On May 12, 1459, the Rajput warrior ruler Rao Jodha laid the first foundation stone of an impregnable fort, atop a jagged cliff of volcanic rock in the Thar Desert of Marwar. He called the citadel Mehrangarh, or “fort of the sun”—and, legend has it, he insured a propitious future by ordering a man buried alive on its grounds. Over time, as the royal clan secured its power, the compound grew to colossal proportions, with soaring battlements, ornately furnished palaces, and grand courtyards enclosed by intricate sandstone latticework. Four hundred feet below, the capital city of Jodhpur became a flourishing trade center.
By the mid-twentieth century, when India gained independence from Britain, royal fortunes had fallen, and bats had moved into the premises. In the nineteen-seventies, the young maharaja began to restore the fort, to open it to the public. Curators filled galleries with artifacts from his collection. Today, visitors gaze at scimitars and armor, antique palanquins, silk brocades, and more than three thousand exquisitely detailed miniature paintings by Marwari artisans.
In 2005, Mahendra Singh, a member of the dynasty and the C.E.O. of the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, asked a man named Pradip Krishen if he could create a suitably arresting landscape around the fort—“greening” a hundred and seventy-five acres of stony ground. Virtually the only plant growing there was Prosopis juliflora, a ferociously invasive shrub from Central America, which Marwaris refer to as baavlia—“the mad one.” It survives on practically no nutrients or water, its branches bristle with thorns, and its leaves and roots emit poisonous alkaloids.
Krishen was not an obvious choice for the job. He was fifty-six years old, with no training in botany, ecology, geology, or landscape gardening. He had tried out several careers, with mixed success: as a journalist, a university lecturer in history, a TV documentarian, and an indie filmmaker on what he calls “the lunatic fringe.” He was six years into writing a book about the trees of Delhi, but he had designed only one small public garden, at the site of an even more ancient fort to the north of Mehrangarh. Looking back, Krishen seemed astonished that he said yes. “What arrogance!” he said as we drove across Rajasthan in September.
To work through how he might approach the undertaking, Krishen wrote Singh a “concept note.” It wouldn’t be a tidy garden or a forest, and it would be green only four months of the year, around the monsoon season. He suggested that they call it an “ecological restoration” project, a term, he explained professorially, that described “the procedures by which people study a habitat, and then attempt to restore it to an original state (either inferred or intuited).” Singh seemed a little baffled, but in a leap of faith he got the board to agree.
Krishen’s first task was to remove the Prosopis. It had sent long roots into fissures in the rock—following its habit, he wrote, of seeking out “inhospitable places, where it hunkers down and digs itself in.” To “grub out” the plants, he hired fifteen Jodhpuri miners, whose forebears had chiselled great blocks of pink sandstone for the walls of the fort. After three months of laborious chipping, the men had extracted Prosopis from about ten acres, leaving the area, Krishen noted, as perforated as “a piece of comic-book Swiss cheese.” He sent out teams of donkeys and handlers with a soil mix packed into panniers. Locals mocked him, predicting failure. “I had a moment of doubt,” he recalled. “What if whatever we plant doesn’t work?” But, he told himself, “we could always put back the Prosopis.”
Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park opened in 2011. Late one afternoon during my visit, when the blistering heat had relented a bit, Krishen showed me around. A trim, wide-shouldered man of seventy-three, he has curly gray hair, a clipped beard, and round glasses that slip down his nose. He led me through a rebuilt seventeenth-century stone archway in the original city wall, with wooden gates painted pale teal—the color of some of his favorite desert plants.
Inside was a display of circular raised beds filled with pebbles and soil particular to various desert habitats, containing dozens of striking plants, many still bearing bright blooms. More than two hundred species of trees, shrubs, climbers, herbs, grasses, and sedges now grow in the park, “an outdoor museum,” Krishen calls it, “of Marwar’s lithophytes—plants specially adapted to living in rocky habitats.” I stopped at a tall, tangled shrub with stems covered in extravagant downy flowers: bui, or desert cotton, which Rajasthanis sometimes use as fluff for pillows.
India, like much of the rest of the world, is in ecological tumult. Between 1880 and 2013, some forty per cent of its forest cover disappeared. It has lost a third of its wetlands in the past few decades, and a third of its grasslands in just a ten-year span. A fifth of its tree species may be threatened with extinction. Krishen’s work has emerged as a showcase for restoring biodiversity to ravaged places—a practice known as ecological restoration, or, more colloquially, “rewilding.” It is based not on industrial-scale quick-fix planting projects but on a near-fanatical attunement to the specifics of local ecosystems and the livelihoods of their people. Rewilders strive to undo some of the environmental damage inflicted over the centuries by humans—the most invasive species of all.
