A journalist spent $11,000 on a forgotten island nobody wanted. Everyone thought he was insane. Brendon Grimshaw walked away from a newsroom career in Yorkshire, signed the papers four minutes before midnight on the last night of his Seychelles holiday, and inherited a dead patch of land called Moyenne. The place was a wasteland. Coconuts so tangled they couldn't even fall to the ground. No wildlife worth mentioning. Just silence. So he got to work. Alongside his friend René Lafortune, Brendon spent the next 39 years planting trees one by one. By hand. No machines. No crew. Just two men and a vision. 16,000 trees later, Moyenne looked nothing like the barren rock he'd bought. Then came the animals. He reintroduced more than 120 giant Aldabra tortoises, a species teetering on extinction. Around 2,000 new birds found their way back to the island. Today, two-thirds of all the fauna in the Seychelles call Moyenne home. Word got out. Tourism exploded across the region in the 80s, and developers came knocking. A Saudi prince reportedly slid $50 million across the table for the island. Brendon said no. "I don't want the island to become a favorite vacation spot for the rich," he said. "Better let it be a national park that everyone can enjoy." In 2008, that's exactly what happened. Moyenne became the smallest national park on Earth. Lafortune died in 2007. Brendon stayed on the island until his own death in 2012. He's buried there, next to his father, surrounded by every tree he ever planted. He took a dead island and gave it back to the world. Source: BBC / Silverback Digest / Story Seychelles