January
2000
The
Man Who Plants Trees
The Satya Interview
with David Kidd
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Vietnam veteran, Transcendental Meditation teacher,
and vegetarian, David Kidd is also the coordinator of an extraordinary
community movement to plant trees throughout America. Satya talked to
him about how he got started and what he learned about community organizing.
When did your journey to plant trees begin?
In December of 1971 at the age of 20, I finished my one-year tour
as a sergeant in the U.S. army in Vietnam and went home on leave. I had
already become a vegetarian because I got really sick on army food over
there. There was a lot of sickness from the food, although you never hear
about that. While at home, I got my act together and made some real serious
commitments because I was going back [to Vietnam] for seven months and
all the signs pointed toward the fact that I may not make it back home.
So, I got my life and my philosophy and religious life in order and made
some real commitments, one of which was to be non-violent. So here I was
in Vietnam for the next seven months serving with the commitment to non-violence
and a vegetarian diet.
How did you manage to be non-violent in Vietnam?
I didn’t have to shoot anyone during those seven months if that’s
what you mean; but it was a combat situation. I ended up being sergeant
of the guards on a small base. Basically, I had to go from bunker to bunker,
and keep everybody on track. It was a rough time. That was in 1972, and
there were two big offensives in Vietnam—the first one was December
1968 and the second was Easter 1972; and I was in that area during that
time.
How did you get into your project to plant trees?
When I got out of the service I tried Transcendental Meditation (TM).
I liked it so much—because it helped me to adjust to my situation—that
I went to Europe for a year and studied to be a teacher of TM and I’ve
taught it for the last 25 years. I’ve been doing that work, which
is promoting individual and world peace, and then basically teaching stress
management programs. I started a vegetarian club in Canton, Ohio in about
1986 and it is very successful, running on its own now.
In 1988 I read about global warming. I thought that if
planting trees would contribute to solving the global warming problem
then I should start a project to plant trees. I did research and found
out that at that time trees were cheap: you could buy a pine tree for
eight cents or a one-year-old hardwood for 12 or 15 cents (now those prices
have doubled).
I thought that we could surely teach everyone to plant
a tree every year, and for 10 years we’d give people trees to get
them started. So, along with 300,000 people in my county, I decided we
should plant three million trees in our county. All the professional foresters
I talked to said that it was ridiculous; that there was no way I was going
to be able to do that. Their rationale was that it had never been done
before, and that if you didn’t have a degree in forestry or horticulture
or agriculture you couldn’t plant a tree responsibly and that you
certainly couldn’t trust children to plant trees.
I thanked them but went ahead anyway. The results have
been that in these last 11 years, in Stark County, Ohio, we have planted
2.4 million trees out of our three million goal. We’re doing 200,000
a year, so in three more years we’ll reach the three million mark.
What did the foresters say about your plan?
First they said you couldn’t plant that many trees because there
was too much volume—300,000 trees in a community: who would do the
work? They were used to hiring people and going out and planting trees.
They didn’t ever use volunteers. They said that you couldn’t
trust children, that if you gave the trees to school kids they would just
throw them away and they’d never make it into the ground. They said
that the ones that did make it into the ground wouldn’t be planted
in the right location and so they’d end up having to be cut down
anyway. We’ve certainly proved that to be wrong. We’ve actually
done some research and did a survival survey [of trees] which showed a
60 percent survival rate.
How do you organize the logistics of such an endeavor?
Basically, we buy trees every year and give them to people who agree
to plant them and take care of them and let them grow to maturity. They’re
not to be used for resale. Out of a couple hundred thousand trees every
year, we give about 60,000 trees to schools in my area. This is one community
project. One hundred and thirty two schools received their trees with
bags to put them in and instruction forms—all delivered on the same
day by volunteers around the town. We also take orders each spring and
give out another 100,000 trees to people who order in advance. They get
a sheet so they know what kinds of trees we have. They order and we try
to give them as many as we can. They don’t always get what they want
but we give what we can.
We also put another 10 to 20,000 out in strip-mined lands
that have been reclaimed and need forest trees. Instead of grass, we plant
trees. This year we’ve planted 11,000 trees along the highway in
my county, bringing the total that have been planted on the highway to
50,000. With 100 volunteers on a Saturday, we can go out and plant 10,000
trees.
How do you get the land?
