Hope Is A Verb - Tony Rinaudo- How to reforest the desert without planting a tree

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Meet Tony Rinaudo, an agronomist who has helped local communities in Niger reforest six million hectares of desert, without planting a single tree. It's one of the greatest environmental transformations on the planet that has led to the restoration of land, livelihoods and dignity. In this conversation Tony shares his incredible journey from growing up in the Australian countryside to working in Niger during the famine of the 1980s, the moment of "divine intervention" that seeded the technique of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration that has reshaped restoration efforts around the world. Tony will restore your hope, especially in the power of science, faith and nature to mend the world. FIND OUT MORE: https://fmnrhub.com.au/ FMNR | World Vision Australia You can read Tony's autobiography "The Forest Underground" - all proceeds go towards supporting FMNR efforts globally. We are proud to have featured Tony as one of our 100 Humankind Heroes and would like to thank our paying subscribers for making projects like this possible. If you're interested in supporting the work we do at Future Crunch, you can find out more at www.futurecrunch.com This episode of "Hope Is A Verb" was hosted by Angus Hervey, cofounder of Future Crunch and Amy Davoren-Rose, the creative director.  The soundtrack for this podcast is "Rain," composed and performed by El Rey Miel from their upcoming album "Sea the Sky."  Audio sweetening by Anthony Badolato- Ai3 Audio and Voice.  We would like to acknowledge that Hope Is A Verb is recorded on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung People. These conversations are inspired by our charity partners and our Humankind Project that celebrates the people who are stitching our world back together. You can contact us directly at [e-mail] Transcripts will be available on our website soon. 

Hi, and welcome to Hope as a Verb, a podcast from Future Crunch that explores what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people that are making it happen. I'm Amy. I'm Gus, and these are the unknown heroes who are mending our planet, stitching together a better future and showing us the best of what it is to be human. In that moment everything changed and I realized I'm not fighting the Sahara Desert. I don't need multi-million dollar budget or decades to solve this problem.

Everything that I need is literally at my feet in this landscape. Reforestation and tree planting are words that get thrown around a lot these days. But for agronomist Tony Renuado, healing our planet means working with nature rather than with big budgets or buzzwords. Over the past 20 years, Tony has worked with local communities in Niger who have gone on to transform 6 million hectares of degraded land, restoring not just the environment but livelihoods and dignity too. It's one of the largest environmental transformations on the

planet and it was done without planting a single tree. Today this approach is being used all around the world with remarkable results. Tony, a man of both science and faith, says it's one of the best news stories you've never heard about, and we couldn't agree more. Tony, welcome to the podcast. It's really lovely to have you here. Thank you, Amy. It's a great pleasure. We like to start with a very simple question. Is there a news story anywhere in the world that is giving you hope right now?

Well, the ironical thing about it is there's so many good news stories, but they don't hit the mainstream media. And what I'm thinking about is there are tens of thousands of small, often very poor farmers who are restoring their land and making a real difference, not only to their livelihood, but to the environment. Where is this happening? Can you give us a little bit more about that? We have a bit of a clue, but I'd love to hear some more. Can you give us a little bit more about that? We have a bit of a clue, but I'd love to hear some more.

So the main areas that I'm aware of are in African countries, Senegal, Niger Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, and many other countries across the continent where farmers are learning about the power of regenerating trees on their own land, and these methods are starting to spread. There's always been instances where local communities have figured out ways of restoring their land but in terms of the scale and the speed that it's happening today it's relatively new. Before we dive into your work we would love to go back in time. You grew up in the countryside of Victoria,

here in Australia. What role did nature play in your childhood? I was always amazed by the beauty and the variety in nature. And I grew up in quite a playground. We had bushland that came almost to our front fence. I climbed the trees with the other boys in our street. We roamed those hills. And the Ovens River, that was our swimming pool. It's where we fished and played. So it had a very big impact on me. And on the flip side, witnessing the destruction of that bushland that I love so much

