My mother is sixty-five. She lived in Delhi for forty years. Three summers ago her body stopped negotiating with the heat. She moved to Kerala. The phone calls now have a different texture — quieter, fewer, with longer pauses where her old neighbourhood used to live. I have a daughter. I am not going to let her grow up in the city my mother had to leave. I am not going to let her, thirty years from now, make the same phone call to her own children. That is the founding moment of wonarth. Everything else in this manifesto is consequence.

For thirty years the environmental movement in India has asked you to be a saint. To donate out of guilt. To save the planet for someone else’s grandchildren. And in those thirty years, Delhi’s air has gone from breathable to lethal, the Yamuna from a river to a chemical drain, the Aravalli from a forest to a quarry. The saintly pitch has not worked. So we are trying something different.

I am Prashant Kumar Nair. I am the founder of wonarth. I am also a father, a son, a husband, and an Advocate-on-Record at the Supreme Court of India. I started this venture not because I am a hero. I started it because I am self-interested, and I am honest about it.

I want clean air for my daughter. I want my parents to be able to walk to the market in May. I want a forest within driving distance that is actually a forest. I am not asking the universe to grant these things. I am organising people who want them too.

We are not a CSR aggregator. We are not a one-tree-per-rupee sentimental engine. We are not a foreign-funded NGO chasing FCRA approvals. We are not a feeder for any law firm or business. We are not a political vehicle. We are not your absolution.

We are a Section 8 environmental venture, in formation, that does three things and publishes everything it does. We plant urban Miyawaki micro-forests where Delhi cannot breathe. We restore degraded Aravalli ridge land in partnership with state forest departments. We re-establish riparian vegetation along the Yamuna where it can take root. Every project is geo-tagged, costed in the open, and audited.

Two sources. Corporates fulfilling Section 135 of the Companies Act 2013, channeled into Schedule VII clause (iv) environmental sustainability. And individuals tired of saviour theatre who want to belong to something honest. Both donor classes get the same thing back: verified evidence, the right to visit the projects they helped create, and our promise that we will tell them when we fail.

Because the people who matter, on both sides of this transaction, are exhausted by performance. Corporate CSR officers do not want one more deck of stock photos and saviour language. They want a board-defensible allocation that does what it says. Individuals who care about the climate do not want one more guilt-pop-up at checkout. They want to walk through a forest they helped fund. We give both classes what they actually want, in language they can defend at home and at work.

If wonarth works, we will all be a little less hot, a little less sick, and a little more able to look our children in the eye in fifteen years. We will not have saved the planet. The planet will be fine without us. We will have saved a city, a forest, a river, our own evenings, and our own old age.

We are selfish. So are you. Let us be honest together.

— Prashant Kumar Nair, Founder, wonarth

Read the longer version of why I started this →