— Widely attributed to Gandhi; not in his Collected Works – a modern environmental aphorism
About this quote
हिन्दी में
हम दुनिया के जंगलों के साथ जो कर रहे हैं, वह उसी का दर्पण है जो हम स्वयं अपने साथ और एक-दूसरे के साथ कर रहे हैं।
What it means
The claim is a diagnostic one, and the word carrying it is mirror. It does not say that cutting forests harms people, which would be an ordinary statement about consequences. It says the forest shows you something you would otherwise not look at directly: the same disposition, the same accounting, applied to an object that cannot argue back. The felled forest is evidence, not the offence being described.
Read that way, the sentence resists the use it is usually put to. Shared as a caption it becomes a general lament about trees, with humans as the villain in the abstract. As written it is narrower and harder — it asks you to accept that whatever logic permits a landscape to be treated as material will not politely stop at the edge of the forest, and that it is already being applied to people somewhere in the same ledger.
What it teaches you
Next time you read about a cleared forest, look past the hectare count for the other half of the same story: who was living there, what they were paid or promised, and who signed. Those facts are usually in the same report and are usually skipped. The line’s claim is checkable — it predicts that the two will keep turning up together — so treat it as a prediction to test rather than a sentiment to agree with.
अर्थ और सीख
इस वाक्य का असली शब्द है दर्पण — यह नहीं कहता कि जंगल काटने से नुक़सान होता है, बल्कि यह कि जंगल के साथ किया गया व्यवहार वही सोच दिखाता है जो हम आपस में बरतते हैं। कटा हुआ जंगल अपराध नहीं, सबूत है। अगली बार किसी जंगल के कटने की ख़बर में सिर्फ़ पेड़ों की गिनती नहीं, यह भी देखिए कि वहाँ कौन रहता था और उसके साथ क्या हुआ — दोनों बातें अक्सर एक ही रिपोर्ट में होती हैं।
Where it comes from
Usually attributed to Gandhi; the line actually appears in This Endangered Planet era environmental writing and is not found in Gandhi’s Collected Works. It is best treated as a modern environmental aphorism carrying his name.
