Open-Source Green Space

Perhaps because he grew up next a forest in Uttarakhand, India, Shubhendu Sharma took nature for granted. But, he says, he must have felt its lack when he went on to work as an engineer at Toyota in the metropolis of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley. Because when renowned Japanese forest ecologist Akira Miyawaki arrived at the Toyota campus in 2009 to plant a forest, Sharma was immediately captivated. Miyawaki had developed a method for creating small, condensed urban forest on degraded soils, which he put to practice on the campus.

Watching those trees grow into a “dense, lush jungle” was a transformative experience for Sharma, who went on to intern with Miyawaki. Sharma first experimented with growing a small forest in his own backyard (where he made some “mistakes,” including planting some nonnative trees). He then applied his training from Toyota to develop a standardized, step-by-step procedure for growing dense, fast-growing, native forests using the Miyawaki Method.

In 2011, Sharma quit his job and started his own company, Afforestt, which promotes the method. The company has helped plant more than 130 forests of varying sizes in 10 countries around the world, including the United States. The forests store carbon and provide green cover in urban areas, habitat for birds and other wildlife. Afforestt has received a fair amount of scrutiny, especially from Western ecologists who weren’t familiar with Miyawaki’s work. But so far, research into these projects has revealed mostly benefits. Researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, for example, looked at 10 tiny forest projects (200 to 250 square meters in size) in the country and found high biodiversity, water retention, and lower summer temperatures in the forested areas.

Miyawaki passed in 2021, but Sharma has continued the work. We spoke over Zoom recently about tiny forests and the healing power of nature.

How does one create a small forest using the Miyawaki method?

The essential part of making a forest is to know what the forest is made up of. Like how you would make a dish in the kitchen. The first thing is to buy the right ingredients. And unless we have all the right ingredients, we will not be able to follow the recipe perfectly. Similarly, we have to find exactly what the potential natural vegetation of that area looked like or looks like. If you are in a place which has a forest nearby, you have to go to the jungle and identify the potential natural vegetation, the vegetation that would grow on a patch of land all by itself without human intervention. We, in the Miyawaki Method, focus only on the climax [forest], because this is the final stage of natural succession. If you are making a forest in your region, the first thing you have to do is you have to find out the species that will make up the climax forest in that region.

“The essential part of making a forest is to know what the forest is made up of.”

The human lifespan is so short that at the scale of the timeline of a forest, we would be just one small part of it. A tree can live for maybe 800, 1,000 years. Humans live for maybe 60, 70, 90 years. In one generation of a forest, many human generations would have passed. So you can imagine we won’t even know what kind of vegetation existed 10 generations ago. We apply the Miyawaki method of reforestation, which is planting of a young forest of a given climate with species that would actually be the end result of a 200-year-long succession. We plan that climate’s forest in its miniature form, in the form of young seedlings. This method is also known as the potted seedlings method. Dr. Miyawaki developed this methodology because he found that the survival rate is highest when you are using seedlings instead of seeds.

When you are planting the seedlings, are you simultaneously planting not just the trees but the grass varieties or the shrub varieties? Is it a simultaneous planting for all different levels of the forest canopy?

In some projects we do, in some project we don’t. The tree is our slowest-growing species when it comes to the mix of all these plants. If you plant the grasses at the same time, they will grow much faster, and they might dominate this area. Ideally, we should let the forest grow to a stage that it blocks the sunlight that comes to the ground, and then turn to the fringe and mantle community and the grasses.

You sometimes refer to historical texts, or poems and paintings to understand a forest’s history and what plants originally grew there. So it can require quite a bit of background research, right?

Well, it’s a continuous process. Take the example of Jordan. You really can’t imagine a forest in Jordan today, but if you look at the history of the place, you will see that the prehistoric landscape was quite green. And then there are books like these [shares slide of several centuries-old travel books including Charles Linneaus’ Voyages and Travels in the Levant, in the Years 1749, 50, 51, 52 and an Arabic botanical text], where you can find traces of those species found there a long time ago.

The researcher who shared a study [about Jordan’s ancient landscape] with us, she has been able to identify many species, their maximum height, the area where they would have been found in Jordan a long time ago. So all this research we’ve made public. That is the beauty of open source. Once you have researched the species, planted a forest using those species, let it grow, you know the results, how beautiful it’s growing, and then you make it open source. Just imagine, one person’s work can be amplified thousands or hundreds of thousands of times, because somebody has done the research the right way.

The Jordan research surpassed all our expectations, because they found fossilized pollen, fallen based on which they were able to identify what used to grow in that region. And now they are planting those species of trees, which are otherwise not even seen in Jordan anymore.

What’s the smallest area within which you’ve created something like this? And the largest?

The smallest we have done this is within three square meters, 10 trees, in Rajasthan [India], in a small circle. That [concept of a small forest] actually picked up really well in the Netherlands. We had some clients visiting us from the Netherlands, and they were very inspired by looking at that small circle. And they introduced a concept called “Tuiny Forest,” which is actually a circle of just three to four square meters. Anyone and everyone could plant that, so they collaborated with a company which would put everything in a box — all the plants and the materials they need to mix in the soil, put everything together — and people can order it for 100-200 euros ($206) and they will send them the kit. Using this you can plant a Tuiny Forest in your backyard.

The largest we’ve created is around 16 acres in Hyderabad [India].

