Sangha of Auspicious Companions

Reforesting Ethiopia with 50 Billion Trees, One Step at a Time

When Halima Kedir began planting trees in Ethiopia’s drought-prone Oromia region, her neighbors laughed. But she kept walking an hour each way to fetch water for her seedlings, tending them, she says, the way her Oromo tradition tends to adopted children: “I see them like my own children.” Her quiet persistence has since helped shift a community’s skepticism into participation, and a nation’s historical relationship with its land from destruction toward restoration, with Ethiopia’s deforestation rate falling by nearly two-thirds over the past decade. The story of the Green Legacy Initiative — which aims to plant 50 billion trees by 2030 — is told in grand statistics, but its roots are in people like Kedir, who didn’t wait for permission or recognition to begin. Her neighbor, once a doubter, now calls her “a role model and someone willing to find local solutions to our issues” — a reminder that transformation, environmental or otherwise, tends to start with one person willing to take a less-popular path in tune with larger arcs of possibility for a greater good.

Be The Change

Today, plant or tend to form of plant life — a seed pressed into a pot of soil, a neglected houseplant given water, or a seedling placed in your yard. Relate to it not as an object, but as something in your care. Notice what shifts in you when you slow down enough to tend to something that cannot speak for itself.