THE FOREST WE FORGOT
The Forest We Forgot: Deforestation, Climate Catastrophe, and the Ayurvedic Conscience India Has Abandoned
| *By Dr. Aakash Kembhavi | Ayurveda Unfiltered* |
“Nine percent of Indians sleep in air-conditioned rooms. The remaining ninety-one percent are sleeping in a country on fire. And the system that always knew how to live with fire — Ayurveda — is busy conducting examinations.”
I. The Country That Forgot Its Own Instructions
There is a passage in the Charaka Samhita that has never left me. In the Vimana Sthana, Charaka describes the conditions that lead to Janapadodhvamsa — the epidemiological collapse of entire communities. He does not blame individual bodies. He does not prescribe individual remedies. He points, with the clarity of a physician who has watched civilisations sicken, at the degradation of Vayu, Udaka, Desha, and Kala — air, water, land, and time. When these four go wrong, he says, no medicine will be enough.
India in the year 2026 is a clinical demonstration of Charaka’s warning.
We are a nation of 1.4 billion people, of whom over a billion have no mechanical protection from heat. We are a nation whose forests — the lungs, the pharmacy, the rainfall-maker, the thermal regulator — have been quietly disappearing since the day we became independent. We are a nation bracing for an El Niño event that climate scientists are calling potentially catastrophic, a monsoon that may fail at scale, a food system already stressed to its limits. And we are a nation that possesses, within its own intellectual heritage, one of the most ecologically sophisticated medical philosophies ever developed — a philosophy that has, with breathtaking institutional irony, almost nothing to say about any of this.
This article is not about despair. Despair is a luxury of the comfortable. This is about reckoning — with numbers, with ecology, with our own professional failure as an Ayurvedic community to be what we were always supposed to be: the custodians of the relationship between the human body and the living world.
Let us begin with what has been lost.
II. The Numbers That Indict Us: Seven Decades of Vanishing Green
When India became independent in 1947, the first National Forest Policy was announced in 1952 with a clear, unambiguous target: bring thirty-three percent of India’s land under forest cover. That number was not arbitrary. It was ecologically derived — the minimum canopy required to sustain rainfall, prevent erosion, moderate temperature, and maintain the biological diversity upon which food systems and medicine alike depend.
Seven decades later, we stand at 21.76%.
Let that arithmetic settle. In seventy years of democratic governance, of Five Year Plans, of environmental legislation, of UN commitments and NDC pledges, India has not crossed the halfway mark to a target it set for itself in the first decade of independence.
The ISFR 2023 — the eighteenth India State of Forest Report, published by the Forest Survey of India — tells us that the total forest and tree cover of the country is 8,27,357 square kilometres, which is 25.17% of our geographical area. Of this, only 7,15,343 sq km is actual forest cover — 21.76%. The government points to a nominal increase of 1,445 sq km since 2021 and calls it progress. What it does not headline is this: India lost 93,000 square kilometres of forests to degradation between 2011 and 2021 alone. What it does not headline is that the gains are largely outside Recorded Forest Areas — plantations and monocultures counted as “forests” in the same way a commercial chicken farm might be counted as “wildlife.”
The ground beneath this official optimism is considerably darker:
From Independence to 1982, roughly 4.238 million hectares of forest vanished — consumed by agriculture (61%), river valley projects (11%), industries and townships (3%), roads and transmission lines (1.3%), and a catch-all of miscellaneous development (23.7%). Since 2000, India has lost a cumulative 2.33 million hectares of total tree cover — a six percent decline. In 2024 alone, India lost 18,200 hectares of irreplaceable primary forest. Between 2002 and 2024, 3,48,000 hectares of humid primary forest disappeared — approximately 5.4% of our total humid primary forest. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation ranks India as having the second-highest rate of deforestation worldwide between 2015 and 2020, losing an average of 6,68,000 hectares annually.
