After fifty years of planting trees, Peepal Baba has arrived at a set of conclusions that sound almost backwards: nature doesn’t need saving, careers kill passion, and for an environmentalist, a grandmother can matter more than a policy paper, and the most important tree in the world may be the one already standing.
Ask him a simple question, and his answer will leave you rethinking what conservation is, what restoration means, and why saving a tree is not always the same thing as planting one.
I ask him: if you had to choose between saving a 500-year-old tree and planting one lakh new saplings, what would you do?
He shifts in his seat, excited, as though he has been waiting years for someone to ask this question. Yet his answer comes in the form of another question, one that cuts to the heart of why protesters wrap their arms around trees and what an ancient tree can mean in a world obsessed with replacement.
“It is like asking: would you save your father, or go and give birth to 500 more children?” he says. “I would save my father. That 500-year-old tree is a mother tree. It produces millions of seeds. You are talking about one lakh saplings — that one tree may already be giving birth to 10 lakh trees.”
It is the kind of answer that creates the rare feeling of intellectual vertigo, the sense that familiar ground is shifting beneath your feet.
‘I confess: I have hardly made a dent. But I tried’
Swami Prem Parivartan — known to the world as ‘Peepal Baba’ — has spent 50 years doing something that very few people in India have done with such relentless consistency: planting trees, tending them, watching them grow, and then letting nature do the rest.
His organisation, Give Me Trees Trust, has restored vegetation across 2,70,000 hectares spanning 226 districts. The numbers are staggering. The philosophy behind them is even more interesting.
His new memoir, Ghosts on Peepal Trees(Ebury Press, Penguin Random House India), published this year, is the book it took him over a decade to write — and a road accident in November 2024 to finally finish. In the Author’s Note, he is characteristically unsparing about the scale of what he has achieved and what it means.
“After working on the ground for nearly five decades, restoring vegetation across 2,70,000 hectares, planting twenty-five million trees and as many shrubs,” he writes, “I confess: I have hardly made a dent. But I tried. That is what matters.”
It is an extraordinary sentence from an extraordinary man. And when I sit down with him one morning — the conversation unhurried, ranging freely across five decades of experience — what strikes me most is not the scale of what he has done, but the modesty of how he thinks about doing it.
The boy who planted trees to avoid homework
The beginning, as Peepal Baba tells it, had nothing heroic about it. In those days, there was no mission statement, and the concept of climate anxiety was not yet an Instagram-approved term to describe what our ancestors already knew. His first introduction to environmentalism was a grandmother, a bicycle, and a child’s natural tendency to find ways to escape the afternoon homework.
He was born in Chandigarh in 1966, the son of an army doctor who would rise to the rank of Brigadier. His early childhood was a series of postings — Dalhousie, Kolkata, Dehradun, then Pune. In Ghosts on Peepal Trees, he describes the smell of conifers entering his lungs before language did, and a childhood spent in the generous, sprawling bungalows of army cantonments, where the land itself was a kind of education.
But the real teacher was his grandmother.
“Granny was, by herself, a thriving ecosystem,” he writes in the book. She arrived when he was born and stayed for 20 years, turning ordinary rooms into breathing spaces, teaching him to make compost from kitchen scraps at the age of six. “Waste nothing,” she would tell him, handing over a bowl of vegetable peels. “Even what you throw away has some shame; let it find new life.”
The baptism — his word — came on his eleventh birthday. 26 January 1977. Republic Day. He came home from the school parade still humming the national anthem, and his grandmother was waiting at the gate. His gardener, Sunil Kaka, took him on an old bicycle to a small nursery on the edge of Kirkee Cantonment, which smelled, the book recalls, of damp soil and cow dung.
The nursery owner handed over nine saplings — two peepal, two neem, two banyan, two jamun and one goolar. “I held them,” Peepal Baba writes, “as if they were living secrets.”
That evening, grandmother and grandson walked along the roadside in fading golden light and planted the first tree — a banyan — in front of bungalow T-20. Forty-eight years later, those nine saplings are landmarks, their roots gripping the road like veins of time.
“It was fun,” he tells me simply, when I ask what drove him in those early years. “We came from school, we put our bags down, picked up our digging tools and just rushed off. It was a good way to get away from homework. It was a good way to avoid being scolded.” He laughs. “There was no mission. There was no climate action. There was no vocabulary like ‘carbon credits’ or ‘global warming’. We just wanted to see the butterflies come.”
‘You cannot save the Ganga. The only thing you can do is save yourself’
Fifty years later, that instinct has hardened into a philosophy, and it is one that challenges much of how modern environmentalism talks about itself.
“When management trainees come to us,” he explains, leaning forward, “we always tell them: you are not here to save nature. You cannot save a planet. You cannot save the Himalayas. You cannot save the Ganga. The only thing you can do is save yourself.”
He is not being defeatist. He is being precise. In the book, he puts it another way, describing nature as carrying “4.5 billion years of silent genius” — a system so intelligent, so self-organising, that human intervention is best understood as service, not salvation. “We are transient guests on this blue planet,” he writes. “The understanding of science should lead to awe, not arrogance.”
On the ground, this philosophy translates into something beautiful and counterintuitive. When Give Me Trees plants on a patch of land, they might introduce 40 species. Within three years, an audit will find 150. The birds have come. The insects have come. The pollinators have arrived through channels no human managed or planned.
“I cannot call a single butterfly through a WhatsApp message,” he tells me, and there is real delight in his voice as he says it. “It will come on its own. The snakes will come. The reptiles will come. We are only caretakers. We are security staff. If we can manage doing what we ought to do, the world will be a much better place.”
