About a Third of All Land on Earth Has Been Claimed by Desert—Almost Twenty Million Square Miles—And the Percentage Is Likely to Increase With

About a third of all land on earth has been claimed by desert—almost twenty million square miles—and the percentage is likely to increase with

110 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 19 & 26, 2011

TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 110—133SC.—HARTFORD, PLEASE DO NOT PULL THIS PAGE OUT BY 1/16”—LIVE ART—R 21628—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN—#2 PAGE—NEW PLACEMENT OF TITLE TO PAGE 111 FROM 110 A REPORTER AT LARGE THE GREAT OASIS

Can a wall of trees stop the Sahara from spreading? BY BURKHARD BILGER

global warming. “The desert always menaces,” the French botanist André Aubréville warned. Photograph by George Steinmetz.

TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 111—133SC.—HARTFORD, PLEASE DO NOT PULL THIS PAGE OUT BY 1/16”—LIVE ART—R 21628—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN—#2 PAGE—NEW PLACEMENT OF TITLE TO PAGE 111 FROM 110 n the Al Hajar Mountains of northern Abdullatif and Reesi wore the tradi- “Yes, a very big, open hotel. We have Oman, at the eastern edge of the Ara- tional white robes and embroidered one banana left. We share it.” Ibian Desert, high above the white ter- prayer caps of Omani Muslims. They Hoff laughed. To the west, the high races and minarets of Muscat, rain comes were born and raised here—although peaks of the Al Hajar rose rank upon rank rarely and then in floods. Hajar means Abdullatif had done his horticultural into the coppery sky, the empty plains half “rock” in Arabic, and the mountains are training in England, at Canterbury Col- in shadow below them. “We have a say- made of little else—a fractal landscape of lege, in Kent—and had seen the country ing in Holland,” he said. “ ‘If you call out umber and dusty limestone, thrust from transformed, in forty years, from a near- in the desert, no one will hear you.’ ” But the sea more than sixty-five million years medieval land of warring tribes to a I knew what he was thinking: not so long ago and still shaped more by salt water unified and oil-rich sultanate. When ago, these mountains were covered with than by sweet. When the clouds burst, as Abdullatif was a boy, firewood was desert junipers and groves of bitter olive. they do a few times a year, the rain skit- still gathered by Bedouin nomads and What would it take to bring them back? ters from the slopes like oil from a grid- brought in by camel; water arrived by dle, gathers into rivulets and swiftly mov- donkey in goatskin bags and barrels once he desert is a good place for vision- ing sheets, and tumbles into the wadies filled with ghee. Now the coast was dot- aries. It can flower in the mind even that wind between peaks. The ancient ted with desalinization plants and it was asT it withers at your feet. About a third of Omanis built networks of aqueducts and sometimes hard to tell that Oman was a all land on the planet has been claimed by underground falajes to funnel the water desert nation. Along the boulevards and it—almost twenty million square miles— to their crops. Oases of mango, date highways of Muscat, the medians were and the percentage increases every year. palm, sweet lemon, and lime still survive as lush as croquet lawns. Weeping casu- Where rain is scarce and the ground is on this system, their fruit knuckled in on arina trees lined the shoulders between stripped of trees, where soil is eroded by itself against the heat, smaller and more beds of petunia, bougainvillea, and topi- the steady beat of sun, hooves, and sea- pungent than their Indian ancestors. But ary trimmed like battlements. The sultan sonal farming, a landscape can turn to on most slopes the only traces of green was said to be an environmentalist—he’d dust in a generation. “These are real des- are a few umbrella-thorn trees, Acacia recently decreed the construction of the erts that are being born today, under our tortilis, anchored to the bare rock. Their country’s first botanical garden—and he eyes,” the French botanist André Au- roots can descend more than a hundred wanted his capital green. bréville warned in 1949, when he popu- feet in search of groundwater. The illusion didn’t last beyond the city larized the term “desertification.” “The “It used to be much wetter here when limits. Most of Oman averages less than desert always menaces.” In the past cen- I was a boy,” Hamad Reesi said, as our six inches of rain a year—barely enough tury, over most of the globe, the amount S.U.V. lurched up a gravel switchback in to sustain native plants, much less thirsty of dust in the air has doubled. the foothills. “You never had to buy fod- exotics like the petunias. On the north- It’s an old story in some ways. Deserts der for your goats.” Ali al-Abdullatif ern coast, long known as the country’s have been advancing and retreating for nodded, then yanked the steering wheel fertile crescent, so much groundwater has much of the earth’s history, driven by tec- to one side to avoid a dropoff. Next to been tapped for farms, orchards, and tonic shifts and planetary wobbles be- him, Pieter Hoff dozed in the passenger date-palm plantations that salt water has yond our control. The Sahara and the seat. Abdullatif is the chairman of the seeped into the aquifers. “Look at this,” Arabian Peninsula haven’t been green for Horticultural Association of Oman, a Abdullatif told us at one point, gesturing thousands of years. What has changed is slender, cultivated man more comfort- at a line of dead palms along the road, the fact that global warming is making able potting plants than going on desert their fronds decaying to dust on the climates more extreme. Regional rainfall excursions. Hoff is a Dutch inventor and ground. “Complete destruction.” is hard to predict in the long term, but former tulip and lily grower who had When we reached the top of the first most models agree on the over-all pat- come to Oman to test an experimental pass, Abdullatif pulled onto an overlook tern. “The wet will get wetter and the dry tree-planting device. We’d spent the past and killed the engine. The sun was set- will get dryer,” Isaac Held, a research sci- few hours bumping over back roads, ting, the road getting harder to follow, entist with the National Oceanic and At- stopping every few minutes to look at and he seemed ready to turn back. “I mospheric Administration, told me. By trees that might be good for Hoff’s proj- don’t like the drops on the sides here,” he the end of the century, according to the ect: hardy natives like Ziziphus spina- said, as he got out of the car. “These sheer Intergovernmental Panel on Climate christi, said to have provided the thorns drops. They do not make me feel very se- Change, rainfall could decrease by fifteen for Jesus’ crown, and Salvadora persica, cure.” After a while, Hoff shook himself to twenty per cent in the Middle East the toothbrush tree. Its fibrous twigs awake and joined Abdullatif outside. Tall and by twenty-five per cent in North Af- were laced with fluoride and antiseptics. and pale, with a bladelike nose and a rica. “That’s a lot,” Held said. The recent Word had it that this area was home to thinning crown of blond hair, he was drought and famine in Somalia, which one of the last baobabs in northern Oman, built for cooler climes. Perched beside has killed tens of thousands of people and but we’d got lost trying to find it and had the dusky, heavy-lidded Abdullatif, he driven many more into Kenya and Ethi- picked up Reesi, a local farmer, as a looked like an egret about to snack on a opia, is a preview of things to come. guide. The great tree was deep in the lizard. To Hoff, the solution seems straight- mountains, he said. We would never “What if the car stops?” he said. “Is forward. If we can replant the forests lost reach it on our own. there a hotel here?” to desertification, he says, we can provide