And since 2003, we have lost more than 6.3% of our dense forests — the old-growth, high-canopy, biodiversity-rich forests that cannot be replanted in a decade or a generation. Once a dense forest is gone, what replaces it — if anything does — is an ecological shadow of itself.
Here is what the statistics do not say but the Ayurvedic physician must: a plantation of commercially grown eucalyptus is not a forest in any sense that matters to medicine, to water cycles, to tribal livelihoods, or to the 7,500 species of medicinal plants that the Indian subcontinent harbours. The government’s accounting methodology inflates the numbers. Our policy literacy has been too weak, and our institutional voices too quiet, to challenge it.
The Western Ghats: A Medical Emergency by Another Name
For those of us in Karnataka, there is a number that deserves particular attention. The Western Ghats — one of the world’s eight “hottest biodiversity hotspots,” the source of the rivers that irrigate peninsular India, the habitat of species found nowhere else on earth — lost 58.22 sq km of forest cover in its eco-sensitive zones since 2013. The Western Ghats is not merely a UNESCO World Heritage landscape. For Ayurveda, it is a living formulary. It is where Nalpamaram, Jeevanti, Bala, Ashwagandha, Brahmi, and hundreds of irreplaceable dravyas grow in their natural ecological context. When we lose that forest, we do not merely lose timber and carbon. We lose the ecological conditions in which thousands of years of botanical knowledge was generated and validated. You cannot replicate a rainforest on a Google Sheet.
India's Ecological Crisis at a Glance
*Scholarly estimate — see editorial caveat in the full article.
Each square = 1% of Indian households. Blue = have AC.
Ayurveda's foundational texts encoded a sophisticated ecological ethic millennia before modern environmentalism. The health of the body and the health of the world are one question, not two.
III. The Cooling Divide: Who Bears the Heat
There is a statistic that should end every comfortable dinner-table conversation about India’s “development story.” According to National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data, only 24% of Indian households own any mechanical cooling device — including air coolers, not just air conditioners. The figure for air conditioning alone: approximately 8% of India’s 300 million households. Rural AC ownership sits at around 1%. The richest 10% of households hold the overwhelming majority of ACs in the country.
Read that again. Ninety-two percent of Indian households have no air conditioning.
This is not a comfort statistic. As heatwaves become longer, more intense, and begin earlier in the year, the absence of cooling is increasingly a mortality variable. It is the difference between surviving a 47-degree afternoon and not surviving it. It is the difference between a child completing her school day and collapsing on the way home. It is the difference between a construction worker finishing his shift and suffering a heatstroke that will cost his family their primary income for weeks.
The paradox is savage: those who consume least, those who have the smallest carbon footprint, those who live most nearly in alignment with the Ayurvedic ideal of low-impact, seasonally-calibrated existence — the rural poor, the tribal communities, the urban informal workers — are the people being destroyed first and fastest by a crisis generated overwhelmingly by the consumption patterns of the global and Indian elite.
And the solution being proposed — more ACs — will accelerate the crisis. If 70% of Indian households were to adopt air conditioning, cooling alone could account for 18% of India’s total electricity demand. India’s electricity grid is still overwhelmingly coal-powered. Every new air conditioner is, in a very direct physical sense, adding heat to the planet while trying to remove it from one room. This is not a paradox that can be solved by technology alone. It is a paradox that can only be resolved by a civilisational shift in how we think about heat, shelter, bodies, and seasons — which is precisely what Ayurveda was designed to facilitate.
IV. The Heat That Is Already Here
This is not a future problem. It is a present catastrophe that is simply being absorbed quietly by the people least equipped to report it.
The summer of 2024 saw temperatures cross 50°C in parts of India — a number that, a generation ago, was considered an atmospheric impossibility in inhabited regions of the subcontinent. Official figures recorded 143 heatstroke deaths and over 41,000 heatstroke cases — numbers that every public health researcher acknowledges are a fraction of the actual burden. Heat deaths are chronically underreported in India because they require a physician’s certification that the death was “heat-related,” and most heat deaths happen to people who die without ever reaching a physician.
