The young man who listens to trees

When Ratul Munshi was growing up in Madhupur, the sal forest began close to his home. Rows of tall trees formed a green wall at the edge of the neighbourhood.

Today, he says, the forest begins nearly five kilometres away.

In between have come farmland and cleared land. For Ratul, the changing distance became a simple measure of what was happening to one of Bangladesh’s distinctive forest landscapes.

He began planting trees. Then he started trying to save damaged ones. Eventually, trees came to shape much of his life.

Now an environmental activist, Ratul travels across Bangladesh planting native and fruit-bearing trees, campaigning for threatened forests and trying to persuade young people to take conservation seriously.

He estimates that he has personally planted about 25,000 trees. He has participated in campaigns involving hundreds of thousands more.

But numbers do not quite explain his attachment to them. Ratul pays attention to whether the soil around a tree has hardened, whether a sapling needs water or whether a damaged trunk might still be saved. He speaks of trees less as landscaping than as living things requiring care.

That instinct became more deliberate when he was a student at Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University.

There, Ratul says, Drabir Saikat, an associate professor at the university’s Faculty of Fine Arts, taught him to look beyond the simple act of planting.

It was an extensive lesson on how to understand what a tree needed — and how trees fitted into a larger ecosystem.

In 2019, that idea was tested.

Ratul and other students campaigned to protect a century-old banyan tree and a pond on the university campus. The protest continued for 37 days.

They eventually succeeded.

It changed the scale of the issue for Ratul. Protecting a tree, he realised, could require organisation, persistence and sometimes confrontation.

The tree that came back

Talking with Daily Waadaa, Ratul said one episode from his university years became "something of a campus story."

"A goat had eaten the bark and leaves of a mahua tree, leaving it badly stripped. It appeared unlikely to survive,” said Ratul, adding “But, I decided to try."

He went to a nearby village, collected cow dung and applied it to the damaged parts of the tree, covering the wounds almost like a cast around an injured limb. He continued caring for it.

The mahua survived.

It still stands on the campus, Ratul said, and the scars that once ran across it have largely disappeared.

That sort of intervention became part of his routine. He learned to raise saplings from seeds and nurse damaged trees. As a student, he says, he spent some of his pocket money and income from private tutoring on planting and conservation.

His work gradually moved beyond the university.

Through the organisation Falada Bangladesh, Ratul says he participated in a programme involving the planting of roughly 300,000 fruit-bearing trees. He also joined an initiative to plant the rare bailam tree across Bangladesh’s 64 districts.

Separately, he said he has planted more than 2,000 palmyra palms.

In 2020, Ratul and fellow activists took their campaign onto the road — literally. They walked roughly 400 kilometres from Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University to Khagrachhari.

Along the route, they planted trees and spoke to residents about conservation and invasive species. Ratul says the campaign reached more than 400 marketplaces across 26 upazilas.

The journey reflected an idea that increasingly guides his work: planting trees matters, but changing how people think about them may matter just as much.

Back to Madhupur

For all his work elsewhere, Ratul said he keeps returning to the forest he watched disappear from his doorstep.

Madhupur Garh, in central Bangladesh, is known for its sal forest. Over the years, the forest has faced pressure from settlement, cultivation and other human activity.

“I have seen trees cut, forest areas cleared by fire and bark deliberately damaged.”

“It hurts me,” he lamented.

The retreat of the forest from his childhood home turned those broader environmental pressures into something personal and measurable.

He now campaigns for the conservation of Madhupur’s remaining sal forest, organising protests, speaking with local communities and trying to involve younger people.

He is also working to establish an organisation called the Bangladesh Forest Resources Research and Development Council. But his concern extends beyond trees.

Ratul talks about bees, insects, birds and wildlife as parts of the same system. Pollinating insects, easily overlooked in everyday life, help sustain the crops people depend on. Forests provide habitat while performing ecological functions far beyond their boundaries.

That is why he is wary of treating tree planting alone as conservation.

A sapling put into the ground can die. A mature tree can be damaged. A plantation cannot necessarily replace a natural forest. What matters, in his view, is protecting the network of living things around them.

“Let the Earth belong not only to humans, but to every living thing,” Ratul said.

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