Against Poverty Poverty is both a cause and a symptom of environmental degradation. You can't say you'll deal with just one. It’s a trap. When you're in poverty, you're trapped because the poorer you become, the more you degrade the environment, and the more you degrade the environment, the poorer you become. So it's a matter of breaking the cycle. We cannot solve all the problems that we face: we don't have water, we don't have energy, we don't have food, we don't have incomes, we're not able to send our children to school. But we can do something – something that is cheap, that is within our power, our capacity, our resources. And planting a tree was the best idea I had. For me, it became a wonderful way of breaking the cycle. Source: From an interview with Amitabh Pal, The Progressive Magazine http://www.storiesrus.com