112 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 19 & 26, 2011

TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 112—133SC. food, fuel, shade, and shelter on an enor- a bulwark against the sand and solid at a summit in Chad in 2010. “We must mous scale. We can conserve water, fer- footing for a shelterbelt of trees. Water fight it. That is why we have decided to tilize the soil, protect wildlife, and cool would collect in the sandstone’s cool, po- join in this titanic battle.” the atmosphere. Every year, human in- rous substructure, sustaining the trees’ dustry sends about nine billion tons of roots and any settlers who wished to he Great Green Wall is a collective carbon into the air. An acre of trees, move inside. In Larsson’s drawings, the effort, which is to say, a patchwork planted in a desert, could pull two to underground rooms have the groovy, Taffair. Each country along its path will re- three tons of that carbon back down. biomorphic look of an old Yes album forest its segment after its own fashion, “Multiplied by five billion, we have cover. coördinated by a pan-African agency in solved the problem,” Hoff says. George Taylor, a former agriculture Chad. The Global Environmental Facil- The math is a little fuzzy, admittedly. and environment officer for U.S.A.I.D., ity has allocated a hundred and nineteen Five billion acres is an area twice the size remembers fielding a number of such million dollars for the countries involved of Europe. Even if all of it could be refor- proposals when he worked in Africa in in the project, but that barely counts as ested, the trees would gradually stop se- the nineteen-eighties and nineties. “De- seed money. A desert, once established, questering carbon as they matured. Still, lusional development,” he calls them. Yet is hard to push back. African leaders have the benefits would be dramatic and the a variation on Larsson’s idea has attracted neither the means to mobilize a billion idea isn’t as far-fetched as it seems. Since substantial political and financial back- tree-planting farmers nor the money for the mid-nineteen-sixties, Israel has for- ing. The Great Green Wall, as it’s known, irrigation systems like those in Israel. ested tens of thousands of acres of the was first proposed in the mid-eighties How can they grow a forest in the desert? Negev Desert, using simple irrigation and finally approved by the African When I asked foresters and environ- systems to collect and distribute the rain- Union in 2007. The exact shape it will mentalists that question, they tended to fall. In Kenya, the Green Belt Move- take is still a matter for debate, but the give conflicting answers: the solution lay ment founded by the late Wangari idea, in its original form, is thrillingly in technology or grass-roots activism, Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace simple. To halt the spread of the Sahara, they said, land reform or carbon-credit Prize in 2004, has planted more than eleven African nations have agreed to financing, drought-tolerant trees or water- forty-five million trees. And the Chinese erect a wall of trees across the dusty retaining gels. And so, this past year, I have outdone everyone. Since 1982, they shoulders of the continent. It will stretch went to Oman and then to sub-Saharan have planted more than forty billion from the Atlantic coast of Senegal to the Africa to look at two of the most prom- trees, many of them in a nearly three- east coast of Djibouti, across sand and ising, albeit contradictory, approaches. thousand-mile strip along the southern scrub and desiccated grassland, in a col- Both of them, as it happened, were es- edge of the Gobi Desert. Forests that umn nine miles wide and almost five poused by Dutchmen. were clear-cut for agriculture during the thousand miles long. If and when it’s Hoff ’s invention, which he calls the Great Leap Forward, fed into furnaces completed, it will be the largest feat of Waterboxx, was inspired by a trip to Italy for the ironworks of the Cultural Revo- horticulture in human history. “The des- in 1994. He was driving past a barren lution, or sawed up for housing and other ert is a spreading cancer,” Abdoulaye mountain range near Naples, and he needs (chopsticks alone consume nearly Wade, the President of Senegal, declared began to wonder what it would take to an acre of trees a day) have been re- planted on an equally epic scale. By 2020, the Chinese plan to add another hundred million acres of trees—an area larger than Germany. As global temperatures rise, reforestation schemes seem to grow ever more ex- travagant—fever dreams of the desert’s future. One project, proposed three years ago by a group of British and Norwegian designers, would consist of long chains of greenhouses and orchards, running for miles across the Sahara. The trees and crops would subsist on seawater pumped from the coast and desalinated using heat and power from huge solar arrays. An- other proposal, from the Swedish archi- tect Magnus Larsson, would make use of an organism called Bacillus pasteurii, which can turn sand into sandstone. In Larsson’s scheme, great masses of the bacteria would be injected into dunes across the breadth of the Sahara, creating “I want to be so successful that it ruins my life.”

TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 113—133SC.—LIVE ART—A 16193 grow trees there. The local climate was some thirteen million dollars, at last forty in all—a gift from Queen Beatrix of fairly dry, but the problem was less a mat- count—to developing the Waterboxx. the Netherlands to Sultan Qaboos bin ter of moisture than of timing. Even des- By the time I met him, he had spent five Sa’id, commemorating his forty years in erts can get as much as twenty inches of years shuttling from desert to desert, test- power. Like most good tools, they weren’t rain a year, but it all comes down at once. ing prototypes with local agronomists. much to look at: a set of simple ideas com- The plants that survive tend to rely on That month alone, he’d been in Kenya, bined to surprising effect. Each box had a condensation—“They drink from the Kuwait, and Bahrain, with Spain and round, four-gallon tank molded out of air,” as Hoff puts it. In Africa’s Namib India still to come. “I always search for polypropylene, with an open-ended shaft Desert, Welwitschia plants have been the most extreme places, where no one in the middle where the seedlings grew. known to live for more than a thousand expects anything to grow,” he said. All The lid was modelled on a lotus leaf, with years on the dew that they absorb through told, he had planted some sixty thousand radiating folds that collected the rain and their long, porous leaves. What if a de- trees in twenty countries, with a few veg- the dew and sluiced them into a pair of vice could be built on the same principle? etable patches and vineyards thrown in. drains. “If you have a rain shower of only Hoff thought. It could collect rain and (Robert Mondavi Winery was testing four inches, then this is full,” Hoff said. A dew, then release it to a seed or sapling Waterboxxes in the Napa Valley.) Oman wick at the bottom of the tank carried the one drop at a time. was his most challenging site yet. If he water to the root at a rate of about four ta- Hoff had never lived in a desert. He could grow trees there, Hoff figured, he blespoons a day—a single tank could sus- didn’t know much about tree planting or could grow them anywhere. tain a seedling for about a year without a industrial design. But he did have a good refill. The whole box functioned as a tem- business sense and a lifetime’s experience n the morning before our trip to find perature regulator, Hoff said. The water with plants. Born in 1953, he grew up in the baobab, Hoff took Abdullatif absorbed heat by day and released it by a small farming village in West Friesland, andO me to see his latest plantings, in the night. The shaft was shaped to let in the the eldest of nine children. His father was port city of Sohar. The site was a former morning and evening sun but throw shade a tulip and lily grower with a moderniz- camel racetrack, levelled to make way for over the seedling at midday. ing bent—he was one of the first farmers an industrial park. The soil was gray and Hoff reached down and pried the in northern Holland to own a tractor— gravelly, compacted into hardpan by bull- lid off one of the boxes. “Mother Nature and Pieter showed an early gift for breed- dozers and steamrollers. A viewing plat- plants trees differently than people do,” he ing new varieties. (Most of his lilies were form had been erected nearby—what ex- said. “We buy a very big plant and then we named after Santana songs: Moonflower, actly was on view wasn’t clear—surrounded dig a hole for it. Mother Nature starts with Black Magic Woman, and his best- by a hurricane fence topped by razor wire. a seed.” Saplings from nurseries have well- seller, a canary-and-aubergine number Beyond it, the land lay table flat in every developed secondary roots, which spread called Festival.) In 1976, Hoff and two of direction, punctuated only by some con- laterally through the ground. Short and his brothers bought the farm from their tainer cranes along the coast and the dis- densely woven, they draw maximum sus- father and began to expand it. By 2003, tant flares of an oil refinery. Hoff knelt tenance from the soil, but they need water when they sold the place, it was Hol- down and poured a handful of dust into right away and by the bucketful. A seed land’s largest grower of lilies. his hand. “It’s like the moon,” he said. can afford to wait. Encased in dung from Hoff went on to devote most of his The Waterboxxes were arrayed in a a passing bird or other animal, it can sur- time and the greater part of his fortune— circle around the platform. There were vive for months without rain. If the soil is dry, it can put all its energy into sending a single taproot in search of groundwater. Hoff liked to collect pictures of trees in improbable places: ponderosa pines sprouting from boulders in the Sierras, holly oaks clinging to ledges of Extre madura granite in Spain. A taproot is one of nature’s astonishments, he said. It can worm itself into the tiniest crack, then expand a few cells at a time, gen erating pressures of up to seven hun dred and twenty-five pounds per square inch—enough to split paving stones or punch holes through brick walls. The Waterboxx is designed to en- courage such persistence. Like nature, it begins with a seed, then gives it just enough sustenance to survive until it finds water. After a year, when the root “Come on, baby—just this once! It’s been forever since reaches wetter soil, the box can be lifted we got stoned and went out carolling!” away and reused. “See these young leaves?”

TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 114—133SC.—LIVE ART—A 15536 Hoff said, pointing to a cluster of heart- shaped buds, bright green against the darkened soil. “They show that the root is already tapping deeper.” This was a Moringa seedling—one of a number of species that Hoff thought might do well here and in Africa. In its native India, it was known as the drumstick tree for its bulbous seedpods, but a generation of tree-planting N.G.O.s had given it a new name: the Miracle Tree. Morin- gas are among the world’s most nutritious plants. Their leaves can be eaten raw, cooked, or ground into baby formula. They contain four times the calcium of milk, three times the potassium of ba- nanas, four times the Vitamin A of carrots, seven times the Vitamin C of oranges, and about half again the protein of soybeans. The seeds can be pressed for an unsatu- “Yeah, but good luck getting it peer-reviewed.” rated fat like olive oil or crushed into a powder that purifies water: its electrolytes attract impurities and precipitate them out •• of the fluid. Best of all, Moringas are fast- growing and extremely drought-tolerant. last two thousand years, all by hand. We ern donors and environmentalists. But “They will not die,” Abdullatif said. “A have eight thousand miles of dikes, all even if he can persuade them to send a Moringa you cannot kill.” made by hand. That is one and a half billion Waterboxxes to Africa, the seed- When Hoff planted these seedlings a times the length of the Chinese Wall. If lings will have to be planted and cared for month earlier, he’d watered the soil and tomorrow there is no electricity, we are be- by local farmers. And they’ll have to be filled the tanks. Now they had to fend neath the water. That is Holland. It’s not convinced that it’s worth it. for themselves. Soon the heat would rise a country; it’s the largest art work in the China is a cautionary example. Most above a hundred and twenty degrees, with world. That is why I tell people, if we re- of its reforestation has been done involun- no rain for six months. Yet Hoff could ally want to replant five billion acres, we tarily, by villagers obliged to meet national count on close to ninety per cent of his can do it. It is a matter of determined will.” quotas. “If you add up all the acres, more seedlings surviving into their second year. trees have probably been planted there (A few months earlier, Popular Science had he cost of planting trees is hard to than anywhere else,” Nick Menzies, the named the Waterboxx its Innovation of gauge, given the wildly varying re- executive director of the Asia Institute at the Year.) All of these Moringas were Tsults. The Chinese spend less than fifty U.C.L.A., told me. “But the survival rates alive, as were about half the tamarisks that cents a tree—just enough to plant a seed- have been dismal.” Farmers have set seed- he’d planted in other boxes. Since he’d ling and pray that it will live. The Israelis lings in the poorest soil, to keep their planted the seedlings in pairs, most of the invest closer to forty dollars, with a suc- crops and pastures clear, or planted them boxes held at least one living tree. “Next cess rate of around ninety per cent. Hoff is upside down, to spite the authorities. year, it will be one and a half metres,” he somewhere in between. Until recently, They’ve laid them in identical grids, re- said, pointing to a survivor. he gave his Waterboxxes away, chalking gardless of the terrain, and never bothered He stood up and swept his gaze around them up as a research expense. But, as to water or thin them out. They’ve plowed the site. If this project succeeded, he his costs have mounted, his strategy has up tenacious old prairies, where trees rarely hoped to plant six thousand more trees in changed. “I have to live,” he told me. “And grew, then left the seedlings and the top- Sohar, and still more in the surrounding you can’t reforest deserts if there is no soil to blow away. Decades after the refor- desert—a forest of Moringas surging up moneymaking business model.” Depend- estation along the Gobi began, the desert from the sand, marching west across the ing on the size of the order, he now sells still claims more than a thousand square Arab Peninsula toward Africa. “Within his boxes for around fifteen to twenty-five miles of land annually. “Every year, we forty years, if the world wants it, every- dollars. In a project like the Great Green plant trees,” one popular saying goes. “But where is covered with trees again,” he said. Wall, he says, the box could be reused up we never see a forest.” The Great Green Wall alone could re- to ten times, bringing the final cost down The Great Green Wall will face even quire five billion seedlings or more, not to as little as a dollar-fifty a tree. tougher conditions. The Sahara is an un- counting those which would die along the The one thing missing from this governable landscape—more than three way. But Hoff wasn’t intimidated. “My equation is local people. When Hoff talks million square miles of sand and stone, ad- country has sixty thousand miles of ca- about the world wanting to reforest vancing and retreating with every change nals,” he said. “We made them over the five billion acres, he mostly means West- in the weather. Between 1980 and 1984,

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TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 115—133SC.—LIVE ART—A 16300 the desert’s southern border moved a hundred and forty-five miles south; by 1990, it had shifted sixty-six miles north. Even if HORSE PIANO the Great Green Wall survives, the land to the south of it can still turn to desert from The idea is to get a horse, a Central Park workhorse. drought or overgrazing. The Sahara is bordered by a semi-arid savanna known as A horse who lives in a city, over in the hell part of Hell’s the Sahel. (In Arabic, sahel means “edge of Kitchen, in a big metal tent. the desert.”) To the north, it gets as little as eight inches of rain a year. To the south, You have to get one who is dying. rainfall rises, but so do demands on farmers. In the past sixty years, populations in the Sahel have more than quintupled. Maybe you get his last day on the job, his owner, his “The idea that there will be an uninter- tourists. rupted green wall from Dakar to Dji- bouti—I think it’s a dream,” Chris Reij, You get his walk back home at the end of the day, an agroforestry specialist at the Free Uni- versity of Amsterdam, told me. “If you some fies, some drool. You get his deathbed, maybe. want to maximize your difficulties, go there.” Reij, who is sixty-two, has worked in the Sahel for more than half his life, And then, post mortem, still warm, you get the vet or else first for Oxfam International, then for the the butcher Centre for International Cooperation, based at his university. Like Hoff, he grew to take his three best legs. And then you get the taxidermist up in Holland and speaks impeccable to stuf them English—the crisp, almost jaunty sort common among northern Europeans. But if Hoff is a businessman turned environmentalist, as trusting of the free mar- re-green two billion hectares, I start ob- desert. On the drive north from the cap- ket as he is of photosynthesis, Reij is a serving the clouds.” ital, Ouagadougou, a faint haze hung radical at heart. He was brought up as a And yet Reij’s own vision is no less over the countryside, more dust than devout Calvinist and studied in Amster- ambitious than Hoff’s. For the past two condensation. To either side of the road, dam in the nineteen-sixties. While Hoff years, Reij and Tony Rinaudo, an Austra- the grasses were parched brittle and sere, was breeding lilies on his father’s farm, lian agronomist and former missionary, the red soil baked hard beneath them. Reij protested the war in Vietnam and de- have organized what they call the African The only signs of life were a few Senega- bated the Club of Rome’s limits to Re-Greening Initiatives. Instead of trying lese fire finches, darting like sparks among growth. “You develop a certain sense to erect a wall of trees across the Sahara, the shea trees. about the world and what needs to be Reij told me, African leaders should look “These are the really difficult months,” done,” he told me. “I had a nice picture of fifty miles south, where a green revolution Reij said. In the open country, the farm- Che Guevara in my room.” is already under way. In the past twenty- ers and their livestock had retreated to Reij and Hoff have never met, though five years, farmers in Burkina Faso, Mali, their mud-brick compounds—miniature not for lack of trying on Hoff’s part. Reij’s and Niger have reforested vast stretches of fortresses with low walls and circular long history in the Sahel, and his ties to the Sahel. They’ve done so with little towers—or to the mosques that spired academia and to private foundations, have money and no modern equipment, in above the treetops. But in the cities the made him one of the gatekeepers for some of the world’s most politically vola- escalating heat and rumors of distant rev- funding in the region. Last year, a Dutch tile regions. Theirs may be the greatest olution had begun to inflame local tem- businessman sent Reij an e-mail on Hoff’s environmental success in African history, pers. When we arrived in the city of behalf. “He was suggesting a meeting to Reij said, and it violates almost every rule Ouahigouya, we found most of its mu- discuss the large-scale inclusion of the of reforestation. nicipal buildings burned. A few days ear- Waterboxx in the Great Green Wall,” lier, police officers in a nearby city had Reij told me. “My reaction was that I had urkina Faso lies just above the equa- beaten a student to death, sparking a riot. no intention whatsoever to participate.” tor, between the sands of Mali to the “The officers are still in hiding,” our The Waterboxx is much too costly for northB and the tropical forests of Ghana driver said, pointing gleefully to the most farmers, Reij told me, and it fails to and Ivory Coast to the south. When I blackened shell of the police station. address the fundamental issue of desertifi met Reij there in the spring, it was the “They’re afraid to come out!” Within cation: what sort of agriculture makes sense middle of the dry season. The noonday days, soldiers would be rioting in the cap- in this place? “Tree planting is bloody sun could send temperatures soaring to a ital as well, looting the houses of govern- difficult in dry lands,” he said. “When I hundred and fifteen degrees and a hot ment officials and injuring the mayor. come across people who say it’s possible to harmattan wind blew down from the To keep tabs on the situation, Reij

