TreeSisters Planting Projects
Tamil Nadu, India
In Partnership with Project GreenHands
This video shows scenes around the tree nursery and the work that goes into growing trees.
Video courtesy of Project GreenHands.
Location: Tamil Nadu, South India
In 2020, Isha Outreach paused this reforestation project due to the complications of the COVID-19 lockdown and following restrictions. During this time, the project evolved into a beautiful and inspirational project called Cauvery Calling which TreeSisters began funding in April 2021. Project Greenhands is now complete, TreeSisters funded 250,000 trees.
Project GreenHands, a project of Isha Outreach, was created to unite an entire state around spiraling desertification in Tamil Nadu, where many major rivers have already dried up and agricultural failure is peaking through combined effects of different land degradation processes and drought.
We are supporting a sub-program called "Trees for Life", an agro-forestry initiative that transforms lives of farmers and their landscapes, through intercropping or growing a grove.
Projects Green Hands has three tree nurseries that grow four million saplings every year to be transplanted on registered poor farmers' small-scale farmlands. The nurseries procure the farmers with ecologically and economically beneficial, native or naturalized trees. Trees can provide timber once they have reached a certain height or farmers can harvest their fruits, or else tree may serve as fodder for livestock.
Trees For Life aims to increase soil fertility, biodiversity, and groundwater retention while providing income that reduces malnutrition and risk of farmer suicide. The additional income from the trees and secondary crops can offset the farmer's loss of income from the reduction in their main crop. The spirit of this project is humbling.
Photos of the Khasi Hills, India project courtesy of Project GreenHands
~ Women planting seeds in prefilled soil pots
~ A tree seed sprouting
~ A planter posing with her newly plated tree
~ A variety of tree saplings at one of the nurseries
~ Planters out in the field tending to the trees
(Photos will change every few seconds or you can scroll with the small arrows on each side.)
"Birthed out of a spiritual teaching that giving oneself as a volunteer in selfless service is a fast track to growth - offered to agonizingly poor rural communities alongside yoga and meditation to help heal broken spirits before catalyzing action through tree planting. Spiritual fulfilment was literally the ground of PGH. Then - take a caste culture and bring them all together - every sector of society side by side in the tree nurseries. The military, business owners and employees, single mothers, aids victims, school children and students, farmers, politicians and police - you name it, PGH brought every type of person together around the shared cause of reforesting to counteract the extremes of climate change - flood and drought. Social justice was the currency that levelled the playing field of PGH. Literally 'we are all in this together'." ~Clare Dubois
Want to know more about this project? Please click below for more information.
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