Tony Rinaudo was about to give up and go back to his homeland Australia with his family. It was the early 1980s. Rinaudo, at the time still a young agronomist with big goals, was driving a trailer full of tree seedlings across an empty, windswept plain in Niger, West Africa. For two and a half years, he had tried to reforest the country to help farmers make a better living. With little success.