Spirituality, environment interconnected: Jaggi Vasudev (Interview)

NEW DELHI - Spirituality and the environment are interwoven because both explore the human environs, says spiritual leader and environmentalist Jaggi Vasudev.

“While spirituality is about exploring the inner ecology, environment is about the outer ambience of man. Spirituality is an inclusive way of experiencing life that takes the environment into account, like yoga that is an individual and yet an universal experience,” Vasudev told IANS in an interview.

The spiritual leader is the founder of Coimbatore-based Isha Foundation that won the Indira Gandhi Pariyavaran Award 2010 for its eco-project ‘Green Hands’ in Tamil Nadu.

“The award has given me the momentum to push the movement 10-fold. It is a tribute to the people who have made the miracle (happen),” he said.

Under project Green Hands, which began in 2005, volunteers of Isha Foundation have planted 8.2 million trees across Tamil Nadu. The movement has found a mention in the Guinness World Records.

Green Hands intends to create 40 model villages in four clusters to restore the 33 percent forest cover (the national average) in Tamil Nadu that the environmentalist said “had shrunk to 16.4 percent”.

“We aim to plant 114 million trees in six to eight years,” said the motivational guru who has addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos for four successive years.

“The nation is being economically deprived. Indians are not being able to harvest the opportunities coming their way. If we do not stop emulating the western economies and convert to a more organic economy focusing on ecological conservation, it will be difficult to consolidate economic gains. It will eventually ruin the country. Policy planners must keep eco-concerns in mind as part of the conversion map,” he stresed.

Trees are the closest kin of man, he said when asked what made him take up eco-conservation as a mission.

“What the trees exhale, we inhale,” he said to substantiate his point.

Clad in a cream and maroon flowing robe and a turban, Vasudev said “the desire to plant more trees stems from my wild ways in childhood”.

“When I was 10 years old, I would arrange for Rs.10 and run away to the forest for days. I would sleep on trees. The bond stayed in my mind till I decided to regenerate the green cover at Vellangiri in Tamil Nadu in 1992. Last year I was in Mysore, the city where I grew up, to attend a programme. A lady who taught me English came up and hugged me and said ‘Now I understand why you did not want me to teach Robert Frost to the class’,” he explained.

“As soon as she introduced Robert Frost to class and began reciting ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep…’ I told her to stop. I could not bear trees being described as woods,” he recalled.

In 1998, a UN delegation toured Tamil Nadu to study its forest cover and predicted that by 2025, the state would be reduced to a desert, he said.

Vasudev and his volunteers have planted thousands of trees near the Isha Yoga Centre in the Vellangiri hills - a relatively arid tract in Tamil Nadu.

The Foundation is now diversifying activity to education and sports too. “We will set up English medium schools in rural areas where English education is not available,” he said.

The foundation has revived traditional sports in Tamil Nadu villages. “Games and yoga are a unifying force.”

“Besides, we have launched an audio-visual health campaign that focuses on food security, importance of agriculture in a country of 120 crore people, soil and water conversation and hygiene,” he added.