In a bid to convey a message on environment conservation, President Droupadi Murmu on Saturday recalled how her father used to bow down before trees and the Earth and seek forgiveness before using them for cooking and agriculture.

Inaugurating the two-day National Conference on Environment - 2025 at Vigyan Bhawan, she also asked people to ponder if it was justified to destroy natural resources that humans being could not create.

Recounting the early years of her life in an Odisha village, she said her family had to rely on dry wood for cooking due to the unavailability of resources.

“My father and mother used to collect wood.They would then cut them (into smaller pieces) and make them worth burning.

I used to see every day that my father would bow down before the logs before chopping them. I used to ask my father, ‘Why do you pray before cutting them?’ He would tell me that he was seeking forgiveness,” the president said amid applause from the dignitaries attending the event.

Murmu said her father would tell her that these wood pieces were once part of a tree that gave fruits, flowers, air and water.

“Now these logs have grown older and dried. Even then, they are helping us,” she said.

The president said her father would also bow down before the Earth before tilling.”I used to ask, ‘Why do you pray before tilling the field?’ He would say, ‘Seek forgiveness before hitting Mother Earth.’ He would say, ‘The Earth is our mother. What all it bears, whatever products we grow, we are able to do it because of Earth’,” she recalled.

Murmu was born in Uparbeda village in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district.

The president said that while travelling on the road, she noticed small mountains had vanished and, when asked, people would say that they were destroyed to make way for construction activities.

The president said many people asked her why people destroyed things that they could not create.