and learning about massive deforestation in other parts of the world. These events had a very big impact on me and shaped the person that I am to this day. And Tony, when you look back on those early years, is there a moment somewhere in there where the seed for the work that you do now was planted? Definitely. So I remember being quite an angry boy and very frustrated because I just saw all this destruction and the adult world didn't seem to care. I was greatly influenced by my mum, her strong faith. And I remember throwing up a child's prayer, please use me somehow, somewhere to make a difference. And it was some time after that I was traveling to a farm with my dad I used to love going out

he'd fix people's machinery and I'd go fishing I'd pick people's fruit and all sorts of things and this farmer had been to a library clearance sale and bought back a whole trailer load of books and unceremoniously dumped them in these empty tobacco shed. And I loved reading, so I was walking around this pile of books, and two dull, green, nondescript books almost leapt out at me. And the first one was I Planted Trees, and the second one was Sahara Conquest. And I devoured those books. I read them from cover to cover, and I realised that not all adults don't care. Not all adults are actively destroying the environment.

There were some people who were making a big difference and I think the seed was sown. Perhaps I could do something along those lines. Can I ask you a little bit more about this because it's a pretty amazing story. I'm really curious to know about what faith has meant for you, both in terms of where you started. You said that your mother's faith was very strong. I wonder how important it's been for you personally. I think mum's faith, what it did was it gave me a framework. And I realized very early that there are more important things to life than financial security,

that we have a duty of care. Yes, we can use God's creation, we can benefit from it, but ultimately we're responsible to be stewards. So that was the framework. I think, particularly once we got in Niger and those early steps, committing your life to go to an unknown country and learn a foreign language and so on, it's really strengthened my faith because so many times we really didn't know what to do. When there was hunger, when there was opposition, when the methods we were using to restore very badly degraded land weren't working, faith was very badly degraded land weren't working.

Faith was very, very important and kept us going. This actually brings us beautifully into the next part of your story because you were in your early 20s with a young wife and family when you took a leap of faith and left Australia for Niger. Can you tell us what work took you there and what was it like on the ground when you arrived? So there were a number of things, but the main task was that I was managing a small reforestation project. In 1973 to 75, there had been quite a severe famine

and the mission that I joined had done a lot of relief work and with the leftover funding they asked permission to start this reforestation works however it wasn't working very well under those conditions even though it had been a biodiverse dry land forest at the time I was growing up in Australia just two short decades later when we arrived there, it was at the point of ecological collapse. So I'd really thrown myself into this. And I think when you're young, firstly, you believe that you're invincible. And secondly, that you can solve the world's problems yesterday. In my mind, if deforestation was one of the root causes of all these problems, the desertification, the poverty, the hunger, then reforestation would go a long way

towards solving them. But it just wasn't working. And I'd studied any texts I could come across. I consulted any experts passing through. I experimented with different methods, different species, different timing. Nothing worked in a sustainable or economically viable way. And to add insult to injury, the very people who we had gone to help called me the crazy white farmer. Who in their right mind would devote valuable farmland to trees of all things when we're hungry? It didn't add up to them. 80% of the trees died. The people weren't interested. And I got to a pretty low point in my career there. I think it would have been very easy to give up and go home. But I felt, no, we've been called to be

here. There must be a solution. And one day I was driving, I had a pickup truck and a trailer full of trees. And I'd stopped at a certain point to reduce the air pressure. If you don't do that, you get bogged in the sand. Looking out over that desolate landscape, I felt even more discouraged. But something got into me, and I just threw up this prayer of desperation. And the amazing thing is that even though I'd been traveling on this bush track for about two and a half years, almost every week by this stage, for the first time I saw what had been there all along. And this what appeared as a useless bush on the side of the road caught my attention. And I took the trouble to walk over and take a closer look.

And if you look at any plant in your garden, all the different species have different shaped leaves. So it's like a signature. All the different species have different shaped leaves. So it's like a signature. As soon as I saw the shape of the leaf on this bush, I realized that that's not a bush. It's not an agricultural weed.

