That same summer, Natalie watched Al Gore’s landmark documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

A 2016 report by a group of academic institutions and environmental NGOs highlighted that indigenous peoples manage at least 24 percent of the total carbon stored aboveground in the world’s tropical forests,8 an amount greater than 250 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global air travel in 2015.9

Hindou persuaded the eminent French documentary maker Nicolas Hulot to film the plight of the M’bororo in Chad. That documentary, Espoir de vie, the last of Hulot’s film career, aired in 2011.

A participant from Zambia, who had listened intently throughout the conference, finally raised her hand at a senior-level roundtable. “I have been hearing this expression—‘we need to think outside the box’—for the past three days,” she said, reiterating the cliché. “It seems a little strange to me,” the woman continued with bemusement. “In my

English economist and writer Barbara Ward, an eminent intellectual and moral leader, whose legacy was rooted in the belief that the environment and development are fundamentally linked. Human beings, she once wrote, had forgotten how to act as good guests on earth and to tread lightly on our planet as other creatures do.

As is so often the case with a shared international issue, getting everyone to agree that a problem needs to be solved is far easier than getting individual countries to agree on what they themselves will do to solve it.