The Man Who Planted A Forest
The year was 1979 in Assam, India. Floods had washed a great number of snakes onto a barren sandbar. When Jadav "Molai" Payeng -- then only 16 -- found them, they had all died. "The snakes died in the heat, without any tree cover. I sat down and wept over their lifeless forms." Then he dried his tears and asked forest officials if they could plant trees in that area. When they told him nothing would grow there Payeng quietly began to plant seeds anyway. Thirty years later the 1,360 acre forest he created on the land where "nothing would grow" is home to birds, deer, apes, elephants and even tigers.
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