A man of the trees

American Forests, Spring, 2004 by Graham Mole

"Mighty oaks from little acorns grow" could have been a tailor-made motto for Richard St. Barbe Baker, founder of the Men of the Trees organization. He helped save the California redwoods, battled to stop the Sahara spreading, and was said to be responsible for the planting of 27,000 million trees.

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Baker's remarkable life was recently commemorated with a simple bronze sculpture in his birthplace village, West End on England's South Coast.

Born in 1889, Richard St. Barbe Baker lived in that age of British Empire when do-gooding was regarded as a natural duty and responsibility. Baker was destined for the church but, while at college in Canada, saw dustbowls created through lack of trees and decided to devote his life to forestry.

The organization Men of the Trees was conceived from his experiences in Kenya. As a junior forestry officer, Baker heard of whole tribes dying as the forests on which they relied were destroyed.

In one of his more than 20 books he wrote of a Saharan tribe: "They found themselves in the last remaining triangle of the forest with 1,000 miles of desert in front and a 1,000 miles of desert behind them. The Chiefs had forbidden marriage and the women refused to bear children as the end of the forest, and with it their survival, was in sight. They did not wish to raise sons and daughters for certain starvation so they had resolved to die out."

The government didn't have enough money to ward off the forests' demise, so Baker had locals fight the desert's spread by planting trees.

He also realized that important events in Africa were preceded by a dance. Hence, on July 22, 1922, 3,000 A-Kikuyu warriors who'd already been rehearsed arrived in Muguga, "the place without trees," and danced before an audience of 12,000. "That day a power was generated with joyfulness that brought warring tribes together to vie with each other in planting trees," Baker wrote.

He'd worked with Lord Baden Powell in the early years of the Boy Scouts movement, so Baker enlisted young warriors and farmers as Forest Scouts who were then nicknamed by the neighbouring Masai "Watu wa Miti" or "Men of the Trees."

Barbe wrote about the Men of the Trees in a June 1924 article in American Forests, then known as American Forests and Forest Life. He later wrote for the magazine about his efforts in the Sahara.

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The scouts promised to plant 10 trees or seedlings each year. If they couldn't think of a good deed to do for the day, they had to go to the forest station and plant 50 saplings. When the rains came, these were planted out as a new forest.

Two years later in London, Men of the Trees was born and Baker began to work on saving California's redwoods. Forming the Save the Redwoods Fund, he spent 10 years campaigning, fundraising, and getting government backing, resulting in the creation of a 17,000-acre reserve.

In 1926 he organized the first World Forestry Congress. But he is best known for his work on Men of the Trees, traveling worldwide to persuade people and their governments of the crucial need for tree cover. He wrote articles, pamphlets, and books; lectured; and lobbied heads of state. Richard St. Barbe Baker died in 1982, still campaigning, at age 93.