Introduction

Tony: After this conversation, I’m convinced, because it happens to me all the time, I’m convinced you’ll go out, you’ll never be the same. You’ll see trees everywhere and your friends will start to question your sanity because they’re there. What we’re physically seeing, it has the appearance of being a bush or just some nondescript, uh, scrubby plant.

It doesn’t fit our perception of what a tree should look like. And of course it is a tree, but it’s suppressed, it’s cut back, it’s damaged, it’s inhibited from becoming what it has the potential to become.

Mike: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your co-host, Mike DiGirolamo.

Rachel: And I’m your co-host, Rachel Donald.

Mike: Bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet, and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today’s guest on the newscast is Tony Rinaudo, an Australian agronomist and Principal Climate Action Advisor for the NGO World Vision Australia.

He is a proponent of a technique called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, also known as FMNR. This technique is credited with successfully reforesting 6 million hectares of degraded land in Niger. It relies on tree stumps and seed stocks that are already present in degraded soil, and simply requires the participation of a farmer to manage their regrowth. It is notable that it can incorporate and reinforce sustainable farming practices like agroecology. In this conversation with co-host Rachel Donald, Rinaudo details the years of trial and error he went through before stumbling upon the realization that the answer to reforestation was literally at his feet.

Also of note is the massive potential this practice has to not only help restore some of the world’s degraded land. But also bolster future sustainable farming practices and truly provide a benefit and stronger return for the farmers that tend that land. Rewilding and reforestation are great topics to cover, but many times people will ask, how do you implement that at scale?

Well, with 500 million smallholder farmers across the world, as Rinaudo points out, this technique may provide an answer.

Rachel: Tony, welcome to the show. It’s a great pleasure to have you on the Mongabay newscast.

Tony: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.

The Concept of FMNR

Rachel: So could you begin, I think, by explaining, for listeners that haven’t yet heard of it, farmer managed natural regeneration, and perhaps through this story of how it came about, because it’s quite extraordinary.

Tony: Certainly. So, there are vast areas of land around the world that were once forested, and they’ve been cleared, but beneath the surface, there’s what I call this underground forest. And in some cases, it’s primarily living tree stumps or bits of root with the capacity to resprout. Very often the land users have been quite thorough, and they’ve removed the stumps and the roots, but there, there are dormant seeds in the landscape, especially in the drier zones where seeds tend to be much hardier and have a long dormancy and remain viable. So as a technical approach, it’s a little bit like coppicing where you have this regrowth growing from a stump and there’ll be many, many stems, as many as 30, even perhaps 50 stems coming from the one stump. And the method involves selecting those stems that you want to grow into tree size and removing the rest.

So the weaker, the smaller. Maybe the broken ones, damaged ones, you’ll remove. And then of the ones that you select to grow, you’ll remove perhaps a third of the lower branches. And then you protect that growth. There are certain threats out there, maybe fire, roaming, wildlife or livestock. Even people have a need for woody biomass.

Or in the, in the process of clearing land for agriculture, the habit is to clear that. If you can protect that growth from those threats, then nature does the rest and it can grow very, very quickly.

Underground Forests & Hidden Potential

Tony: So, at the heart of it, actually, it involves mindset change. And I think nature is quite capable in many instances.

It’s quite capable of self-healing, but there’s these constraints that hold it back, and a lot of those constraints are a human, inflicted human, cause. If we can change people’s mindsets about the value of trees on agricultural or other landscapes, then their behavior will change and nature will have a chance to bounce back.

Rachel: You know, when I was researching this, I realized that I didn’t even know that trees could regrow from their stumps. I had just assumed that that was it, essentially, if you, you know, you cut a tree down to its stump, then it is essentially dead. Because it’s something that we just, I don’t think I’ve ever seen, right?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stump with these stems growing out of it. And yet, when I thought about, um, other plants, you know, even plants in my own home, it’s true, if regrow. So how is it that we normally, don’t see that. You know, if you go over to a logged forest and you see, you know, this really devastating, um, portrait essentially of all of these stumps, why is it that we don’t often see these little stems coming out of them?

Tony: It’s a fascinating question. And I talk about invisible forests in plain view.

And so, they’re there. After this conversation, I’m convinced, because it happens to me all the time, I’m convinced you’ll go out, you’ll never be the same. You’ll see trees everywhere, and your friends will start to question your sanity, because they’re there.

