Richard St. Barbe Baker, on the left, in the 1920s.

...In the realm of forestry one name must stand out, that of a man of enormous energy and all-encompassing vision, who foreshadowed and inspired the present worldwide Green movement, and even shared Gandhi’s conviction’s linking a postindustrial society with lasting peace. This man was Richard St. Barbe Baker, who, as a young forester in 1922, founded the Men of the Trees in Kenya, a country that is now playing a leading role in tree-planting and which holds the headquarters of the International Council for Research in Agroforestry. [Webdesigner note, 2005: we would now want to add mention of Kenya's amazing Green Belt Movement.]

In his book, My Life My Trees, St. Barbe describes the devastation of the forests in the Kenya highlands caused by nomadic herdsmen, land-hungry white settlers, and logging contractors.

Goats do great damage to trees.

The young forester’s response was to demarcate a wide area and get it designated as a forest reserve. With the cooperation of a man who was to be his lifelong friend and colleague, the Kikuyu chief Josiah Njonjo, St. Barbe had thousands of indigenous trees planted between rows of grain and yams—an agroforestry system. At the same time he started Kenya’s first large tree nursery, planting olives in conjunction with Mutarakwa cedars, an association found in the natural forest. Thus, from the first, as he admitted, St. Barbe took advantage of the local tradition of mixed cropping.

Later St. Barbe became responsible for the sustainable development of mahogany rain forests in Nigeria, where he observed another example of plant symbiosis:

Each mahogany is surrounded by numerous trees belonging to other families, amongst which is that important family of Leguminosae—the soil improvers. These I have observed to be good nurse trees for the mahoganies. The more important species of mahogany require the services of a succession of nurse trees throughout their life to bring them to perfection. Some of these provide just sufficient competition to coax the young sapling upwards. Others do their work in secret under the surface of the soil, interlacing the roots, a sort of symbiosis, like the mycelium, which starts as an independent weblike growth, surrounds the sheath of plant rootlets and prepares food that can be assimilated by the growing trees.

In the 1950s and 1960s St. Barbe undertook two extensive expeditions through and around the Sahara, and put forward a breathtaking plan for the reclamation of the world’s largest desert by progressive tree-planting.

Once desert -- this land was fully reclaimed after 25 years of reforestation (northern fringe of the Sahara).

...St. Barbe...encouraged the Saharan states that he visited to proceed with schemes best suited to their individual talents, policies, and resources. He was particularly impressed by large-scale desert colonization schemes being pioneered by Egypt, one of which involved five-acre family orange groves with leguminous crops such as peanuts and cowpeas growing beneath the trees.

While water for some of the projects was provided by irrigation channels from the Nile, in other cases wells were sunk, some of depths as great as 3,600 feet. Ancient wells, some going back to Roman and pre-Roman times, were discovered and opened up. There is said to be an underground sea the size of France beneath the Sahara. This could doubtless be made available for irrigation by modern oil-drilling techniques.

The remains of ancient civilizations have been found near the center of the Sahara. Their water supplies must have been ensured by the presence of forests, but when these were cut down and regeneration made impossible by browsing animals, the water table, maintained by the trees’ roots, would have sunk to great depths.

St. Barbe’s vision of a Green Belt round the Sahara was revived at an exhibition in London in October 1989, sponsored by a number of relief agencies. The exhibition did not envisage an endeavor to plant a continuous shelterbelt round the desert’s perimeter, but a mosaic of protective zones, comprising forests of drought-resistant trees and crops, which would eventually merge.

Innumerable forms of land use practiced in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, whether traditional or extemporized, have agroforestry characteristics. It is being increasingly recognized that symbiotic systems, involving the integration of trees with other crop plants, constitute a vast and complex subject of study, which contains the seeds of a comprehensive new-old technology for meeting all basic human physical needs.

ROBERT HART

Excerpted from Robert Hart's Forest Gardening, pp. 113-116, Chapter 11, "Agroforestry Against World Want," Copyright © 1996, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont. Reprinted with permission. The three photos above were added by the webdesigner.

http://www.chelseagreen.com/2005/topics/Forestry