The Man Who Planted 25 Million Trees

After fifty years planting 25 million trees, Swami Prem Parivartan, known affectionately as “Peepal Baba,” offers a counterintuitive insight: the most important trees are not the saplings we will plant in the future, but the elder trees that are already standing. His answer to whether he would save a 500-year-old tree or plant a hundred thousand saplings comes as a question of its own: “It is like asking: would you save your father, or go and give birth to 500 more children?” And it reframes conservation as an act of reverence, rather than a numbers game. Rather than tracing his life’s work with the throughline of an ideology, he highlights a grandmother who taught him to make compost when he was six, to a bicycle, and a boy’s talent for avoiding homework. Having built a 400-person organization that has restored vegetation across 270,000 hectares spanning 226 districts, his advice for young people is unexpected: don’t pursue environmentalism as a career; do it in your free time. “The moment it becomes transactional,” he explains, “it is finished. You become very cold. The passion goes. You start thinking about deliverables … and profit and loss.” What emerges from half a century on the ground is something quieter than a movement: less ambition, more affection, and the understanding that nature carries billions of years of intelligence, and that the deepest human contribution may simply be learning not to destroy what is already saving us.

Be The Change

Today, go outside and find the oldest tree near you, on your street or in a park or neighborhood, and simply stand with it for a few minutes, noticing its bark, its canopy, and the life it holds.

A Storyteller Who Gets Out of the Way

According to gifted storyteller Brian Conroy, “Before I ever told a story, I internalized the elements that made a good story” by absorbing vibrant family rhythms and cadences, the music, the laughter. Stories about his father brought him to life though he died when Brian was only four months old. He felt his father’s spirit, was taught to kneel and pray, listening for the unseen. Later, Brian connected with Buddhist masters orienting toward compassion, wisdom, and service. Whether teaching youngsters in school or refreshed Buddhist teachings for the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, Brian tells stories that are universal, focused on principle and virtue, that reflect our everyday lives. A story brings us together, “so that for a few minutes we all live inside the same story, in the kind of world we wish to see.” The story unfolds in the listener’s mind. Does it change the world? Brian says, “In the grand scheme of things, storytelling isn’t much. But it’s one small way I can help build bridges. Whatever you have, in your own small way, that’s enough.”

Be The Change

In one small way, give whatever you can to someone today – a smile, a story, attention, love…

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When Five Teens Helped Rescue My Unconscious Son

Amanda Coll and her seven year-old son with cerebral palsy were riding on a modified scooter when they hit a puddle and fell. Suddenly, she realized her son was unconscious. She had no phone on her, and the park was nearly empty. Desperate, she shouted for help. Five teenagers, sheltering under a picnic cover from the drizzle, immediately came sprinting. One called an ambulance. One chased down Coll’s frightened younger son. Two stationed themselves at the park entrance to flag down the paramedics. And one wrapped a blanket around Coll’s unconscious son, draped another over her shaking shoulders, and genuinely offered encouragement: “You’re doing a great job as a mum.” Eventually, they made it to the hospital, and the son recovered fully. But what lingers is the way five young strangers, without hesitation or instruction, jumped to help out a family in need, dividing up exactly what was needed and taking action.

Be The Change

Today, help someone before you can convince yourself not to, or before you can think too much about it.

This Week’s DailyGood Digest

As we look back on this week’s inspirations, themes of transformation and renewal wove across inspired unfoldings across the globe.

We explored how being the change we wish to see in the world is a practice accessible to anyone, as highlighted in a Colorado mayor’s weekly stay in a homeless shelter. We saw how a mother’s love holds the power to transform systems, as witnessed in a cafe chain founder’s journey towards a more inclusive society. In France, the ‘Civic Hour’ celebrates generosity as a renewable energy, where people across 250 French municipalities have offered one no-strings-attached hour to give of their presence, time, and heart. Additionally, a Paris bakery is doing its part to reduce food waste by showing how yesterday’s croissants can indeed pave the way for a sustainable tomorrow. Meanwhile, a man in England who researches forgotten lives reminds us of life’s delicate impermanence and the gift of the present. Buddhist monk Shoukei Matsumoto reflects on an elusive practice of emptiness by looking beyond the assumptions we carry about how things work. Finally, the view of trees as sanctuaries comes alive as a Quebec town grants them legal rights, inviting us to listen to and learn from nature. As we enter a new week, these stories remind us that transformation, like nature, is ever-present and ever-possible.

