In 1987, a botanist named Hugh Wilson looked at 109 hectares of exhausted hill country on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula. Most of its old-growth forest had long since been cleared for grazing, and much of what remained was buried under gorse. He proposed doing essentially nothing about it.

Gorse is a spiny European shrub with yellow flowers that New Zealand farmers have spent generations trying to eradicate. They burned it, sprayed it, bulldozed it—and it kept coming back. Wilson’s plan was to stop. Leave it. Let it grow.

The reaction was not warm. As Earth Island Journal recounted, one Banks Peninsula farmer wrote to the local newspaper in the late 1980s that he was “all for preserving the little bits of bush that are here, but as for letting gorse go and turning it into native forest, that’s fools and dreamers stuff.”

The phrase stuck. Three decades later, it became the title of Fools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest, a 30-minute documentary released by Happen Films in 2019 that is free to........

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