There are many stories about the sacred Arunachala Hill, which rises alone from the surrounding plains to a height of 860m in India’s Tamil Nadu state. One of them is a story of restoration and rebuilding for a sustainable future –  of how dedicated volunteers helped reverse decades of wood clearing and burning that left the once-green Hill barren and dry by the 1970s. In some ways, it is a story that has echoes of the ancient stories of how the Hill came to exist.

Australian ecologist John Barrie Button, who first encountered Arunachala in 1989 when he was invited to help local people reforest it, tells the mythic legend this way: ‘Shiva, Lord of Destruction and Re-creation, was asked to adjudicate an argument between Vishnu, Lord of Preservation, and Brahma, Lord of Creation, as to who had precedence. Having manifested Himself as a column of the pure light of consciousness, he bade each of them to find His limits; one to seek the lowest point, and the other the highest. Neither apparently was successful, and in their awe of Shiva’s brilliance, they pleaded with Him to take a form less dazzling, which mere mortals could then behold. Shiva agreed, and transformed himself into the form of the mountain, Arunachala, which has been venerated ever since.’