“Forty pine, forty larch, twenty spruce. It’s a long run so single-line in, fill the fingers, and bag out at the back. Don’t fuck up the access.”
My icicle fingers force stiff shoelaces through the metal hook eyelets at the top of my boots as my foreman calls out the instructions for the day. Myself and four other tree planters have just tumbled out of the warm pick-up truck into the frosty 8am mountain air. Beneath the layer of thick mist that will clear in a few hours, fallen logs and other slash form the graveyard of a forest that once was. We will soon begin slamming our shovels into the ground every 3-4 metres, covering the cut-block with three different species of tree: pine, spruce and larch. Cedar was probably logged as well, but it’s easier to log those on the coast so they rarely get replanted here in the interior British Columbia. Poplar, alder, balsam, and others definitely grew here once, but they don’t make great lumber – pine, larch, and spruce are ideal lumber.
We load our bags with between 300 and 500 baby trees. The percentage of each species we need to plant changes every day (40-40-20 today). The cut-block today is narrow and heads straight out from the landing with limited road access, forcing us to load our bags heavier than usual, plant as far as we can while filling any narrow logged blips along the treeline, then walk all the way back to the truck when we run out of trees. Planting back to the truck would save time walking at the start of the day but would cut off access to the back for the end of the day, and nothing is worse than having to deadwalk your last full bag-ups all the way to the back because you planted out the front at the beginning of the day.
Loaded with 50+ lbs of baby trees around our waists, we feel the spiked bottoms of our caulk boots scratch against the rocky landing until we climb up the cut-bank into the block. It will be nine hours, around two thousand trees each, and countless scrapes and bruises before the five of us clamber exhaustedly back into the truck.
My life gives the impression of being divided into two seemingly opposite halves:
1. Attending school in the city (first undergrad and now grad school). This is almost entirely digital with occasional meet-ups either in class or in coffee shops. Physical exercise is usually for the sake of exercise and the most valued active part of myself is my brain.
2. Tree planting in a remote work camp in British Columbia. Digital communication here is only out of necessity because the “real communication” happens in person in the moment; there is extremely limited cell service anyways. Physical exercise is the entire nature of the job and the most valued active part of myself is my body.
Is there something to learn from bouncing between these two extremes? Are they even as extreme as I’m making them out to be?
There is often a sense of “here and now” in tree planting camp that is difficult to find in my non-planting life. The increased sense of presence also helps me remember what happens in a day. I can describe in detail the many aspects of bush life; the people and conversations, the layout of the cut-block, the smells, the equipment, and how the weather/bugs/temperatures/crew morale/slash level/anything else affected the day. In my office life, there is little I can even remember happening in an entire day. What I can describe is typically side-hobbies rather than what I am actually doing in said office – the content of the courses I study for and social media interactions often leave my brain the moment I step away from the computer. When planting, I feel more; the physical exhaustion and pain caused by the job give way to relief so much more satisfying. Something as basic as water brings so much more joy while planting than it does in the office.
Jenny Odell, in her EYEO 2017 talk how to do nothing, discusses finding groundedness in the actual ground beneath our feet. We need a connection to the “direct, sensuous reality” of those things in our immediate presence. When listening to this, all I can think of is tree planting.
I think about the dirt caking onto my skin and behind my nails, remnants of these cut-blocks that will remain embedded onto my skin long after I leave them. The purplish bruises and scrapes will fade in the weeks after planting ends. As my body “heals” from the physicality of tree planting, it also separates from the world around me. The old dirt disappears from my skin as the shovel is replaced with a laptop. The only “fresh” dirt on my hands is from re-potting my mint plants into the dislocated dirt at least a foot from the actual ground. The cuts and bruises along my legs disappear as I walk along slash-free city sidewalks.
“Slash - The tree residue left of the ground as a result of forestry and other vegetation being altered by forest practices or other land use activities. Slash includes materials such as logs, splinters or chips, tree branches and tops, uprooted stumps and broken or uprooted trees and shrubs.” (Ministry of Forests and Range 85.)