What we’re physically seeing, it has the appearance of being a bush, or just some non-descript scrubby plant, it doesn’t fit our perception of what a tree should look like. And of course, it is a tree, but it’s, it’s suppressed, it’s cut back, it’s damaged, it’s inhibited from becoming what it has the potential to, to become.

Honestly, once you’ve seen them, you can’t unsee them. And in almost any landscape that was forested before, you’ll see some remnant, some evidence of this, this emerging or attempting to emerge underground forest. It’s there.

Rachel: I love it. I love that terminology for underground forest. It makes me think of the mycelium networks and how there’s so much life and communication happening under the soil that just because it’s sort of beyond our immediate human senses and perspective gets forgotten about.

Roadblocks and Revelations in Niger

Rachel: But tell me, because This idea of, you know, you sort of seeing a thing that looked like a bush, but in fact was a tree, was the moment that kick started your creation of farmer managed natural regeneration. And that was after, essentially, a failed attempt to reforest an area in Niger using other techniques.

Could you speak to that a little bit for me?

Tony: Certainly, but first of all, I must say it was new to me. But in no way is this a new technique. And it goes back centuries in European countries, in Africa, many parts of the world, farmers and land users have been, uh, practicing one form or other of tree management that involves selection, pruning, management.

So, it’s not new, but for me, when I arrived in Niger Republic in 1980, and I saw this devastated landscape. What had been a biodiverse dryland forest when I was a child, within two short decades, it had been reduced to the point of ecological collapse. Most of the trees in that southern one third of Niger Republic, West Africa, had been cleared for agriculture.

And as population grew and, and certain difficult years, people needed to buy food, they would cut firewood and sell it. That forest disappeared. But the remnant was there. The stumps were there. And being a semi-arid country, there are perhaps millions of dormant seeds beneath the surface of the soil. I inherited a small reforestation project.

But all I saw in those early days was these vast, empty And I thought, well, the solution should be relatively simple. Trees have been cut. We need to raise new seedlings in a nursery and plant them out. Under those harsh conditions on the edge of the Sahara Desert, and with the attitude of the people who were struggling to survive.

So, I empathize with them. I understand where they’re coming from. How could they possibly afford to give up some of their valuable farmland when they were regularly hungry? But, um, using those methods failed. Perhaps 80 percent of the trees that were planted died. The, the thanks that I got from the people I was trying to help was they called me the crazy white farmer.

And it would have been very easy to just give up and go home. It, it, it wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d studied restoration textbooks. I’d consulted experts. I’d experimented with seed from around the world. and different methods and different timing. Nothing worked in a sustainable or economically viable way.

So, when I’d failed after all that effort, it would have been very easy to just give up and go home. One day, I clearly remember driving to the villages. I had a vehicle loaded with tree seedlings and knowing full well most of them would die. The people didn’t appreciate what I was doing, but I felt there must be a solution.

And it was at that time I just threw up this prayer of desperation. Please help. Please open our eyes. And the amazing thing to me is, I’d been on this bush track almost every week for, at that stage, two and a half years. Eyes open, but totally blind to what had been there all along. And I actually stopped to reduce the air pressure to prevent the vehicle from getting bogged in the very sandy soil.

And as I, as I stood up from reducing the air pressure, this bush in the distance caught my attention. And I took the trouble to walk over and take a closer look. And if you look at the leaf of any plant, nearly any plant, it’s like a signature that tells you what species that plant is. So immediately when I saw the shape of the leaf, and it was very distinctive, double lobed leaf.

I knew what that was. And in that instant, everything changed. Because I realized it’s not a bush, it’s not even a weed, that’s a tree. And I bent over, brushed away some of the accumulated sand, and sure enough there was a living stump under those stems. In that instant everything changed because I’d been in the country and traveled enough on those bush roads to know actually there are millions and millions of these what seem to be bushes across that landscape.

Okay, and, and the real problem. It’s not how to reforest this area with new plants. The real problem is mindset change. If people’s false beliefs had led to such negative attitudes to these trees and such destructive practices, then the real solution wasn’t going to be so much technical or even, even financial.

