The Farmer Who Planted Trees He Would Never See

In 1930, a seventy-year-old Kansas farmer named Elzéard Bouffier — no, that's fiction. But Richard St. Barbe Baker was very real. At age twenty-six, this British forester arrived in Kenya and saw land stripped bare by decades of colonial farming. The soil was dying. Locals told him nothing would grow there again. Baker didn't listen to the evidence. He recruited twelve thousand Kikuyu men and women, handed them seedlings, and asked them to plant.…