That's a tree that's been cut down and it's re-sprouting from the stump. And for me, in that moment, everything changed. And I realized I'm not fighting the Sahara Desert. I don't need multi-million dollar budget or decades to solve this problem. Everything that I need is literally at my feet. I knew there were millions of these bushes strewn across that landscape. And in that moment, the battle lines shifted. It wasn't a technical or financial issue I didn't need a miracle species of tree that could withstand drought and goats and people pulling them out what I realized was if it was people's false beliefs about the value of trees on their land

that false belief that led to negative attitudes and destructive practices, that's where the real battle lay. And all that was really needed was if I could only convince communities that they'll have a better life for themselves and their children if they work with nature instead of destroying it and allow some of these bushes to regrow into trees, then if I could convince them of that, the rest would be relatively easy. Listening to this part of your story, I mean, it is such a light bulb moment.

But can you explain to us what exactly did that sprouted tree stump mean? In areas that were forested in the past that haven't been bulldozed and ripped out, there's this vast, what I call underground forest of, in many cases, living tree stumps with the capacity to sprout and regrow into trees. with the capacity to sprout and regrow into trees. And even in the absence of tree stumps, very often there are dormant, hardy seeds across these landscapes. They might stay in the soil, persist in the soil for decades,

even centuries, waiting for the right conditions to germinate and grow. I should have known anybody growing up in Australia that's seen a eucalyptus tree that's been cut down. After weeks, you'll start to see these little sprouts coming from the stump. And certainly after bushfire, our eucalypts are champions at re-sprouting, regenerating. It's as if I needed to go through the futility of doing things that didn't work to be absolutely convinced of what was needed. You have this moment, it's a revelation, as you described it, the battle lines shift. What happens next? We know that from your story, you managed to get a few farmers on board with your idea. How hard was it to convince people that this could work? So it's one thing to know what to do. It's quite another to know how to

do it. So I got this idea, let's ask for volunteers. And we were able to enlist about 12 volunteers in as many villages. And I approached it like an experiment. And I said to them, let's just do it on a small corner of your farms and see what happens. And within a month or two, those selected stumps, tree stumps that were regrowing and now they're being managed, they started to look like trees with the thinning and the pruning. Within just a couple of months, I was convinced this was the solution. However, for various reasons, maybe a fear of going against tradition, maybe a desperate need for fuel wood, certain individuals came at night and cut those trees out. And everything could have fallen in a heap in 1983, but that was the very year that events beyond our control took over. It barely rained that year. People had a severe shortage of food and eventually a severe famine.

And we were able to use the tool of Food for Work to introduce this idea, to get people used to this idea of having trees on their land across a whole district. And that was the turning point, 1984, when we exposed the whole population to this practice of regenerating trees on their land. Tony, is there a danger in all of this of yet another story of, you know, people from the rich world coming into Africa to try and do things in a certain way? And is there something different about this technique and this approach that maybe gets past those quite old-fashioned approaches? Oh, definitely. So I guess some of the critical questions, and I'll try and remember them all, is, is this empowering or disempowering? And because the people own this themselves, they shape it, they utilize it to their own benefit, it's most

definitely empowering. Is it exploitative or is it enriching? And again, all of the benefit goes to the people who do the work. It's not something that gets exported off or siphoned off for overseas markets. As long as this tool is used in this way where you're empowering and enabling local communities to work with nature for their own benefit, then there's no danger of what you describe there. But if it's used to profit others in an exploitative way, then that would be really sad.

Can you then talk us through the process that you use to do this work? The method that we teach, farmer-managed natural regeneration, it simply involves identifying and selecting the trees already there that you want to regrow. And then can we control those constraints that usually stop nature from healing itself? And what I'm referring to here is typically large-scale burning every year, overgrazing on the same land, cultivation of every square inch of a farmer's paddock, and the removal of woody biomass. Remembering that in these countries,

families depend on firewood for cooking, for heating, even for light. We're not creating a national park. The only motivation that very poor people have to do this work in the first place is that they will benefit. That could involve cutting the tree down eventually, but the difference is they're managing the trees on their land sustainably. They will benefit. That could involve cutting the tree down eventually, but the difference is they're managing the trees on their land sustainably and they're continuously allowing new trees to regrow on that land. So Tony, can you give us an idea of what is the difference between an area that has been restored using this technique

