French Star

Jadav Payeng is a 59-year-old farmer; a member of the Mishing tribe in Northeast India. Mishing have lived on the banks of the Brahmaputra for millennia. Early every morning Jadev travels two miles from his home to a small strip of land in the middle of the river. There he works a small farm. He also works to revive the ecosystem. His little island was attached to the mainland until shifting waters isolated it. “This was all sand. No trees, no grass, only driftwood,” he says. Every day for four decades, Jadav has been turning his island into a jungle paradise. “First with bamboo trees, then with cotton trees. It’s not as if I did it alone. You plant one or two trees, and they have to seed. Once they seed, the wind knows how to plant them.” When the trees became established, animal life followed; tigers, deer, monkeys, elephants, even rare white rhino have made this their home.