12 Small Decisions That Paid Off Decades Later, Like Orange Peels That Grew a Forest

In the late 1990s, a local juice company made a deal with Costa Rica’s Área de Conservación Guanacaste: it could spread its leftover peels on worn-out park land. About 1,000 truckloads, roughly 12,000 metric tons of peel and pulp, went onto a bare 7-acre cattle pasture.

In 2014, Princeton researchers went back and walked past the plot’s big wooden sign, because it was covered in vines. Their study found 176% more wood in the trees than on untreated land next to it, and about three times as many tree species.

In 1994, a park officer exploring a remote rainforest canyon in Wollemi National Park, northwest of Sydney, came across a small grove of trees nobody recognized. They turned out to be Wollemi pines, a species known from fossils going back 91 million years and thought to have died out about 2 million years ago.

Only 46 adult trees and 43 young ones grow in the wild, at a site kept secret. Instead of hiding the species, scientists grew it from cuttings. Wollemi pines now stand in botanic gardens across Australia and abroad, and many garden nurseries sell them.

Thomas Parnell, the University of Queensland’s first physics professor, wanted to show his students that pitch, a tar that feels solid at room temperature, is really a very thick liquid. In 1927 he heated some, poured it into a glass funnel and left it to settle for three years. In October 1930, the funnel’s stem was cut.

The first drop took eight years to fall. Nine have fallen so far, and nobody has ever seen one actually drop. Guinness World Records lists it as the longest-running laboratory experiment, and the tenth drop is expected sometime in the 2020s.

In the early 1800s, Sweden was running short of oak for its navy’s ships. So in 1831, the crown began planting oaks on Visingsö, an island in Lake Vättern. By the middle of the century, some 300,000 trees covered about 890 acres.

An oak needs well over a century to grow tall and straight enough for a warship. In 1975, Sweden’s Chief of Navy was told the first trees were ready. By then the navy no longer built ships from wood, and it turned the offer down. The forest still stands, and it is open to visitors.

In a 1789 codicil to his will, Benjamin Franklin left 1,000 pounds each to Boston and Philadelphia. The money was to be lent, at interest, to “young married artificers, under the Age of twenty-five years”, young tradesmen getting started. After 100 years, part of it could be spent on the city. The rest was to grow for another century.

In Boston, the amount ready to spend in 1907 was $438,741.98. It built a technical school that opened in September 1908. That school, now Franklin Cummings Tech, still teaches trades, and in January 2026 it moved into a new $75 million building.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, dug into a mountain on a Norwegian Arctic island, keeps backup copies of crop seeds from gene banks around the world, in case the originals are ever lost. Between 2008 and 2014, one gene bank deposited 116,484 seed samples there.

In 2015, when its home collection could no longer be used, it became the first ever to withdraw seeds. The 38,073 samples went to new gene banks in Lebanon and Morocco and were sown that November. All the seeds taken out in 2015 and 2017 germinated well, and fresh seeds grown from them have gone back into the vault.

In the 1930s, the University of Wisconsin—Madison started an arboretum as an outdoor lab for learning how to repair damaged land. Ecologist Aldo Leopold said in his 1934 dedication speech that it should be “a reconstructed sample of old Wisconsin.”

Civilian Conservation Corps crews did much of the planting by hand, and one archive photo shows them at work on a prairie on Nov. 2, 1936. Ninety years later, its Curtis Prairie is regarded as the oldest restored prairie in the world, and in 2021 the whole arboretum was named a National Historic Landmark.

Botanist Charles Bessey spent years arguing that trees could grow in the Nebraska Sandhills, a sea of grass-covered dunes with almost none. In April 1902, more than 200,000 treeless acres there were set aside as forest reserves, and a tree nursery was started near Halsey.

Crews planted the seedlings by hand, and the forest eventually spread over nearly 20,000 acres. It was once the largest hand-planted forest in the world and is still the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The nursery, about 120 years old, is the oldest federal tree nursery in the U.S.

In 1975, the waters off Cape Rodney and Okakari Point, north of Auckland, became New Zealand’s first no-take marine reserve: no fishing and no collecting. Its rocky reefs were so bare that they looked white in aerial photos, because sea urchins had eaten the kelp.

It took about 30 years for the protected snapper and crayfish to grow big enough to keep the urchins down, and for the kelp forests to return. Today the reserve’s mature snapper produce about 10 times more young fish than unprotected areas of the same size.

By the 1950s, logging had left Saihanba, a highland area in northern China, almost bare. In 1962, foresters began planting trees there, and their children and grandchildren kept going.

Over three generations, forest cover rose from 11.4% to 80% across about 227,000 acres. In 2017 the Saihanba foresters won Champions of the Earth, the UN’s top environmental honor. The UN Environment Programme says the forest now supplies 137 million cubic meters of clean water to Beijing and Tianjin every year.

A couple in Tallahassee, Florida, lived on the edge of a 45-acre cypress swamp for 14 years. Worried that the cypress trees would one day be cut down, they bought the swamp and later placed it under a conservation easement, which keeps it from being developed.

Today the swamp is a wood stork rookery. Audubon reported about 275 wood stork nests there, along with nesting anhingas and great egrets. The swamp’s alligators help, too: they hunt the raccoons and snakes that would otherwise take the eggs.

In the fall of 1879, William James Beal, a botany professor at what is now Michigan State University, wanted to know how long seeds can lie in the soil and still grow. He filled 20 bottles with sand and 50 seeds each of 23 kinds of plants, left them uncorked and buried them on a sandy knoll.

At first a bottle came up every five years, later every 10, then every 20. In 2021, 142 years after the burial, the 16th bottle was dug up, and 20 seeds of moth mullein germinated. Four bottles are left.