When British colonial officials arrived in West Africa, they didn’t recognize the gardens they saw there. For them, gardens were tilled fields, crops in straight lines, and trees cleared. It suited the English climate – but not the West African climate, as James C. Scott explained in his remarkable book, Seeing LIke A State.

It was one of a series of examples Scott cites of people from one culture moving into another culture and imposing their views, without understanding differences of climate, plant growth, and sustainable agriculture. And these imported ideas of ‘scientific cultivation” remained with many African governments even after they became independent. In Niger, French colonial authorities taught farmers to remove sprouting trees from their fields each year before planting crops – the opposite of what they should have been counselling.

Only when West Africans went back to growing plants as they once did, and Niger’s farmers stopped clearing tree stumps, could agriculture recover and become sustainable once more.

I thought about that while reading a quite extraordinary story in Yale Environment 360, As Africa Loses Forest, Its Small Farmers Are Bringing Back Trees. It expands on an equally astonishing story about Niger that had appeared in National Geographic in April 2022, reporting on how farmers had been quietly reforesting their country but researchers had only discovered this much later.