Krishen and I entered a narrow canyon, hewn by fifteenth-century miners from a solid cliff to channel runoff to two man-made lakes below. The trail opened to an expansive view of the fort, and of the park’s many plants. They had euphonious common names: cowpea witchweed; heart-leaf indigo; googal (an endangered species used in Ayurvedic medicine to lower cholesterol); and thhor, a cactuslike succulent that forms in rounded clumps the size of tractor-trailers. Krishen chose thhor as the logo for the park, less for its beauty (although he does find it beautiful) than for its hospitality. He calls it a microhabitat, providing shade and protection for twenty-four smaller plants, and for vulnerable creatures such as rodents and lizards. Like the park, it is proof that the harshest places on earth can support multitudinous forms of life.
As we finished our walk, Krishen spotted a pioneer butterfly struggling to free itself from a spiderweb on a ragged mallow. He delicately removed the web and sat on a stone bench, pulling at the silk until the butterfly flew away. He likes to say that when you restore a landscape you “learn how to read the Book of Nature,” an experience that he calls “one of the joys of my life.”
Mehrangarh Fort, looming on the escarpment above us, figures in one of the creation stories of modern ecology. In 1730, the maharaja of Jodhpur needed wood for a new palace in the compound, so he sent soldiers to cut down khejri trees in the desert village of Khejarli. The trees are sacred to the Bishnoi people, and a villager led a protest by wrapping her arms around a trunk. The soldiers brutally broke up the demonstration, slitting the throats of three hundred and sixty-three people. The protesters are said to have been India’s first environmental activists, giving rise to the term “tree-hugger.”
In September, some fifty of their modern-day successors gathered at the fort: members of a newly formed group called the Ecological Restoration Alliance of India. E.R.A.’s long-term goal is to fundamentally change how India’s citizens, industries, and governments interact with the environment. Its members include field biologists, ecologists, organic farmers, rain-forest and wetlands specialists, permaculture experts, a conservation geneticist, and a few enthusiasts just starting out. The group intends to be a catalyst, carrying out restoration projects and spreading information about best practices through public talks and open access to scientific papers. Krishen, who sits on the alliance’s steering committee, describes it as a “very small tribe,” but it is ambitious. Its Web site, referring to the many forces that are stripping India’s lands and contaminating its water, asks, “How can we not just arrest such trends, but reverse them?”
The United Nations, in yet another call to immediate action on the climate crisis, designated 2021-30 the “Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.” But there is no consensus on exactly how to enact repairs. The only thing everyone agrees on is the value of trees. They serve as carbon sinks, provide habitats and food, reduce water pollution, and prevent erosion. Still, some twenty-five million acres of forest are destroyed every year, by clear-cutting or fire, usually to make way for mines, grazing land, crops, and tree plantations, for timber, palm oil, and other products.
Most funding thus goes to guilt-absolving projects that promise to plant billions of trees—in the Amazon, the California redwood forests, the Sahel, and many of India’s twenty-eight states. In January, 2020, the World Economic Forum announced an initiative to plant a trillion trees. Bank of America, Mastercard, Microsoft, and the National Forest Foundation, among others, declared their support. Conservation International and MyTrees, which plan to help restore seventy-three million trees in Brazil, urge, “SAVE TREES, WIN PRIZES: Get rewarded for helping the planet every month!” The media, looking for feel-good stories, has routinely broadcast such measures. A National Geographic headline announced, “India Plants 50 Million Trees in One Day, Smashing World Record.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi relishes such headlines. Developing nations like India are in an especially painful bind: coping with cascading environmental catastrophes while pursuing rapid industrial growth. Modi claims to have found a way to do both. At the U.N.’s 2019 climate summit, he pledged to restore sixty-four million acres of degraded land by 2030. He also oversees one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. India will soon overtake China as the most populous nation, with more than 1.4 billion people. Although it contributes only seven per cent of global CO2 emissions, it is the third-largest polluter, after China and the U.S. At present, seventy per cent of its electricity comes from coal. The government recently predicted that India’s demand for electricity would double in the next decade.
Modi’s critics say that, in the rush to join the developed world, India is devastating the environment. Warnings from scientists are ignored, as dams, roads, and power lines are built in fragile habitats. In recent years, the Modi administration has taken steps to nullify the Forest Rights Act, which enabled Indigenous people and other forest dwellers to resist development projects in their homelands. A young participant at the E.R.A. conference described Modi’s India to me as “development on steroids.”
Attempting to replenish India’s tree cover, Modi, like his predecessors, has invested heavily in “compensatory” planting. For the state forest departments that implement these plans, biodiversity is a relatively new concern; following colonial precedent, they have historically regarded native shrubs, grasses, and climbers as “weeds” or, worse, as “junglee.” Under pressure to plant quickly and extensively, they install fast-growing, thirsty saplings, with little thought to whether they’ll survive.
The success rate of such initiatives is low. One recent study, published in a Royal Society of London journal, examined a hundred and seventy-six sites in tropical and subtropical Asia. After five years, an average of forty-four per cent of the trees had died. In October, when the online journal Yale Environment 360 surveyed tree-planting efforts in the Philippines, Turkey, India, and elsewhere, it found that scientists described them as poorly designed and mismanaged at best. Often, they “fail to grow any forests at all.”
