Miyawaki Method of Afforestation by Subhendu Sharma

[Laughter] so my name is Shubham do Sharma I live in Bangalore and I'm going to talk about the miyawaki method of a power station so the picture which you see on your screen is a forest a forest is a place so dense with trees that you can't even walk into it irrespective of its size the picture which you see is a 20 plus acres forest in Hyderabad or it can fit in a small space as small as somebody's houses backyard a garden this picture is in white field Bangalore both of these forests are man-made so the miyawaki method of afforestation creates forests of native species that together close to each other so dense that you can't even walk into it in 2009 dr. Akira miyawaki came to India and made his first forest in the factory where I used to work and this is the picture of that particular project when it was 2 years old but why making of these forests is so important to us you see most of the ancient civilizations of the world either evolved inside a forest or close to a forest this picture is of Guatemala most of our ancient art history paintings folklore epics also are inspired by the forest and it's trees let's learn about how far is naturally evolved before the earth was formed the soil was formed we had our planet completely filled up with rocks and on these rocks something special started to grow lichens which is a symbiosis between fungi and plants now these lichens on these rocks slowly penetrating into them converting this rock into powdered material and this powdered material makes soil in the soil slowly the grasses starts to grow and when these grasses die they become biomass for the soil thus they make the soil thicker and in this thick soil shrubs can start to grow the small shrubs that grow on the grass they add more root systems they made soil thicker the leaves that fall from these shrubs add more and more layers to the soil and starts to form humors which creates an environment where even the trees can start to grow the first species of trees to appear on any particular patch of land naturally are called pioneer species these are the trees that show up first tightly forming a forest of pioneer species now these trees wood is soft and also flexible they grow fast but they don't have strength so these trees of softwood fast-growing trees create an ecosystem where the sunlight doesn't reach the ground it's dense enough that you can't even walk into it but eventually these are not the trees which are going to continue regenerating on that particular patch of land these trees will be taken over by slow growing species which can grow under the shade of other light loving trees and these trees are usually much taller they are more robust compared to the softwood light loving trees so a forest of these species is going to form a cluster which can be called together climax forest species and this particular forest can be called the climax forest of that particular place all these climax forest species are going to keep on regenerating again and again so if a tree dies its natural death number of seedlings will be waiting for that gap to open in the canopy they will grow and fill up that gap so it will appear from the outside as if the forest has become permanent it will keep on regenerating itself and that is why it's called the climax forest of any particular geography once established these forests are going to regenerate themselves probably till the next ice age even if these forests are destroyed because of any external factor maybe forest fires may be human induced agriculture may be clear cut off forests again these forests are going to regenerate themselves and again they will go through the same steps of grasses shrubs pioneer species and climax species but because the soil formation would have already happened this time instead of taking thousands of years it will happen within just two hundred years this succession is known as secondary succession so in miyawaki method we basically skip some of the steps of secondary succession and create a dense natural forest just give me one moment I'll show you an additional slide yeah so you can see my screen right so because of the kind of industrial agriculture we practice the exclaiming forests are being destroyed actually because of the agricultural practices and I'm using particularly Punjab for giving you an example of regeneration when the soil microbiology is destroyed after the farming when the fields are burned there are fewer and fewer chances of secondary succession to take place naturally so what we have to do is we have to create an environment where the step which occurs within three to four years doesn't get stopped so we do not have to remove the grass instead of that if we just wait for secondary succession to continue maybe in hundred hundred and fifty years we will see a climax forest coming back after akhira miyawaki in his work has bypassed some of these steps and created an environment where you add topsoil to a barren patch of land or you regenerate the topsoil by adding microbes to it and skip these steps of secondary successions like moving towards grass moved from grasses to pioneer species and directly plant - for a species right on day one and within 20 to 30 years you will be able to see a forest which looks like a forest that would have occurred naturally in two hundred years so miyawaki method in nutshell is a call making of a quasi natural forest using the same natural succession steps and mimicking the secondary succession which converts a barren patch of land into a forest so this is photo of dr. miyawaki swirl done back in 1974 in Yokohama University Japan I learned from him started experimenting with my own house where we made it made a small forest in just 700 square feet and after three years it started to look something like this in 2011 and we started a company and we have been making forests in different cities of the world a few of many difficult geographies like Rajasthan or Iran the basic difference between a regular tree plantation versus the forest made using miyawaki method is that these forests are the multi layer so we have a shrub layer a subtree layer 3 layer and canopy layer and because of this multi-layered forests we are