Frequently Answered Questions

The first thing you notice is the rock. Not the trees, there aren't enough of those yet, but the rock. Everywhere you swing a pickaxe there's another one waiting underneath, as if the hill has spent a few million years perfecting ways of discouraging optimism.

The first pit took the better part of a day. The hundredth wasn't much easier. Somewhere around the thousandth I stopped thinking of them as holes and started thinking of them as conversations with gravity. Water is funny like that. It isn't interested in your plans or your deadlines; it follows the easiest path every single time. If you want it to stay, you have to give it a better path. That's most of what I've been doing here, really, trying to persuade rain to linger a little longer than it otherwise would.

The land has a memory, and I don't mean that in the mystical sense, although if that's your thing, I'm not here to argue. I mean it in the practical sense. The rain remembers where it used to flow. Seeds remember where they used to germinate. Birds remember where they once found fruit. Restoring a forest isn't so much about creating something new as it is about removing enough obstacles for those old memories to wake up again.

There's a tree here that fruits for maybe two weeks each year. If you didn't know it was there, you'd walk straight past it eleven months out of twelve without giving it a second glance. The hornbills never miss it, neither do the fruit bats, neither, I've learned, do the Irula. That tells you something about expertise. The people who know a landscape best aren't the ones who can name every species from a book; they're the ones who know exactly where to stand on a particular morning in a particular month and catch a falling mango.

I've spent years reading books about ecology. Useful, important books. They've taught me a great deal, but none of them has ever stood on a hillside, looked at the clouds gathering over the ridge and said, "Not yet. Wait until the second rain." An Irula elder did exactly that one afternoon, and he was right. The books weren't wrong, they just weren't standing where we were standing.

People often ask whether this place changed me. It's a strange question, because eight years of carrying stones and digging pits would probably change anybody. What surprised me wasn't becoming stronger, although that happened too, it was becoming slower. Not physically, but in the part of your mind that insists everything should happen by next Tuesday. Somewhere along the way that urgency begins to look a little ridiculous. A tree doesn't care about your schedule, and the monsoon certainly doesn't.

Volunteers usually arrive carrying backpacks full of useful equipment. Headlamps, water bottles, hiking boots, mosquito repellent, power banks, things sensible people bring into the outdoors. After three or four days, though, most of them have picked up something they didn't pack. A different pace. You can watch it happening. The first morning they're checking their phones every twenty minutes. By the fourth day they're arguing about mushrooms over breakfast. By the end of the week they're pointing excitedly at bird calls they can't identify. Civilisation recedes surprisingly quickly when there's enough to notice.

I don't know if we're saving anything here, that feels like a larger claim than I'm qualified to make. What I do know is that the water table is higher than it used to be. There are butterflies here now that weren't here before. After the first proper rains, I hear frogs in spots that used to stay silent. Those seem like respectable facts. The rest, I suspect, is interpretation.