ficusreligiosaanup

Encouraging Local people’s participation in climate change action was my prime objective. To obtain it, it was necessary to start a program which presents global warming and climate change and its solution with a spiritual touch. For this reason, I planned to promote Mt. Fishtail as the foot-trail of fish lord (Matsyanarayan) and peepal plantation as a way to worship him and save him from losing his snow cover. As, we all know that picture always speaks louder than words. Because of this fact, i choose photography and painting as a way to persuade people about my concept.

But implementation of this idea was almost impossible for me because my age and time factor. For this reason, I introduced my idea to some organizations working on the field of eco-conservation. Among them Bandobasta, which is working for conservation of agro-bio-diversity, took it positively and agreed to help me to implement my idea. In the collaboration of Anup R Chalise (me) and Bandobasta we started the PEEPAL PLANTATION AND PROMOTION CAMPAIGN.

                              As the first step of our campaign, we planned to organize Matsyanārāyaņa Darsan and Pīpal Prabardhan Karyakram 2067B.S (Lord Machapuchre worship and Ficus Religiosa plantation campaign 2067), on the World Environment Day (5-June, 2010), with the media partnership of Machāpuchre FM. For the promotion of this program, I used my photographic and artistic skill.

The idea worked:

          The idea and the concept of the program proved successful as the people targeted by the program, i.e. uneducated local people and youths, actively participated in the program. Mr. Haribamsa and Mr. Madankrishna participated in the program as the chief guest of the program and praised the efforts maid by us. Environmental experts, who participated in the program, gave some speech about global warming and climate-change and importance of ficus religiosa to control it. Initially, 90 peepal saplings were planted in the bank of the Seti River but people are planting peepal saplings continuously .Now days there are more than 250 peepal planted and managed  properly.

As the second program of our campaign, we organized training and orientation program. The basic concept of this program is a simple sentence-“people will not cut the tree, if they can harvest leaves”. In this program we taught people about the methods of making artistic materials from leaves of ficus religiosa and others plants.