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Why Ukraine Is Rewilding in the Heat of War

In the semi-arid grasslands of southwestern Ukraine, within earshot of missile strikes, conservationists are returning wild donkeys, horses, and buffalo to a steppe that hasn’t heard their ancient sounds in two centuries — and in doing so, are rebuilding something more than an ecosystem. Rewilding Ukraine’s work in the Tarutino Steppe is at once practical and quietly radical: the reintroduced kulan reduce wildfire risk from exploding mines, enrich depleted soils, and sequester carbon, while the organization brings war veterans into rewilded landscapes as part of PTSD recovery and gathers Ukrainian and Romanian schoolchildren at the Danube Delta to learn what it means to tend a living world. “I genuinely love nature and I feel deeply connected to this landscape,” says local volunteer Petro Hramatik, whose words carry the particular weight of someone who has chosen to stay close to what he loves even as the ground around him is mined. In the spring of 2022, a kulan foal — the first born wild in 200 years — stumbled to its feet on the Tarutino Steppe after a punishing winter, making history in the middle of a war that was making its own kind of history. That an act of restoration could continue, and even bear new life, under such conditions says something worth sitting with about where human beings choose to place their hope.

Be The Change

Step outside today and spend five minutes listening, really listening, to whatever living sounds surround you — whether birdsong, wind in trees, or even a dog barking down the street. Paying attention to the landscape is itself an act of care, and noticing what’s already wild and alive near you is where a deeper relationship with nature begins. Let yourself be surprised by what you’ve been moving past without hearing.

Remembering the ‘Give While You Live’ Philanthropist Who Quietly Built 5k Schools Across America

Julius Rosenwald, the businessman who built Sears into an empire, spent his fortune on nearly 5,000 schools across the rural American South. And he refused to put his name on any of them. Working alongside Booker T. Washington, he insisted that communities contribute their own resources alongside his, believing that ownership mattered as much as opportunity. “If no name is used,” Rosenwald said, “it will belong to the people.” He also arranged for his philanthropic foundation to spend itself into extinction within 25 years of his death, convinced that wealth hoarded across generations helped no one. He called it a “Give While You Live” approach. Throughout his life, he gave away over 60 million dollars, which is about 1 billion dollars in today’s times. What Rosenwald left behind wasn’t a monument to himself but something far more rare: a model of giving that trusted people to rise when someone stood beside them rather than above them.

Be The Change

Today, do a small act to support someone or a group without their knowing, without seeking credit or recognition for it. Rosenwald believed that when no name is attached, something truly “belongs to the people.” Test that idea yourself, even in a small way. Notice what shifts in how the act feels when the giving is purely for the thing itself.

Founder of a Cafe Chain with a Cause Has a Full Circle Moment

Ten years ago, Amy Wright opened Bitty & Beau’s Coffee with the quiet hope that one day her son Beau, who was born with Down syndrome, might want to work there. She sat in her car before walking in, already a little choked up, knowing what she was about to witness: not just her son in a uniform behind a counter, but the living proof of what she’d spent a decade building toward, inspired by him. “I’ve spent the last 10 years hoping to create more opportunities for people with disabilities,” she said. “Today, I got to see what that looked like through the eyes of my own son.” What the video captures, beneath the high-fives and the jumping and the “I love you’s,” is something far more rare and valuable than success.

Be The Change

Today, think of someone in your life who has been quietly working toward something — practicing, training, building confidence in ways you may have overlooked — and encourage them by telling them specifically how you see them growing.

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A machine can generate endless words. It can’t live a life, or tell you the truth of one.

Come listen for the sound of the genuine, in someone else’s life and maybe in your own. 🙏