Remember the childhood picture of you climbing that tree in your colony? You might want to hold on to it. As for those of you who belong to a nature club, you don’t want to miss a single meeting. Trees, wild grass, exotic birds, vibrant flowers... who knows how long these are going to last? At the rate at which the earth’s green cover is depleting, these beautiful objects of Mother Nature will all become the stuff of picture books soon. A mother we’ve not only stopped caring about but are ruthlessly harming for our selfish needs.
In fact, there will come a time in the future when you will have to sit your kids down and tell them all about trees – quite like how Ted Mosby does in How I Met Your Mother. Because a recent study found that a startling 58,000 trees are cut every year in India! How many trees do you think are going to last till the next generation? First, dinosaurs became extinct. Are trees headed in that direction, too? Seems like it.
This can stop, if we DO something about it. Actually do rather than just sit and make long proclamations. To make our work easier, an NGO called The Sapling Project is distributing free saplings to everyone who signs up on their website or attends the events they organise. While most tree plantation programs are carried on in parks and forest areas, The Sapling Project encourages planting saplings in your own colony and neighbourhood. This way you can check the progress of your plant each time you step out!
And if you feel that planting free saplings isn’t enough, you can always join The Sapling Project as a project co-ordinator for your area. You can help them out by spreading the word in your locality and getting more people to join the distribution drive, organise volunteers to expand the area of distribution and collect money from donors. In fact, you can even help them out from the comfort of your home, simply by spreading the word on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms and encouraging your friends to join the website. You can also keep in touch with other participants about the progress of their saplings.
It doesn’t take much really to make a difference. The question is, are we ready to take the initiative?
