In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck writes, ‘It is one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens that groups of individuals are periodically infected with a feverish nervousness which causes the individual to turn on and destroy, not only his own kind, but the works of his own kind.’India was once a pioneer in environmental management and had progressive conservation laws; today, it is not surprising to read that the country ranked 176 out of 177 nations in the recently released 2026 Environmental Performance Index, beating only Laos. Given the persistent concerns about air and water quality, biodiversity, and ecosystem protection, it is worth remembering what brought us here and where we are headed.The crisisThe relentless push for ‘ease of doing business’ has led to near-total approvals for forest diversion. The government gave the go-ahead to as many as 10,026 proposals during the period 2020-25 and rejected just 120 proposals – an overwhelmingly high approval rate. Some regions, like Andaman and Nicobar, J&K, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Mizoram, saw no rejections. Coincident with manifold efforts to dilute and bypass environmental laws (even approving post-facto clearances) and culminating in the passage of the Jan Vishwas Act (2023), the pace of forest diversion has accelerated sharply in recent years. Around 215,943 hectares of forest land were approved for diversion for non-forest use between the period FY15 to FY26, rising from 11,941 ha./yr. in the first 5 years to 22,563 ha. in just the last 2 years.The Green India Mission missed its target to establish new forest cover by 98%, per the CAG. This must give pause, especially when we ironically claim a 22% increase in very dense forest cover, by diverging from FAO guidelines and including commercial plantations, agricultural orchards, and urban trees.Institutional absenceThe courts, especially the Supreme Court, had stepped in over the years to moderate the natural bias of the state towards ignoring environmental considerations in development. This has now changed. The pro-clearance National Green Tribunal (NGT) has not helped. The Print noted that the NGT dismissed all environment justice and public interest-centred appeals from January-June 2026, while around 60% of industry-centred appeals were accepted. Of the 119 appeals considered in the first half of 2026, no bench has given a favourable judgment to a single environmental/public-interest appeal.A study has revealed that the National Board for Wildlife has cleared 97% of its projects in protected areas and corridors over the past 12 years, 100% in 3 specific years, and over 100 projects in a day. Finally, the Central Empowered Committee (CEC), which used to report to the Supreme Court, has now been taken over by the government itself, ensuring full compliance.In this climate of one-sided and rampaging environmental exploitation, all that affected citizens can do is to protest. This article aims to show how, let down by institutions, this most desperate of actions is now spreading across the country. Slender threads of opposition, fuelled by growing numbers of aware people, is keeping hope alive. Agitations spreading across the countryThe classic example of a cave-in by the judiciary leading to agitations is the definition of the Aravalli range. The court rejected the recommendations of the Forest Survey of India and the central empowered committee to take up an unscientific definition that would derecognise 90% of the Aravalli hills and leave them open for mining and real estate development. This led to massive protests across Rajasthan, pushing the courts to set up another committee (with no independent experts) to revisit the definition. Whatever the outcome, people have woken up to the risks from this scandalous decision, which would have destroyed local water sources and allowed the Thar Desert to spread across North India.In Uttarakhand, even after the debacle at Tharali village, which was mostly wiped out by a cloudburst in 2025, the government is bent on doubling the road from Uttarkashi to Gangotri in the most fragile Bhagirathi Eco-Sensitive Zone. Scientific rebuttals were all ignored, and it took the action of local women tying raksha sutras for the 6000+ devdar trees that were going to be felled, and a letter by veterans in public life, Dr. Karan Singh and M. M. Joshi, to question the clearances for this project. The veterans wrote, ‘In a valley that has just witnessed a severe avalanche that buried hundreds of people, sacrificing trees that arrest these avalanches is tantamount to a crime.’ The protests against the Ken-Betwa River Inter-linking project have focused on flawed and insufficient compensation, while the Supreme Court has still not held a single hearing on its own CEC’s report since 2019. Affected villagers (many tribal) have attempted ‘jal anshan’ and ‘chita andolan’ to immerse themselves in the Ken and Bearma streams. While the administration has now agreed to review the compensation, all institutional checks failed, and it came to this: the state browbeating its own citizens and driving them to desperation.In Uttarakhand, a range of protests by locals has not succeeded in stopping the widening of the highway between Dehra Dun and Rishikesh, for which 4,300 mature sal trees are to be felled in a well-used elephant corridor. The protesters have since made their point, leading to a review of the project.Across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, there have been multiple public protests to protect mangroves, forests, and coastlands. Public awareness has ensured that the proposed ‘safarization’ of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and the clearing of remaining coastal mangroves is more visible and will be contested. In Assam, activist Pranav Doley has been jailed under the severest NSA, as he was protesting the acquisition of land near Kaziranga National Park for the construction of a Hyatt hotel. This has led to multiple protests, coalescing around the near-elimination of the eco-sensitive zone around Kaziranga. Whatever happens, forest land grab is not going to be a cakewalk for the state.While these agitations have succeeded in raising the profile of the environmental struggles, numerous others languish. The agitation against the mega dam on the Siang in Arunachal, the prolonged agitation in Ladakh so local people can have a say in land and resource management, agitations in Indore against dirty water, dam fatigue in Sikkim, agitations against Assam’s elephants being shipped to temples in Tamil Nadu, various local agitations and a campaign by leading international NGOs against Vantara’s trade in animals, and, finally, legal filings against the imminent destruction of rare tropical forests in the Great Nicobar Islands – where the consent of the Gram Sabha may have been falsified, and the project has no public support among vanishing tribal populations – all these and more protests are bubbling under the surface.Could the sheer endurance of these protests kindle an inchoate hope? Can we accept their environmental challenge to lead to a more reasoned and inclusive politics, a more sustainable economy, and even a higher quality of life?The hopeThere are no words of comfort at this desperate time; even the protests do not signify a reversal, merely a postponement. In The Lord of the Rings, Theoden asks, ‘So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?’ Much earlier, in the midst of another battle, Bilbo provided an answer by planting an acorn, explaining that the acorn represents the ‘promise of new life,’ and that in the face of death and destruction, the only choice left is to continue living and rebuilding. Renowned anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodall left us with the same fighting message of hope. She would neither choose optimism nor denial. For her, hope was an ongoing discipline: a practice of choosing action over despair. ‘We face the sixth great extinction, climate change, loss of forests, poverty,’ she once said. ‘But hope is about taking action in spite of it all. It’s about saying: I will do my bit. And when we join together, those bits become a movement.’‘Hope,’ the great Czech dissident playwright turned president Václav Havel wrote, ‘is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.’ This fraught moment calls us to hold on to hope for good.Himraj Dang writes on environmental issues.