Up Close and On the Ground With Canada’s Intrepid Tree Planters
Photographer and filmmaker Rita Leistner was a planter herself for years, before returning to document the grueling seasonal profession.
Tree Planter Russell Robertson (2017).jpg
In Canada, logging companies hire professional tree planters to place seedlings in the ground by hand. It’s a seasonal job—physically demanding and over rough terrain. Leistner has found that most people can’t appreciate just how demanding it is. In fact, she credits her time planting trees as preparing her for being a photographer in conflict zones. “Someone at my agency in New York at the time, when I‘d been working in Iraq, was giving me advice, and they’re like, ‘Well, you should take tree planting off your bio because it looks trivial next to your other accomplishments.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, those like half-million trees that I planted, that was one of the hardest things I will have ever done in my life.’”
image.jpg
The tree planters in my project are working for logging companies and for the government. But tree planting is in transition. It’s going from being something securely within the forestry industry to a kind of anthropocene symptom and solution to climate change. According to headlines, planting billions of trees is one of the most feasible and affordable ways of taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Who is going to plant those billions? It won’t be done by volunteers planting a few trees a day. Canada’s professional tree planters are capable of planting upwards of 2,000 to 5,000 or more trees per day! If tree planting were an Olympic sport, Canadian tree planters would win all the gold.
image.jpg
image.jpg
image.jpg
https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...rs-photography