Noted environmentalist, Gandhian, and social activist Chandi Prasad Bhatt, recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 1982, the Padma Bhushan, Gandhi Peace Prize and the Indira Gandhi award for national integration, is the founding father of the Chipko Movement. He hails from Uttarakhand and had founded the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh (DGSS) in Gopeshwar in 1964, which later became a mother organisation to the Chipko Movement, in which he was one of the pioneers.

In 1956, Bhatt found hope when he heard a speech by the Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan, who was on a tour of the area. Bhatt and other young people launched themselves into the Sarvodaya movement and Gandhian campaigns, of Bhoodan and Gramdan and organising villages for economic development and fighting liquor abuse throughout the Uttarakhand.

In 1960, he left his job at GMOU, to commit full-time to his Sarvodaya activities, and by 1964, Bhatt had instituted the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal (Society for Village Self-Rule) to organise fellow villagers in Gopeshwar for employment near their homes in forest-based industries, making wooden implements from ash trees and gathering and marketing herbs for ayurvedic medicine-and to combat vice and exploitation.

Curtailment of the villagers' legitimate rights to trees and forest products in favour of outside commercial interests enabled Bhatt, in 1973, to mobilise the forest-wise society members and villagers into the collective Chipko Andolan (Hug the Trees Movement) to force revision of forest policies dating from 1917. Women, who regularly walk three to five miles to the forest to gather and carry home fuel and fodder on their backs, took the lead. True to the movement's non-violent philosophy, these women embraced the trees to restrict their felling. Establishment of "eco-development camps" brought villagers together to discuss their needs within the context of the ecological balance of the forest. Stabilizing slopes by building rock retaining walls, the campers planted trees started in their own village nurseries. While less than one-third of the trees set out by government foresters survived, up to 88 percent of the villager-planted trees grew.

In 1974 he and his colleagues led a movement to save the cultural and archaeological heritage of the Badrinath shrine.

Although Bhatt has attended meetings in lowland India and abroad as a spokesman for Chipko, he has remained a man of his community. He and his wife continue to live the simple life of their Himalayan neighbours. In the process he has become knowledgeable and productive in helping ensure his peoples' hard won living. In 2003, he was appointed a member of the 'National Forest Commission', which reviewed all existing policies and legal frameworks relating to forest management, and submitted its report to the Government in 2005.