Tell us about your Maruvan project.

“Maru” means desert and “van” means forest. So “maruvan” means forest of the desert. We always wanted to work in Rajasthan. We wanted to prove to ourselves that we could make a forest even in arid places like Rajasthan. We got an opportunity in 2017 to make our first desert forest there, and we did that very successfully. After that, we realized that we had to have a dedicated research and development center in Rajasthan, because it’s a very lengthy process to bring back forests in desert areas. You have lost the topsoil, you have lost the water already, and the entire ecosystem has kind of collapsed. So we created the Maruvan [project] in a dedicated space, and three of our colleagues are living on that land right now. The goal is to bring back the lost forests of the Marwar region of Rajasthan.

We collected the seeds; we created a seed bank; we have created a nursery. We have a number of experiments, obviously; we planted some forests as part of those experiments. Some were successful, some failed. We have done a lot of experiments successfully with water conservation. Plants need three things to grow, sunlight, moisture, and the medium, soil. Here, the soil is available, but it’s dead. Water was not available at all and sunlight is available in abundance. So, our journey starts with soil regeneration and water conservation. Afforestation comes in third.

By staying in one place, we learned so much about water that today we are able to harvest and conserve millions of liters of water in a big lake in the middle of the desert.

We had to go beyond the Miyawaki method to find ways of regenerating the soil naturally, and especially microbially. And eventually what we also realized was that Maruvan has to become a place where people can stay in a forest. So we also did a lot of research and application of that research in building structures [using natural materials], and right now Maruvan is a place where we have this forest and we have a habitat for colleagues and visitors. It eventually led us to finding new ways of constructing, because everything has to be low impact here; this region is so sensitive.

Afforestt is a for-profit organization. Why not create a conservation nonprofit?

I did not know anything about the nonprofit world when I started. My only exposure to systems were business systems. I had worked for Toyota, which was a very big company. I visited a number of our suppliers, who would be smaller than medium-scale enterprises, and I could see that these guys were able to get things done, they’re able to make things move, because that’s their bread and butter. If a for-profit entrepreneur does not deliver something, he doesn’t get paid. NGOs get paid first, irrespective of whether they change the world or not.

“At a basic level, we are all beings of nature.”

I’m not against the nonprofit model. But I think the reason why Afforestt became successful in such a small period of time was because we were accepted wholeheartedly by large businesses, which would otherwise shy away from working with NGOs or advocacy groups. If we would have been like Greenpeace, we would not have ever worked with Shell. Shell is a client of ours today. I’m not a big fan of Shell. I don’t agree with so many things that they have been doing, but the reason that we could make a forest on their research-and-development premises was because they had a business, and we are a business. They had no hesitation in talking with us. They said, “This is your one-and-a-half acre, we want you to make a forest in it, because we want our employees to enjoy nature, blah, blah, blah.” And we said, “Okay, we’re going to make a forest for you.”

But even though you’re giving away information as open-source, are you thinking about the places where these forests are getting made? Aren’t they in places where people have a certain amount of privilege? How do you scale this benefit that you’ve created to make it more accessible?

People are marginalized because of many wrong practices. To give you an example: In the 1960s, India went through something called the Green Revolution, where a huge number of chemical-fertilizer-producing companies, pesticide-producing companies, came in (this is post-independence) and now after these 70, 80, 100 cycles of chemical agriculture, the land has got nothing in it. It’s absolutely dead. Very often we do very large scale, spread-out projects in Punjab [a state in northern India], especially with people who are marginalized. We work with a nonprofit called EcoSikh, which sponsors that. So in some places, we are doing it.

But I’ve seen why marginalized people cannot learn forestry, because of the cost of farming, especially in these regions. The input cost of chemical farming, is so high, and the margins are meager. And whether they’re large or small, their entire land is farmed up to the last square inch, or they will never be able to make ends meet. Asking these farmers to reduce their farming and plant the forests would be like taking away a piece of bread from their platter. I cannot ask them to make a forest, even if I’m giving them everything for free. And I can tell them, “You know all the health benefits. Your bodies are polluted, your land is polluted, your water is polluted, these small forests are going to mitigate it,” but they have no other way but to continue to kill their land and reap whatever small amount of profits they can from it. They’re so trapped in this vicious cycle of land degradation and poisoning of their lives and economically being marginalized to such an extent that they are committing suicides.

So when a person is on the verge of committing suicide, because of this debt on their head, and the land’s not producing anything without chemicals, it would be really stupid of me to suggest forestation as a solution.

But there are solutions. The solution is to get out of this whole menace of chemical agriculture, to start farming naturally. So right now, it is not the time to talk about afforestation to the marginalized communities. Right now is the time to talk to these companies, talk to the policymakers, about organic farming or natural farming.

Do you have any thoughts of which other paths you’re going to take in the future?

We recently started a health retreat, in a forest, where we are bringing in people, making them stay in a forest for a week and perform some detox cleanses on their bodies, which is extremely healing. Right now, it’s like if you want to do something about the environment, OK, stop using tissue papers, don’t buy this shampoo, buy that shampoo. Fair trade and all this stuff is happening, and this is the least people can do. But at the heart level, they’re not aligned with the natural world. At a basic level, we are all beings of nature. And to make that realization happen in a person’s life, you need to take them to a forest.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.