Not deciding is the most expensive decision

By the early 1980s the drylands of Niger were losing their trees faster than anyone could put them back. Tree-planting projects had swallowed something like sixty million dollars and produced barely twenty thousand hectares of forest, most of which died soon after it went into the ground. Nothing had worked.

In 1983 a young agronomist​a plant and soil scientist stood in a field on the southern edge of the Sahara and watched his own trees die. For two years he had trucked seedlings out into the drylands of Niger, dug them into the sand and come back to find the heat, the wind and the goats had taken almost all of them. But then one afternoon, crouched by the truck letting air out of the tyres, a little bush somehow caught his attention. He walked over and started to investigate. The bush was not a bush, but the stump of a former tree sprouting many new branches. Under the sand the stumps of the old forest were still alive and each year they pushed up a fresh crop of green shoots.

Growth in a plant is steered by a hormone called auxin, made at the growing tip of whichever shoot has pulled ahead (Müller and Leyser, 2011). Auxin flows downward and holds the buds below it in check, so a single leading stem keeps the rest subordinate and draws the plant's strength up into one trunk. A stump throwing thirty equal shoots has no such leader, therefore the resources get spread evenly across all thirty.

So Tony Rinaudo, the agronomist, taught the farmers to walk up to a stump, look at the shoots it was throwing, choose the strongest and cut the rest away. Cutting them back, the whole plant finally has somewhere to send everything it has and the shrub that had stayed a shrub for a generation grew into trees in a few years.

No seedlings, no nursery, no water trucks. Over the next two decades, cutting back shoots, regreened something like five million hectares of Niger (Reij, Tappan and Smale, 2009).

The word for what they were doing is older than the method. To decide comes from the Latin decidere to cut off, from caedere to cut. A decision is the moment you cut away the options you will not take. So the farmers were deciding in the oldest sense of the word.

You are not short of roots

You are almost never short of possibilities. The lives that could grow from where you are standing are already down there under the surface.

Rinaudo's farmers did not make the desert fertile. It was fertile all along, just short of decisions.