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TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 116—133SC. oversee the tree plantations. It was a tidy, seemingly scientific method, but it often heavy, with some alloy, steel, something. failed miserably. Without trees to shelter the fields, the topsoil dried up and blew away. Without farmers to tend to the Next day you go over to Christie’s interiors sale and buy a trees, the seedlings died. By the early baby-grand piano, eighties, crop yields were down to less than four hundred pounds per acre—in shabby condition but tony provenance, let’s say it graced the the United States, the average cornfield entry hall produced fourteen times that amount— and the fuelwood crisis was worse than of some or other Vanderbilt’s Gold Coast classic six. ever. In the spring of 1984, Reij drove across the border into southeastern Niger And you ask the welder you know to carefully replace the to design a soil-and-water-conservation piano legs project. He’d grown to love the Sahel by then—“It felt like a second mother coun- with the horse legs, and you put the horse/piano somewhere try,” he told me—but he despaired of its like a lobby, future. “It was a drought year, a very bad drought year,” he said. “There was so and you hire a guy to play it on the hour, so that everybody much sand and dust in the air that you will know couldn’t see a hundred metres. Even at noon, we had to drive with our head- how much work it is to hold anything up in this world. lights on. I thought Niger was being blown off the map.” That same year, Reij —Anna McDonald recalled, the French environmentalist and former Presidential candidate René Dumont visited the region and reached chatted with local bartenders or with a holm, of the Times, had warned that the the same conclusion. “Burkina Faso isn’t Syrian family that owned his favorite Sahel faced a desperate fuelwood short- a developing country,” he declared. “It’s a hotel in town, but nothing seemed to age—“the other energy crisis,” he called disappearing country.” faze him. Going from village to village in it. Almost every tree within forty miles of his S.U.V., he looked like a retired pro- Ouagadougou had been cut down. To ony Rinaudo, Reij’s future partner in fessor on holiday: floppy hat, comfortable meet the demands of multiplying popu- the Re-Greening Initiatives, was belly, high domed forehead fringed with lations, one study estimated, reforesta- workingT in the city of Maradi in those gray. An avid bird-watcher, he had a tion would have to increase fiftyfold. “It days, near Niger’s southern border. He beautiful, warbling whistle with which he was ‘Oh, my God, the desert is expand- had come to the Sahel from Australia often accompanied himself as he drove. ing! Let’s plant some trees!’ ” George four years earlier with his wife and infant “I’m a born optimist,” he said. Or per- Taylor, of U.S.A.I.D., recalled. “So they son (they would have three more chil- haps he just had a longer memory than did these industrial-scale plantings in dren in Africa). He was in charge of or- most. every country across the Sahel. Big Cat- ganizing tree-planting and farming proj- When Reij first came to Burkina Faso erpillars bulldozing down what they ects for a Christian aid group, Serving in with his wife, in 1978, he had been hired thought was useless brush. And then Mission, but was soon doing famine- by Oxfam as a regional planner. It was putting in just huge fields of eucalyptus.” relief work as well. “I was in shock,” he hard to know where to begin. The Sahel The Sahel had inherited from its told me. “We had windstorms that was in the midst of a devastating long- French colonists a strictly compartmen- would bury the seed or carry it away. We term drought: close to a million people talized approach to agriculture: crops had a mouse plague. We had locust died of famine between 1972 and 1984, over here, trees over there. Farmers were swarms—hatchlings moving across the prompting huge shipments of Western told to clear and plow their fields, enrich ground like a carpet. We had crows who aid. In Burkina Faso’s Central Plateau, them with chemicals, and plant them knew where the drill holes were. For a some villages lost as many as a quarter of with improved species. Foresters would young agricultural adviser—I was born in their families, as they were driven into 1957—it was just mind-boggling.” exile, and water levels fell between twenty One afternoon, Rinaudo was driving and forty inches a year. “I was gripped by into the country with a trailer-load of tree a certain fear,” Reij recalled. “Am I going seedlings when his truck began to get to work here? Am I going to live here?” mired in deep sand. He got out to let Much of the conservation work in the some air out of the tires, for better trac- area was a disaster of good intentions. tion, and looked around at the barren Two years before Reij arrived, Erik Eck- scrub that encircled him. “I’m wasting

