The Forest Underground is the story of Tony Rinaudo’s mission to regenerate forest in the
dilapidated landscapes of West Africa. His love for the natural world and his devastation over its continuous exploitation were developed through his childhood in Australia. In his 20’s after completing mission training, Rinaudo left with his wife Liz to become a missionary in Niger with the hope of incorporating regenerative farming and landscape restoration into his mission work. The book, written in an autobiographical style, recounts Rinaudo’s (and his family’s) experience of mission in Niger, his struggles and failures to establish sapling plantations, and eventual discovery and development of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). This is a method of ‘reviving’ the tree stumps resulting from deforestation through a particular pruning technique, which has a far higher growth success rate than simply planting delicate saplings in the harsh conditions of the Sahara. The Forest Underground is essentially an autobiography, interspersed with cultural insights about the Nigerien people, reflections on faith, and environmental discussion.
I was researching carbon-capture tree growing projects ahead of my trip to India when I stumbled
upon this book. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t come across Rinaudo’s story earlier in my research since it seemed so revolutionary in this field. I ordered it to read during my trip, expecting it to be insightful and informative for my tree-plantation internship, but I didn’t expect that it would also have such an impact on my faith. Rinaudo gently relays the complexities and surprises making up a life given to protecting the natural world, and sacrificially serving God and the community in which he was placed. He is honest about his failings and mistakes, about the terrible hardship of living outside your culture through times of famine and corruption, but also about the tender lessons and profound faithfulness of God through these struggles. It is a powerful testimony, and I found myself welling up every time I opened it.
As a young Christian trying to enter the world of environmentalism and sustainability, I relate to Rinaudo’s desperate feeling of wanting to make a difference but not knowing how to begin. He writes that when he was young he prayed a “child’s prayer”: ‘Father God, please use me somehow, somewhere, to make a difference.’ This struck a chord, as I had coincidentally prayed this exact prayer, sitting in a tiny jungle Field Study Centre in India just before beginning to read this book, and I'm sure many others have prayed similarly under the shadow of looming climate disaster. However, later near the end of the book, he writes ‘I am in awe of how God has and is answering my prayer… there is little room for doubt that God has indeed “prepared in advance good things for us to do.”’ It can be incredibly frustrating that we only see the ways God weaves together each small step we take in hindsight when it feels like we could achieve so much more if He just clearly told us the way to go. However, this emphasises the importance of sharing these connections and reflections when we do see them to encourage others, as Rinaudo has in The Forest Underground. I love his advice that ‘experience has taught me that just enough is revealed to us to enable us to take the next step’: the rest of the road is made of faith.
His book highlights that even if we feel that we have lost our way and are not achieving what we feel we could be, God wastes nothing that we do. Rinaudo reminisces that he struggled with tasks such as language learning, administration, or food distribution which he didn’t feel were his strengths, and seemed peripheral to what he actually wanted to be doing: planting trees and restoring the landscape. However, whatever we give to God, He will use, and Rinaudo’s story demonstrates that a mission like conservation actually needs surprisingly much more than just the application of scientific knowledge: it’s about understanding culture and different connections to the land, about learning language, about building relationships with people over years and years, about sacrificing your own family and familiar comforts, about finding the right leaders and the right ways to speak to people to achieving shared understanding, it’s about surviving frugally in a harsh environment, about thinking and rethinking and going back to the start, about organisation and administration, leaving your comfort zone to do what needs to be done – Rinaudo had to learn so many skills he didn’t even know he would need, but every small thing he did was used by God in surprising ways. I think this is such an important perspective for Christians in environmental work: for us it is not about objectively ‘saving the earth’, but about relationship. We know that ultimately God will be the one to bring complete restoration, not us, but our work as His people on this side of the new creation is repairing relationships - with the earth, with each other, and with God simultaneously, and that needs input from every walk of life. At the end of the book, Rinaudo and his wife return to Niger after they had left the mission field for a few years, and see the results of the work they began there. He emotively delineates the deep, deep impact he and his family had on the Hausa people they lived amongst for so many years, and vice versa. They went to Niger wanting to restore the landscape and plant trees, which was achieved, but alongside this, they encouraged
many people’s hearts – this to me is the epitome of Christian environmentalism.
The Forest Underground also successfully encapsulates the overwhelming hopelessness and fragility of what Rinaudo was trying to achieve – planting tiny saplings in the harsh desert soil, amongst social corruption, migration, devastating famine, and the objections of local people whose priority was, understandably, growing crops rather than trees, struggling to see the relationship between the two. And yet, he surrendered the situation to God, and God used it for good. He used a famine which threw the local people into poverty and starvation, and Rinaudo into famine relief work which he did not feel equipped for, to integrate FMNR into local farms. Before the famine, farmers had been too skeptical and desperate for food to introduce FMNR into their practice, but as a relief administrator Rinaudo was able to develop a system whereby people could only receive food relief packages if they agreed to regenerate 40 trees on their land – this meant that farmers saw the efficacy of FMNR on crop improvement with their own eyes, without the pressure being on Rinaudo to convince them. So although the famine was devastating, it also became a pivotal moment in beginning work to regenerate the degraded landscape.
The impact that Rinaudo’s work has had is scarcely believable, and completely fascinating – six million hectares of degraded land reforested (in Niger alone!), healthier crops, doubled yields, increased soil fertility and decreased soil erosion, diversification of crops and income streams for farmers, fewer crop pests, halted desertification, restored ecosystems, better water retention, fewer climate refugees, farmers empowered to restore their own land without relying on external organisations, and all of this emerges from tree stumps! It shows so clearly how we were made to live in relationship with the natural world and the gifts of biodiversity which God has given us, and the consequences when we decide they are expendable.
Rinaudo’s career has extended beyond his mission work in Niger – he has since worked as Principal Climate Action Advisor at World Vision, become a Right Livelihood Award Laureate, collaboratively produced a film about FMNR – The Forest Maker, written The Forest Underground, given talks international climate conferences, and much more. However, he speaks incredibly humbly about his involvement in the global impact of FMNR, describing how over years he has ‘been able to transition from field worker to international campaigner,’ and emphasising that God uses ordinary people to do great things. As I previously mentioned, I was initially drawn to this book because of the astounding and far-reaching impact of Rinaudo’s work, and the fact that his solution was, in his own words, ‘embarrassingly simple’ – it seemed too good to be true. But what struck me most by the end was the vastness of what God was able to do with one man’s passion, and Rinaudo’s profound demonstration of what a lifetime of faith through all circumstances can look like. It must have been incredibly difficult for Rinaudo to encapsulate his entire lifetime’s work into 200 pages, and it has also been a mission for me to encapsulate any of it in a single article. So thank you to Tony Rinaudo for taking the time and work to share his story and give encouragement to another generation!
‘If we have the capability to go to the moon, build nuclear bombs and mow down forests, then we have the capability to restore one billion hectares of degraded land, and do it quickly. And if Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, in one of the harshest climates, with minimum government or external assistance can achieve a reforestation rate of 250,000 hectares per year, what can be achieved elsewhere? And the answer is: if we put our mind to it, much, much more.’ – Tony Rinaudo
Please do look up The Forest Underground, or have a wander through the FMNR Hub site: Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration - which has lots of interesting resources and videos about the impact of FMNR.
Photos shared with permission from Tony Rinaudo.
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