CAN ONE MAN
DEFEAT
Few threats to human civilization are as serious as the rapid spread of the world’s deserts.
So far research offered few solutions. But now an Australian agronomist has come up with
an effective one all on his own, and it requires only a simple tool...T
he barren, lifeless landscape
with its arid, parched ground
rolls on for as far as the eye
can see. The last inhabitants
of the small village of Humbo
in Ethiopia have been living
in the desert—and struggling to survive.
The last tree was cut down years earlier,
and replanting trees in the bone-dry soil
seemed impossible. The villagers had
long since abandoned all hope. Their dire
expectation: If the burning heat didn’t kill
them, they’d all die of thirst as the region
continued to dry out. But Humbo did not
die—quite the contrary: Only a few years
later the area had changed so drastically
that it was unrecognizable. The wasteland
had turned into a flourishing forest.CAN YOU SAVE THE WORLD
WITH A POCKET KNIFE?
The name of the man who brought back
the forest is Tony Rinaudo. The Australian-
born farmer and agronomist has learned
to transform dry wasteland of the kind he
found in Humbo into a thriving forest—and
he does so with a simple method: farmer-
managed natural regeneration (FMNR). It
takes advantage of the root systems that
remain in the ground after the trees are
gone. When Rinaudo first saw the small
bushes, he thought they’d grown on their
own in the desert. Then he realized they
were sprouting from the roots of trees that
had been cut down. The root systems were
still alive. Was it possible to regrow the
trees from them? “It changed everything,”he recalls. “We didn’t need to plant trees
on a multimillion-dollar budget. Everything
we needed was already there.” Pruning
the bushes to only the strongest shoots
made them regrow as trees. “If you do it
correctly, the trees will come back even
in dry regions. And where the trees grow,
you can raise millet and sorghum as well,”
says Rinaudo, now 63.
He discovered the method almost by
accident. In a desperate attempt to revive
an area of Niger, a landlocked country in
Western Africa, he’d planted 6,000 trees,
but soon they had all died. Then he made
his breakthrough discovery: green shoots
emerging from a dried-out tree trunk. That
meant the roots of the tree were still alive.
All it would take, he hoped, was to pruneA DESERT?
A photo and its story