The real solution was going to come in a social solution. How do you convince farmers? And communities, actually, it’s in your best interest, you’ll create a better future for yourselves, for your children, by working with nature, instead of fighting it and destroying it all the time. Everything that you needed for restoration in that landscape was literally at your feet, but it would require behavior change to bring about realization.

Rhett: Hi, this is Rhett Butler, the founder and CEO of Mongabay. Please join me for a special in person event with Jane Goodall. To celebrate her 90th birthday and Mongabay’s 25th birthday. The event will be hosted by the Commonwealth Club of California on September 16th, 2024 in San Francisco. You can also join virtually from anywhere, find the link in the show notes for tickets and use the promo code C1 PARTNER, one word, all letters uppercase for 10 off.

I hope you can join us for this exciting conversation with my friend, Jane Goodall. One of the world’s most iconic conservationists.

The Social and Environmental Benefits of FMNR

Rachel: Right, okay. But I suppose that behavior changed within the context as well of, as you’re saying, because the climate had been destroyed and a lot of resources were being extracted.

Um, and these people were living in sort of abject poverty. So how is it then that, you know, reforesting using this technique has a positive knock-on impact on the communities? Is it that the microclimate becomes more stable? It becomes easier to grow crops? Is, you know, do they use agroforestry and plant their own cash crops, for example, in between the stumps?

What is, how does this help them?

Tony: I’d say all of the above. You know, it’s universal, whether developed countries or developing countries. People feel, if I’m bringing this message, we should return some trees to our farmland. They feel as if I’m asking them to give up something. And the opposite is true.

With the right trees, managed the right way, In the, in the right density, it’s plus, plus, there’ll be greater crop yield. There’ll be more biodiversity so that if you have a climatic or environmental shock that destroys one type of crop or livestock, you’ll have something else to fall back on, so you’ll be more robust, more resilient in the face of climate change. You can diversify your enterprises. In the case of many developing countries, once you have trees, many of these species are flowering. You can now keep beehives and whether or not there’s a drought, the trees will flower. You’ll have honey to eat or to sell. People in developing countries still primarily use biomass energy for heating, for cooking, even for light.

No trees, very little biomass energy. In fact, what they use, the crop residue, the animal manure, is desperately needed to go back on the land. Once you have trees, you’re meeting an immediate need there. If you grow enough trees, this translates into extra income. There’s, there’s an almost inexhaustible demand for biomass energy in developing countries.

But we can do better than that. Some of these species will be a source of traditional medicines, wild fruits, fodder for livestock. They alter the microclimate. So, creates much better conditions for agriculture, higher crop yield. In fact, in Niger, crop yields doubled for various reasons, lower temperatures, lower wind speeds.

Higher soil, soil fertility, habitat for predators of insect pests. This, this is just multidimensional, and I’ll add another thing. We didn’t realize this until some research came out from Senegal. A number of the species that farmers selected for regenerating on their land have this characteristic of hydraulic lift, and what that means is through the taproot, they’re drawing moisture from deep in the soil profile, deeper than what crop plants and grasses can reach.

At nighttime, some of that moisture is drawn up and it leaks through the tree’s shallow roots within reach of the crops and grasses, effectively bio irrigating the crop. And so I’ve got these magnificent photos in the height of a drought year. The closer you get to the tree, the healthier and greener and taller the crop is. The further you get away from the tree, some of the crops actually desiccated and died.

Rachel: You know, I feel quite emotional whenever we start talking about trees, in particular trees and vegetation ecosystems, because they are such beautiful and simple examples, and I don’t mean simple with regards to a lack of complexity, but so simple to understand that every single one of these organisms is working in tandem to balance the holistic global well-being of that ecosystem.

And there is such a beautiful example every single time of how things can work together in harmony, essentially. And I think they provide a model for kind of moving past the, the human models of, of binarization or competition and all of this. So, I feel very, very emotional when people begin to talk to me, especially about what’s going on under the soil, because I think it’s, it’s, it’s. It’s such a beautiful message of hope and possibility, especially in a planet that is, feels increasingly destabilized.

Tony: Well, I’m glad you brought up that topic of hope because there’s certainly that impact of, in, in the environment. And all those complex and wonderful things happening under the soil and above the soil.

The biggest change that I see when I go back into these communities is the restoration of hope. And if you can picture it, if you can put yourself in the shoes of these families who struggle to feed their children adequately, to put decent clothing on them, or even send them to school. And many people have given up hope.

