The GMSL had central seed repositories for each of the three main river basins as primary interventions to ensure the sustainability of COLIBRI. For this, it identified locations belonging to villagers themselves where the seed banks were to be constructed. On the Heen Ganga, this was to be at Padupola where an existing but defunct seed storage facility was going to be refurbished. The one on the Thelagamu Oya was earmarked for Etanwala and that of the Kalu Ganga was to be at Narangamuwa. With all of these, the speed of construction was of course driven by the commitment of the specific set of villagers involved and the energy and drive of their respective cascade trainers and watchdogs. In that respect, the one at Etanwala came up fastest with the one at Narangamuwa slightly slower but following gamely. The one at Padupola is already constructed at some previous time but there has been comparatively little done there. When we visited the completed one at Etanwala, we saw that it was very well constructed and quite beautifully created. However, the seeds were being stored in plastic containers and that is a no no. A better option will be provided for them soon. Their ex-situ plantation was also coming along beautifully. The other two? Well… let us see how those progress. As with anything, the Greens only say something is done when it is done well and done with durability.

Seed Bank on the Thelgamu Oya: From construction to completion at Etanwala

Internal and external of Etanwala seed bank: Note the plastic containers

Ex-situ plantation at Etanwala Seed Bank

The Green Movement is only too aware that our planet is all we have. This is why we are doing our bit to take care of it. GMSL-COLIBRI’s work in the KCF and its environs have proved our commitment to working with Indigenous People and Local Communities (IPLCs) under the adage “Those who use the most stand to lose the most so they conserve the most”. On World Environment Day  (WED) 2022, we will be launching a program to rehabilitate and rejuvenate about 100 acres of buffer zone forests in the Midland and Deanston estate areas where damaged natural forests and degraded tea lands will be given new natural life through a tree planting process. On the 5th of June (WED), we will be launching the exercise in the Midland Area. The effort will be a community led one as always. The Greens will work with their member organization Grama Abhivurdhi Foundation for Environment Conservation (GAFEC), local communities and its watchdog groups and cascade trainers on this exercise.

Update (6th June)

GMSL and GAFEC planted 520 trees (double the original estimate) at the picturesque camping site at Medawatte as a youth driven initiative with our watchdog groups joining with others in the area to enhance the area around the nature camp that had originally been created by GAFEC under the GEF-SFP 6 range of environmental initiatives. The program went of smoothly. However, as with all such interventions, our oversight would have to be constant to enable these areas to be maintained and the plants allowed to grow without being damaged either by locals or tourists.

The GMSL-GAFEC youth teams meeting before the exercise

Planting in progress

Shot of the site with the teams from up on an adjecent knoll

Enjoying a mid-day meal after hard morning’s work

It has been a year and a half into COLIBRI and while we had many battles to fight during that challenging and heady time what with COVID a country in economic crisis, a nation in agitation and general downturns across pretty much everything. Despite these challenges we still managed to meet our tasks head-on and during those engagements we tried not to take the easy way out, constantly rethinking our thinking. From those we extracted two short cases studies cum best practices (as part of a four study exercise) based on our experiences.

The first was on how to engage in sensitive areas where people and protected areas rub shoulders with one another. In that, we realized quickly that a community was a far bigger organism than most NGOs – indeed – most people suspect and we unpacked all of that through a fairly decent grammar while also talking about the way in which we blanket covered the area and literally left no one behind thereby actually increasing our workload but also massively improving the volume work that our donor funds were capable of delivering on the ground. You can read that study here.

The second was how we used the improvement of green cover across that terrain to increase community cohesion with everyone from state officials to medical officers, police, community farmers, youth and children, activists etc. getting enthusiastically involved in the effort that didn’t simply look at the protected area only but the larger terrain that had been damaged by rather ill-though initiatives – including myopic ideas of protection that caused more damage than it prevented. You can read that study here.