This shapes how he thinks about afforestation itself. In Ghosts on Peepal Trees, he describes the traditional method of planting — slow, patient, deeply personal — as being like classical music, ‘steady and layered’. You dig a pit, sometimes with borrowed hands, fill it with compost, plant the sapling and then you wait. “Every monsoon was a festival,” he writes, “every survival a small victory.”
But too much of what India calls afforestation, he warns, is something else entirely — ritual dressed as action.
A nation of rituals
India, he says with no particular anger, is a nation of rituals. And tree plantation drives are among its most elaborate.
“On June 5th, everybody goes into party mode,” he tells me. “Everyone starts calling us from April — banners, signages, there is a party. And then in September and October, you see all the saplings drying up because nobody is there to water them.”
The problem, he explains, runs deeper than neglect. India has the largest plantation budget in the world — larger, he says, than the US and Australia and Europe combined. And yet survival rates on plantation drives are catastrophically low. “On paper, on Excel sheets, you say 40%, 50% survival. In reality? Two percent. Three percent. Four percent.”
What would he do with that budget, if given the choice? He does not hesitate. “I would not allow a single new sapling to be planted. I would say: conserve what is already left. Our old forests. Our ancient trees. Let us fence those areas. Let us create wildlife corridors. Let us invest in what already exists.”
This is where the 500-year-old tree becomes more than an analogy — it becomes a policy position. “We are shutting down our ancestors,” he says fiercely. “You cannot do that. And we need to learn from other countries. In Dublin, in Glasgow, in Amsterdam, in Paris — they have 300, 400, 600-year-old buildings. If they need to build something new, they build it somewhere else. They do not bulldoze the old. Same attitude. We need the same attitude for trees.”
Stealth, community and the oldest currency on earth
In five decades of working on the ground, Peepal Baba has learned something that no course in environmental science teaches: that the real work happens invisibly, slowly, and almost always through other people.
He describes his style of working as that of a backbencher — starting projects without fanfare, building community support first, never announcing until the work has matured.
“The moment we write about it,” he explains, “too many people come. Too many cooks spoil the broth. We are out on the battlefield. We know how things work on the ground. So zip up, do your thing, and once it matures, show the world.”
In the book, he describes discovering what he calls “the oldest currency on earth: goodwill.” In his early years as a roadside gardener in Pune, when money for saplings ran out, strangers offered spades, gardeners lent manure, shopkeepers gave water in discarded bottles. “I realised,” he writes, “that generosity grows faster than grass when watered with purpose.”
That instinct — to embed the work in the community before anything else — has protected his projects in ways that formal structures never could. He recounts incident after incident where land mafia or local troublemakers arrived to interfere, only to find not just the Give Me Trees team but the entire surrounding community ready to defend the patch. “When 150 people are sitting there, and 200 people are involved in the whole thing,” he tells me, “they back off. Community is very important. Your team is very important.”
He pauses, then adds something that sounds like the distillation of fifty years: “You are nothing. The real work is done by the whole troop.”
Don’t make it your career
And then there is the advice no one expects from a man who has built a 400-person organisation and spent half a century in service to trees.
“Career is such an ugly word,” he says, with settled conviction.
I had asked him what he would tell young people who want to follow in his path — people like my six-year-old daughter, who already tries to rescue dying moths and stops to look at every tree. His answer surprises me. He would not tell them to pursue environmentalism as a profession.
“The moment it becomes transactional,” he explains, “it is finished. You become very cold. The passion goes. You start thinking about deliverables and PPTs and profit and loss.”
He pauses, then says something that reframes the entire conversation: “I would like to see my country, my planet, with hobby gardeners. Hobby foresters. Hobby birders. Saturdays, Sundays, holidays. They take their friends, their families. It is like a picnic. It is party time. You do the real thing.”
In the book, his grandmother’s voice surfaces at just the right moment — the same woman who told him at 11 that becoming a doctor or engineer was “such a boring thing”. “Do the thing that makes your blood sing,” she used to say. “The rest will follow.”
He is still following that advice. His best recommendation for young people passionate about nature is to first build a balcony garden. Then join a school eco-club. Let parents take children to forests instead of malls, to wetlands instead of multiplexes. “If you don’t know the names of the birds,” he reassures me, “it’s okay. Let them Google it. Let them just explore.”
And if someday, by accident or by grace, the thing they love becomes something larger? He gestures at his own life. “I don’t even know how this organisation happened,” he says, with genuine wonder. “I really don’t. There was some divine conspiracy.”
Spend weekends in forests. Follow curiosity before ideology
When our conversation began, I thought I was speaking to one of India’s most prolific tree planters.
By the end, I realised I had spent two hours with a man trying to convince me to stop obsessing over planting trees.
Not because planting doesn’t matter. He has devoted half a century to proving that it does.
But because somewhere along the way, we started believing that every environmental problem could be solved by replacing what was lost with something new. A sapling for a forest. A plantation for an ecosystem. A target for a living thing.
Peepal Baba’s argument is far more uncomfortable. The greatest environmental victories may not be the trees we plant tomorrow, but the ancient ones we refuse to cut down today.
When I asked him what young people should do, he did not tell them to become environmentalists. He said, plant a balcony garden. Learn the names of birds. Spend weekends in forests. Follow curiosity before ideology.
It is advice that sounds almost too small for someone who has planted millions of trees.
Then again, almost everything he told me sounded smaller than the environmental movement likes to sound.
Perhaps that is what environmentalism looks like after 50 years on the ground: less ambition, more affection. Less saving the world, more learning how not to destroy what is already saving us.
That is why his answer to my question lingered long after our conversation ended.
Would you save a 500-year-old tree or plant one lakh saplings?
For him, the answer was obvious.
And perhaps that is the lesson hidden inside 50 years of planting trees. After all the targets, campaigns, budgets, reports and plantation drives, the most important tree in the world is often not the one we plan to plant tomorrow.
It is the one that is already standing.