They’ve tried this and they’ve tried that. It gets to the point for some where you’re no longer willing to try because you don’t want to be disappointed again. It’s happened too many times. And then here comes this very, very simple concept, literally a solution at your feet, which empowers you and enables you to create that future that you want simply by now.

Working with these wonderful forces of nature instead of fighting them and seeing them as the enemy that needs to be conquered. And it’s, it’s just so liberating. So, the biggest reaction that I see when I go back. It’s this outburst of joy, people dancing and singing and saying, Tony, come and see what we’ve done.

And the hope’s just oozing through their pores. It’s just wonderful.

Rachel: That’s stunning. It kind of leads me on to this, uh, topic that I wanted to explore with you, because this is called farmer managed natural regeneration.

Regenerating Earth’s Degraded Land

Rachel: But obviously the farmers that you are speaking about, the farmers of Niger are very different, I think, to probably what people in the Global North think of when they think of farmers.

And that is typically now, you know, multinational corporations or huge, huge landowners. And there’s been some tension between rewilding ideologies. Some people who believe that farmers should be proponents of rewilding and should be the people kind of leading this charge with regards to soil regeneration because if anything, they are the first people to benefit from it.

Versus other people who think that nature should be entirely left alone, that farmers shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the regenerative process because farming has been so damaging to the soil. And it’s kind of like this split between farming practices, probably, you know, Global North, Global South or minority world, majority world.

But it’s, it’s a debate that’s, how do I put this? Probably muddying the waters, a little bit about what is actually achievable. And there’s some pretty big names on either side of it that keep going head-to-head in conference rooms. And I was just wondering if you would weigh in and say what you think about this with regards to human involvement, perhaps a necessity of human involvement in the regeneration process.

Tony: Certainly. So, I think there may be a place for some degree of factory farming for our food. But if you think about it, it will only reduce emissions going forward. It can’t do anything about the historical greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere that are causing damage today and will continue to do so for decades and centuries to come unless we draw it down.

So even if we went that route of getting off the land, it’s only a partial solution, and I would argue an inadequate solution. The wonderful thing, and perhaps surprising thing about soils is, even in their current state, and there’s millions of hectares of degraded soil out there. Even in their degraded state, they still hold three times the carbon of what’s held in the atmosphere.

And you think of the potential, if a century ago most soils had maybe four, five percent organic matter. And today many soils are down to 1 percent or less. Think of the incredible volume of carbon that could be locked up in that soil through regenerative agricultural practices. It’s, it’s not insignificant.

And in fact, I think it’s actually essential that we put more attention into this. Globally, total agricultural land area. It’s about 5 billion hectares.

Mike: Just to give you some perspective here, that’s 38 percent of the total land area on Earth. That’s all for agriculture. Two thirds of that is pasture land for livestock, and the remaining third is cropland.

This data comes from the Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO.

Tony: And while agriculture, by definition, it’ll never be wilderness, it’ll never be land without people, I, I think neither should it be. an ecological desert, which much agricultural land either is already, or it’s quickly heading in that direction.

Monocultures, no biodiversity, no ecosystem services, in the sense that nutrient cycles, water cycles, and energy cycles, they’re, they’re disrupted. They’re not working as effectively as they could be. If we removed all farming and put it into a factory, where There’s 5 billion hectares out there that are damaged and not functioning and not drawing down carbon, not providing ecosystem services or hosting biodiversity. And my experience is, yes, in, in many cases, nature can heal itself. It can also be very, very slow. And in some landscapes and some climates, it may never happen at all. With climate change and with the massive biodiversity loss, the land degradation that the world is experiencing, we don’t have time to let nature just go its own course.

“We don’t have centuries to make a change”

Tony: We don’t have centuries to make a change. Through working with land users, land holders, we can greatly speed up the process. But again, as we spoke about earlier, it requires this mindset change. That leads to behavior change.

Mike: Tony is making an important point, but I would add here that farming practices and farming behavior is incentivized by what our governments choose to subsidize.

And in many places like the United States, that would be practices that favor commercial farming and monocultures, which take up an estimated 80 percent of the agricultural land. Over 1 million dollars a minute are given out in global farm subsidies. So, while you listened to this podcast, well over 20 million in subsidies were handed out.