E.R.A. aims to provide alternatives to what it regards as “mindless tree planting programmes.” It also contends with another rewilding approach: the trend of planting “tiny forests.” The practice began in the nineteen-seventies, when a Japanese botanist named Akira Miyawaki started creating small, tightly packed groves of native saplings, shrubs, and grasses, in carefully prepared soils. Admirers described dense forests that grew far more rapidly than natural ones.
Word caught on abroad, and Miyawaki was summoned to Malaysia, China, Italy, and Brazil. His forests, some no bigger than a tennis court, attracted butterflies, bees, and birds, and provided islands of shade and quiet in ever-hotter, more congested cities. In 2008, he was in Bengaluru to create a plot at a Toyota plant. A young engineer there, Shubhendu Sharma, planted a Miyawaki grove in his own back yard, and soon became one of India’s most successful proselytizers for the method. He quit his job, started a company devoted to Miyawaki forests, and gave TED talks in which he discussed corporate social responsibility and outlined a method that could create a hundred-year forest in just ten years.
Miyawaki’s cardinal rule resembles one that guides E.R.A.: carefully study soil needs and habitat, and use a selection of local plants. India, though, has relatively few native-plant nurseries, and, as Modi pledged to plant millions of trees, businesses and cities introduced tiny forests helter-skelter. Scientists note that the groves often require earthmovers, truckloads of fresh soil, and—for the first few years—weeding, manuring, and copious watering, in regions where water is scarce. There are not yet any hard data proving these forests’ long-term survival rates in India.
At the conference, people who have spent decades in the field, mostly with small nonprofits, gave presentations on their challenges and accomplishments. One has worked with local communities to restore six thousand acres of agricultural land. Another turned an old cement quarry into an eco-park, creating a template for industrial land reclamation. A third works with residents and local leaders to restore hilly wetlands in Tamil Nadu, where the flow of water had turned sluggish and foul. Wetlands, like deserts, have historically been dismissed as wasteland, and the area was filled with garbage and invasive plants. The group removed all of that, and planted native sedges, grasses, climbers, and trees. Within a year, drinkable water had begun to flow again.
These kinds of ideas, built on deep understanding of individual environments, aren’t as easy to implement as mass interventions. But ecologists argue that, especially in a place with as many ecosystems as India, the only viable response to the climate crisis is a patchwork of effective local solutions. Native plants, Krishen points out, have evolved over millions of years “to feel at home with that particular kind of soil and its microbes, that moisture regime, that climate, those particular rhythms of the seasons.”
Restoration ecologists have struggled to frame this vision so that it can compete for the attention of governing bodies and big donors. “Coming up with a common story has not been easy,” Nitin Pandit, the former director of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, who is not a member of the alliance, told me. “But if it’s narrated correctly by N.G.O.s, taking in other stakeholders and actors, and the government doesn’t pay attention, it’s missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime.”
In a talk that Krishen gave at the conference, he put it more urgently. Anticipating a run on arable land in the next decade, he said, “Rising populations, extreme weather events, dropping productivity of land—all will contribute to food insecurity. I’m saying, let’s get ready for it.”
After the conference, Krishen gave me a ride from Jodhpur to New Delhi, a distance of three hundred and sixty-five miles, with a stop in Jaipur to visit a different kind of desert-restoration project he’d taken on. Before leaving Mehrangarh Fort, he got a bag of dog biscuits from his truck, offering one as a parting gift to a favorite stray, Bavekoof—Urdu for “without any sense.”
Krishen’s facial expression hovers between quizzical and sardonic when discussing human follies, but turns tender as he talks about his family (which includes four dogs and two cats) or a plant he is particularly fond of. He grew up comfortably in the diplomatic neighborhood of New Delhi, where his father, Prem, worked in the civil service. His mother, Vimla, came from a modest background, but had high aspirations for Pradip and his two sisters. He fondly calls her “a bit of a Jewish mother.”
As a young man, Krishen was considered an “odd bod”—a misfit. He did his undergraduate work in Delhi, and, in the late sixties, went to Balliol College, Oxford, for a degree in history. He returned a “Bolshie” radical, obsessed with New Wave films and the Beatles. He recalls that Prem was quietly furious, and that “Mummy was also disappointed in me—I wasn’t going to be an ambassador.”
He married his college girlfriend, Sonu Davar, and they lived in an apartment in his parents’ house. Sonu worked in the theatre, and Krishen, after teaching for several years, began producing television documentaries for a popular science program: on moon rocks, how animals communicate, the social life of honeybees.
After three years, Krishen said, that “wasn’t fun anymore.” In 1980, he won first prize—ten thousand rupees—in a script competition held by the National Film Development Corporation. The screenplay, based on a novel by the Irish writer Joyce Cary, became his first feature film, “Massey Sahib.” Set in 1930 in a small town in British India, it centers on a young typist in a district magistrate’s office, who expects a fine career simply because he speaks English and works for a respected official. Krishen found the perfect filming location deep in the jungle: Pachmarhi, the former summer capital of the Central Provinces. When he was casting the female lead, a tribal girl who marries Massey, Sonu introduced him to a colleague: a shy twenty-two-year-old architect with no acting experience named Arundhati Roy.