Twenty men and sixteen women had been shortlisted from a longlist twice that size to act as watchdogs. The Greens were careful as usual to select people by studying them for months to see if they have the integrity, staying power and commitment required to watch out for the people and the environment. From the 4^th – 7^th of April, they were provided with a three day immersion training at the Wingate Hotel and environs in Hettipola where there already fair knowledge of people and nature was further expanded with Suranjan, Amila (ex-greener and now the curator of an open zoo) imparting a bulk of the knowledge they were provided with.

From the classroom to the great infinite rooms of nature, the team was given the best possible training

Not only where they trained on environment but they were also given training on mindfulness and being constantly aware in all of their work. As with all such work, it is easy to be sensationalist when seeing something that looks wrong on the surface. They were warned not to succumb to such habits and to study a situation carefully before they report upstream. The team was called “The Protestors of Dumbara” or “Dumbara Suraksha”.

Smartphone Distribution

Finally, they (and the Cascade Trainers) were all provided with mobile phones to help them in their work. We had thought that they would need about a month to absorb what they knew and to start reporting back on various issues in their terrain but that was not how it happened. Instead of waiting, they went straight into their work, checking on the condition of green cover, plants, seed that has been our inputs to the community while also checking on various other issues that they thought were important for us to know about. That data stream was stupendous and absolutely amazing.

The Dumbara Suraksha team was trained physically and mentally for the challenges they will face

They didn’t stop there. Most of them were from farming families so they also used their mobile phones to check prices in Dambulla and to obtain the best possible prices for their own produce which was an unlooked for but tremendously positive collateral outcome.

What can we say? Well, we now have a “Green Battalion” of 56 highly trained, highly enabled trainers and watchdogs in the Knuckles.

The Dumbara Suraksha team started to really get into the act as soon as they were trained

“Green Cover” is a very fashionable word in our world – especially because there is so little of it to be found anywhere on earth these days. The KCF though, is still deep montane forest – either virgin or with substantially dark virgin growth. Its boundary areas still comparatively healthy with white forest cover. I am using local parlance here – dark is literally jungle so thick that rarely does sunlight hit the forest floor making the whole area akin to twilight in all light and white is less dense where light does permeate to the ground and lights up the area. Well, in such terms, the KCF is at present pretty sound all things considered. However, what with the protectionist approach removing farmers from their chena traditions much land adjacent to the KCF and its boundaries have been allowed to run fallow and we knew that if something was not done about that, eventually the white forest will get hammered and even the dark forest attacked.

The whole community turned up to plant the canopy at Rathninda

However, we were careful. You see, “green cover” is not just dark wood /strong wood that lasts for decades only. For the communities living in those areas, there was also the agro-greening that was required on their own plots. There were watersheds feeding vital rivers and tanks where there were settlements that had been damaged. There were the concrete and asphalt roads whose sides had been stripped bare of all vegetation. There were swaths of fractured terrain where old tea plantations had gone missing literally – leaving a scarred and ugly scape. These were the areas that were very unfashionable – there were no rare frogs or impossible to find bats or two instances of a supposedly magical medicinal plant that had to be protected with life as forfeit. Yet they were critical to the continued harmony of the human-environment interface. This is why we redefined “green cover” to mean all of those areas that we mentioned.

Next, we got our community to understand what we saw and believe us, they got it in a jiffy. No coaching required. They knew it because it was part of their heritage – their traditions. So, instead of the GMSL doing NGO work, the community – and we mean the whole community (i.e. the farmers, the youth, the children, the men, the women, the state officials, the area business people, the local government officials, the enforcers like the police and the forest department) took collective ownership and just went in – planting canopy roads, rehabilitating damaged watershed areas, shoring up river banks, helping prune down dense foliage in home gardens, creating nurseries, transporting plants, obtaining plants from places where they had found them and just doing their thing – almost as if we were not there. This is precisely the outcome we wanted. The community to know, understand, act. That way, they will continue whether we are there or not. Green cover initiatives takes years to show success – way beyond the COLIBRI project life cycle. With their enthusiasm, the community showed that their environment and their green areas were in safe hands.

Amal and Aruna,our field controllers take a hand planting on the banks of the Dungolu Oya

The youth take plants deep into the jungle to improve the green cover of the Meegahawewa watershed