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TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 117—133SC. —LIVE ART R21680N—PLEASE INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY my time,” he remembers thinking. “It the sun or get in the way of the equip- sisted on cleared fields and foresters who wouldn’t matter if I had millions of dol- ment. And that means getting rid of the claimed any new seedlings as state prop- lars and dozens of staff. I wouldn’t have a trees. erty, farmers in Niger had learned to chance. The water table was forty to sixty In the Sahel, the situation is reversed. avoid growing trees altogether. If a seed- metres deep. I’d plant the trees and watch The sun beats ceaselessly down. There’s ling sprouted in a field, the farmer dug it them die.” too little water for irrigation, too little up before an agent forestier noticed. If an It was in that moment of surrender, money for mechanized harvesting. The N.G.O. paid for a communal woodlot, it he says, that an altogether different trick isn’t to maximize your crops’ expo- was dutifully planted, fenced in, and left thought struck him. What if he had sure, Rinaudo realized, but to minimize to die. In most cases, the trees cut down things backward? Every year, the villag- it—to provide shelter and shade from the to make the fences outnumbered the ers cleared the brush to make room for wind and the withering heat. It’s not ones inside. crops, and planted trees around them. enough to plant a row of trees around “So I went to the forestry depart- And every year the plantings failed and your field. You have to grow them side ment,” Rinaudo recalled. “And I said, the brush resprouted from its old root- by side with your other plants, as a sec- ‘Look, what you’re doing isn’t working. stocks. What if they just let it grow? ondary crop. That way, you can harvest You have a forest guard at the entrance What if they cut back only a portion of grains and vegetables on the ground, to every city, but the wood comes in any- the native trees, let the rest mature, and fruits and nuts in the trees. way. Would you let us try something? If planted crops between them? Farmers in the tropics have been you give people permission to harvest The idea went against conventional doing this since agriculture began, Den- trees, we will teach them to take care of wisdom in almost every way. In temper- nis Garrity, of the World Agroforestry them.’ ” As it turned out, the foresters ate areas like Europe, the United States, Centre, told me. But the tradition was were easier to convince than the farmers. and southeastern Australia, the growing largely quashed by colonization. In the “We had ten or twelve in as many vil- season is short and sunlight is a limited French colonial system, trees were the lages who agreed to try it out,” Rinaudo resource. The best way to take advantage property of the state—even those which said. “They were ridiculed and laughed of it is to plant your crops beneath an grew on a farmer’s land. Pruning without at. As soon as it looked like the idea was open sky. Most of modern agriculture— a permit could earn you a fine; felling a taking root, people would come in at its rolling plains and mechanized har- tree could get you jail time. “The laws night and cut the trees back down.” The vesters, monocultures and center-pivot were put in place to protect the forests,” real battle wasn’t against the Sahara, he irrigation systems—is predicated on that Garrity said. “They did the opposite.” discovered, but against people’s ideas. “If assumption. Nothing is allowed to block Caught between agronomists who in- we could change their minds, we could change everything.” In the end, the farmers were given an ultimatum: unless they protected their trees, they would get no food from Ri naudo’s famine-relief program. “A lot of them hated me,” he said. “They protected roughly half a million trees, but, when the famine was over, two-thirds of them chopped down their trees again.” It was the other third that made all the difference.

inaudo and his family went home to Australia in 1999, but Reij con- Rtinued to work on conservation projects in the Sahel. In 2001, he co-edited a book called “Farmer Innovation in Af- rica,” but most of what he described were small local changes. Nothing that could be called a movement. Then, in the sum- mer of 2004, Reij returned to Niger for the ﬁrst time in a decade. “There were villages that I used to be able to see at dis- tances of several kilometres, the land was so barren,” he told me. “Now I couldn’t see them. There was too much vegetation. I thought, Huh. Something is hap- “So then I said to myself, ‘Why should I make toys pening here.” when I can make the deals to make the toys?’ ” A few days later, Reij sent a note to

TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 118—133SC.—LIVE ART—A 15551 Gray Tappan, a geographer at the U.S. Geological Survey. Tappan had spent more than twenty years documenting land use and vegetation in the Sahel with satellite images and aerial photographs. Like Reij and Rinaudo, he had worked in the area during the terrible droughts of the early eighties, but he hadn’t been back in years; and he hadn’t heard any talk of reforestation. “A lot of the satellite images were medium or coarse resolu- tion, where you couldn’t see the trees,” he told me. Even if you could, the area that Reij had seen was dominated by winter- thorn trees, which lose their leaves in the rainy season. In the satellite images, they didn’t appear green. “The whole phe- nomenon flew under the radar,” Tappan said. Tappan promised Reij that he’d do an aerial survey. Then he began to dig into earlier records of the country’s vegetation. Beginning in 1955, when Niger was still a colony, French cartographers had taken tens of thousands of aerial photographs. “When I was your age, I had to hike ten miles through the ice and snow to a Tappan found copies of these at the of- porno store when I wanted to look at dirty pictures.” cial mapping agency in Niamey, then he compared them with his own survey results, as well as with photographs from •• 1975. “I was blown away,” he told me. “I’d never seen something like that.” more rain, was nearly barren. Niger, to adviser for World Vision, a Christian re- There weren’t just a few more trees along the north, was cloaked in forests. “You lief and development organization. Since the roadsides. Entire stretches of the can literally see the border from space,” 2009, he has helped lead the African Re- country had been reforested—more than he said. Greening Initiatives. “I don’t think that twelve million acres in all. What’s more, After Reij and Tappan made their I’m creating a green movement or turn- the most densely forested areas weren’t in discovery, they travelled through south- ing all these villagers into environmental- parks or nature preserves. They were on ern Niger together to try to figure out ists,” he told me. “The bottom line is just farms. what had happened. “Of all the places this: growing trees puts food on the table “Twelve million acres equals about for trees to return, why there?” Tappan and money in your pocket.” two hundred million trees,” Reij told me. wondered. It was the poorest country in To Reij, what he’s seen has been a “No other country in the Sahel, or even the world, according to the United Na- kind of regional awakening—an out- in Africa, has managed to do that.” We tions Development Programme, and it pouring of new ideas from farmers and were sitting in a bar in Ouahigouya, barely had a rainy season. The two men aid workers left with no other choice. looking at aerial photographs on Reij’s eventually traced the story back to Ri Sometimes, he said, it takes a near-death laptop. One set was from 1975, the other naudo and his epiphany that day out- experience for a person or a people to from 2005. In the older pictures, the skin side Maradi. Farmers who still had trees truly change their behavior—to pull of the continent lay pale and featureless standing after the drought in 1984 found themselves out of the sand by their own below, creased only by a streambed or that their harvests increased. Women hair, as people in Mali like to say. “Il faut two and by the faint cross-hatchings of who used to spend an average of two and reculer pour mieux sauter,” Reij said, quot- roads. Thirty years later, it was covered a half hours a day collecting wood now ing Montaigne. You have to step back in with trees. It’s tempting to credit the cli- spent half an hour. And their neighbors, order to jump. mate, Reij said, since rainfall has in- seeing this, began to protect seedlings on creased somewhat in that same period. their own land. “The penny dropped,” orldwide, more than a billion But rainy periods haven’t had this effect Rinaudo told me. “Trees stopped being acres of forests could be regener- on Niger in the past, or on its neighbors a weed.” atedW naturally, according to the World today. He pulled up a photograph of Until Reij called to give him Tappan’s Resources Institute. But the re-greening the border between Niger and Nigeria. results, in 2004, Rinaudo had no idea of Niger won’t always be easy to replicate. “Same landscape, same people, same cul- how far things had come. But he has In some places, like Burkina Faso’s Cen- ture,” he said. Yet Nigeria, which gets since returned to Niger three times as an tral Plateau, the rootstocks of native trees

