Stone to Forest.

In 2008, the land was a stripped grassland on the Sukabumi hills in West Java. Years of illegal logging had taken the trees, then the topsoil had washed off the slope. The hills were bare and starting to slide. Rice farmers in the valley below had no water. The mountain that should have held it was draining straight down.

That same year, the Indonesian government launched the Satu Milyar Pohon program, a national effort to plant one billion trees. We bought the land and joined the program. After surveying the slope and the soil, the only tree suited to conditions that hostile was teak.

Before any tree went into the ground, we cleared the slope, surveyed and plotted the land, built roads and drainage channels, and ran a quality-controlled tissue-culture nursery to select healthy seedlings. Then we planted, fertilised, and built housing on site for the workers who would tend the trees for the next two decades.

Every step is documented. The nursery, the clearing, the worker team, the fertiliser schedules, the survey plots. A verification team can walk the property and read the record.

Eighteen years later, the canopy is closed across most of the property. Topsoil has rebuilt itself, slowly, from the leaf fall. The rice fields in the valley have year-round water again. The slope is held by the roots.

Most timber operations run on a 25-to-30 year clear-cycle. Plant, grow, cut everything, replant. We do the opposite. We trim selectively, year after year, and always leave more standing than we take. This is a hundred-year project.

About thirty families have lived and worked on the property continuously since the first few years of planting. Each family has housing on site. They are the reason the forest still stands.

From early in the project, we built a scholarship program around the workers' families. It is called Anak Asuh. It covers school costs for the children of plantation workers, from kindergarten through to university. Several of the children we sponsored as kids have finished their degrees and now hold jobs of their own.

It is the part of this project that does not show up in a canopy survey or a carbon estimate. It is the reason the people who built this forest stay.