TOMAS BORSA
Opinions Editor

Treeplanting: in common lore, it is the summer job of hippies, dropouts and soap-fearing vagrants whose carbon footprint (Birkenstock, naturally) is only slightly smaller than the gas-tank of their converted bio-fuel school-bus.

I’ve known staph infections with better hygiene than some planters and so I can’t help but concede that perhaps there is some limited truth to this facet of the tree-planting stereotype.

Allow me to construct as honest (and jaded) an image of treeplanting as I can: 10 hours of marching through brush with a 50 pound, lopsided bag uphill, downhill, through carrion piles and wasp nests, shoulder deep in botany with no ostensible purpose apart from maiming, tripping and generally aggravating you to the point of mental breakdown.

All of these factors contribute to some of the highest stress, dropout and injury rates in any industry. But over two seasons of planting, I’ve come to realize that treeplanting, in and of its grubby self, is not an intrinsically valuable, nor ecologically beneficial act in the slightest. Treeplanting is not a tree-hugging, Gaian eco-quest but a cog in the gear of the lumber industry and a practice only marginally more earth-friendly than strip-mining. Let me explain.

Treeplanting is entirely contract based. Typically, the contracts are with logging companies or mills who dictate density, species and quality requirements for each area to be planted. Contracts may also (less commonly) be for grain or cattle farmers, who sell the carbon credits to oil or logging companies to offset excessive emissions.

And to ensure growth in the harshest of conditions, the trees themselves are not so much organic seedlings as pesticide-laden marvels of chemical engineering. Naturally, most veteran planters look past the dangers of long-term exposure to these chemicals.

The utility of treeplanting lies in its efficiency, and its highest cause is the maximization of crop yields. Ultimately, contracting depends on there being a demand for paper products — an inherently biologically damaging venture.

As much as I might resent the hypocrisy of the industry, I love treeplanting and I will do it for as long as my body allows me to.

But let’s be honest; from the outset, treeplanting is not designed to recreate a natural habitat, nor is it in any way a truly sustainable practice — from the high pay to the design of the industry, gains are only ever short-term. Reforestation is intimately linked to deforestation, and planting and logging are essentially one and the same — different stages of the same inorganic, mechanized process.