In 1999, an American teacher named Ronald Sakolsky was working as an English exchange teacher at Luoyang No. 2 Foreign Language School in central China’s Henan Province. One day he caught a televised news segment about a woman named Yin Yuzhen, who was attempting something that sounded borderline insane: turning a stretch of the Maowusu Desert in Inner Mongolia into a forest, one sapling at a time.

He was moved enough to do something about it. Sakolsky wrote to institutions back in the US and got a foundation in Boston to donate $5,000 for Yin’s tree-planting work. The money was sent to her in cash.

“I have never seen such a big amount of money before. It made me surprised,” Yin said, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP). To put it in perspective, that $5,000 in 1999 could have bought her a 400-square-meter apartment. Instead, she spent nearly all of it on saplings. She kept exactly one dollar bill as a souvenir.

In the spring of 2000, Sakolsky traveled out to the desert to meet her in person and see the work. At that point, the land was still mostly yellow sand. He was openly skeptical.

“When Mr. Sakolsky........

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