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Avancée du désert

This piece was originally published in Manas, March 14, 1979.

Twenty years ago (1959) an Englishwoman, Wendy Campbell-Purdy, having heard Richard St. Barbe Baker say that the spread of deserts could be stopped by a green wall of trees, bought a one-way ticket to North Africa and set to work planting trees.   On forty-five acres of desert in Morocco (Tiznit), she planted 2,000 trees, and four years later they were twelve feet high.  She proved that this manmade strip of oasis would change the climate (increase the surface humidity) by growing wheat and barley in the shelter the trees provided.  Then she went to Algeria, where a reluctant government, gave her a 260-acre dump.  The seedlings she set out there did so well that the astonished Algerian officials promised her help.  She went home to England to raise some money, and eventually she formed the Bou Saada Trust to wage biological warfare against the Sahara.  A few years later the 130,000 trees she had planted at Bou Saada (in Algeria) were flourishing and the fertile area they created was growing vegetables, citrus, and grain.  Plans were then made to invade the great desert with the green things growing.

How urgent is this campaign against deserts?  In 1977 a UN conference on Desertification reported that the world's desert areas are rapidly spreading.  One third of the land surface of the Earth's surface is now desert, and every year the Sahara gains 250,000 acres of once-productive land.  The lives of some 630 million people are threatened in the regions of the world now turning into desert wasteland.

Wendy Campbell-Purdy has recently formed a registered trust called Tree of Life to continue this project and undertake similar ones.  The idea is to save the "the vulnerable communities on the fringe of the Sahara and other world deserts by working with them to stop the deadly process of desertification, restore the life of the land and protect the livelihood of the people."  An explanatory booklet Tree of Life (London address is given, by now certainly invalid), describes the program:

The Tree of Life evolved directly from the work of the Bou Saada Trust in Algeria.  This successful pilot reforestation scheme has now been incorporated in one of the world's most ambitious tree-planting programs--the thousand-mile protective "green wall" right across Algeria.  The first task of the Tree of Life is to set up similar pilot projects, in cooperation with the Governments concerned, to continue the green wall along the entire northern edge of the Sahara Desert.