Are they mostly going to what Tony is suggesting here? No. The World Resources Institute argues redirecting these subsidies towards farming practices that encourage land restoration instead of degrading it.

Tony: What gives me courage in this area is that there’s more than 500 million smallholder farmers worldwide. And I, I see that as 500 million opportunities to effect positive change on not only the, the land that they are managing, many, many farmers are accessing communal land, degraded landscapes, grazing land off their farms. So they also have an influence beyond the, the land that they’re, they’re directly managing.

The potential for that is simply enormous. And I, I reflect back on what happened in Niger, where once this idea was released and it took on a life of its own, spreading from farmer to farmer, for the most part, not even with my knowledge, it just happened, spontaneous movement that was going out there.

After 20 years, there were 5 million hectares of formerly degraded land, now supporting 200 million trees. And for most of that, I don’t know how that happened. So we, we can have these arguments, but the fact is there is a place for humanity to, to amend the wrongs of the past and to speed up the restoration.

And then my, my last point, the flip side, if we take all the people off the land and let nature take its course, think of the, the millions of people displaced, the increase in poverty. The increase in conflict over scarce resources and the added urban misery. It’s, it’s too much to, to contemplate and I think much, much better to work with people and facilitate the change in their mindset so that they now work with nature instead of destroying it.

Rachel: There’s an interesting campaign, I’m no doubt that you’re aware of, but for our listeners, it’s 30 x 30 and it is the idea to rewild or begin the regeneration process of 30 percent of Earth’s landmass by 2030. And yet the plans for this, which have been drawn up, you know, by sort of the United Nations and Global North essentially leading countries, involves no human interactions.

Mike: The Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022, commits to protecting 30 percent of the world’s lands and waters by 2030. In the two years leading up to the signing of this agreement, Indigenous rights advocates campaigned heavily for the inclusion of wording that would guarantee their rights in the stated targets.

It was only in the final hours of negotiation that that wording was included that satisfied Indigenous delegates to that conference. They specifically included OECMs, which are known as Other Effective Area Based Conservation Measures. This is a complicated acronym that basically describes a geographic area that has a management structure.

It can include local groups and Indigenous communities. As well as sustainable agriculture or fisheries. However, as Rachel is validly pointing out, this does not necessarily mean that Indigenous rights are safe with this Kunming Montreal Agreement. As countries seeking to fulfill their obligations under Target 3 of this agreement are already conflicting with Indigenous groups in places like Mexico’s Campeche state, where Indigenous groups currently live on a UNESCO heritage site.

So, while the Kunming Montreal Agreement does include provisions to address the rights of Indigenous peoples, Experts have told Mongabay it’s hard to measure compliance with these, because countries often use surface area indicators.

Rachel: So, we’re looking at Indigenous peoples being displaced from their lands in order to protect them, in order to, you know, provide ecosystem services for the continuation of fossil fuels capitalism, essentially, around the world.

And it completely fails to grasp what you’re saying, which is that human beings. Are around the world already a stewarding and caring species and working in tandem in nature because we are also biological organisms and we are also members of ecosystems and with the right incentives and the right knowledge and the right capacity, we can use essentially all these incredible like intellectual capacities we have to work together healing the problems caused rather than perpetuating the problems caused. And I think that that’s a really important drum to keep banging in this time that there are systems that are problems rather than there being a sort of inherent problem in humans. Exactly as you’re saying, some of our behavior is problematic, but behavior and mindset can change.

The Power of a Social Movement

Rachel: And it’s really, really, really important to remember, especially as the world becomes, as we were saying before, increasingly. fractured, so it seems, certainly politically. And this leads me on to something that you have said in past interviews, I think is just really, really beautiful. And it’s that FMNR, Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, is a social movement, and that’s why it’s taken off.

And that’s why it’s having all of these successes around the world, because it’s not these centralized projects that are being managed by people from the outside, but it is spreading like seeds itself across the planes of the world. And social movements are impossible to stop once they reach a certain tipping point.

Tony: I, I love it and imagine if we tried to direct and control and fund this thing, you’d never achieve the results that it’s achieved by being free and spreading organically from person to person. You couldn’t, you couldn’t raise the funding. You couldn’t administer the, the rollout across the vast territories.