and one in which it's yet to be carried out? There are all different degrees of restoration and it's always a work in progress because when you think of untouched tropical jungle that's been cleared, it could even take centuries for that to get back to a restored original state. But if you take that landscape that confronted us in Niger

where nearly all of the vegetation had been removed, wind speeds of 70 kilometres per hour, very high surface temperatures, loss of organic matter and therefore fertility in the soil, lowering of the water table, like it just becomes lifeless. As soon as you start to build back that vegetation, you create a more favourable microclimate, lower temperatures, lower wind speeds, less evaporation, more fertile soil, better conditions for plants to grow in and also a habitat

for other organisms. Birds start to come back and with them they bring more seeds, perhaps species that weren't there, they'd been eliminated. Water tables rise and we've seen cases where the springs that are dried up have been revived. And then of course this translates, it has such a big impact on people's livelihoods. People can now grow more in different

types of crops and livestock. Their food security improves, their incomes increase. People feel good about life. Hope is restored through this simple act of restoration. This is such an incredible story, Tony. And I know it's a big question, but what were the scale moments along this journey? I mean, how did you go from a handful of farmers to one of the greatest environmental transformations on the planet? In retrospect, one thing that I've learned is that with an incremental increase in effort, you can affect an exponential increase in impact. This thing started with 12 farmers. Then with the stress and the effort of Food for Work program that we were managing, we introduced the idea to 100 villages. Over the following 20 years, simply spreading from farmer to farmer at the rate of a quarter of a million hectares per year.

And after 20 years, there were 200 million trees across 5 million hectares of farmland without planting a single one of them. And then if you fast forward a little bit further, we came home, I joined World Vision in 2012. I thought, wow, it worked at a local level, it worked at a national level. Let's, with a little bit more effort, what could happen? And so in partnership with the World Agroforestry Centre, we hosted a FMNR, Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration Conference in Nairobi,

an international conference, and started to spread the word beyond borders. Today, and that was the spark really, things really started to shift after that point. Today, we've introduced this idea into nearly 30 countries. Some years back we created an online training course because there's physical limits to what one person, you know, how many countries you can visit and how many people you can speak to. So we created this online course. We're already into the second course for this year.

71 participants from 18 countries are registered with a very small lever. You can move a gigantic object quite easily. And so the types of leverage we use, we create awareness, we advocate, we facilitate exchange visits, we train people, and we identify local champions. And if you combine all those things, it creates this great multiplier effect. And sometimes you don't know the results until years later, and then all of a sudden you learn, oh, there's so many thousand hectares restored there

where you've never stepped before. The movement has gone beyond you. There's a lot in the news about tree planting. Every month seems to bring some announcement from a government or from a city that wants to do a big reforestation project. What's the difference between the press release that we see and the reality on the ground? You might sound surprised, but I get quite annoyed actually, What's the difference between the press release that we see and the reality on the ground?

You might sound surprised, but I get quite annoyed, actually. And it's even more than just listing a number of trees that a certain government might want to plant. They have to break records now for the most trees planted per day. And it's ridiculous. There's no report there on how many of those trees survive. I'm not against tree planting. Of course, there's a place for tree planting, and it's actually complementary to the work that we do in natural regeneration. But there's never an addressing of, well, why did

the trees disappear in the first place? And if we plant trees, will the same fate fall on these new trees that fell on the original forest? They never seem to ask that question or take measures to counter those forces that destroyed the trees in the first place. In our Western worldview, we feel, oh, this is so badly broken, so degraded, we could only fix it, if at all, with technology and lots of finance. And yet the opposite is true. Nature is incredibly resilient. And if we change human behaviors, those constraints that stop nature from self-healing,

it's more than capable and more than willing to heal itself and come back. Secondly, these are usually top-down government-led programs that enforce what's happening. So they haven't enlisted the voluntary will and understanding of the communities whose day-to-day lives are affected by that landscape. So sadly, and particularly in the more harsher, the drier environments, sadly most of those trees that are planted die and it's expensive, it's time-consuming and ultimately it's self-defeating because if you plant trees that die often enough, people won't want to have anything to do with that type of activity again.

