They called it fools and dreamers. Now it's a forest.

A botanist named Hugh Wilson looked at 109 hectares of exhausted hill country on New Zealand's Banks Peninsula in 1987 and proposed doing almost nothing. Most of the old-growth forest had been cleared for grazing, and gorse, the spiny European shrub farmers had burned and sprayed for generations, had buried the rest. Wilson wanted to leave it. One local farmer wrote to the newspaper that the plan was "fools and dreamers stuff." The phrase became the title of a documentary. Wilson understood that gorse acts as a nurse crop. Its thorns keep grazing animals off native seedlings until the young trees grow up through it and shade it out. The gorse then dies, having built the forest that killed it. He removed the goats and possums, stopped the spraying, and waited. Hinewai Reserve is now roughly 1,500 hectares. Wilson is in his eighties, still cycling to work, still hand-writing the quarterly newsletter. He doesn't drive.