Krishen frequently interrupted his narrative to be sure I was paying attention to the scenery. We passed small farms growing maize, bajra (a black millet used for flour), and guar (which produces a gum useful in processed food and explosives). Much of the landscape, though, was sand and rocks, speckled with stunted scrub, wispy wild grasses, and occasional solitary trees. It looked pretty desolate, but he made me see it as he did—a place that could sustain life of all kinds. Years earlier, he’d noticed distinctive plant formations in the desert, and begun asking local people what the shrubland was called. He finally found a man who told him it was known as Roee. Ever since, Krishen has been trying to make the word known: “If you name it, you put something in people’s minds.” He cited similar eco-regions—the Namib (“vast place”) of southern Africa, the chaparral of California and Mexico—and said, “They’re all shrublands that are admired and conserved.”
As we drove, Krishen touched lightly on painful chapters of his past: he and Sonu separated in 1982, and she died three years later, of a probable brain hemorrhage. His parents helped to raise their young daughters, Pia and Mithva.
After Arundhati Roy’s star turn in “Massey Sahib,” Krishen began collaborating with her on films: he directed, she wrote and acted. Roy moved in with him, and in 1993 they were married. Their films—“In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones,” based on Roy’s experiences as an architecture student, and “Electric Moon,” about a fading royal family who own a jungle resort—won a few awards and developed a cult following, but they didn’t make any money. Krishen was stuck. He hated working with the National Film Development Corporation, and he couldn’t see himself in Bollywood.
He left his girls at home with Roy and his parents, and began spending much of his time in Pachmarhi. He and an architect friend, Golak Khandual, built a house there, and every day they rambled through the jungle with a retired forester who taught them the names—English and Latin—of some fifty species of trees.
Eventually, Krishen was invited to a meeting, held by the state government, where development plans for Pachmarhi would be discussed. He began reading up on integrated conservation planning, and, in collaboration with an N.G.O. in Delhi, came up with a pitch. The state gave them a contract, but soon cancelled it and turned the task over to the Town and Country Planning Organisation. Krishen responded to the resulting plan with a critique that ran to a hundred and twenty pages. Others expressed similar objections, and the plan was soon scrapped.
While Krishen was having a midlife crisis, Roy was writing a masterpiece. Around the time that “Electric Moon” was finished, Britain’s Channel 4 commissioned her to write a script. She dashed off a three-page treatment, about a single woman in Kerala bringing up her children within an extended family, but she wanted to pursue the idea as a novel. In 1996, Roy showed the completed manuscript to Krishen. He recalls being “completely bowled over.” So were Roy’s agent, publishers, and critics. The book, “The God of Small Things,” was translated into more than forty languages, won the Booker Prize, and went on to sell six million copies. In Roy’s acknowledgments, she describes Krishen as “my most exacting critic, my closest friend, my love.”
For the first time in Krishen’s adult life, money was not a worry. “I didn’t need to look over my shoulder for the wolf at the door,” he says. But, after spending most of three years in Pachmarhi, he was still at loose ends: “Arundhati has written her book. I go back to Delhi with nothing to show.” That was the impetus for “Trees of Delhi.” He confided in the preface that he’d been walking in the arid forest at the heart of the city, the Central Ridge, for nearly forty years, yet he knew very little about what grew there: “To my untrained eye, the Ridge was just a wild-looking place, with lots of thorny trees and bushes.” His epiphany came in February, 1995, after the leaves had fallen. He made a note: “Every dry twig had sprouted a tiny, pale green affirmation that it was still alive.” He was struck by the redemptive power of nature. Trees, he wrote, “are balm and salve to our mistakes.”
Immersing himself in research, he gathered information about the botanical and urban-planning history of Delhi, which has more than two thousand acres of forest. Writing does not come easily to Krishen. “I sweat blood,” he told me. It got harder in 2004, when he was given a diagnosis of tongue cancer, and went through chemo and radiation. Still, he’d decided, “this was what I wanted to do.”
“Trees of Delhi,” subtitled “A Field Guide,” describes the animating features of two hundred and fifty-two urban trees. Krishen took the photographs and fussed over an elaborate design, yet the tone is conversational and engaging. Because he’d been an amateur for so long, he could anticipate the kinds of questions ordinary readers would have: “Most tree flowers are BISEXUAL, with both male and female parts, and are known as PERFECT FLOWERS.” In the “Back of the Book,” he found a place for bits he couldn’t relinquish, including a few words about the planet’s biggest banyan. Situated in the village of Gotte Bayalu, it is about seven hundred years old, and capacious enough that twenty thousand people can stand in its shade.
The book was a best-seller in India. “Pradip was a rock star,” a friend told me. Excited readers began asking him to lead tours of the city’s trees. Once, a hundred and sixty people showed up, despite driving rain.