From all your years of doing this work, is there one story of a village or a family that really stands out for you? This is an unfair question because there's so many good stories. But one day we had some visitors. I think they were Canadians. So we took them out to the villages. And I usually don't do this, but we sat under the tree in the village. I didn't go straight to the work with the community members. We just sat under the tree to talk to the people. And that's like a signal in Africa. Immediately, a crowd starts to appear. And I asked this question, I said, of all the different interventions, and we dug wells,

we did famine relief, we introduced the natural regeneration of the trees. Of all the interventions, introduce the natural regeneration of the trees, of all the interventions, which one has had the biggest impact? And one of the elders stood up and he said, Mr. Tony, none of these. And I was a little bit shattered. I thought, I've just wasted 17 years of my life. What's this guy on about? life what's this guy on about but he went on to say before this project came we were nothing we were nobody all that we saw of our village chief was the dust from his Land Rover when he sped through our village the only time we had dealings with the government was when they came to fine us for chopping down a tree. And the only knowledge we had of the outside world was what we heard on the BBC, but nobody knew us. But today, today, the village chief comes to us for counsel.

The foresters don't come to fine us. They bring visitors from across the country to learn from us. And here we are today. You brought people from Canada and last week from Australia and previously from here and there. And it really puzzled me. I thought surely saving someone's life through famine relief was pretty significant. Why is he saying these things? And then I realized how slow I am. What he was saying was that we have our dignity, our self-respect, our pride. This was the big impact of this project. So I've never forgotten that it's so powerful wow

i've got chills just listening to that tony it really is an incredible moment where can people go to find out more about this work and most importantly to support it if you go online and type in fmnr.hub, H-U-B, and there's oodles of information there. There are many short stories. There are case studies and project reports. So lots and lots of information there. If you're in a position to give to this work, because now we're really trying to scale this up.

Our goal over the next decade is to initiate a movement that sees the restoration of one billion hectares of degraded land worldwide. So in the top right corner, there's a donate button. And if you click on that and it takes you to another page, please scroll to the bottom. The instructions are at the bottom of that page on how to give. We've loved this conversation so much, Tony. And to finish, we'd love to know,

what does hope mean to you? I love that question. And I think I even mentioned it earlier, the biggest change I see is not, ironically, it's not the reforestation at all. As I go back into these villages that have embraced this and have implemented and indeed re-greened their landscapes, the biggest change that I see is this restoration of hope, and it just thrills me to see people who felt defeated, who'd given up even trying, and now happy and hopeful and initiating change to make that future that

they want for themselves and their children. And not too long ago, I came across this passage actually written by Augustine of Hippo. Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage. And I remember the anger of myself as a little boy, so angry at the destruction all around me. I was angry. That was the name of the first daughter, but the name of the first daughter, but the name of the second

daughter was Courage. Anger at the way things are, but courage to not leave them that way. Courage to get up and do something about the situation that you see. And it dawned on me, hope isn't just a feeling. Hope doesn't mysteriously fall out of the sky and bless a favoured few. No, we make hope happen by the actions that we take. And that's really, really important. I speak in so many audiences around the world and too many young people have given up hope. They said, it's not worth it. It's too late to change anything. And my response is, it's never too late. There's always something that you can do. What gift, what idea has God put in your head? For goodness sakes, don't lie in bed in the morning defeated and unwilling to get up. Take that first step, do that one thing and keep doing it and the rest will follow.

There is so much to take away from this conversation, but one thing that runs all the way through is the reminder that nature can and will heal if we're just willing to give it the opportunity. If you want to learn more about Tony, you can check out his autobiography, The Forest Underground. All proceeds from sales of the book support farm and managed natural regeneration activities around the world. We're proud to have featured Tony as one of the 100 people in our Humankind project, which you can find on our website. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making these projects possible. If you'd like to find out more about supporting us by becoming a paid subscriber,

check out futurecrunch.com. We would like to acknowledge that this podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to support Hope as a Verb, please subscribe and leave a review. And if you want to reach out directly, send us an email at hope at futurecrunch.com.au. Thanks for listening.