Growing timber and firewood for Auroville

Auroville Today, January 2015 #306 India faces a drastic shortage of timber and firewood, and Auroville is no exception, its forests notwithstanding. Over the years, Auroville foresters have introduced the drought-resistant ‘Work’ tree’ from Australia and have focused on re-growing the Tropical Dry Evergreen Forests (TDEF) that once were indigenous to the Coromandel Coast, collecting seeds from small remaining TDEF groves and setting up TDEF nurseries. These nurseries have since provided most of the TDEF shrubs and trees that now thrive in Auroville and which have also been sent to other places such as the Tholkappia Poonga (also known as Adyar Poonga), the 58-acres ecological park in the Adyar estuary area of Chennai. But the Auroville planners and foresters have given no or only little thought to the timber and firewood needs of the growing township. In a recent report published in Auroville’s internal weekly News and Notes, the Forest Group reported that timber stoc...
>> More