At the time, India’s environmental movement was energized; an anti-logging crusade, led by village women in the nineteen-seventies, had been followed in the nineties by mass protests against an enormous dam that the government was building in Gujarat. Roy wrote in fierce support of the movement. Krishen’s advocacy followed a different trajectory. (They parted amicably in 2010.) He spent years exploring a great swath of the country’s forest lands, which led, in 2015, to his second book, “Jungle Trees of Central India,” and to his work in restoration ecology.
As we drew closer to Jaipur, Krishen pointed out increasing numbers of khejri—the tree that the eighteenth-century protesters in Rajasthan had sacrificed themselves to save. “You hear it before you see it,” he said, noting the buzz of bees that its flowers attract. “It’s fantastic for their forage.” The khejri is invaluable to desert people, too. In the Rajputana famine of 1869, they ground its bark to make flour, which kept them alive. The bark is still used to treat inflammation, bronchitis, dysentery, leprosy, and piles. Farmers feed their cattle with the leaves, which also make a rich compost. The seed pods, which resemble emaciated green beans when unripe, are a key ingredient in Rajasthani cuisine. Krishen told me, “You had some of them the other day in our lunch.”
In January, 2016, as word spread about what Krishen had done at Rao Jodha, the Jaipur Development Authority asked if he would design a new park in town. Officials from the horticulture department took him out in a sleek white car, showing him parks that he might remake. Krishen, uninterested in designing ornamental gardens, asked, “Don’t you have some untidy little corner of the city that’s unravelling?”
They pulled into a ghostly place called Kishan Bagh. Amid a city of four million people, it consisted of a hundred and fifty-eight acres of bald hillocks and peaked dunes badly scarred by goat trails. The road leading in was being used as a dumping site. The horticulture office had attempted to create a large cactus garden, but the cacti had died. All that remained was a set of concrete stairs leading to weed-choked beds, surrounded by bricks, scrap iron, broken beer bottles, and plastic waste. To the officials’ amazement, Krishen looked out at the dunes and remarked, “It’s gorgeous. Now, this is something I’d love to work on.”
Kishan Bagh Desert Park, completed in 2021, is sandy, not rocky, but it has Krishen’s marks all over it. Joined by two dogs and three young naturalists trained in the Krishen method, we followed a picturesque winding boardwalk through tall grasses. A series of colorful billboards enticed visitors to learn “All About Roee,” and noted, “The Thar Desert has something like 120 different kinds of native grasses!” Long overlooked in the global fanfare about trees, grasses are just beginning to get their due. Grasslands have extensive root systems, and store a greater proportion of their carbon underground than trees, which release carbon they’ve accumulated when they burn or rot. According to the Climate Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit, grasses account for a fifth of the carbon stored in the world’s soil; protecting this reserve, the trust says, is “by far the greatest natural climate solution besides reforestation.”
Like all flora, grasses have an intimate, complex relationship with their terrain. In 2007, Krishen began to understand some of this, in part by observing bunches of Oropetium grass in Rao Jodha park, along with the peculiar hardened earth in which they grew. Scientists had been studying “biological soil crusts” for decades, but have only recently discovered just how much they aid deserts. Teeming with microscopic life, the crusts reduce soil erosion and increase its fertility, capturing nitrogen and carbon from the atmosphere and sharing them with other growing things.
While laying out Kishan Bagh, Krishen and his naturalists had pulled together hundreds of scattered rhizome clumps of Saccharum spontaneum and planted them around the park. They were pleasantly surprised: the Saccharum, which are usually associated with moist sites, settled in comfortably. Each year, for ten days after the rainy season, they form masses of silver-plumed pennants, stealing the show.
A small fringe-toed lizard with a blue tail flashed by. Krishen said, “They can’t move and breathe at the same time.” It was the kind of memorable detail that makes him an effective popularizer. In his books and his parks, he has synthesized several disciplines, describing the interplay of species, atmosphere, and microbes in lively, accessible terms. One wildlife scientist told me, of Krishen’s contribution to ecology, “He has expanded the scope of who can participate. Anyone who has a connection to the land can engage.”
His passion has proved contagious. In 2018, he met Somil Daga and Fazal Rashid, two millennials working at an organic-farming startup in Delhi. They had read “Trees of Delhi,” and become fanatic “tree-spotters,” but had only recently discovered restoration ecology. When a client asked them to rewild some two hundred acres in Rajasthan, they nervously turned to Krishen for advice.
Not long after they met, Krishen asked Daga to be an apprentice at Rao Jodha. Daga, who is thirty, had trained as a mechanical engineer, and was still learning about plants. When I met him, he cheerfully admitted, “Four years ago, I didn’t know a tomato plant from a cucumber vine!” Now he is the park’s director, and speaks fluent rewilding: “Apart from bringing back birds and insects, a properly restored habitat will require almost no looking after at all. It is entirely self-sustaining. That is its beauty and magic!”
While Daga was starting out at Rao Jodha, Krishen asked Rashid, who’d initially pursued an editorial career at Penguin Random House in Delhi, to help him develop a twenty-five-acre wildflower meadow at a boarding school. Rashid still works with the organic-farming startup, and is establishing a native-plants nursery in Bhopal. He said, “Pradip’s inspired me to spend my life working with plants and landscapes.”