able to fill up the entire vertical space with greenery thus we have 30 times more green surface area when we compare these multi-layer forests to a garden or a monoculture because there is energy of different species that trees grows 10 times fast and the entire process is purely natural we do not use any pest repellent or fertilizer B these forests are so bio diverse because the birds and small animals they feel really safe because of density of these forests so we have helped factories farms schools into the lands and also we work with her eg for this particular project in Telangana where we have converted an old field agricultural field which used to have chemical agriculture practice on it now into a dense natural forest where we have peacocks where different types of birds and animals come in state of the other this photo is of a two year old forest so in apartment buildings public spaces this is a public park and this is a wasteland in Delhi next one Allah also in Singapore Zoo we made a small forest and now we are working on making forest which not only better the environment but also becomes an experience for the people living close to these places so we are creating these forests of well-being where we have an area for meditation where we have places where we can sit and walk and jog inside before us so let's talk about how forests are made the first step of making a forest is to go to a natural forest and learn from it so the first step is to identify the potential natural vegetation of that particular place now what is potential natural vegetation if we deprive this piece of land from human intervention what is the vegetation that is going to grow on that particular patch of land by itself and these species are going to be the native species of that particular place so this is in kind of National Park where one of my colleague is conducting a survey and you can see how to three different species are growing so close to each other in their natural setting and some wise people of the ancient world they declared some of our forests as sacred so it wasn't allowed to pick anything from these forests not allowed to cut any wood from these forests and these places became our hot spots for surveys so we go to what you called they were I never card or carve in Japanese it called shinji no mori a teacher dr. Akira miyawaki when he started his forest service from Qin januaries in Japan so this isn't go out this photos from Goa so when we go to a natural forest which is declared as sacred group we find the intact pool of all the species this is in buttoned-up our job where we are doing a project the guru nanak sacred forest what we are doing is we are bringing back those forests and because the name of Guru Nanak theory is associated all these forests are being declared as the new sacred grooves which are 550 trees each to celebrate his five hundred and fiftieth birthday this year so these trees otherwise are nowhere to be seen in pan Java apart from in these sacred rules this is a miswak tree it's called P Louisville it's beyond so once we know our trees we divide them in four different layers share out sub tree tree and canopy and this is the main reason why our forests have 30 times more to green surface area because we can utilize the entire vertical space and once we have done our survey we come back and we validate it this information from the ancient text poetry wherever we find some evidence of those trees being written about in the history of that particular place and we can go back up to a few thousands of years so same species like equal ecology has not changed much the natural ecology in all these thousands of years so the moment we go back to our history we are able to retrieve all that information that's necessary to bring back peace for us so we collect the seeds from the natural forest from the mother trees will germinate seedlings out of them and then we convert our soil into soil as good and fertile soil of a natural forest so in a natural forest you can dig the soil just by your hands we also make our soil so soft that you can dig it with your hands we add nutrition perforation materials so that soil can become loose and roots can penetrate easily into it and water retention material so that soil can stay moist we dig the soil to a depth of one meter and mix these materials in it and also we add microorganisms we reintroduce the lost microorganisms because the movement soil is exposed to sunlight these microbes they die and they move so slowly that naturally they coming back to your soil is is is very difficult or very long time taking so what we do we make Jeeva mereth using dr. sabapathy lickers methodology of making G memory cow dung cow urine soil from a natural forest jaggery a little bit of desi ghee in this brood jehan breath there is a high concentration of these microbes we diluted added to our soil life comes back in in our soil we mix the mammoth and all the materials that we are going to mix in our soil so this is one of such examples where we have learned from the sacred groove we have collected the seeds we have germinated the seedlings we have regenerated the soil and this is basically the start of a new sacred groove in punjab places and these are the places especially places like Punjab Rajasthan they're replanting of these sacred groves is the most important activity today so we once the soil is prepared we plant our seedlings at a high density of 3 to 5 seedlings per square meter we cover them with a thick recovered the soil with the thick layer of mulch so that when it rains or when we water all the water seeps through the mulch goes to the soil and it doesn't evaporate back into the atmosphere also because of this mulch the microbes are going to thrive under the mulch they will not get exposed to the ultraviolet rays of sunlight and they won't get sterilized in winters when it's very cold the frost formation will happen only above the mulch so soil can still breathe while it would be freezing outside and within a year the roots of our trees are going to grow much deeper they are going to make mesh which holds the soil tightly and this also means that the trees will be able to support each other they will be able to communicate with each other