Summary

Chapter 8, "Green Wall, Black Wall," discusses efforts to keep the sands of the Sahara from further encroaching on certain areas of Africa even as parts of Europe struggle with increasing numbers of Africans who migrate there, many because of environment-related issues. The author meets Colonel Pape Sarr, Senegal’s directorate of water and forests, who is one of the architects of the Great Green Wall, a proposed barrier of trees that would stretch 4,700 miles long and be 10 miles wide, crossing 11 countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. Proposed in 2005 by Nigeria, the work has barely begun and remains controversial. Sarr takes the author to an area where dozens of people are planting seedlings and shows him the current state of the wall, which is a mere eight inches tall. The project is difficult because there is not enough...