HUMBO, Ethiopia — The bees have returned. For decades, farmer
and beekeeper Adila Agebo's hives in this small agricultural
community were nearly dry. Years of stripping the hills of their
vegetation to make charcoal, collecting firewood and
construction material from what remained of the forests, and
letting animals graze on the green remnants had devastated the
landscape. Severe soil erosion led to landslides down the hills
into the villages. Large silt deposits choked farms of
productivity and washed out roads, leaving a community already
susceptible to hunger in an even more dire situation. As
vegetation in the hills dwindled, bees stopped migrating to
where the plant life had drawn them many years ago. World
Vision, a humanitarian organization working in Ethiopia since
the 1980s famine, saw that the land's degradation was having a
severe effect on the availability of food and keeping locals
poor. World Vision Australia forester Tony Rinaudo saw potential
in the hundreds of thousands of tree stumps left on