khejri trees, a flowering tree native to Western Asia and India, according to Shiva's book Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom.
In Shiva's telling, the ruler of Jodhpur, a city located in the Thar Desert in northwest India and a popular tourist spot, needed firewood for the construction of his new palace. When the soldiers arrived in the forest, they first found a woman, Amrita Devi, and her young daughters who offered their heads in exchange for saving the trees. When the story spread throughout other Bishnoi villages, 363 people also sacrificed their lives for the trees. The king heard about the killings, and he issued a royal decree making the cutting of the trees illegal, a precedent that still exists today.
Guha said there is no historical evidence to back the Bishnoi legend other than the story being a "popular myth." But to honor the legacy of the Bishnoi's sacrifice, the government of India designated Sept. 11 as National Forest Martyrs Day in 2013.
"A way to be dismissive": Tree-huggers in the U.S.
In the United States, the term "tree-hugger" appeared in writing as early as the 1960s, even before the Chipko movement brought the term into the mainstream.
In Chicago, a group of conservationists tried to stop the creation of a highway that would go through Jackson Park, now a 551.5-acre park on the shore of Lake Michigan. An Associated Press article captured the moment in September 1965, boasting the headline, "Saws Buzz Around Tree-Huggers." The beginning of the article reads: "The battle was between the tree-huggers and the city. The city won."
The word was not used more widely in American politics until the 1990s, according to Jay Turner, a professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College. And at the time, it had an overwhelmingly negative connotation.
"Debates over logging, early concerns about energy and climate change, they were all beginning to gain momentum," Turner said of the 1990s. "This label 'tree hugger' really got mobilized as a way to be dismissive."
Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was briefly labeled a tree-hugger by conservatives in his party just before a presidential run in the early 2010s, after co-starring in an advertisement with Rep. Nancy Pelosi about the need to find common ground on climate change policy.
Gingrich quickly shrugged off the name, Turner said – but throughout the '90s and early 2000s, it appeared to be "pushed on" environmentalists. They pushed back, he said, because they believed their work in public health and good stewardship "all just [got] wiped away when you throw out the term tree-hugger."
Roger Gottlieb, a professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, said in a human-centered culture, it's easy for people to make fun of a connection with something that's not human. But for him, trees can bring all people together.
Gottlieb requires his students to find one tree on campus and visit it a few times a week. Each time they visit, they write a short journal entry.
"I had one kid who started off saying, 'This is stupid.' And then three weeks in it was, 'Oh, I've given my tree name: His name is George,'" Gottlieb said. "The last entry was, 'George doesn't look too good today.'
"What did he become? A tree-hugger."
Tree-huggers in the new era
Gen Z has embraced the word "tree-hugger," said Leah Thomas, a 31-year-old environmental author and founder of the Intersectional Environmentalist.
To her, it's associated with ecofeminism, a political movement emphasizing historical associations between the plight of women and the ecological revolution. Thomas immediately associates the word with Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a 1,000-year-old California redwood tree for 738 days between 1997 and 1999.
"I love the term so much," Thomas said. "I love calling myself a tree-hugger. There's nothing better than hugging trees."
Back in Rock Creek Park, the appreciation for trees was visible in every corner. Kamila Agi-Mejias enjoyed a shady spot in her lawn chair between two American elms with her daughter and husband. Yin Torrico took a quick pit-stop in the middle of his around 50 mile bike ride to rest his bike against an oak tree and fill up his water bottle. Across from Torrico's tree, Katy Ward laid on a picnic blanket underneath another American elm reading. In a large grassy area next to Ward, even a group of frisbee players took notice of the trees to avoid them as they flung an orange disc through the air.
By the creek, Brown and her gaggle of campers explored fallen tree leaves – but the trees alone did not keep their attention for long. Soon, they were back to the creek.
"CRAYFISH!" one camper screamed with his hands plunged in the water.
The shrieks of excitement echoed through the trees.
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