Alternatively: Slash – the dismembered and uprooted 70% of plant-bodies left behind after people are finished taking the 30% of plant-bodies they want from the decimated forest. Slash also includes new plant-bodies seeking to reclaim the forest, such as fast-growing alder and poplar
If cut-blocks are the graveyards of the forests and their destroyed plant-bodies, then cities are the graveyards of cut-blocks. Cities were cleared of forests much longer ago than the cut-blocks, but they still hold this natural past. All land does.
Maybe it’s the sense of “bio-permanence” that feels so grounding about digging through the dirt all day? Yes, people might clear the trees and even replace them with concrete sidewalks for a while, but they’ll be back. Whether we replant them or not, they’ll be back. It takes so much human effort to maintain the physical structures we’ve built on top of the dirt; renovating old buildings, cutting down trees growing too close to the road, repairing cracked sidewalks, uprooted grass growing inside the cracks. If we all just stopped for a while, the city would become “uninhabitable” by city standards but perfectly habitable for almost everything else. When we cut down a forest, whether or not we build a city on top, we make it “uninhabitable” for much of the life that was there before. But that life will also come back. What is habitable vs. inhabitable is just a matter of perspective.
This makes me wonder about the association a lot of people have between the natural world in general and “meaning.” People, myself included, often retreat from the city for brief periods in an attempt to find a refreshing relief from the fast pace and somewhat meaningless structure of city life. Why would people need “relief” from their lives? Why would a retreat require the “natural world” when people themselves are “natural”? What actually is a forest or “the natural world” and is it really gone just because we’ve put other “city things” on top? Just because it takes more time and effort to see the natural world while in the city doesn’t really mean it’s gone; just masked.
Thoreau’s oft-cited quest for meaning lead him to live beside Walden Pond for two years but the fact that he was even able to walk between Concord, Massachusetts, and his cabin in the woods is a far cry from what would be possible now. In the 1850s, few cities contained more than 100 000 people; today, that is hardly considered a city. Walking outside most cities nowadays would lead to smaller city neighbourhoods, then suburbs, then farmland, then towns, then more farmland, and then maybe some protected/regulated wildlife area.
To arrive in my own planting camp (in a typical non-COVID year) requires several flights, one 3-4 hour drive on a regular road, and another hour or so bumping down a windy dirt logging road. Deep along these logging roads through crown land are the only places I’ve seen homemade cabins with squatters living inside. But these cabins have a high chance of being issued a demolition order as “squatters rights” are essentially obsolete in British Columbia for both private and crown land.
Not that Thoreau would have cared much for the legality of his own cabin, but he would have a much greater chance of being evicted and slapped with a $100 000 fine now. His meticulously calculated expenses for the year pale in comparison even with inflation. Re-connection to and with the life (human too, but particularly non-human) around us in the way Thoreau imagined is no longer tenable. It’s no longer really possible to find meaning through total disconnection from our techno-industrial society.
There is another crucial element of planting life that, I’ve found, is difficult to find in city life: constant direct interaction with the same 40-50 people for the duration of the planting season. I personally know every individual I see in a day and can give my full attention to whoever I talk to. In the city, my energy and efforts are spread among different people in different places. Rather than one cohesive group of 40-50 people sharing everything, there are hundreds of networks of different communities of people who cannot possibly dedicate all their time and effort into one intimate cause.
Andrew Sullivan, a former columnist in New York Magazine who found himself addicted to social media, articulates the importance of the types of direct human-to-human personal relationships. These are the types of interactions I find so often in planting camps but not city life:
Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.”
The reference to aeons of humanity is, I think, important because it links our current interactions with each other to an entire human history of connections. They are how we experience our very humanity. Encountering hundreds of nameless faces that I couldn’t possibly remember in one single day, interacting with strangers who flow seamlessly in and out of my life with no expectation of genuine connection or commitment, can feel disingenuous to the deeply unique, personal and human trait of building meaningful social communities with each other.
