In 1981, a young agronomist named Tony Rinaudo arrived in the Niger Republic with a simple, noble goal: stop the desert. The Sahel region was a landscape of dust and despair, stripped bare by decades of intensive farming and relentless drought. Tony did what every expert told him to do—he planted trees. He built nurseries and distributed thousands of seedlings.
Underneath the "dead" soil lay a massive, ancient network of roots—an waiting for a chance to grow. DER.2021.German.WALDMACHER
One afternoon in 1983, while driving through the barren fields, Tony stopped to change a tire. He looked at the small, scrubby "bushes" poking through the sand—the same ones he had dismissed as useless weeds for years. He took a closer look and realized they weren't weeds at all. They were tree stumps. In 1981, a young agronomist named Tony Rinaudo
Tony realized he didn’t need to plant new trees; he needed to wake up the old ones. He developed a simple method called : selecting the strongest stems on a stump, pruning the rest, and protecting them from livestock. Der Waldmacher (2021) - IMDb He built nurseries and distributed thousands of seedlings