According to the Daily Mail, in northeastern India, there is an island called "Majuli", since 1900, due to the impact of climate change has led to the deterioration of the island's land quality, the monsoon leads to a large number of high-quality soil loss, and slowly turned into barren wasteland, so the island's wildlife is also gradually disappearing.

The story begins in 1979 when Jadav Payeng, a 16-year-old Indian boy, saw a strange sight. In Assam Region, the northeastern state of India where he was born, floodwaters swept in countless snakes. After the flood, thousands of snakes lay dying and paralyzed on the shore, and the sight changed his life.

"The snakes all died from the heat, as the sandbar was not covered by trees. I sat on the bank and stroked the dried out bodies of the snakes and cried uncontrollably. It was like a massacre. I wrote to the government's forest management department asking if I could plant trees on the sandbar, and they replied that nothing could be planted on the sandbar, except that I could try planting bamboo. It was a very painful process and I had no support at all, but in the end I did it." Payeng, now 52, slowly recounts that year.

No one would have imagined that the dry sandy land of the past would become a lush forest covering 550 hectares today. The forest is home to a wide variety of birds and animals, as well as deer, rhinos, tigers, elephants, and many animals on the verge of extinction have found a place in the forest. This animal paradise took Payeng 36 years to build, starting from a single seed alone, and then he locked in on this as his life's work.

Payeng has never stopped planting several seedlings a day for the past few decades, and it is estimated that he has planted over 10,000 trees. He started with bamboo, but later planted some of the indigenous people's less valuable trees as well. Irrigation of the saplings is Payeng's biggest problem, as the place is so big that it is difficult for him to bring water from the river to irrigate all the saplings. He came up with a solution, a bamboo watering system. On each sapling there is a bamboo track, on top of which is placed a pit made of mud with a hole in the bottom, and the water held in the pit drips bit by bit on the track made of bamboo, and then slowly flows on the saplings. After about 20 years, Payeng was finally able to bring taller and valuable trees into the forest, such as teak.

In addition, with his deep knowledge of ecosystems, Payeng is slowly introducing organisms to the land as well. Because the soil is poor, Payeng's first step was to bring in ants and earthworms. "Ants and earthworms are great helpers, they fertilize the soil. They burrow into the surface of the soil, which is as hard as a rock, and fill the soil underneath with small holes, making it easy when tilling." Payeng himself moved into the forest, gave up his job as a farmer and only raised cows to sell milk, built a grass hut on the dry land, and his family of five still lives in the forest.

As the forest grew larger, other problems followed. Wild elephants from the forest began to haunt the villages next to the woods, consuming the villagers' crops uncontrollably, and tigers hunted the villagers' poultry and livestock with impunity. Angry villagers began to complain to Payeng that the wild animals had become a threat to their lives.

In order to solve the problem, Payeng continued to plant more trees, especially banana trees, because elephants like to eat bananas, banana trees can easily attract elephants in the forest, and no longer go out of the forest to harass the villagers. As more and more animals came to the forest, a biosphere was formed and the tigers no longer left the forest to hunt.

Day after day, what had been an arid, dead sandy landscape slowly evolved into a self-sustaining environment where the ecological balance created an ideal place for animals to live.

Payeng's story of reforestation has sparked the thoughts of many forensic scholars using science. "Nature has its food chain, so why can't we follow it properly? If we as sentient beings don't protect animals, who will?" Payeng's experience has taught us that we don't need huge statistics to understand the devastation caused by deforestation, nor do we need huge projects to protect the survival of our natural treasures. With scarce resources and limited knowledge, Payeng demonstrates the basic human instinct to be in harmony with nature.

The forests of Payeng have now attracted countless animals, and a herd of 100 elephants visit the Payeng forests every year, settling comfortably for several months. Because of these elephants, the world knows that there is a man who, in his own small way, has accomplished great things. 2008, the Indian government's forest department discovered Payeng's forest by tracking a group of migrating elephants. The forest has since been named "Molai Forest" after Payeng's pet name "Molai".

In 2012, Payeng was recognized by Nehru University in New Delhi, India, as the "Forest Man of India".

In 2013, Payeng was again recognized by the Forest Management Institute of India. In the same year, Will McMaster, a documentary filmmaker from Canada, was so moved by Payeng's story that he prepared funds on the Kickstarter platform in the United States, and finally turned Payeng's story into a documentary film, "Forest Man", to let the world know that the power of one person can affect the ecological environment of the earth.

Even now, Payeng has not changed his heart when he decided to plant! He still lives in his forest, manages it every day, and dreams of opening up more land, with his latest plan being to plant a 150-hectare forest next to the barren land.

"Five of my best friends who went to school with me as a child are now engineers, and it took me just over thirty years for anyone to recognize that my life's work is this forest." Payeng believes in what he believes in and lives a contented life with his woodland bird wife and children.