Every so often I come across a story that makes the work we do here feel small in the best possible way. This is one of them. Marimuthu Yoganathan drives, well, conducts, a bus in Coimbatore. He works the S-26 route between Marudamalai and Gandhipuram for the Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation, punching tickets and calling out stops like any other conductor. He was born in 1969 in Kotagiri, up in the Nilgiri Hills, to parents who had migrated from the Thanjavur plains to work as tea pluckers. There is nothing about his job title or his background that would suggest he has spent close to four decades planting trees. But that's exactly what he has done. It started when he was thirteen. He saw timber trucks hauling away illegally felled trees near the tea estates where his family worked, and it made him angry enough to do something about it. He and a group of friends began physically blocking the trucks and filing complaints with forest officials. That's not a metaphor. A thirteen year old, standing in front of a loaded timber truck, because he couldn't stand watching the hills get stripped. By the 1980s he had moved from confrontation to persuasion. He started performing street plays at tea estates to get people talking about deforestation, because shouting at truck drivers only gets you so far. Somewhere along the way street plays turned into slideshow talks, and slideshow talks turned into a habit. Reader's Digest India reported that over 32 years he has given awareness talks at more than 5,800 institutions, schools, colleges, parks, clubs, offices, wherever people would listen. And the whole time, he kept planting. Wikipedia's account puts the number at more than 500,000 saplings over close to four decades. He sticks to indigenous species, neem and banyan among them, because he wants trees that actually belong in that ecosystem, not ones that look good and die in five years. On his bus route he hands out free saplings to passengers. He has reportedly spent his own salary, including at least one Diwali bonus, funding plantation drives instead of keeping the money for himself. None of this made him popular with everyone. He has been called a public nuisance more than once, hauled into police stations and courtrooms for getting in the way of projects that meant cutting down trees. In 2016 he was arrested during a protest against a road-widening project near an agricultural college that would have felled a stretch of old trees. He was released within hours. By his own account, every court judgment involving him has gone in his favor. I don't know how it feels to be arrested for planting trees and blocking a road crew, but I imagine you'd need to believe pretty strongly in what you're doing to keep going after that. The recognition did eventually come. The Government of India gave him the Eco Warrior Award in 2008, presented by the Vice President. CNN-IBN gave him a Real Heroes Award in 2011. The Tamil Nadu government has honored him too, and he has been mentioned by the Prime Minister on Mann Ki Baat. But from what I can tell, none of that changed his day job or his routine. He is still a bus conductor. He still hands out saplings on his route. There's a quote of his that stuck with me: "I cannot describe the joy I experience when I see a tree I have planted tower over me." That's it. That's the whole motivation, as far as I can tell. Not a five year plan, not a funding target, just wanting to see something he planted grow taller than himself. I think about Yoganathan whenever someone tells me that caring about the environment is a luxury for people with money and free time. He is a government bus conductor. He has spent his own modest income, not corporate sponsorship, on saplings and travel to schools. He didn't wait for a grant or a title or a following. He started at thirteen with nothing but anger at a timber truck and kept going for forty years. I'm not saying everyone needs to plant half a million trees. Most of us won't and that's fine. But his story is a useful check against the idea that doing something for the environment requires resources most Indian households don't have. It mostly requires deciding to start, and then not stopping. Sources and further reading - Wikipedia, "M. Yoganathan": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Yoganathan - Reader's Digest India, "Extraordinary Indians: Bus Conductor Marimuthu Yoganathan's Tree-Saving Movement": https://www.readersdigest.in/features/story-extraordinary-indians-bus-conductor-marimuthu-yoganathans-tree-saving-movement-128085