The Chipko Inheritance

---

My Sustainable Encounter with Apurva Bhandari

by Albert Schiller

A leader’s most potent philosophy is often not a learned strategy but an inherited one. It is a set of first principles absorbed from family and the geography of one's childhood. Apurva Bhandari delivers an intriguing narrative on this phenomenon. His work in reforestation is more than a career choice. His life is the modern expression of a deep-seated legacy. His professional doctrine directly translates the values he inherited from his parents and the soil of his Himalayan roots. To understand his methodology, one must first understand its source.

Raw Commitment

Bhandari was born and raised in the Himalayas, the land that gave rise to the Chipko movement. This is the foundational layer of his operating system. The Chipko philosophy, where local women physically embraced trees to protect them from loggers, represents a non-negotiable, raw commitment to the environment. It is an authentic, non-performative environmentalism, rooted in community survival, unaware of corporate performance. This worldview, absorbed in his youth, starkly contrasts the world of vanity metrics and performative action he would later encounter in the business landscape and eventually reject. This underlying paradigm informs his rising critique of disconnected, digital-only environmentalism, lacking direct, physical, and communal responsibility.

Twins

This inheritance was as much geographical as it was familial. His father was a plant pathologist who ran a "lab to land" project, a man dedicated to translating scientific theory into tangible agricultural outcomes. This instilled a deep-seated belief in applied, practical science that solves real-world problems for real communities. His mother was a school principal cherished for her dedication to tree planting, embedding the value of environmental stewardship into the community's next generation. Bhandari grew up in an ecosystem where environmental work was not a corporate social responsibility initiative. It was a fundamental, integrated part of science, education, and his community life. These two streams, his father's pragmatism and his mother's community devotion, form the pillars of his own doctrine. He inherited a belief that a solution must be both scientifically sound and socially embedded to be of value.

The Fieldtrip

This deeply rooted origin makes his subsequent journey significant. His early career was a conscious move away from this inheritance, a period of "job hopping" through the seemingly disconnected worlds of oil and gas and enterprise technology. This phase can be understood as a necessary exploration of humankind’s unmissable footprint on its inhabitable world. It was a journey into the heart of the extractive, scalable, and technologically driven systems he would later need to understand to build a viable alternative. He had to gather the tools and language of the modern business world, a world far removed from the community-led principles of Chipko. This departure was an unconscious preparation to fulfill his mandate in a new era. His final validation came when he received an award from a key leader of the Chipko movement, bringing his journey full circle. The inheritor of the Chipko legacy, who had left to study modern tools, is now recognized by the source of that legacy. It is a testament that his synthesis of ancient values with modern mechanics succeeded.

So what can we take from his approach?

Questions for Audience

1. Bhandari’s philosophy is deeply tied to his specific geographical and familial inheritance. Can a leader without such a "Chipko Inheritance" develop an equally authentic and powerful environmental doctrine, or is this level of commitment unique to those with a personal, place-based origin story?

2. The blog frames his time in extractive industries like oil and gas as a "necessary diversion." How can leaders and professionals today consciously undertake such a "fieldtrip", gaining critical knowledge from established systems without being co-opted by their values?