using the fungal networks that grows throughout the root zone within an here the forest will become so dense that sunlight won't be able to reach the ground and this is the stage when all the leaves that fall they quickly decay and form humors and this humors is food for the forest so as the forest grows big more and more leaves fall on the ground means more humans is produced and in this produced humans will be all the nutrition all the moisture all the microbes which the forest needs scrote so this is how the forest becomes self-sustaining dr. miyawaki says in a natural forest like this no management is the best management and this is the stage when we come out of the forest and declare it as a self-sustaining natural forest so this is how we make a 100 year old forest in just 10 years thank you very much thank you thank you thank you should I do that was very nice yeah she paid to work for us in creating that large forest in Hyderabad that he was mentioning earlier I heard she went to talkin in the TEDx what six seven years back when was your first I am sure you have done so many TEDx talks now so then I was fascinated with what he was doing and then I reached out to him till the time he did do this the scale at which I had the question if you do so then read them probably four four year five years now so we are very happy with the kind of work that he has done I jokingly say that if you volunteer for India Khadem II will become carbon neutral for life so any of you who want to volunteer and want to become carbon neutral please volunteer for ending academy and you'll be carbon neutral we also wanted if you remember the first flyer that we did it for the conference we all wanted to launch when do you remember that 10 by 10 spaces that we left in between the forest there are 17 spaces that we left that in the in this forest we left spaces for creating a environmental land landen environmental sculpture park and basically bring out indigenous thought in an artistic form so that and the launch of that part was supposed to be the launch of this form but that didn't happen but eventually the idea is that all these ideas that we are seeing we should also represent it in a in artistic form and that's one of the uses that that sculpture park will be used any questions Porsha been do please reach out meanwhile I also would like to mention if you ever visit Hyderabad and hurry this is an invite on your behalf because I feel and consider it as my for assessment please do visit forest which we have made in shankarpalli it's a beautiful place and you'll feel like you have come to a natural forest in fact it's much denser and the diversity is much higher then that you will see in any South Indian natural forest and it's really a great opportunity it was really a great opportunity for us to make such a large forest at such a scale that not many projects in the world forestation projects have the scale like that and have the expanse like that so you can practically get lost in that forest without realizing that you are not just 30 kilometers away from the city you know there's a question for you study the companion plants and plant accordingly in the forest or is it just a group planting of all native plants in that region so in some of our surveys we have seen the companionship and when we see a repeated companionship that time we consider the companionship we plant these trees close to each other so we have seen like in central India there is a tree called Sajha and Hindu and Allah I think these three trees they keep on repeating this this small cluster it keep repeating itself throughout the forest so after seeing some such repetitions we can consider them as growing into good companionship and we respect that so purpose maybe we would plant them close to each other but at the same time our plantation is dense enough that if such companionship exists in its natural form within 10 to 15 years naturally these trees are going to reappear in pairs because there is enough opportunity for them to spread close to each other there will be enough opportunities for seeding to happen or cross-pollination to happen so as of now only in two or three projects we have done a purposeful companionship otherwise we just plant dens to each other assuming that trees are going to support each other eventually various supports then go or that you have done so we went to go off for the survey of the forest but the site was in Maharashtra the closest to that particular area was the forest in Goa there is a question about Delhi so Delhi we have forest if you google sundial close to I team just next to sundial is our forest and on Google Maps it's written as urban forest park by a forest it's a public place so anybody can go and visit there and right now we are executing a project for the CAG of India which is also at ITU so just opposite the ITU metro station we have the CAG building and we have one and a half acre of site in heart of the city that's a beautiful project with a sculpture in the center but that's not open for people right now this one more question way would you get the native plants to start in miyawaki forest new place so this is the biggest challenge which we faced 10 years ago when we started and today also it most of the news videographer fees we say is this challenge however we have three very authentic nurseries one is in Rajasthan which we ourselves started it's the project is called Maru one ma are you pierre second is a nursery owned by government of Gujarat in para otra and in central India we have a nursery close to Cana National Park which is our biggest supply supplier right now owned by his name is purshotham sink pari ha and just yesterday we have uploaded a video of his nursery on our YouTube channel with this phone number so if anywhere in Telangana Andhra Madhya Pradesh Maharashtra this girl you are planning to make a forest he would have around 80 different indigenous species of central India so you can get in touch with purshotham G and source your seedlings from there yeah I think that's about it thank you she will do thank you honey thank you thank you thank you everyone

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Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020