Exhausted with the overbearing grey concrete this is creeping up at the metropolis like some futuristic horror film, a growing collection of folks have determined to do their bit to domesticate little inexperienced utopias, on occasion as rise up gardeners.
These 'guerrilla gardeners'-who get activated just ahead of monsoon-range from a dentist who seed-bombs forests neighbouring Mumbai to a yoga trainer who surreptitiously plants tree saplings wherever she will find a unfastened spot in her neighbourhood. Their small interventions are harking back to the 'guerrilla gardening' movement that started in London some years in the past, the place electorate roamed round identifying abandoned spaces and cultivating them when nobody was once having a look.
"Just before monsoon, we fly a four-seater aircraft over a 200-mile radius outside Mumbai and scatter seeds over areas that we can see are deforested or strip-mined," says Dr Firdaus Batiwala, who has encouraged different contributors of the Bombay Flying Club to do the same. "The best way to do it is to create a seed ball of clay and manure embedded with seeds. When you throw it, and the seed sprouts and the survival rate is much better because it has its nutrition from the ball in the initial few weeks. It's an old Japanese technique."
With the assistance of Sanctuary Asia mag and Bhavan's zoology professor Parvish Pandya, Batiwala has been purchasing indigenous seeds-kanchan, Indian teak, bor-because they manage to develop in hostile prerequisites the place the highest soil is misplaced or the land is in bad shape, and the place the more finicky species won't develop, he says. Many of Mumbai's ubiquitous timber aren't native-gulmohar got here from Madagascar and rain tree from Jamaica-and had been introduced by way of British botanists.
The idea of constructing new ecosystems round local timber sparked an pastime in Malad-based businessman Vikas Mahajan a number of years in the past. He shaped an informal team known as Friends For Reviving Our Green Earth.
Green warriors pass in for seed-bombing
Members of Mahajan's team steadily seed-bomb outdoor the city. Mahajan also conducts unfastened workshops to teach youngsters how to wash and dry seeds after they have eaten fruits-oranges, lemons, chikoos and mangoes. "We show them how seeds can be a treasure, not garbage," says Mahajan, who designs school science labs. "Basically everyone has to work for nature."
While seed-bombing works easiest outdoor the city, guerrilla gardeners running inside of Mumbai take the somewhat more concerned saplings route. A couple of weeks in the past, eco-entrepreneur Savitha Rao planted the primary of a mini-city forest in a park in Goregaon. Her organisation Keshav Srushti aims to create 100 metropolis forests the usage of local species of timber, shrubs and herbs, which have a tendency to be more immune to pests and disease. "We plant them intelligently so that two trees do not compete for the same resources. The idea is to make them self-sufficient ecosystems. These also bring in diverse species of birds, not just crows and pigeons," says Rao.
"Air pollution has become a serious problem and trees are the best air purifiers. You can choose the food and water you consume, but you cannot choose the air you will breathe. As human beings we can still take precautions, but what about animals and birds? Can a puppy or a sparrow put on an air mask? When a cow breathes polluted air all the time, will it not impact the quality of milk which is then consumed by us?" asks Rao.
Breach Candy-based guerilla gardener Nisha Mulchandani, a yoga trainer, has been planting timber for years, many of that have now grown to towering heights. "Every year, when Nana Chudasama used to distribute free saplings just before monsoon, I would just go and pick them up, pile them into my car, and plant them wherever I saw a spot of earth. The problem is that now every thing is cemented so it is difficult to find spaces," she says, bemoaning the collection of timber which might be being indiscriminately hacked. "A tree takes time to come up but it takes a minute to chop it. The tree pose (vrukshasana) is an important posture in yoga... we forget that we are so intimately connected to nature."
Indeed, if timber are viewed now not as impediments to human civilisation however as interactive beings that observe their very own woody etiquette, the similarities are endless. German forester Peter Wohlleben, who wrote the spell binding book 'The Hidden Life of Trees', means that timber keep up a correspondence with one another identical to folks. There are mature well-behaved ones who are the "upright members of ancient forests" and there are those who hog assets. But in contrast to human beings in their current destructive avatar, timber consider in community, help every different by way of their network of roots or thru odor or alerts despatched out by way of leaves, and are part of a woodwide internet that can have moderately more lasting significance than the worldwide internet.
As environmentalist Bittu Sahgal says, "In the wild, the best seed-planters are the creatures large and small. In our cities, where we have edged out the natural seed dispersers, we must step in. Guerrilla gardening is just the thing our cities need and where we are likely to find the least resistance is on the largest vacant spaces available-the thousands of desertified rooftops of our green-starved cities."
