Like many others who have watched Amazon deforestation with despair, I didn’t think it was possible to regrow a tropical forest. The Amazon seemed caught up in a vicious cycle, as the land was cleared for cattle farming or crops, and while I had read about high level discussions of compensating countries for ‘ecosystem services’, such as paying them to not cut forests, I had never heard of a way individuals could do this.

And then I learned the story of Omar Tello, an Ecuadorian who has done just that over the past 40 years. He has restored rainforest on an area that had been cleared for farmland, turning it into a forest that is home to thousands of species of insects, birds, reptiles, mammals and amphibians. He is one of only a few people who have ever achieved such a transformation.