The broader toll is staggering. Over the period from 1992 to 2015, more than 24,000 people died due to heat in India. The NDMA puts the figure at 25,716 heat deaths between 1992 and 2016. In 2024 alone, India lost approximately 247 billion labour hours due to heat exposure, resulting in nearly $194 billion in economic losses — concentrated overwhelmingly in agriculture and construction, the occupations of the poor.
Fifty-seven percent of Indian districts, home to 76% of India’s total population, are now classified as high to very high heat risk. India’s annual average temperature has been rising at 0.15°C per decade since 1951. Indian cities are warming twice as fast as rural areas, creating urban heat islands that make nighttime temperature recovery impossible for millions of people sleeping in concrete buildings with no ventilation. Evidence from multiple cities shows that when temperatures reach 40°C and above, excess deaths increase by 20 to 57 percent — not from heatstroke alone, but from the cascading effects of heat on cardiovascular function, kidney disease, respiratory illness, and immune suppression.
The most affected are exactly who you would expect: construction workers, farmers, street vendors, domestic workers, the elderly, children, the chronically ill. These are not statistical abstractions. These are the patients who come to Ayurvedic clinics. These are the people whose bodies Ayurvedic medicine was designed to protect.
And the mortality rate for heat waves in India has increased by 62.2% over the last twenty years.
V. The Coming El Niño: A Crisis Upon a Crisis
If the heat of the present is alarming, the climate mathematics of the near future are sobering in the extreme.
A Super El Niño event is developing — what climate scientists and the Indian Meteorological Department are tracking with increasing concern. The IMD indicates a 35% probability of rainfall being significantly below normal in 2026 — a figure that, in the language of monsoon meteorology, represents an elevated risk of drought conditions across much of the subcontinent.
History is instructive here: 13 of India’s 23 recorded droughts in the past century have coincided with El Niño events. The 1997-98 and 2015-16 El Niño events caused major droughts, massive crop losses, and extended heatwave conditions across Asia. A supercharged El Niño — in a country that receives over 80% of its annual rainfall in four months — would devastate Kharif crop yields for rice, pulses, and sugarcane. It would drive food inflation. It would stress hydropower generation. It would push already heat-stressed populations into conditions where survival itself becomes the organizing principle of daily life.
And here is the connection that demands to be made explicit: forests are India’s primary rainfall regulators. Trees transpire water vapour into the atmosphere, seed cloud formation, and moderate local temperatures in ways that no technology can replicate at scale. Forests are not merely the beneficiaries of rain — they are, in part, its makers. Every million hectares of dense forest that India has lost since Independence is a reduction in our intrinsic capacity to moderate the impact of events like El Niño. We have been dismantling our own climate resilience, hectare by hectare, decade by decade, and now we face a climatic challenge with a fraction of the natural infrastructure we once possessed.
The deforested nation does not merely suffer more from drought. It also recovers more slowly, loses more topsoil, loses more water to runoff, loses more biodiversity, and produces less food from land that was once supported by forest-regulated water tables.
The deforestation statistics and the El Niño forecast are not two separate stories. They are one story, written across the same landscape, by the same decades of developmental choices.
VI. The Ayurvedic Diagnosis: We Always Knew This
The deepest irony in this unfolding catastrophe is that Ayurveda — the intellectual system that India claims as a national heritage, that fills the desks of 500,000 BAMS graduates, that is promoted in international forums as India’s gift to the world — contains within it a more sophisticated ecological ethic than most modern environmental philosophy.
The foundational concept is Loka Purusha Samya — the structural homology between the cosmos and the individual body. The five elements (Panchamahabhuta) that constitute the universe are the same five elements that constitute the human being. This is not metaphor. It is a systems epistemology: the health of the individual is inseparable from the health of the environment, because they are made of the same stuff, governed by the same laws, and subjected to the same forces.
