In 1979 a great river in India flooded an island called Majuli. When the water went down, a boy of sixteen walked out onto a sandbar and found hundreds of dead snakes on the hot sand.
There were no trees on that sand. There was no shade. The snakes had come with the flood and the sun had finished them.
The boy walked to the forest office and asked the men there for trees. They gave him twenty bamboo plants and one sentence: "Plant them yourself."
His name is Jadav Payeng, and he has been planting trees on that sandbar every single day since that summer.
In the first years he carried water in two cans, twice a day, in forty degrees. He put the seedlings in the sand and walked back for more water. Nobody helped him. Nobody paid him.
"People have been asking me the same question for forty years," he says. "Why? And I say: the snakes died because nobody had planted anything."
That sandbar is now a forest of five hundred hectares. It has a name — the Molai forest, from his own nickname.
Deer live in it. Vultures came back after thirty years. A herd of wild elephants has been coming to the forest every year, and tigers walk in it at night.
He is in his sixties now. He plants in the morning and walks in the evening, and his hands tell the story: he has been working with a spade and wet sand for most of his life.
"Have you been counting the trees?" a journalist asked him.
"No," he said. "I have been planting them. Counting is your job."