Small but fertile oases — which number around 35,000 and are dotted across the country — are some of the last remaining scraps of the tall, lush natural forests that once covered Ethiopia, and which, along with their biodiversity, have all but disappeared.
“It’s a remote part of the world, where the natural environment has become part of the spiritual environment,” says Christof Mauch, director of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the University of Munich, Germany. “It is culturally, as well as scientifically, important to save these pockets of forests,” he says.