Vayu is both the wind in your lungs and the wind over the Western Ghats. Jala is both the fluid in your tissues and the water in your rivers. Prithvi is both the density in your bones and the soil in which your dravyas grow. When the Panchamahabhuta outside are disturbed — by deforestation, by pollution, by the disruption of seasonal rhythms — the Panchamahabhuta inside follow.
This is not traditional wisdom being poetically stretched to fit a contemporary crisis. It is the precise clinical logic of Janapadodhvamsa — Charaka’s explicit teaching on epidemiological collapse caused by environmental degradation. He described it 2,500 years ago. We are living it now.
Ritucharya as Ecological Ethics — Not Just Clinical Protocol
Ritucharya — the Ayurvedic science of seasonal regimen — is discussed in the opening chapters of Charaka Samhita, Sushruta Samhita, and Ashtanga Hridayam. In most Ayurvedic colleges today, it is taught as a chapter to be memorised for examinations: which foods in which season, which Panchakarma at which junction. It is rarely taught as what it actually is — an ecological ethic.
Ritucharya’s foundational premise is not personal health optimization. Its foundational premise is that the human being is a participant in a seasonal ecology, with responsibilities not just to maintain personal balance but to synchronise with the rhythms of the living world. Consuming seasonal and local food is not a wellness trend — it is a systemic obligation that, at scale, reduces the agricultural pressure that drives deforestation. Avoiding excessive consumption is not asceticism — it is the practical recognition that the earth’s regenerative capacity is finite. Living with the sun — rising at dawn, sleeping near nightfall — is not primitive — it is a minimal-energy lifestyle philosophy millennia ahead of the energy crisis we now face.
The question that should trouble every Ayurvedic educator is this: are we teaching Ritucharya as a living philosophy of ecological participation, or as a set of exam answers?
The Dravyaguna Emergency
Every practitioner of Ayurveda is, in some sense, a beneficiary of India’s forests. Our entire pharmacopoeia — thousands of botanical drugs, the vast majority of which cannot be synthesised, cannot be adequately replicated in vitro, and exist in their full therapeutic complexity only in their natural ecological context — depends on the continued existence of the habitats in which they evolved.
When we lose primary forest, we lose not just trees. We lose the mycorrhizal networks, the pollinators, the soil chemistry, the moisture gradients, the canopy light conditions — the entire ecological web within which medicinal plants develop their therapeutic profiles. A Brahmi grown in a monoculture plantation under artificial irrigation is not the same plant as Brahmi growing on the banks of a jungle stream under a forest canopy. The therapeutic complexity of Ayurvedic plants is a product of ecological complexity. Destroy the ecology, and you degrade the medicine.
How many Dravyaguna departments in Ayurvedic colleges have conducted a systematic survey of the local extinction status of medicinal plants in their region? How many PG theses have addressed the relationship between deforestation rates and the availability of classical Ayurvedic raw materials? How many PhD guides — and I include myself in this reckoning — have encouraged scholars to work at this intersection of ecology and pharmacognosy, which is arguably the most urgent research frontier in the entire field?
The silence, on this matter, is professional negligence.
VII. The Disparity Indictment: Who Suffers, and Why
The ecological crisis in India is not a crisis that distributes its suffering equally. It is a crisis of extraordinary precision: it punishes the poorest, the most rural, the most forest-dependent, and the most marginalized with disproportionate ferocity, while the consumption that drives the crisis is concentrated among those most insulated from its consequences.
Consider who lives in forests, or lived in them until displacement. India’s tribal and forest-dwelling communities — constitutionally recognized, historically marginalized — have for centuries practiced forms of forest governance, botanical knowledge, and seasonal living that are textbook Ayurvedic ecology. Their gathering areas have shrunk dramatically as deforestation has reduced natural forest and converted it to plantations, pushing communities from subsistence forest use to plantation labour dependency. Their traditional botanical knowledge — much of which informs Ayurvedic practice — is being lost at the same rate as the forests that made it possible.
