“Jadav Payeng, known as the Forest Man of India, spent 40 years of his life planting a tree every day to save his island, creating a forest and restoring wildlife in it. Now in his 50s, Payeng has created an entire forest ecosystem, much larger than the 840-acre Central Park in New York, which is home to tigers,

rhino, vultures and 115 elephants – and he doesn’t plan to stop any time soon.”

“””Earlier, this was all sand. No trees, no grass — nothing was here. Only driftwood. First with bamboo trees, then with cotton trees. I kept planting — all different kinds of trees. “”It’s not as if I did it alone, you plant one or two trees, and they have to seed. And once they seed, the wind knows how to plant them,

the birds here know how to sow them, cows know, elephants know, even the Brahmaputra river knows. The entire ecosystem knows.””, says Jadav”

“Children are not often invited to speak to the United Nations General Assembly. But there stood Felix Finkbeiner, who started his project as a nine-year-old. At the time of his speech, Finkbeiner was four years into leading a remarkable environmental cause that has since expanded into a global network of

children activists working to slow the Earth’s warming by reforesting the planet. By the time he delivered his speech at the UN in New York in 2011, at the age of 13, Germany had planted its millionth tree, and Plant-for-the-Planet had been officially launched.”

Today, Finkbeiner is 19—and Plant-for-the-Planet, the environmental group he founded, together with the UN’s Billion Tree campaign, has planted more than 14 billion trees in more than 130 nations.

““We’re going to be the victims of climate change. It is in our own self-interest to get children to act,” he says. “At the same time, I don’t think we can give up on this generation of adults and wait 20 or 30 years for our generation to come to power. We don’t have that time.

ll we can do is push them in the right direction.””

When Antonio Vicente bought a patch of land in São Paulo state and said he wanted to use it to plant a forest, people called him crazy.  It was 1973 and forests were seen by many as an obstacle to progress and profit.

““The area was totally stripped,” he says, demonstrating by pointing to a painting of the treeless land in 1976. “The water supplies had nearly dried up.” But what started off as a weekend gig has now become a full-time way of life. More than 40 years later, Vicente – now 84 – estimates he has replanted

50,000 trees on his 31 hectare Serra da Mantiqueira mountain range property. “And if you ask me who my family are, I would say all this right here, each one of these that I planted from a seed,” he says.”

On Vicente’s own patch, there are now eight waterfalls. The mountain trail there is absolutely spotless, with no litter or cigarette butts, with a rich earthy smell and views in the distance of the Mantiqueira mountain range’s rolling green valleys, the only noise the trickle of the waterfall.

Speaking of his own project in the Mantiqueira mountain range: “I didn’t do it for money, I did it because when I die, what’s here will remain for everyone.” He adds: “People don’t call me crazy any more.”

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