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Sacred groves are an age-old and world-wide phenomenon, traditionally consisting of forest zones, protected by people based on their spiritual relationship with the deities or ancestral spirits believed to reside there. India alone counts nearly 50,000 sacred groves, with 2000 in Kerala where they are known as kaavu. Presently, the sacred groves are under serious threat with numbers of groves reducing drastically. In this article, the authors challenge one of the dominant theories that sacred groves, while previously protected by religion, now disappear due to the loss of traditional beliefs. Starting from the observation that the destruction of sacred groves has less to do with a loss of faith but more with a change of faith, the article focuses on the ambivalent role of religion and the impact the commercial offer of some specific Hindu rituals has on the declining number of sacred groves. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among grove-owners in Kerala, the authors argue that it may be true that religious perceptions maintained the sacred groves for centuries, but that the same religious tradition now provides both justifications and marketable rituals for cutting them down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information concerning the continuing story of wood, trees, and forests in the ritual fabric of Jagannath, a Hindu deity, in India. In mid-2006, there was a new Bhaktivedanta Ashram temple opened in the village of Kuansh, Bhadrak district in Orissa. The author implies that although the new temple's policy is to welcome all devotees, the most amazing aspect of the venture was that he emphatically claimed that the new wooden statues of the four main deities of Lord Jagannatha, Baladeva, Subhadra, and Sudarshana were made strictly according to the Puri tradition and the scriptures.