Consider who works in the heat. Construction workers who build the towers of climate-controlled offices. Farmers who grow the food consumed in air-conditioned restaurants. Sanitation workers who maintain the infrastructure of cities that are rapidly becoming too hot to maintain. These are people whose bodies are exposed to extreme heat for eight to ten hours daily, whose occupational hazard is increasing every year with rising temperatures, and who have no institutional protection, no employer health coverage, and no political representation adequate to their crisis.
Consider who will lose food security first when El Niño reduces monsoon rainfall. Subsistence farmers with no irrigation fallback. Small landholders in Vidarbha, Bundelkhand, Rayalaseema — regions that are already the names synonymous with agrarian distress in the Indian public consciousness — will face another blow. The farmers who have the least capacity to adapt will bear the largest share of climate adjustment.
And now consider who profits from the development model driving deforestation. The river valley projects that flooded forests. The mining operations in tribal land. The infrastructure corridors through primary forest. The industrial townships on land diversion. The beneficiaries of this development are rarely the communities whose forests are lost. They are rarely the workers who will die of heat. They are, with uncomfortable regularity, entities and interests that operate at a considerable remove from the ecological consequences of their extraction.
This is not a polemic. It is arithmetic.
VIII. When the Heat Becomes Personal: A Physician’s Body as Testimony
I want to pause the argument here — and speak not as an institutional reformer, but as a patient.
In the period following my treatment for Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, I encountered heat in a way I had never encountered it before. I have lived in Karnataka for most of my professional life. I know what Indian summer feels like. I have taught Ritucharya to students for over three decades — the dietary modifications for Grishma Ritu, the logic of Shita, Kashaya, and Laghu ahara, the reduction of Pitta-aggravating exposures. I have prescribed Chandanasava and Usheerasavam and counselled patients on staying cool. I believed, in the comfortable abstraction of clinical knowledge, that I understood heat.
I did not. Not until my body, stripped of its defences by illness and recovery, met the summer on its own terms.
**I experience severe physical exhaustion coupled with a feeling of helplessness not being to perform my routine activities. If affects my mindset as well. Being a clinician, I have always looked forward to consulting and healing people but this experience has left me questioning my capabilities and drains me so much so that I do not have the energy to do a consultation. Being an administrator in a college, I have always strived to give my 100% but presently, I am not able to. **
What I experienced was not unusual. It was, in fact, textbook Ayurveda — which is precisely what troubled me. Ayurveda explains with complete precision why a post-illness body is heat-vulnerable: Ojas — the body’s adaptive, immunological, and vitality reserve — is profoundly depleted by cancer and its treatment. Agni is destabilized. Bala — the body’s innate strength and resilience — is diminished at every level: Sahaja, Kalaja, and Yuktikruta. The post-NHL body is, in Ayurvedic terms, a body with its thermostat damaged, its cooling mechanisms compromised, its capacity for homeostatic recovery reduced.
The heat that a healthy body manages with effort, the depleted body cannot manage at all.
I tell you this not to invite sympathy — I have colleagues, access to nutrition, institutional support, and resources that most of my patients do not. I tell you this because in those weeks, I finally understood, with my skin and my nervous system and not merely my intellect, what 76% of Indians in high heat-risk districts are navigating every summer — except they are doing it without any of the protective cushion I possess. They are doing it after years of nutritional depletion that is functionally indistinguishable from illness-related Ojakshaya. They are doing it in homes that trap heat. They are doing it while continuing to work, because they cannot afford not to.
The construction worker who dies of heatstroke in May is not dying of an unusual event. He is dying of the ordinary summer — in a body made vulnerable by poverty, by poor nutrition, by overwork — the same mechanisms that made me, temporarily, susceptible. The difference is that my vulnerability was time-limited and medically supported. His is permanent and structurally produced.
