In 1995, Turkish truck driver Sehmus Erginoglu began clearing rubbish and watering saplings; 25 years later, a former Mardin dump had become a small forest

There's a patch of land just outside Mardin, Turkey, that used to be the local dump. Today it holds roughly 11,000 trees, all planted by hand, by one man, for free. According to a 2019 study published in the journal Science, degraded or unused land like this is exactly where the planet has the most untapped room to grow new forest, and Sehmus Erginoglu, a retired truck driver, has spent 25 years quietly proving the point with a shovel and a garden hose.

A truck driver's retirement project became a small forest
Back in 1995, Erginoglu looked at a stretch of wasteland near his hometown of Mardin and decided to do something about it. He started small, hauling away garbage, then laying down water pipes, then planting saplings, one at a time, with no funding and no formal plan. Middle East Eye visited the site and photographed his work; the outlet reported that the patch of land is now home to roughly 11,000 trees, with thousands more scattered nearby. Erginoglu, who was 71 at the time of that report, estimated he had personally planted over 20,000 trees in Mardin, and possibly closer to 30,000 once surrounding villages were counted.

Fifty hand-dug wells keep the whole thing alive
None of this happened with a budget. Erginoglu tends to the trees every day the sun is out, skipping only when it rains, and he has never taken a salary for the work. To keep the forest watered, he dug around 50 wells himself, tapping into natural springs nearby. The Turkish government has chipped in with pine saplings, but the daily labor and most of the cost have come from savings earned during his years driving trucks across Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Middle East Eye reports that Erginoglu said he earns no money from the project but that it brings him real joy.


Why doing this kind of unpaid work might actually be good for you
There is a scientific reason projects like this tend to make people happier, not just poorer. A European Journal of Aging study, 'Aspects of formal volunteering that contribute to favourable psychological outcomes in older adults,' followed more than 108 Australian retirees who began volunteering for the first time, the ones who felt their work served a cause they truly believed in showed measurable improvements in self-esteem, confidence, and overall well-being six months later. That tracks with a separate, much larger study.

The study, ‘Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing,’ published in Scientific Reports in 2019, followed nearly 20,000 people spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature, whether in one long visit or several shorter ones, was linked to significantly better self-reported health and psychological well-being. If the research holds, that daily habit may be doing more for him than he ever set out to prove.

A small forest with big-picture timing
Erginoglu's project also lands in the middle of a larger, ongoing conversation about tree cover and climate change. The Science study titled ‘The global tree restoration potential’ notes that the planet has room for roughly 900 million additional hectares of forest without cutting into farmland or cities, and the study's authors argued tree restoration could be one of the more promising tools for pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. Other scientists have since pushed back on exactly how much carbon new forests could realistically store, so that specific claim remains debated. Still, the basic instinct behind Erginoglu's work, that empty, neglected land can be turned back into something living, lines up with where a lot of environmental science is currently pointed.

Turkey's government has leaned into this too, marking November 11 as National Forestation Day each year, a tradition that began in 2019 when the country planted over 11 million saplings in a single day. Even so, Middle East Eye has reported that environmental groups continue to fight government-approved mining and deforestation elsewhere in the country, including in the Mount Ida region.

A legacy that doesn't need a bank account
Erginoglu never married. According to Middle East Eye, he explained that he did not want anyone else entering his life after his parents passed away, and that his six siblings already had families of their own to leave their savings to. Trees, in his view, are a different kind of inheritance, one that reaches everyone rather than just his own bloodline. He was quoted as saying that money cannot be carried into the afterlife, but that the good a person does outlives them. In the summer, locals come by to sit under the trees and eat the fruit. That, more than the tree count, seems to be the actual point.

Sitting above his forest is Mardin's old hilltop castle, watching over a city that gets brutally hot summers and mild, occasionally snowy winters, according to Middle East Eye's description of the area. It's easy to walk past a patch of unused land and see nothing worth the effort. Erginoglu looked at the same kind of land and spent 25 years proving otherwise.