The highway planting is on public land. All the rest of the trees
go out to private properties. School kids take them home and plant them
in their yards. All the farmers who get trees and people who get them
at work share them with their friends. Churches get them and give them
out. All kinds of groups get trees and go out and do special projects.
We have a lot of scout projects and other projects. We take horticulture
kids out of school to do planting.
How did you go about community organizing?
The first thing I did before I ever launched the project was to form
an advisory committee. If you’re going to do a community project
this massive that may be subject to criticism, you have to disarm all
of your critics right up front.
To do this, I did kind of a “three-step” method.
The first thing I did was to invite all the people who were capable of
being my critics to be on my advisory board. What you do is you get everyone
with a horticulture degree, everyone teaching in the colleges in either
forestry, biology, or botany, agriculture, all the federal, state, county,
and city experts and invite them to be on the board. People think of the
expert on trees in their community to be the park director. So we invited
all the park directors to be on. The truth is the park directors are not
experts in forestry. They’re experts in cutting up trees that have
fallen down and hiring a landscape firm to put one back. They’re
mostly experts in mowing. But everyone thinks they’re the experts
in trees so we had to include them in our project.
We asked these people not to tell us whether or not we
should give away three million trees but to tell what species of trees
we should give away if we were to give away three million. We didn’t
give them permission to tell us not to do it. They basically said that
my area should be 60 percent hardwood deciduous and 40 percent conifer
with about 16 or 18 different species. So over the life of the project,
which was aimed at 11 years, we would give out those numbers of trees,
in those quantities, and those types.
The second step was to go to all the mayors. I had them
write a letter saying that our project was a great idea. Of course they
said, “What does our park director think?” And I said, “Well,
he’s on our advisory board.” And they said, “Oh, OK. We’ll
write you a letter.” Then we went to the school board and got the
superintendents to give us a letter saying that if we gave free trees
to schools, and delivered them so no one had to leave the buildings to
pick them up, and if we gave them bags and instructions, then they would
certainly encourage all of their principals to participate in the project.
Then we went to our donors. In some cases, the donors
were city groups like the Rotary Club or Knights of Columbus, and a lot
of times there were corporate donors. They always ask three things. First:
“If we’re going to support a tree project in our community,
we want to make sure the mayor agrees it’s a good idea.” We
would respond: “We have a letter from the mayor and he or she says
it’s a good idea. In fact you’ll notice that we have a letter
from seven mayors in the county, all saying that they’re happy to
have the project.”
“Oh well, then,” said the donors. “What
does our park director think? He’s in charge of trees around here.”
Again we were ready: “We have an advisory board and here’s the
list and your park director is on the advisory board and in fact here’s
a list of trees that they recommended.”
“OK. How do we know if we give you money the schools
will accept the trees?” was the third question. “Well, here’s
a letter from the superintendent….”
So you had to do all your homework. We then made financial
projections and were really honest about the whole thing. We had a very
well laid out brochure, and it helped us start out with a $30,000 project
which is now up to $70,000 in our community. By community I mean our county,
which has a population of 300,000 in an area of 374,000 acres—the
size of Cleveland and all the suburbs.
How has your project expanded?
Surprisingly, under President George Bush, there was an initiative to
increase tree planting in the U.S., and it was called “America the
Beautiful.” That program distributed some extra money to all the
states to promote volunteerism in tree planting and I clearly had the
biggest volunteer project, with 60,000 students and a total of 100,000
people out of a population of 300,000 involved. So the state of Ohio came
to me and said: “We’d like you to spread this project through
all the counties of Ohio.” I got a personal service contract with
the Department of Natural Resources’ division of Forestry to spread
the project over four years to all the counties of Ohio.
We did exactly the same thing as we did in Stark County.
We created a written proposal with all those letters and all those advisory
board forms, and talked to every mayor in the state, either got letters
from them or helped them type letters if we had to, and raised money and
launched projects in all the counties. We have now planted eight million
trees in Ohio, and with projects starting in other states we now have
reached 11.5 million trees planted. That’s how many we’ve bought,
distributed and planted. We’re not sure how many are surviving, but
we do expect that over the life of our program half of the seedlings will
live.
What are the other states?
We have projects in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas.
And I have got projects going in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska,
and other places. We’ve mailed several hundred packages of information
out around the country and around the world and have no idea what they’re
doing. So we may have started some projects that we don’t know about.
Every once in a while someone comes up to me and says we did this thing
based on your information.
Are you looking to expand the project in other ways?
Now that we’re almost done giving out the number of trees in our
area that we wanted to give out, we’ve taken a new and real exciting
direction. We looked at all the green space in the county and tried to
figure out how much of our land was being held as park land. The combination
of all the city, township, and county parks isn’t very much as a
percentage of the total land—only two or three percent. I personally
feel that just like tithing in our personal and financial life, we should
tithe 10 percent of the land to nature and leave it feral and not use
it for any other purpose.
What we’re looking for are those little scraps of
land that nobody else wants. I want the swamps. I want the marshes. I
want the ditches and the drainage ditches and the creeks and the rivers
and the banks on either side. I want the corridors of land that go along
the road that are cut off by an access road that are too small to build
or farm on and that have been mowed for the last 70 or 80 years because
somebody took all the trees off and forgot to put them back. And I want
to plant trees and protect them and leave them as forests for the benefit
of both humans and wildlife. I want the dead spaces, the pieces that are
trapped in some kind of commercial development. Sometimes you’ll
have a little space in the middle that’s dead and can’t be accessed
and somebody’s sitting there paying taxes on it and mowing it every
year. I want to reforest it and put it in our nonprofit trust and just
hold it in perpetuity as woods.
How do you go about doing that?
We have changed our articles of incorporation to allow us to be a
land trust. We’re asking for these properties to be donated to us.
There are times when we may have to buy properties instead of having them
donated, but we’ll first go around and get the easy ones. Believe
me, all over the country—and not just in Ohio—there are developers
who have, for example, developed a thousand acres and they’ve built
homes on 850 acres but have a 150 acre lowland area that’s either
swampy or wetlands which the Environmental Protection Agency will not
permit them to fill in. Guess what? For the last 20 or 30 years, they’ve
been paying taxes on that useless land and they’re tired of it. So
those are the kinds of properties that can be given to us and we can reforest
what needs to be reforested and protect the rest from encroachment. We
can put some signs up and leave them as wild space. Or, if they’re
already being used, we can put a trail in and keep them nice, and ask
people to stay on the trail and off the rest of the areas, and let them
be something boaters can enjoy, hikers, or equestrians. Then we’re
really serving a purpose in the community.
Who would look after this land?
For every piece that we get, our intention is to find the nearest
local organization that will administer it. We would turn to the nearest
Homeowners Association and invite them to maintain this property. The
immediate neighbors could be responsible for just checking for trash and
any kind of illegal dumping. Everyone can keep an eye on those places
to make sure there’s no inappropriate or criminal behavior going
on. It could be a church, or a Junior Chamber of Commerce.
We’re doing people a favor by creating parks without
them having to fund a park district. It actually saves them money—they
don’t have to buy the land but they get the use of it. Sometimes
we take private property and allow the public to have access to it. On
the other side, we also want to have sites that are strictly for wildlife,
that are not for people, and so that’s happening.
When you say we, how big is your staff?
Two.
Just two?
Yeah, and a host of volunteers.
What skills have enabled you to do all of this?
What it takes to put these kind of projects together is a person with
both vision, so they can see the opportunities, and really good organizational
skills. I believe I was just gifted with that. The important thing that
I learned from the military not to do is ever use the command form of
speech. Especially when you’re in the nonprofit world and working
with volunteers, you can never give an order, you have to ask. I really
appreciate the fact that I work with volunteers and that I get to ask
them to help. When you ask people nicely, they often just help out. That’s
been my secret of success.
How do you keep people motivated?
The answer is that you really owe it to your volunteers to teach them
how to recruit and train other volunteers. Because the ones who quit are
those who worked hard, did a good job and experienced burnout because
you didn’t recruit enough help for them. Once people are doing a
job, then they really need leadership training. To learn how to be a good
leader is to learn how to delegate. In the military you delegate by giving
orders. In the private sector, you delegate by learning how to ask. A
lot of people have a problem with that. They don’t feel that they
deserve help or they have control issues that keep them from trusting
other people to help them accomplish their goals. Or the other people
may not do it as well as they can do it, so they don’t ask for help
because of the fear that it won’t be successful. So what we have
to learn to do is to trust people to fail sometimes; and know that after
they try a couple of times, if you encourage them and help them along,
they’ll get it right. If they fail repeatedly and are hopeless in
the task, then you’ve asked the wrong person to do the job.
Who are the best volunteers?
Meditators. People involved in some form of meditation—doesn’t
matter really what—are more awake, more alert, and as they grow in
consciousness, they grow in responsibility and social awareness. So people
who have gained in consciousness are more quick to respond to the vision
of what I am trying to get at. I really have to say that I have used people
involved in Transcendental Meditation programs around the country to be
involved in starting projects and spreading them. They are connected in
their community with others who are movers and shakers and we’ve
done a lot of good things. That’s probably been one of the secrets
of my success. I’ve networked through a couple of million meditators
around the U.S. I’ve never told that to anyone but that’s the
truth.
Do you see a connective effect with this work in terms
of vegetarianism or animal rights?
The question is: Does this work help to bring together groups to work
on this project who could then realize that they might work on other activities?
We haven’t seen that yet, but it seems like a really safe project
to work on. We’re not asking people to be vegetarians or animal rights
activists. We’re not in any way a radical group. We’re actually
being a conservative group—working with parks and park directors
and organized groups in the community, and often with very conservative
business and foundation donors to do a project that everyone can agree
on.
I hope this will be a nice way to create a core group
of people who are proud of themselves for what they have done so that,
first of all, they’ll take over the activity and continue it so I
can go on and start new ones. And secondly, I hope they’ll begin
to see that if this works, maybe they can be involved in some other things.
I would suggest that both environmental groups and animal rights groups
and even vegetarian groups who want to help animals should consider having
a green space committee in their own town, village, township, or county
and share that vision of obtaining land and protecting it.
What about urban areas?
One of the risks in this thing is that you don’t want people
to give you their problems. We already have been offered pieces of land
that are not suitable and are not acceptable. As we get into urban areas
we’re going to have to do a lot of testing on the soil. In the country
it’s a reasonably safe thing to know what you’re getting into,
although you never know what’s lying in the bottom of a pond. In
the urban areas, you really have to watch out, just in case someone comes
along and says you have to pay $2 million to clean your property up. However,
we’ve already done urban tree planting projects and have created
these kind of sites, especially around industrial areas, but we have not
gone back and tried to clean the land.
What was the biggest influence in turning you on to
planting trees?
When I was about 11 years old I went down in a field and dug a tree
up and brought it back and planted it in my yard and the darn thing lived.
And I knew that, even though I had no idea what I was doing, that was
all it took—that even a kid who doesn’t know what he or she
is doing can do it. And if you tell them they can do it and you give them
a tree, then they surely can take care of it and do a good job. I have
had many parents come to me and say, “I planted a tree with my son
who’s five years old and he made sure I did it right. If there was
something wrong he’d say, ‘No, no, no. You can’t do that.
You have to do it this way.’ And we were so proud of him for really
knowing what we’re supposed to do and telling us to stop before we
planted the tree and look up to make sure there were no wires, and look
down and make sure there were no pipes under the ground.”
So we’ve learned that we can trust kids to do this
kind of work, and giving them the experience of planting a tree at that
young age will bind them to Mother Earth for the rest of their life. In
fact, someday they will drive around and they’ll go down that street
and say, “Well, I don’t live there anymore but that’s my
tree.” For the rest of their lives they’ll remember all the
trees they’ve planted and where they are and how they’re doing.
That’s the practicality of a program like this. If we can give that
experience to lots of people, then as adults they won’t be afraid
to buy things and plant them. A lot of people grow up having never planted
anything, a flower or a tree, so what we’re doing is very practical.
But it’s also a spiritual quest isn’t it—teaching
people to care?
To me this has always been a spiritual project, but we’ve never
talked about that in public. People get it individually but we’ve
never said, “We want you to share this spiritual experience with
us.” People really feel the practicality of it: every time you teach
people that they can plant a tree, including the kids, then they’re
not afraid to do it on their own somewhere else. That’s how this
whole thing spreads. It really is one of the most practical things you
can do for the environment. You think of each tree and how many birds
and squirrels and even insects you support by the planting of one tree
and multiply that by 11 million or a hundred million. It’s really
gratifying to know you’ve done a good thing for wildlife.
To find out more about David Kidd’s project, contact:
American Free Tree Program Inc., PO Box 9079, Canton, OH 44711. Tel.:
330-454-3111;Email: execdir@freetree.org;
website: www.freetree.org.
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