When faced with the collective challenges of climate change, financial instability, energy, water and soil scarcity, poverty, malnutrition and ever-increasing numbers of environmental refugees, it can be difficult to envision the scale of interventions needed to address these issues. Project GreenHands (PGH) is an initiative that aims to resolve some of these concerns on a large yet appropriate scale. Through the auspices of the Isha Foundation, PGH has enabled over a million volunteers to plant 7.1 million indigenous trees in Tamil Nadu, southern India during the last four years, aiming to increase the tree cover of the entire state back to its original 33% within ten years through mass people-participation and the planting of a further 114 million trees.
The project is a direct response to increasing desertification in Tamil Nadu due to over-industrialised farming, climate instability and the degradation and suffering of an increasingly poor and marginalised rural people.
At the core of the PGH strategy is the belief that social transformation is fundamental to environmental transformation and vice versa, and this is achieved by educating local people about the multiple benefits of trees, and then giving free saplings to those who have pledged to care for them for two years. In India trees can grow between five and twenty feet in a year, providing access to fresh fruits that can reverse malnutrition. Trees provide free medicines and shade, fodder for the cattle, green manure for the fields, fuels and fencing.