By, by some estimates, there’s, there’s. Two to three billion hectares of degraded land worldwide who could come up with the resourcing to affect that?

Mike: The United Nations Convention to combat desertification did in 2022 they released a report that showed actually as much as 40 percent of the world’s land can be classified as degraded Most of which is caused by food production Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary to that convention, told the Guardian that along with farmers practicing regenerative agriculture 1.6 trillion invested by governments and corporations over the course of a decade could restore 1 billion hectares of land. Now 1.6 trillion might sound like a lot, but as of last year, global fossil fuel subsidies alone were 7 trillion. What’s more, according to the UN, a dollar spent on restoration could have a return between seven and thirty dollars.

I encourage you to check out Fiona Harvey’s reporting on this in The Guardian.

Tony: In that once people realize, actually it’s to my benefit, if I work with nature instead of destroying it, I will benefit, I will have a better future. Then, as you said, it’s very, very difficult, maybe impossible to stop them.

Excellent. There’s a lovely statement, you know, fairly recently there was a coup in Niger Republic where this work started. And Tijani Abbas, a researcher in, in Niger was asked the question, Oh, with all the turmoil, what’s the status of the FMNR? And he said, don’t worry. FMNR is the farmer’s green gold, green oil, right?

They will not abandon it. And it’s, it’s going on as, as normal. And, and this is true, you know, governments change, policies change, funding changes, but once people understand, actually this is my bread and butter, they’re not going to let it go.

Rachel: Totally. I’ve got a friend who runs a vegan cheese company in Europe and he had this astonishing foresight which was to go and speak to farmers, livestock farmers and say, ‘Hey, listen, what do you think about the future?’ And they said, ‘well, we’re very worried about the future because it is our job to think three generations in advance. And we can see the problems. We’re already experiencing the problems with our crops. We can see also that the social movement is shifting and people are eating less and less meat. And we need another option.’ And he said, ‘well, I need beans for my vegan cheese, and I think it’s ridiculous that I’m having to import them from very, very far away. So can we create a plan whereby you begin to transition the product that you are farming?’ And, and so he’s done this in, in, in Europe, in the Netherlands.

And it is such astonishing foresight, and I think as well, such an important reframing of a, the critical component that farmers are in our social systems, but also the fact that these are people who do think ahead because they are the last people in the global north, essentially, that are still connected to the land.

And so they do have this capacity to see farther than the rest of us, typically, who are working on desks. And I just think it’s a really beautiful example of, again, that network of people coming together and working together to figure out. What is the way that we can survive this together or transition together, rather than, you know, being pitted against one another, which is so often how farmers are, certainly in the countries.

Where I’ve lived, they are seen as sort of, you know, an enemy of the people, which is bizarre because they’re feeding the people.

Tony: That was a very wise approach. The mistake that too many of professionals in the development industry, the mistake they make is thinking because we’re educated and we’re professional, we have the solutions that we’re going to impart to you and treat people as if they were a blank slate with no ideas.

No. No dreams for the future, no life experience of their own. And I’m often asked, how, Tony, how do you get farmers to change from being clear, clear felled farmers to having all these trees across their landscapes? And it’s not that I convinced them, they convinced themselves. And I asked this question. If we continue business as usual, destroying the environment, what does the future hold for yourselves and your children?

And many of the people I work with, they haven’t got a high education, maybe only primary school or thereabouts, but they’re far from being stupid. They worry about the future. They think about their circumstances. And that questions it like a trigger and all of a sudden when we’re running the workshop the, the atmosphere changes and the dynamics changed from it being a problem that Tony’s brought for us to discuss to actually, no, this is very personal, this is my problem.

And when, when they’re in that position and they’re talking amongst themselves, that’s when you have fertile, fertile land for people to start exploring, well actually it’s impossible, we can’t go on this way, what are our alternatives? So, it’s very, very important to consult people and ask them what they see from their vantage point.

And it’s quite disturbing what you said about, is it the 30 30 plan? That it’s, it’s already signed and sealed without consulting the people whose livelihoods and the history is bound up with the area they grew up in.

Rachel: Yeah, well, there does seem to be this like pervasive belief in the destruction or like the destructive capacity of humankind, as if that is what is ingrained.