So what do I make of the stark contrasts between tree planting and city life? Do I think everyone ditch a few months of their life every year to clamber around decimated forests and mountainsides far away from most civilization? Honestly, if people are (physically, financially, psychologically, etc.) able to, then probably. Canada’s reforestation initiatives are growing anyway so there’s lots of opportunity.
BUT is it necessary or even possible? I think there are three important aspects to the meaning I gain from tree planting but have a difficult time finding in the city. While it’s easier to find them while planting, maybe there are other ways.
1. Physical connection to immediate surroundings
2. Physical connection to people
3. The combination of exhaustion and relief
This prioritization of physicality in relation to people, place, and effort helps guide my mind to a place of meaning. In planting camp, these three things happen all together, exerting my body physically through and in the land in close community with other planters.
It would be incredibly difficult to find these three things in a city that is so far removed from the altered natural world that exists far beneath it. To constantly re-connect oneself to that in the face of an entire techno-industrial society working against it would take a lot of willpower. If not full-blown a full-blown anarchist mindset to “burn it all down,” at least an active resistance to the disembodied, disconnected, and absent lifestyle somewhat expected of people in major cities.
I think there are groups and communities doing this; community gardens, intentional communities, teams of dumpster divers, etc, but I’m not sure these go far enough. Admittedly, it’s difficult to think of what would be “far enough” because it would need to be extremely grounded, present, and human when, frankly, an article can’t do that. Whatever “going far enough” is, it would mean connecting with some deep-rooted aspect of our humanity that our current techno-industrial society denies. I’m reminded of a planting memory from a previous year:
A piece of blue flagger marks the line of trees most recently planted by a crewmate. I slowly make my way alongside it, leaving my own row of blue flagger in my place. Chad, the planter two trees ahead of me, is moving slower than usual; we both are. It’s the end of the season and our bodies are weak with over 40 days of intense physical activity.
Suddenly, we hear a human screech from the opposite corner of the block. Startled, we both look up to see Molly, our spunky foreman, storming toward the truck in a fury.
“CHAD!” she screams, bouncing off the ground with the energy needed to release her roar. “CHAAAAD!”
“Whaaat?” Chad calls back. His voice betrays a hit of fear; Molly can be a sweet and protective foreman but she can also be a pillar of rage that will take you down in her stride.
In the distance, we can see Molly climb high up onto a log in order to ensure Chad’s attention, her own position of authority, and that her voice projects further.
“It’s CUSTOMARY,” she screams out in the direction of Chad, “in human societies to BURY YOUR SHIT!”
I stop planting to nearly cry with laughter and look at Chad, who has stopped as well and turned beet red.
“Yeah um… sorry?” He calls back, laughing uncomfortably.
Part of what I love about this memory is just the image of Molly stumbling upon a pile of Chad’s feces, then jumping on that log to scream about it. But also, in reference to this article, Molly’s outburst reconnected our own activities to those same aeons of human history that Andrew Sullivan did (albeit in a cruder manner). Whether into a city’s sewage system, a latrine, or holes dug by tiny tree planting shovels, we are still connected to this aeons-old human social custom of burying our feces. Sometimes planters like to think of themselves as rejecting “society” but really it is just one urbanized form of society (cities) they are rejecting.
This memory also contains all three of my favourite aspects of planting with a feeling of groundedness, embodiment, and presence. We were exhausted after the day's work at the time, but somehow this makes the memory even stronger: I distinctly remember what if felt like being there, laughing at Molly’s outburst and Chad’s response. There was also a strong feeling of camaraderie and connection between the five members of our crew that enabled us to build so many distinct memories that year.
If we are to reclaim in the city this sense of groundedness, embodiment, and presence that creates such meaningful memories, I think we’ll need to find other ways to reconnect to what and who we were before the city (aside from just fecal-buriers). We’ll need to rebuild this connection to the people around us, the physical ground beneath our feet, and our own physical body’s capacity and the need to act.
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