Regenerating Jordan’s native forests
These articles always seem strange to me. There was another story a few years ago, also from Jordan if I recall correctly, where some member of the royal family did some permaculture thing with some Western group. Great success, look at all the plants, amazing, greening the desert and all that, fancy YT videos, and they were celebrating some anniversary.<p>Now here's another one, and they're creating a forest on 250sqm.<p>It feels like they're starting over and over, but either there's other successful projects "next door" which the articles never really mention, or the other projects were shut down or failed some time before. Did they? If so, why?<p>The same thing happens in Saudi Arabia where they had some amazing results by (oversimplified, yes), digging some swales and putting some rocks on steep hills. The grass was coming back, trees were growing. And that's it, cut, no more info. You'd think that this would be naturally adopted by each neighboring community immediately, and the whole desert would be greened in no time. But somehow it isn't. Why?<p>These countries are fairly autocratic, and obviously these projects have the blessing of the rulers, or they wouldn't happen, and surely the rulers would love to have the forests restored and the desertification stopped and all that, and it makes for great photo ops, too. Why then, don't they decree these projects to happen at scale?<p>I'm not saying it's all bullshit, maybe it's just journalists who need a new story every other years, but these are, to me, obvious questions, that I'd answer if I was writing an article about these things, and it's suspicious that they aren't being answered, ever.