And so, we need to protect the Earth from us rather than reimagine our relationship with the Earth. It’s a really, really, it’s a very devastating belief that there’s lots of people who have done, you know, very interesting research on where that comes from, including I’m going to shout him out, Carl Safina, who sort of traced the history of Western thought back to ancient Greece, where Perhaps this first, you know, man nature split occurred, which has resulted in the devastation that we see today.

I just want to do another shout out as well before we close, Tony. I don’t know if you had a chance to listen to this. I’ll send it to you afterwards, if not. But we spoke with, I spoke with Owen Dalton, who is an Irishman who’s re the Bar Peninsula and the south coast of Ireland. And it’s a really beautiful story of care, because essentially what he did was get this land that was totally degraded, throw up a big fence to keep, you know, the sheep out, and then remove the, the foreign species, the pests like rhododendron. And then he left it alone. And it is such a rewilding sort of miracle the way that this land has come back to life in a very, very, very, very short period, because he took the care to go in, undo the damage that had been done, maintain it so that that damage doesn’t, isn’t allowed to creep back in.

And nature has sort of taken care of the rest. So, it’s a really beautiful symbiosis of what can be done when we work in tandem.

Tony: Oh, that’s amazing. Please resend me the link. I didn’t see that. You know, there’s this, there’s this, uh, perception that land is very fragile and vulnerable, and if you break it, it can’t be repaired.

In my experience, it’s the opposite. It’s extremely robust, and it has this enormous self-healing capacity if we remove those constraints that I mentioned earlier, and one of them would be invasive species. If, if we alter the dynamics, it’s amazing how quickly and how, yeah, the, the, the restoration capacity of nature is simply enormous.

Isn’t it just?

Rachel: And I also think that that should speak to our own restoration capacity as pieces of nature, and not just towards nature, but towards each other, that we are so capable of restoring the relationships that have broken down between one another. And I say this, you know, Essentially, on the eve of a couple of elections around the world, a couple of debates around the world, we are perfectly, we are as resilient and flexible and capable as the land upon which we depend.

And I think that this should serve as examples of how we heal with one another as well.

Tony: That’s lovely. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think there’s so much truth in what you’ve said.

Rachel: The underground forest. It’s everywhere. It’s in all of us.

Tony: The underground forest within.

Rachel: Yes, exactly. Oh, Tony, this was such a delightful conversation.

Thank you so, so much for your time. And thank you for your work. And I think we’ve hectares of Niger now regenerated with this technique. Do you have a number just as we close? Of how many other hectares around the world?

Tony: So, it’s just an estimate, and it would be incomplete, but we think there are over 18 million hectares.

Wow. Now, I have to reiterate that it’s not all linked to my work, because historically, and also intuitively, we come across communities that just figured it out for themselves. So, for example, in Malawi, there are some 3. 2 million hectares. of farmlands with more trees today than several decades ago. It’s a form of FMNR that they developed themselves.

So yeah, there’s, there’s lots happening out there and I think even more to be discovered.

Rachel: Oh, wonderful. Well, Tony, thank you so much for your time today. This is a delight.

Tony: Thank you, Rachel. It’s been a pleasure to speak to you as well. Thank you.

Rachel: Thank you.

Undeployed Solutions

Mike: So, I, I want to, I want to like say this is really miraculous, except it makes so much sense that it’s like, of course, that’s what happens. So, it’s not, to call it miraculous would be misleading because it’s not like it’s magic. This makes a lot of sense and it’s really doable. So, on that note, there’s a couple of figures I wanted to point out to you.

So, there was a, this is something that I dropped a note in on the audio about, and Tony brought it up in conversation about, he said something around like 3 billion. Hectares of land in the world is degraded. It’s actually more than that. According to the United Nations, at least it was a couple of years ago, they released a report and they set up to 40 percent of the world’s land can be classified as degraded and most of it is caused by food production.

So yeah, that was a really, I mean, it’s, it’s a devastating statistic. Um, but, and the Guardian reported on this, and by the way, the reporter was Fiona Harvey, and she does a fantastic job. The person they interviewed was the Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and he basically touted regenerative practices, such as agroforestry, things like that.

If subsidies were, you know, funneled into that, it could be done for about, you know, 1. 6 trillion over the course of a decade. I need to clarify that this is to restore 1 billion hectares of degraded land, which is still quite a lot of land. It’s equivalent to the size of the United States or China, according to the reporting from the Guardian, which is, sounds like a lot of money, but it’s actually not a lot when you take into consideration the amount of subsidies we give things like fossil fuels and industrial agriculture every year.

