IN the village square of Anthili, 140 miles north of Athens, on the vast plain where the Persian King Xerxes camped in 480 B.C. before he charged Thermopylae, there stands a marble statue. It is not a monument to the defenders of Thermopylae, but to the recent rebirth of Anthili and the man who made it possible: Walter Eugene Packard, a Point Four soil reclamation expert from California.
Thirteen years ago, Packard persuaded the villagers to let him irrigate 100 acres of their arid, salty plain to grow rice. Within five years. Packard's project in Anthili and other towns had converted Greece...