Others have been galvanized by Krishen’s opposition to reckless development; for ecologists, preservation is as important as restoration. In “Trees of Delhi,” he wrote about a rare, almost intact wilderness called Mangar Bani: a dry forest outside Delhi, in a valley where the village of Mangar sits. Krishen wrote that the bani (“little forest”) was sacred among local residents, “protected by the superstition that anyone who breaks a branch or grazes his goats here will suffer grievous harm.” But, in recent decades, villagers had joined mining companies and real-estate developers in illegally logging and selling parts of the forest. The bani is a “little green gem,” Krishen told me. “If you can’t preserve this, you can’t preserve anything.”
After “Trees of Delhi” brought Mangar Bani to public attention, a young man from the village named Sunil Harsana devoted himself to preserving the sacred grove and the thousands of acres of surrounding forest. He quit his job as a graphic designer at a newspaper, and scraped together funding for research. He told me, “When I got into this work, I asked the elders what they thought about the bani. They’d say, ‘You can’t do anything about it.’ I decided, I’ll do what I can, so I don’t have that look on my face when I get old.” Harsana, who is now thirty-six, said that he couldn’t have done it without Krishen’s advocacy, and the help of other outsiders: Chetan Agarwal, a fellow at an ecological nonprofit who had learned about Mangar Bani from Krishen; a retired Army officer; two environmental lawyers; a biologist. Together, they began to take real-estate companies to court, and Harsana contacted the press when trees were illicitly cut. He called himself the watchdog of Mangar, a role that aggravated many of his neighbors. “People would cut whatever,” he said. “Now they know there will be a case. They don’t like me, but we’ve achieved an equilibrium.”
In places like Mangar Bani, environmentalists are trying to accommodate the principles of ecological restoration to political realities. One E.R.A. member told me, “The work Krishen is doing is certainly the way forward, but he is a prototype, and working with budgets that are not replicable on larger scales yet.” The areas that Krishen restores are, in a sense, laboratories for testing techniques. In places where human claims compete with restoration efforts, ecologists must focus as much on the behavior of people as on that of the wildlife.
During the conference at Mehrangarh, I met two founders of E.R.A., Divya Mudappa and T. R. Shankar Raman, who are tropical-forest ecologists. Personal and professional partners, they run a program for India’s Nature Conservation Foundation in the rain forests of the Western Ghats, a mountain range sixteen hundred miles south of the Thar Desert. They invited me to see their work on the Valparai Plateau, an area dominated by agricultural interests, which have both built the economy and harmed the environment.
The damage began in the nineteenth century, when the British started to cut down the jungle, replacing it with vast monoculture plantations of cardamom, coffee, and tea. Today, some seventy thousand people live there, and many of them work on the tea plantations—sprawling fields sometimes called “green deserts.” Mudappa said that she, too, used to think that tea was a terrible crop: “It is, in a way. But now we know that deserts aren’t dead.”
The final, hour-long climb through the Anaimalai Hills—named for the Asian elephant—consists of forty hairpin turns through dense forest and sheer drop-offs. Motorcyclists and bus drivers passed my cab with brio, ignoring signs that warned, “Elephants Have Right of Way.” As we approached the Valparai Plateau, the tea fields emerged. Bright green and cropped as neatly as an English croquet lawn, they lined the hills for miles. Rail-thin silver oaks, imported from Australia, were planted at regular intervals in the fields, for shade. Standing incongruously in narrow pathways among tea bushes were three gigantic gaur: Indian bison, six feet at the shoulder and weighing more than a ton. A sign nailed to an oak advised, “Save Nature for Future.”
Raman and Mudappa follow the pragmatic principles of “community-based conservation,” performing a kind of ecological shuttle diplomacy from their N.C.F. jeep as they persuade plantations, residents, and donors to work with them. After twenty years on the job, they have reconciled themselves to partial success. Raman, soft-spoken and philosophical, talks about the need to address “ecological illiteracy.” Mudappa is more prone to expressions of delight (“Look, tree nymphs!”) and occasional admissions of frustration. She told me that “staving off pressures on the forest is an everyday battle and nightmare.”
The Western Ghats, with at least three hundred and twenty-five endangered species, have been called one of the world’s “hottest hotspots” of biodiversity. Roadkill is an obvious problem, and when Mudappa and Raman began working in the hills they considered creating wildlife corridors to enable animals—particularly the endangered elephants—to travel between forested areas. But the plantations wouldn’t agree, so they lowered their sights and focussed on conserving and restoring the forest that remains: fifty wooded patches of up to a few hundred acres apiece, separated by snaking roads, the town of Valparai, and the steeply tiered estates.