So, you know, just Just seeing that in, and hearing that really, ha,

Rachel: man,

Mike: that just gets me. So.

Rachel: Yeah. It’s yet again, more examples of the fact that we have the solutions available. It’s just that they’re not being deployed. And I think it’s this question of scale. So people have been speaking to me a lot recently about scale and like, how do we scale up?

How do we scale up? You know, well, this thing that you’re talking about, how do we scale it up? And if we can’t scale it up, then it’s not going to be the solution for, For, you know, the, the global problem, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how much pressure is put on that adverb up, that things need to scale up, and instead how we need to be thinking about what can scale out, rather than up or down, what can scale out and be networked like a root network.

And I think this is something that I love so much around these cases of rewilding that are actually working, as opposed to the cases of rewilding that are failing. It is when the human community is as embedded. In the activity as the roots of the plants themselves, if you buy up a huge, huge, huge piece of land and use machines to plant rows and rows and rows of monoculture trees in order to try and, you know, rewild in some kind of sense, it fails.

This is what Tony talks about at the beginning. It doesn’t tend to work. But when people steward and care for the land and allowed for allow for wildness to poke through as well. for listening. When we become one again with these ecosystems, that’s when these projects seem to take off, whether that’s Tony’s work with FMNR.

Or whether it owns work in the Irish rainforest, like these are solutions that scale across and that’s what we need to see more of.

Mike: Yeah, and something he brought up was that the farmers he’s talking with, their job is to worry about the future, to think about the future and be concerned about it because that farm needs to sustain them for generations and monocultures destroy the nutrient content of the soil.

I’ll have to check this but I believe like It’s like two to three times less the nutrient, uh, content of non monocrop soil. So it just degrades the soil so quickly. And it, and it’s also just one crop. So if something happens or there’s like a, a dip in the market or you don’t get as much return on your crop, you’re kind of, you know, SOL.

So, I mean, like there’s an incentive there for people to adopt these practices. There’s another conversation we had on the Mongabay newscast with a journalist named Tom Philpott. on agroecology. And I highly recommend listeners go back and check that one out. It was a couple of years ago now. And we, we talk about this at length in the context of the United States.

It’s a really good conversation. So if I do say so myself, so please do check that out.

Rachel: Well, Mike, I absolutely love this conversation and I love that we’re kind of platforming more and more of these scale across solutions. So thank you so much. It was really, really enjoyable.

Mike: Yeah, thank you. I, I always love talking about, like, your conversation with Eoghan Daltun, which, by the way, audience, if you haven’t checked that out, please do.

Such an inspiring conversation. I always love having talks about what it’s like to rewild, regenerate nature, and this is just a great conversation. Another great example of what can be done.

Rachel: Yeah, when we work in tandem. Oh, fantastic.

Mike: Alright, I’ll see you on the next one.

Rachel: Thank you.

Credits

Mike: If you want to read more on Tony’s work, please see the articles linked in the show notes.

And, as always, if you’re enjoying the Monbabay Newscast or any of our podcast content, like our sister series, Mongabay Explores, and you want to help us out, we encourage you to spread the word about the work we’re doing, and By telling a friend word of mouth is still the best way to help expand our reach.

But as always, you can support us by becoming a monthly sponsor via our patreon page at patreon.com/Mongabay. We are a nonprofit news outlet, so just a dollar per month does make a difference and it helps us offset production costs. So if you’re a fan of our audio reports from Nature’s Frontline, go to patreon.com/mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay newscast and all of our podcast content. And you and your friends can also join the listeners who have downloaded the Mongabay Newscast well over a half a million times by this point. By subscribing to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts from, or you can download our app for Apple and Android devices, just search either app store for the Mongabay Newscast app to gain fingertip access to new shows and all of our previous episodes.

But you can also read our news and inspiration from Nature’s Frontline at Mongabay. com or follow us on social media. Find Mongabay from our accounts on LinkedIn at Mongabay News. And on Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, Mastodon, Facebook, and TikTok, where our handle is at Mongabay or on YouTube at MongabayTV.

Thank you, as always, for listening.