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TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 119—133SC.119—133SC.—LIVE ART A16171 could be pressed to make butter for cooking or skin care; neem leaves made an excellent mosquito repellent. And almost every tree had some medicinal value: marula bark for malaria and rheu- matism; neem oil for acne and contra- ception; tamarind leaves for jaundice, boils, dysentery, and hemorrhoids. Farming this way is hard work, Kindo admitted: “I’m always here, even during the dry season. Even if a baby is being baptized, I’m here.” The zais had to be chopped out with a pickaxe or a hoe, the trees continually pruned and protected from goats and poachers. (The scare- crow on Kindo’s farm wasn’t meant for birds; it helped ward off local gold min- ers, who came scavenging for wood.) Still, if the Sahel has a surplus of anything, it’s manual laborers. And agroforestry more than repays the effort. On av- “I cooked us a lovely dinner for two—you could at least do the dishes!” erage, zais increase yields between thirty and eighty per cent, Reij said—“It should really be a hundred, because the •• starting point is often zipele.” The thirteen hundred pounds of grain that Kindo died off long ago. The soil on the Cen- Oxfam. He made compost piles and harvested per acre, and the food, fuel, tral Plateau is lateritic—laced with alu- girded the slopes with low stone ridges fodder, and medicine that he got from minum and iron oxides, which give it its to prevent erosion; he set up termite col- his trees, had carried him from subsis- rusty red color. Mixed with water and onies to churn the soil, and hung feeders tence to surplus. “With my cowpeas baked in the sun, it hardens into a crust to attract birds, for their droppings. On alone,” he said, “I can pay for food to that’s nearly impermeable to the rain. the neighbor’s property, the soil was as keep my family for a year.” Zipele, the locals call it. hard and flat as a clay tennis court; on At the top of the hill, where Kindo’s One morning, Reij took me to see Kindo’s side, it was dimpled with circu- property ended, one of his neighbors Ousseni Kindo, one of his favorite farm- lar pits. This was an ancient technique came over to greet us. Small, gaunt, and ers in the area. Kindo owns eleven parched called zai agriculture, Reij said—a kind well into his fifties, the man had lost his acres on a hillside north of Ouahigouya. of low-tech version of Hoff’s Water- right arm in a car accident. His left arm Lean and grizzled, he wore a midnight- boxx. The pits, each about a foot wide, was still strong enough to heft an axe, blue robe and a cream-colored prayer cap, collected the rain and funnelled it toward however, and he was busy digging a zai. and kept up a high-pitched patter as he the plants at the bottom. Kindo added a Thirty-five years after Erik Eckholm showed us around. (He claimed to be little dung to each one, to fertilize it and warned of “the other energy crisis,” farm- fifty-four and brought out a birth cer seed it with native species. The rest was ers like these were turning his predictions tificate to prove it; when we pointed up to natural selection. “If the seed dies, upside down. Instead of stripping the out that it said he was sixty-nine, he it doesn’t cost you anything,” Dennis land of forest, they’d added three-quar- laughed and admitted that he couldn’t Garrity, of the World Agroforestry Cen- ters of a million acres to the Central Pla- read.) His compound was home to two tre, told me. “If it survives, you know it’ll teau, and another million acres to south- wives, fourteen children, a pair of zebu be hardy.” ern Mali. “It’s counterintuitive, but it’s cattle, and an unruly mob of sheep and Kindo’s land had the scrubby look of true,” Garrity told me. “The more peo- goats. To keep the latter away from his savanna, yet every inch of it was culti- ple, the more trees.” seedlings, he carried a homemade sling- vated. The trees came in dozens of shot, armed with a sharp rock. species and were spaced about twenty ithin a generation or two, Reij be- When Kindo first began farming, feet apart, as in an arboretum. Their lieves, agroforestry could spread in 1985, the land was barren. In some branches formed a canopy above the Wacross the southern Sahel, forming a spots, the topsoil had washed away, ex- rows of millet, sorghum, cowpeas, and green zone many times wider than the posing the rock below. During the next dryland rice at their feet. Some trees Great Green Wall. If so, it will arrive just twenty-five years, Kindo tried every trick provided fruit: tamarind, marula, rai- in time. Even if farmers manage to dou- he could to improve things—some sinier, custard apple. Others, like the ble their harvests, they’ll barely be able to picked up by trial and error, some from winter thorns, fertilized the soil by fix feed the doubling population. The cur- other farmers, some from N.G.O.s like ing nitrogen with their roots. Shea seeds rent famine in Somalia, which could

