Islands of fertility Have you ever heard of the Great Green Wall? If not, I recommend looking it up.  It's fantastic.  A lot of people in Africa are working to turn the Sahara Desert back into the Sahara Rainforest (which is what it used to be). It's a huge project.  It seems so impossible.  How can it possibly happen? Let me introduce you to the concept of "islands of fertility." Trees create more organic material than they need, dropping extra leaves onto the soil, which makes the soil capable of storing more water.  (This is especially true of deciduous trees, but evergreens do it, too.)  This means the water from rain stays on the land for much longer, instead of all flowing out to the ocean.  Trees also create water, because their presence causes more rain to rise up from the ocean and fall on the land.  Put those two things together, and it means that the more trees you have, the more trees you can have. And smaller plants, and fungi, and animals.  Do you want more of every species in an area?  Add more trees. This can be generalized to other areas of life. Let's say you have a few precious resources.  Very few, very scarce.  If you concentrate them all in one place and build a system that reliably produces more than it consumes, your resources will keep on growing.  Whenever you have extra, you take it to the edge, spreading the diameter of production just a little further.  You keep doing this, on a regular basis.  What happens? Exponential growth. At first, it will look like almost nothing is happening.  The progress will seem trivial.  You will have to be patient.  But eventually, enormous things will be happening quickly. Small things can become great things in the blink of an eye.