We have tried to live as eco-friendly as humanly possible. We do our best to save water, electricity, recycle and reduce our plastic usage but it can get overwhelming at times. We are trying to adopt and adapt to Ayurvedic principles of conscious living. I try to drink water from an earthen pot instead of fridge cooled water. We have never brought a bottle of any kind of sugary drinks or carbonated drinks ever. I try to drink a body cooling preparation known in Ayurveda as a Hima wherein herbs are soaked overnight in water and consumed the next day. The efforts continue.
Charaka, in his discussion of Vyadhikshamatva — the body’s resistance to disease — makes a point that has stayed with me through recovery: that immunity is not merely a personal biological property. It is shaped by the quality of the air, water, food, and environment the body inhabits. You cannot build Ojas in a degraded ecology any more than you can build a healthy crop in eroded soil.
My illness taught me this with a clarity that thirty years of clinical practice had not. And it is this clarity — uncomfortable, embodied, impossible to dismiss — that I bring to everything else I have argued in this article.
The forest matters to me now not only because Charaka said so. It matters because I know, in my body, what it means to be depleted — and I know, now, that an entire nation of people is being pushed toward that depletion by forces they did not create and cannot individually resist.
That is the physician’s testimony. And it demands a physician’s response.
IX. The Mirror for the Ayurvedic Community
I want to be direct here, because this is a publication that has always valued directness over professional courtesy.
The Ayurvedic community in India has, by and large, failed to show up for this crisis.
We have produced thousands of PG theses on classical topics — many of them valuable, some of them genuinely important scholarship. We have conducted clinical trials on individual conditions. We have published case reports and review articles. We have delivered papers at conferences on the standardisation of classical formulations. We have engaged, sometimes productively, in the evidence-based medicine debate.
What we have not done — with anything like the urgency the situation demands — is mobilise as an intellectual and professional community around the ecological foundations of our own system. We have not demanded that Vrikshayurveda — the classical Ayurvedic science of trees and plant ecology — be revived as a living discipline rather than a historical curiosity. We have not made medicinal plant conservation a matter of institutional priority in our colleges. We have not produced a coherent Ayurvedic position on deforestation — not as environmental activists, but as physicians who understand that their pharmacopoeia is being dismantled in real time.
We claim the authority of a 5,000-year tradition. We invoke the genius of Charaka, Sushruta, and Vagbhata in every introductory lecture. But Charaka wrote about Janapadodhvamsa — the collapse of communities through environmental degradation — not as a historical event but as a clinical reality requiring physician response. He did not say: “This is a problem for the government. Continue your panchakarma practice.” He said: the physician who understands health must understand the conditions in which health becomes impossible.
Are we that physician? Are our institutions producing that physician?
The answer, in most cases, is no. And that answer is something we need to own, before we can change it.
IX. What Ayurveda Actually Proposes — If We Choose to Listen
Let me be careful here to distinguish between easy romanticism and substantive ecological practice. I am not suggesting that Ayurveda has a magical solution to climate change. I am suggesting that Ayurveda contains a coherent worldview within which the following practical commitments make complete sense — and that our institutions are uniquely positioned to advocate for and model them.
Vrikshayurveda as Conservation Biology. The classical texts on plant science — Vrikshayurveda, Parasara’s Krishi Parasara, and the botanical sections of the Arthashastra — contain sophisticated frameworks for understanding plant ecology, seasonal behaviour, soil relationships, and sustainable harvesting. These should be integrated into Dravyaguna curricula not as antiquarian interest but as the basis for a contemporary medicinal plant conservation ethic. Every Ayurvedic college should have a functioning medicinal plant garden managed according to ecological principles — not a decorative installation, but a working demonstration of sustainable horticulture.
Ecological Ritucharya as Community Education. Ritucharya education, delivered through Ayurvedic practitioners and community health workers, should include not just personal dietary and lifestyle recommendations but environmental Ritucharya — the collective seasonal obligations of a community to its landscape. This means advocating for native tree planting at seasonal junctions, for watershed conservation during monsoon, for the restoration of village-level forest patches. The Ayurvedic practitioner should be a community ecologist, not just a clinical physician.