They showed me places where they have used “passive restoration” (preventing encroachment by road crews and people cutting firewood) and other stretches that have required “active restoration” (planting native species at the bedraggled edges). They measure success in incremental steps, not in the leaps attempted by billion-tree initiatives. Mudappa said, “If it doesn’t become a rain forest, O.K. Elephants still use it.” During the monsoon season, they go out with their staff—five field technicians, four conservationists, two Ph.D. students, and a few other seasonal employees—to plant three hundred and fifty to four hundred saplings a day. That sounded impressive, but Mudappa laughed and said, “The plantations go out in their trucks and plant silver oaks by the thousands—bang, bang, bang.”
Seven Indian companies own the majority of the plantations. Mudappa and Raman have spent more than fifteen years securing alliances with three of the largest ones, the Tata Group, Parry Agro Industries, and the Woodbriar Group. N.C.F.’s nursery is on Tata’s land. Mudappa and Raman showed me some of the roughly sixty thousand plants that the foundation grows there, mostly from seeds collected along the road and from the edges of plantations, and introduced me to some of their field technicians: two young women, who were repotting seedlings, and a middle-aged man, who was moving some saplings. They live in a nearby Kadar village. Part of Mudappa and Raman’s mission is to demonstrate that forest dwellers know the land better than they do. Mudappa said that she relies on their “extremely good field craft,” and considers them “the most natural allies for forest conservation and restoration.”
The remaining rain forest is home to species that only an ecologist could love. Along with the charismatic megafauna—Bengal tigers, gaur, leopards, and elephants—there are small, outlandish creatures that include hump-nosed pit vipers, giant wood spiders, flying lizards, and the purple frog, a subterranean amphibian with a piglike snout which emerges from its burrow once a year to mate. (The frog was recently “discovered” by scientists, but Mudappa emphasized that it has been “known to the local tribal people forever.”) As we walked in the woods, she bent down to remove a leech from her leg. A few moments later, I felt something crawl up my ankle—too quick to be a leech and too small, I hoped, to be a wood spider. I furtively slapped my calf until the sensation stopped.
For rain-forest conservationists, part of the job is to find ways to make it easier for humans and other animals to share territory. When monkeys began removing roof tiles from plantation workers’ houses and stealing food, Mudappa and Raman advised the families on better waste disposal, and provided new roofing, which the plantation installed. After a trip to Borneo, where they saw orangutans using cables to cross roads, they devised their own zip lines for macaques, made of recycled hoses from fire engines.
But these kinds of interventions do little to relieve the financial pressures faced by the plantations. The chairman of Parry Agro’s board, M. M. Venkatachalam, has spoken of trying to “make restoration an economic activity that can sustain itself.” He told me that balancing fiscal and ecological considerations is “a huge challenge—definitely in India, with its large population, where land is in short supply.” One of Parry Agro’s tea plantations is organic, but, he said, it yields less than half of what chemically treated plantations do. Parry Agro’s parent corporation also owns one of the country’s largest fertilizer companies: “India requires huge amounts of it to provide food for the population.” Yet chemical fertilizers can harm the fertility of soil and lead to pest infestations, and pollute the water and air. When I asked Venkatachalam about some of N.C.F.’s initiatives, he agreed that “greater diversity can improve the soil and control pests,” but said that now wasn’t the time to invest: “As prices fall and wages rise, the tea industry is going through financial difficulties.”
Mudappa and Raman, anticipating concerns about cost, have figured out how to practice a form of restoration virtually for free, with help from another endangered species: the great hornbill. In an essay, Raman describes it as “a giant among birds”—up to four feet long, sheathed in black and white feathers, with a “huge, grotesquely caparisoned beak” of bright yellow and a matching “horny protuberance,” called a casque. The female, after breeding and nest-building, lays her eggs and seals herself in with her droppings. She leaves a narrow opening, where her mate can leave food and she can “forcibly eject” her further waste, “like a bazooka blast.” Late on our second afternoon, as we drove through a stretch of forest, Raman jammed on the brakes, crying, “Look!” We leaped out and saw twelve great hornbills, their distinctive beaks and plumage just visible as they soared above the canopy.
Mudappa was inspired to pursue ecological restoration after watching how hornbills and civets—voracious consumers of fruit and dispersers of seeds—practice it. Based on this knowledge, she and Raman are beginning a study for a new plan, in which some of the Australian silver oaks that dot the tea plantations would be replaced with native strangler figs. The seed of a strangler fig, they write in “Pillars of Life: Magnificent Trees of the Western Ghats,” is dropped by a hornbill, a bat, or a macaque into a “cozy nook on the high branches of the host tree,” where it can’t be eaten by deer or elephants. The sprout begins to send leaves above those of the host, and sinewy roots creep down the trunk and into the soil. Gradually, the roots form a thick, multipronged trunk, which smothers the host.
The strangler’s practice might seem like the basis for a horror movie, but, as Mudappa talked about their idea, it seemed like an act of poetic justice: replacing a pretty but ecologically negligible import with natives that produce tens of thousands of figs each—a perpetual feast for insects, birds, bats, and other pollinators. It would bring biodiversity to the tea fields, and potentially increase their yield. Mudappa said they have no intention of seeing all the oaks slowly consumed—“just ten to twenty per cent.” The only thing required of the plantations would be a “behavioral and attitudinal change”: stopping workers from lopping off fig sprouts when they trim the oaks each year.