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TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 120—133SC.—LIVE ART—A 16189 affect twelve million people or more be- When it comes to planting trees in turning the surface of the earth into an fore it’s over, has shown how precarious the desert, unfortunately, mad ambition art work. It might be in Holland or Is- the situation is. “All those children be- is often its own reward. The more titanic rael, southern Spain or someday, per- tween five and fifteen—bloody hell! the struggle, in the words of the Senega- haps, the Sahel. But you have to start What will they be living off in ten years?” lese President Abdoulaye Wade, the somewhere. Reij said. “We should act as if the Devil greater the appeal. Wade turned eighty- In Oman, on the evening that Hoff is knocking at the door—and he is five in May, and is said to think of the and Abdullatif went searching for the knocking.” Great Green Wall as a valedictory ges- baobab, the light had begun to fail when Reij’s call to action can seem contra- ture—an arboreal Arc de Triomphe. Last we finally climbed back into the car. The dictory. The best way to help local farm- year, when an official promotional video road had narrowed to an old camel path ers, recent history suggests, is to leave for the Wall was released, it looked as and the dropoffs were more precipitous well enough alone. Yet groups like if it could have been made three de- than ever, but we decided to forge Oxfam and Rinaudo’s Serving in Mis- cades ago. It showed bulldozers clearing ahead. “I will never forget this baobab,” sion have played a crucial role in the re- away brush in Senegal while happy vol- Abdullatif muttered. “But first I have to greening—if only, at times, by undoing unteers and soldiers planted nursery seed- pass through this in one piece.” Soon we decades of bad advice from former colo- lings all in a row. “When I saw that, I just were off-road entirely, the undercarriage nists. Even in areas where forests can re- started to tear my remaining hair out,” of the S.U.V. clanging like a gong, a sprout naturally, there are wells to be dug, Reij told me. cloud of dust billowing around us. At roads to be built, and land reforms to be one point, we stopped to ask directions encouraged. In parts of Niger, Mali, and ear the end of our trip, Reij and I from two small boys standing outside a Burkina Faso, the authorities now let drove north into Mali, up a wind- mud hut. And then, suddenly, there it farmers trim or cut down their trees as ingN road that led to the cliffs of Bandia was, next to a small stream at the bottom they see fit. But in most of the Sahel the gara. The cliffs are the leading edge of a of a hill: the great tree. old colonial system of government con- sandstone escarpment that juts a thou- In the deepening dusk, it looked trol continues. sand feet above the Seno Plains. Centu- like an apparition out of “The Arabian Last January, Reij began a project with ries ago, people built mud-brick struc- Nights”—a fat caliph surrounded by his the World Wide Web Foundation to tures in the shadow of the rock, like those fan-fluttering harem. It was wider than broadcast the latest innovations over cell at Mesa Verde, that are still used as gra- our vehicle and at least forty feet tall, with phones and radio. But the Re-Greening naries by local villagers. “This is all farm- knobby gray branches that hung low over Initiatives’ most effective tactic, by far, has land now,” our guide told us, as we the water. Its wrinkled hide was embed- been much more direct: take the poorest looked out from the top. “Twenty years ded with thousands of pebbles and farmers, pile them into a van, and show ago, people left this place to go else- nails—offerings, Abdullatif said, from them what agroforestry has done for their where. Now they are coming back.” I villagers who hoped they would rid them neighbors. “This isn’t a big project with a could see the thatched roofs of a village of tooth decay. Like the Moringas in cloud of money,” Reij said. “It’s a move- tucked among some mango trees below. Sohar, this baobab had almost certainly ment with a bunch of people with their Beyond them, to the south and west, come from someplace else. Half a mil- noses in the same direction.” airy groves of winter thorn and acacia lennium ago, perhaps, a settler from Whether Reij can persuade others stretched to the horizon. The wind Zanzibar or East Africa had brought a to join him remains to be seen. African whipped across the plains so steady and seedpod here and planted it in a rare leaders are loath to give up their literal vi- sharp that it made my eyes water. But patch of wet soil. And then, for hundreds sion of a Great Green Wall, the journal- there was no sand in it. “If you come here of years, his or her descendants had kept ist Mark Hertsgaard recently wrote in on a clear day, you can see all the way to the water flowing past, chasing away The Nation. Yet most Western donors Bankass,” the guide said. “Green! Green! goats and sheep and hungry cows until are convinced that this vision is doomed. Green!” the tree’s roots grew deep, its branches so Hertsgaard, who wrote about the re- It was a spectacular view, but not so strong and thick that they could fend for greening of the Sahel in his 2011 book, different, I thought, from the one that themselves. “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty I’d seen a month earlier, with Pieter “If we could plant a tree like this in Years on Earth,” believes that the Global Hoff, in the Al Hajar Mountains. In both Sohar, all of Oman would come to see it,” Environmental Facility will push for a places, people were fighting to stave off Hoff said, gazing up at the branches. In grass-roots approach to the Wall, and an encroaching desert; they just had differ the meadow behind him, Abdullatif and that it’s unlikely to fund any proposals ent means at their disposal. The Sahel our guide were kneeling on the ground that are scientifically suspect. But when I had manpower but no money; Oman for their evening prayers, bowing low to- spoke to Mohamed Bakarr, a senior spe- had money but little manpower. Hoff’s ward Mecca and the setting sun. Their cialist with the G.E.F., he wasn’t eager to twenty-dollar Waterboxx might not in- voices came to us as a steady murmur force the issue. “It’s the country’s prerog- terest the subsistence farmers of Mali, mixed with the rustlings of leaves. When ative,” he told me. “One cannot rule out but then Sultan Qaboos and his citizens they were done, Hoff bent down and the idea that some will want to have tree weren’t likely to pick up axes and dig zais. picked something off the ground, then plantations. Those are things that we There is a place for technical ingenu walked contentedly back to the car. His cannot control.” ity and epic reforestation schemes—for pockets were full of seeds. 

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