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Part conservation effort, part labor of love, Jadav Payeng has single-handedly reforested a small inland island in India by planting a tree a day for more than 30 years.

The biggest river island in the world

It was the dead snakes that tipped him off that something had to be done.

The island is not small. It’s actually the biggest river island in the world. That still doesn’t really explain why it took people several decades to realize that anything weird was even happening on it.

You know, like planting an entire forest larger than Central Park in Manhattan.

The giant sandbar of an island is called Majuli, sitting in India’s unpredictable Brahmaputra River, and in 1979 it was in trouble.