TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021290/0212640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.5 KB | 138 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 74

Forest of Dreams


By Lance Morrow


    With the names of trees you can make a fine pagan bouquet
of words: hornbeam, ginkgo, quickbeam, oak, white willow,
tamarind, Lombardy poplar, false cypress, elder, laburnum,
larch, baobab, black gum, rowan, hazel, whitebeam, tree of
heaven, ash . . .

    At one time trees were sacred. Gods inhabited them and took
their forms. Trees were druidic. They rose out of the earth,
gesticulating, tossing their hair. They were the tenderest
life-form: cooling, sheltering, calming, enigmatic. Or else
they might harbor terrors: beasts and devils in the dark
forest. They were, in either case, magic. Still are, of course,
although they have also evolved into mere lumber.

    The spiritual descendants of those who worshiped trees may
sentimentalize them now as some green sermon. Ronald Reagan did
not. Once during the 1980 campaign, in a nuke-the-wimps frame
of mind, Reagan claimed that no matter what environmentalists
say, trees are a source of deadly pollution. On the campaign
plane later, Reagan's press secretary James Brady sighted
forests below and shouted, "Killer trees! Killer trees!" It
seems that Reagan was confusing nitrous oxide with deadlier
oxides of nitrogen. Never mind.

    The Republican President in the White House now may not
poeticize trees -- he takes a certain pride in not poeticizing
anything -- but he does have a fine secular appreciation of
what trees do. They hold the earth and scrub the air. Chop them
down, and the world becomes a moonscape in a greenhouse.
Egypt's eastern desert is a cautionary text: each tree in the
sparse landscape is under the protection of a Bedouin family.
Sometimes the people build a wall around each tree to guard the
leaves from goats.

    George Bush, who said he wanted to be an environmental
President, is making trees a kind of fetish of his
Administration. In his budget submitted last week, Bush
allotted $175 million to plant 1 billion trees this year. By
the year 2000 there should be 10 billion new trees that
eventually should absorb 13 million tons of carbon dioxide a
year, or 5% of the nation's annual emissions of the gas.

    The news is that a larger environmental ambition is in
harness. John Kennedy launched the Peace Corps. There may be
some symmetry in the fact that a man in the Bush White House
has hatched the idea for something called the Earth Corps,
which will try to enact the spirit of the last line of
Kennedy's Inaugural Address in 1961: "Here on earth God's work
must truly be our own."

    The Earth Corps is the inspiration of James Pinkerton, the
31-year-old Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy
Planning. Pinkerton did not begin by thinking about trees, but
rather about the wreckage of America's inner cities and the
prospects that face young black males. Looking for an approach
to the problem, he considered the way that the Army, at its
best, trains people -- teaches them discipline, teamwork and
such values as courage, honor, strength, loyalty, pride. The
experience, when all goes well, can transform lives. The welfare
system institutionalizes an abject status quo and produces
generations of angry, mired victims.

    Pinkerton made a triangular connection among these points:
the unused energy and gifts of young blacks, the real needs of
the environment, and the motivating focus of some parts of
military life. Pinkerton wanted to remove the Earth Corps from
direct Government (and therefore congressional/political)
control and from the sort of bureaucratic and ideological
overelaboration that came with the Great Society. Unlike
Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, which was run
by the U.S. Army, the Earth Corps is to be not a Government
agency but a nonprofit corporation funded by private donations
and perhaps eventually some Government grants. Its director and
chief executive officer is John Wheeler, 45, an intense,
effective idealist who graduated from West Point in 1966,
served in Viet Nam, took degrees from Harvard Business School
and Yale Law School and among other things headed the
foundation that got the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial installed on
the Mall in Washington.

    With a grant of $300,000 in seed money from the Annie E.
Casey Foundation and office space near the White House donated
by lawyer Allan Fox, Wheeler is developing plans to establish
an Earth Corps Academy, probably in Virginia, by next year. The
corps will recruit 500 cadets for a two-year tour of service
that will start with three months of forestry, academic and
environmental training at the academy. The recruits will be
young men -- and women -- ages 16 to 21, with preference given
to attracting the poor. Recruits will have to pass a qualifying
examination and must be drug free. Their main work will be
reforesting the nation, starting with some 1.3 million acres of
South Carolina that were torn apart by Hurricane Hugo.
Eventually, Wheeler hopes, the corps will attract 4,000
recruits a year. By encouraging local and state conservation
corps as well, the Earth Corps may be able to double Bush's 10
billion trees by the year 2000.

    Cadets will wear uniforms with the Earth Corps insignia (the
earth seen from space and the words TRUTH, DUTY, ONE EARTH.)
They will receive food, shelter and the minimum wage, a portion
to be set aside in savings. When a cadet leaves the corps, he
will have technical skills and environmental training. The
corps will work to find him a job or a path to higher
education.

    Pinkerton and Wheeler are concerned that the military image
might deter recruits. It is the military esprit they want, not
military coercion or rigidity. Wheeler is also steering 10,000
miles clear of the welfare mentality. The corps will not be
remedial, not mandatory, not a punishment, not an entitlement,
not cushy and not trivial. Excellence and dignity are words
that recur in Wheeler's conversation. Cadets will do hard,
necessary work -- reforestation, fire fighting, fire
prevention, wetland protection, cleaning up oil spills and
protecting habitats for endangered species.

    The Earth Corps is still a seedling. But it is a daring
idea. From the first landfall, the logic of the American
enterprise was the ax, clearing the way west through
wilderness. That was a way to make a civilization, as Brazil
is now making a civilization by burning itself down. The idea
of the Earth Corps draws a line that circles back to the
sacred.