The Man Who Stopped the Desert

In the early 1980s, a devastating drought turned Burkina Faso's Sahel region into a wasteland. Villages emptied. Crops failed. The earth cracked like old leather under a relentless sun. Most people fled, but a farmer named Yacouba Sawadogo stayed behind and did something his neighbors thought was madness — he began planting trees in the dead ground. Sawadogo revived an ancient technique called zaï, digging small pits in the hardpan soil and filling them with compost and seeds.…