These 'guerrilla gardeners'-who get activated just ahead of monsoon-range from a dentist who seed-bombs forests neighbouring Mumbai to a yoga trainer who surreptitiously plants tree saplings wherever she will find a unfastened spot in her neighbourhood. Their small interventions are harking back to the 'guerrilla gardening' movement that started in London some years in the past, the place electorate roamed round identifying abandoned spaces and cultivating them when nobody was once having a look.
"Just before monsoon, we fly a four-seater aircraft over a 200-mile radius outside Mumbai and scatter seeds over areas that we can see are deforested or strip-mined," says Dr Firdaus Batiwala, who has encouraged different contributors of the Bombay Flying Club to do the same. "The best way to do it is to create a seed ball of clay and manure embedded with seeds. When you throw it, and the seed sprouts and the survival rate is much better because it has its nutrition from the ball in the initial few weeks. It's an old Japanese technique."
With the assistance of Sanctuary Asia mag and Bhavan's zoology professor Parvish Pandya, Batiwala has been purchasing indigenous seeds-kanchan, Indian teak, bor-because they manage to develop in hostile prerequisites the place the highest soil is misplaced or the land is in bad shape, and the place the more finicky species won't develop, he says. Many of Mumbai's ubiquitous timber aren't native-gulmohar got here from Madagascar and rain tree from Jamaica-and had been introduced by way of British botanists.
The idea of constructing new ecosystems round local timber sparked an pastime in Malad-based businessman Vikas Mahajan a number of years in the past. He shaped an informal team known as Friends For Reviving Our Green Earth.
Green warriors pass in for seed-bombing
Members of Mahajan's team steadily seed-bomb outdoor the city. Mahajan also conducts unfastened workshops to teach youngsters how to wash and dry seeds after they have eaten fruits-oranges, lemons, chikoos and mangoes. "We show them how seeds can be a treasure, not garbage," says Mahajan, who designs school science labs. "Basically everyone has to work for nature."
While seed-bombing works easiest outdoor the city, guerrilla gardeners running inside of Mumbai take the somewhat more concerned saplings route. A couple of weeks in the past, eco-entrepreneur Savitha Rao planted the primary of a mini-city forest in a park in Goregaon. Her organisation Keshav Srushti aims to create 100 metropolis forests the usage of local species of timber, shrubs and herbs, which have a tendency to be more immune to pests and disease. "We plant them intelligently so that two trees do not compete for the same resources. The idea is to make them self-sufficient ecosystems. These also bring in diverse species of birds, not just crows and pigeons," says Rao.
"Air pollution has become a serious problem and trees are the best air purifiers. You can choose the food and water you consume, but you cannot choose the air you will breathe. As human beings we can still take precautions, but what about animals and birds? Can a puppy or a sparrow put on an air mask? When a cow breathes polluted air all the time, will it not impact the quality of milk which is then consumed by us?" asks Rao.
Breach Candy-based guerilla gardener Nisha Mulchandani, a yoga trainer, has been planting timber for years, many of that have now grown to towering heights. "Every year, when Nana Chudasama used to distribute free saplings just before monsoon, I would just go and pick them up, pile them into my car, and plant them wherever I saw a spot of earth. The problem is that now every thing is cemented so it is difficult to find spaces," she says, bemoaning the collection of timber which might be being indiscriminately hacked. "A tree takes time to come up but it takes a minute to chop it. The tree pose (vrukshasana) is an important posture in yoga... we forget that we are so intimately connected to nature."
Indeed, if timber are viewed now not as impediments to human civilisation however as interactive beings that observe their very own woody etiquette, the similarities are endless. German forester Peter Wohlleben, who wrote the spell binding book 'The Hidden Life of Trees', means that timber keep up a correspondence with one another identical to folks. There are mature well-behaved ones who are the "upright members of ancient forests" and there are those who hog assets. But in contrast to human beings in their current destructive avatar, timber consider in community, help every different by way of their network of roots or thru odor or alerts despatched out by way of leaves, and are part of a woodwide internet that can have moderately more lasting significance than the worldwide internet.
As environmentalist Bittu Sahgal says, "In the wild, the best seed-planters are the creatures large and small. In our cities, where we have edged out the natural seed dispersers, we must step in. Guerrilla gardening is just the thing our cities need and where we are likely to find the least resistance is on the largest vacant spaces available-the thousands of desertified rooftops of our green-starved cities."
Guerrilla gardening takes root in Mumbai
![Guerrilla gardening takes root in Mumbai]()
Reviewed by Kailash
on
June 17, 2018
Rating:
