Shaking hands in the Kikuyu fashion

Part of what made St. Barbe an effective catalyst and lobbyist for tree planting and conservation was an ability to convey the deepest concepts of ecology in a personal and compelling way to the public. He packaged education with stories; as his friend Hugh Locke put it, "St. Barbe was a raconteur" - a storyteller. And there were many stories to tell.

For example, in the course of his life and mission St. Barbe often faced death and serious injury. He was "smashed up" three times during WWI; charged by an enraged and wounded buffalo in Kenya; was shipped back to England to die in one of the multiple instances in which he contacted malaria; suffered blood poisoning and fought off a surgeon’s threatened amputation of his leg for three days after a shipboard injury; was crushed against a wall, during a stint as a mounted policeman, by a rogue horse that had already killed a man; exhibited severe lockjaw symptoms from a poison thorn; was completely blind for two days from tree sap that had splashed in his eyes (he credited a witch doctor for his recovery); retrieved Men of the Trees paperwork in the midst of an aerial bombing during the Battle of Britain; journeyed unarmed through bandit-infested badlands; spun desperate circles through quicksand in a secondhand vehicle in a remote tract of the Sahara Desert; traveled through military and guerilla war conflicts, such as during the Mau Mau “trouble” in eastern Africa ... etc..

All of the thirty books he wrote are now, unfortunately, out-of-print. Although some of them were hastily written – one was dictated in ten days while he was sick in bed – he was an able chronicler of one of the greatest adventurers of the era: himself.

Planting trees in corn & yams, early 1920s

Moreover, in even his earliest writings on forestry he advocated mixed age, mixed species plantings of native trees for symbiotic benefits, including the prevention of disease; the combination of forestry and agriculture to maximize land use; and sustained yield through selective harvesting techniques. He condemned the clear-cutting of forests. These insights, now finding acceptance, were outside the mainstream for much of his life. They have never been expressed with more conviction.

His notions of a sentient planet earth prefigured Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. “Trees are like the skin of the earth,” St. Barbe declared. “If the being loses more than a third of its skin, it dies.”

If the story and message of Richard St. Barbe Baker had to be reduced to one word, that word would be "trees."

His contribution to the tree-planting component of the Civilian Conservation Corps was acknowledged by the bestowal of an honorary degree from the first forestry school in the United States at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan. These tributes took place during his lifetime; since then, in North America his achievements have been mostly overlooked.

Most significantly, his plans for an international undertaking to reclaim the Sahara and other deserts of the world through tree-planting have yet to be initiated on the scale he proposed.

Nonetheless he is, for all time, one of the twentieth century’s most colorful, versatile and important heroic figures. As the planetary environmental crisis deepens, the world will increasingly turn for inspiration and insight to the message of Richard St. Barbe Baker, the Man of the Trees.

PAUL MANTLE

Excerpts from his Eulogy St. Barbe, His Ideas

Global Vision In Memoriam