Dinacharya as Low-Carbon Living. The Dinacharya framework — early rising, natural light, seasonal food, minimal processed consumption, walking as transport, earthen and wooden vessels, natural textiles — constitutes, when practised even imperfectly, a genuinely low-carbon lifestyle. This is not austerity. It is intelligence. Ayurvedic practitioners should be articulating this explicitly in the language of ecological responsibility, not just personal wellness.
Panchakarma’s Environmental Preconditions. You cannot detoxify a patient in a toxic environment. The logic of Shodhana — purification — applies at the systemic level. An Ayurvedic community that advocates for body detoxification while remaining silent on environmental toxification is operating with a profound inconsistency at the centre of its clinical philosophy.
Research at the Ecology-Pharmacognosy Interface. The most urgent, underfunded, and intellectually fertile research frontier in Ayurveda today is the intersection of ecology and medicine. How does forest loss affect the availability and quality of wild-harvested medicinal plants? What are the extinction risk profiles of the 600-plus medicinal plants listed in classical Ayurvedic formularies? Can agroforestry systems provide ecological substitutes for wild-collected medicinal plants, and under what conditions? These are not peripheral questions. They are questions about whether Ayurveda will have a pharmacopoeia in fifty years.
X. The Closing Reckoning
The Charaka Samhita ends its discussion of Janapadodhvamsa not with despair but with a responsibility: the physician who understands the conditions that make communities sick has an obligation — dharma, in its fullest sense — to speak about those conditions, to act against them, and to prepare both the community and the individual to navigate them with whatever resilience can be cultivated.
India’s forests are going. The heat is arriving. The El Niño is forming over the Pacific. The monsoon is uncertain. The 91% who have no air conditioning are exposed, in the most literal physiological sense, to the consequences of decisions made without their participation and without their benefit.
And somewhere in this landscape is the Ayurvedic community — the inheritors of a system that saw all of this coming, that built its entire logic around the premise that the health of the body and the health of the world are one question, not two — still largely occupied with examination reforms, drug standardisation debates, and the evidence-medicine paradigm war.
I do not say this to excuse myself from the indictment. I have been as guilty as anyone of allowing the urgent to displace the critical. But there is a point at which silence becomes a clinical symptom in itself — a sign of collective dissociation from the tradition we claim to inhabit.
The forest we forgot was never just trees. It was the ecological memory of a civilisation that knew how to live within its means on this particular piece of earth, in these particular seasons, with these particular plants and rains and soils. Ayurveda was that memory’s medical expression.
The question before us is not whether we can reverse the deforestation statistics. That will take decades of policy and political will that extend far beyond our professional sphere. The question before us is whether we are willing, finally, to speak in our own voice — the voice of a medical tradition rooted in ecological intelligence — and say, clearly and without institutional timidity:
This is what is happening. This is what it means. And this is what a civilisation that understood Loka Purusha Samya would be doing about it.
The forests are waiting for that voice. And so, I suspect, are our patients.
Dr. Aakash Kembhavi is a PhD Guide, RGUHS; Chief Editor, International Journal of Ayurveda; and Director, Astanga Wellness Pvt. Ltd. He writes at drkembhavi-s.github.io under the banner “Ayurveda Unfiltered.”
[Transparency note: Data research and structural framework for this article were developed with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic AI). All analysis, editorial positions, and clinical perspectives are the author’s own.]
| Key Data Sources: India State of Forest Report 2023 (FSI/MoEFCC) | NFHS-5 | Lancet Countdown 2024 | CLASP India Cooling Reports | NDMA Heat Wave Data | IMD Monsoon Forecasts 2026 | FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 | Global Forest Watch | CEEW Heat Risk District Analysis 2026 | India Water Portal Climate Reports |
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