A list of people with a common symptom:
Johnny Appleseed
The Man Who Planted Trees
L.A. Treepeople's founder Andy Lipkis
Nobel Laureate and Greenbelt Movement founder, Wangari Maathai.
These are the names of people united across time and continents by the one feature — an extreme compulsion to plant trees. I do not use the word 'compulsion' here carelessly. I make tree planting sound like a psychological disorder. And it is.
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines 'compulsion' as "an irresistible persistent impulse to perform an act." For an immediate example I take a look around. Much of what I do every day may, in fact, be a compulsion. Coffee drinking, eating, going to work, kissing my sweetie — compulsions!
A case to add to our list: Lionel Dennis Johnston, retired iron-worker, San Luis Obispo resident, dedicated for the past 20 years to planting trees on the Central Coast. He has grown, given away, and/or planted between 20,000 and 30,000 trees since 1991! His compulsion began after he was struck on the head by a falling piece of wood while working construction — a Phineas Gage for our case study!
Lionel spent most of his life as a union iron worker, building bridges, libraries, nuclear power plants — his compulsions! He was a busy beaver until a small piece of wood fell on his head. I was a Mogli of the Rocky Mountains until a cloud of depression landed on my head. Thankfully, we are both still alive! Now going to work for us means tree planting.
As metaphorically fascinating as Lionel's accident was — this sylvan thunderbolt, this enlightenment from above — the cold truth is that Lionel has lived in almost constant pain from age 50 to age 71. And the pain continues. That little piece of wood fell from on-high and built up critical velocity before punching through his hardhat and sending shock waves through his skeleton. The impact broke bones in his back. It left a small hole in his skull, now patched with a metal plate. But out of his constant pain he lives a vigorous life.
Add another case to these: Gregory John Ellis. That is yours truly.
How did I get into tree planting? For me, it was partly inherited — I was born in the forests of Wyoming to biologist parents who raised me like a wolf. I moved from the least populated state to the most populated state in the USA. My compulsion started after a bout with depression.
Lionel and I have discussed our shared compulsion, and that of our forerunners, at length, searching for a cause. We have developed an epidemiology for our disorder.
First, we find that people with a certain amount of pain, whether it is psychological or physical, are most susceptible to an urge to plant trees. Pain can break-off routine and interrupt societally ingrained compulsions. After conditioning myself to be a computer geek in the mould of my father, I woke up depressed one day. I spent three years severely depressed to a world that seemed to have the sole aim of making uneven surfaces flat and everything else square or digital. Of course there is much subtlety and a whole lot of beauty to the modern world we've somewhat inadvertently created. We live in a degenerative economy, one that degrades the complexity and order of the natural world, one that increases entropy in the open system of the earth by burning, crushing, and homogenizing. This is an insight that is difficult to see because it is painful! Hence, it's easier to see if you already have pain.
This realization tends to compound the pain that initiated it. Tree planting was an easy solution to both forms of pain that Lionel and I happened upon. Tree planting is the basis of a regenerative economy, one that restores real complexity, immaculate order, and actually decreases entropy within the open system of the earth. But tree planting is not the end-all to a degenerative economy. It is merely the most basic form of a regenerative economy. Regenerative solutions must be full spectrum and come in many forms which I cannot begin to predict, reaching all disciplines, creating new disciplines, and transcending disciplines. We cannot feed, warm, and shelter ourselves by tree planting alone.
Or maybe we could!
Back to the epidemiology of tree planting. Actually, there are two distinct pathways to tree planting. For many individuals — e.g. Lionel and myself — the discovery of a regenerative economy is pain-driven, a palliative alternative for recovering addicts of the degenerative economy. The second comes from the sheer, childlike-pleasure in the ideas and experiences of tree planting. Tree planting, in theory and practice, happens to be intrinsically enchanting to people not yet fully indoctrinated into the degenerative economy.
There is no cure for our disorder, which itself is a cure. However, we take solace in the hope that our disorder will one day become common place. Perhaps it will become so common place that it will be declassified. So, I give away the intent of this column: Be careful what you read here! Knowledge is contagious.
Snow Plant (Sarcodes sanguinea)
Photo by: Shelley Ellis
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