Before I left, Mudappa and Raman invited me to their house in Valparai, for a cup of tea. Raman spoke hopefully about their work as a model of coöperative restoration between rewilders and planters. Mudappa countered that donors aren’t interested in models; they want projects that run like businesses, with quick, deliverable progress: “They say, ‘We want to scale up. What is your exit strategy?’ But restoration requires the long-term engagement of ecologists. I’m just happy that people want to restore parts of their land, and let us restore what’s left. Why shouldn’t this continue?”
Every day when Krishen is at home in Delhi, he walks in the Central Ridge—the forest that led to his discovery of the fortitude and bounty of trees. In September, 2020, he took some friends to marvel at a stand of seventy-foot kaim, the tree under which Krishna is said to have played as a boy. They took a wrong turn and came upon a vast open space, perhaps ten acres, that the Delhi Forest Department’s earthmovers had scraped clear of ground cover. The workers had created “a military-style grid” for trees that would need far more water than the dry soil of the Ridge could provide. Krishen wrote a sharp letter to Delhi’s lieutenant governor, and a scathing piece about how the Forest Department was proceeding “in dire ignorance of even the basic tenets of ecological restoration”—a process that would cause soil runoff and the sure death of ill-suited saplings. He called up several journalists, who returned with him and reported on the desecration.
Krishen has spent years campaigning for the restoration of the Ridge, which he believes could be “the most beautiful urban jungle in the world.” In 2021, he was asked to serve on a six-member committee to advise the Delhi government on a plan for restoring biodiversity there. One major objective was to eradicate Prosopis juliflora, Krishen’s old nemesis, which, he estimated, had overtaken ninety per cent of the forest. The plan’s author—C. R. Babu, a professor emeritus at the University of Delhi’s Centre for Environmental Management of Degraded Ecosystems—wanted to remake the Ridge along the lines of New York’s Central Park, with tennis and handball courts. His proposal involved introducing at least half a dozen species that don’t grow in Delhi. But, he explained, water tanks could be installed and contour trenches dug to keep the soil moist. The branches of Prosopis would be periodically lopped, and native plants installed beneath.
When Krishen objected that the plan wouldn’t contain the Prosopis or restore the original flora, Babu retorted, “We do not need your half-baked theoretical knowledge.” An exchange of haughty e-mails followed, and Babu soon resigned, saying that he couldn’t work with the committee. Still, his plan remained. The minister in charge of forests persuaded the committee to agree to a pilot scheme of twenty-five acres, and Delhi’s Forest Department began to put it into effect.
Krishen is accustomed to thwarted projects, which he calls “my little paper airplanes with bent noses.” One restoration effort, in the northwest Himalaya, was cut short when the nonprofit that he was working with ran out of money. But unreasonable resistance fires him up. He has several new books in mind, one of them a journal about the Central Ridge. It is sure to be part love letter to the native survivors, part screed against the British and Indian governments for despoiling the forest even as they aimed to prettify it, and part outline for a restoration project that would demonstrate how to invite the wilderness back into the city.
In the meantime, the ideas espoused by E.R.A. are spreading in India. Officials in the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been working with ecological restorationists for years. “Things are changing,” Ramesh Krishnamurthy, who leads courses for forest officers at the Wildlife Institute of India, told me. “A landscape-level approach for biodiversity management is functionally taking root.” Krishen and Raman are preparing their own training materials for forest departments.
One afternoon, Krishen took me through a section of the Central Ridge that he hopes will one day be rewilded. The Ridge is part of the Aravalli hills, which stretch northeast from Gujarat through Rajasthan and into Delhi. The range, Krishen wrote in “Trees of Delhi,” with a touch of competitive pride, is more than a billion years old, “compared to just fifty million for the Himalaya.” As I walked with him and his dogs, we turned onto a wide trail spread with hay. It followed colonial precedent: the British viceroy saw the Ridge as a pleasant place to ride horses—an “amenity forest.” Today, a cavalry regiment of the Indian Army leases a polo ground there. The hay prevents the horses from kicking up dust. Passing a pile of garbage, Krishen explained that the spot was a dumping ground for the polo clubhouse.
Krishen’s description of the forest was interrupted by a rude screech: a parakeet overhead. He sometimes finds crude wire traps for game animals—left, he speculated in one essay, by policemen “having their idea of manly fun.” Still, some wildlife remains: a subset of the original bird population, plentiful butterflies, and well-fed feral pigs, macaques, and cows, which congregate at the forest’s entrances. Krishen deplores its derelict state—“the Rutputty Ridge,” he calls it—but he is stubbornly hopeful: “Unlike everywhere else in Delhi, where we are very likely to have drenched the ground with chemicals and other toxic effluvia of human civilization, the Ridge’s soil is still alive.” ♦
An earlier version of this article imprecisely described the size of wooded patches in the Valparai plateau.
