A brief history of a global environmental movement

The founder and driving force behind International Tree Foundation (from 1922 to 1992, Men of the Trees) was Richard St. Barbe Baker (1889-1982), whose experiences working as a civil servant during the 1920s reinforced a sense of vocation he had experienced as a child.

Among the trees near his Hampshire home, he had felt himself overwhelmed by the forest’s beauty, his heart brimming with “a sense of unspeakable thankfulness”. Baker’s father was a forester and evangelist, and Baker himself went to Canada as a missionary. In 1910, he saw deserts in the making where trees had been felled and soil was drifting, and responded by encouraging tree-planting around homesteads and for shelter-belts; he helped develop tree nurseries on the Saskatchewan University farm.

He returned to England to study Divinity at Cambridge, and was there when the 1914-18 war broke out. After serving as an artillery officer, he returned to Cambridge in 1919, but the object of his missionary zeal had changed and he sat for the Diploma in Forestry. The Colonial Office assigned him to Kenya in 1920, where he found a troubled landscape. Arab husbandmen had invaded the forests, removing the trees which protected the soil, while their herds of goats prevented the tree cover from returning. Now they were succeeded by European colonisers who mercilessly felled wide areas of forest.

He offered his dream of world unity and rural regeneration.

In Kenya, many tribal chiefs did not see the need to plant trees, leaving it instead to nature, while younger warriors took more of an interest in dance rituals. Baker suggested instituting a “Dance of the Trees”, along the lines of ritual dances for crop planting. Three thousand warriors came to the camp, taking their place in front of the solitary sacred tree which had been allowed to survive. He called for volunteers to plant trees and protect the remaining native forests: thus was born, one hundred years ago, the International Tree Foundation. Volunteers across Kenya planted thousands of seedlings from nurseries and helped establish a more varied bank of young trees. Baker worked with the tribesmen to reestablish forests.

During this time, he commented that the young men who helped him develop nurseries were brought up in a tradition of mixed farming and grew healthy crops without using chemical fertilisers. Such observations in time attracted Baker into the organic farming movement as it began to take shape during the 1930s and ‘40s. Baker criticised his superior officer for thoughtlessly serving “a regime which had done virtually nothing to protect the soil, forests or wildlife”, and his efforts to develop scientific resources were frequently frustrated by officialdom.

In 1924, Richard St. Barbe Baker became Assistant Conservator of Forests in Nigeria, responsible for an area the size of France, which included one of the best surviving rain forests in tropical Africa, full of splendid mahogany trees. He noted that the prized Guarea mahoganies were never found in single stands, again drawing conclusions from this about the dangers of monoculture. He saw a forest as the perfect farming system, manuring itself and working efficiently with no need for pesticides or weed-killers. The humus-rich soil acted as a sponge, a huge reservoir which prevented flooding and released its water in the form of springs. But despite his reverence for the forest, Baker was having to issue permits to fell huge amounts of mahogany while being short of funds for reforestation. The colonial administration had adopted a purely profitmaking approach, with fast-growing exotic trees being planted for the sake of rapid timber production, regardless of ecological suitability.

Forestry as an economic science could succeed, Baker came to believe, only by aiming to approximate the conditions of the natural forests which he studied all over Africa during the mid-1920s. Recovery was possible, only, however, if it was not driven by the short-term profit motive.

Towards the end of his life Baker summed up his faith in terms of obedience to the natural order: “The fate of an individual or a nation will always be determined by the degree of his or its harmony with the forces and laws of nature and the universe”. This belief in a God-given natural order, the limits of which could not be exceeded with impunity, was a central feature of the early organic movement’s philosophy.

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The term “the organic movement”, in the context of the 1930s and ‘40s, requires some explanation, albeit brief. Today it is likely to call to mind the idea of foodstuffs grown without the aid of chemicals and sold as premium products in supermarkets. Certainly, the organic movement has always sought to avoid reliance on products of the synthetic chemicals industry, but the reason behind this is positive, rather than negative. It is that health, rather than being the absence of sickness, is a positive energy which can be encouraged through observing the Rule of Return of biological wastes to the soil. Sir Albert Howard, the agricultural botanist and plant-breeder, spent many years in India, and used the image of the Wheel of Life to summarise his ideas. A fertile soil – one teeming with healthy life in the form of abundant microflora and microfauna (particularly earthworms) – will confer health on the plants that are grown in that soil, and on the animals and humans which consume those plants. Chemical fertilisers – the Devil’s dust, as Howard described them – could not compensate for the lack of biological life in an infertile soil; the inevitable consequence was soil exhaustion and erosion, in turn leading to famine and social breakdown. The early organic movement was also concerned with issues such as the dangers of monoculture; the value of smallholder farmers; the importance of mixed farms; the treatment of animals; the importance of farming to the national economy and the nation’s culture; and the need to view the world ecologically and biologically, rather than through the lens of a mechanistic, industrial approach.

At the 1947 Summer School a far-sighted talk was given by Philip Mairet on “The Ecological Basis of Civilisation” – more than twenty years before the journal The Ecologist first appeared. Mairet, although neither a farmer nor grower, was a central figure of the organic movement’s early phase. He argued that Western civilisation, in its treatment of the natural world and its destruction of trees, had been drawing an overdraft on the future instead of investing in it. Rather than living parasitically on the natural world, it needed to exist in a symbiotic relationship with nature. Mairet particularly drew attention to the importance of trees in attracting, preserving and directing water, “The vehicle in and by which all living… beings are able to live or move or fulfil their functions”.

It is understandable that Howard would have been attracted by St. Barbe Baker’s outlook and activities. When ITF held their first Summer School in 1938 he was one of the speakers, and his influential book An Agricultural Testament (1940) begins with a passage in praise of nature’s farming methods, as demonstrated by forests. Another speaker on this occasion was the Dorset landowner and forester Rolf Gardiner, a leading figure in the organic movement from its earliest days until his death in 1971. One finds in the pages of the Trees Journal, established in 1936, various contributions from notable personalities of the movement. Baker was a founder member of the Soil Association when it was established in 1946 to investigate the relationship between soil quality and health.

Mairet, Howard and Baker were acutely aware that the destruction of trees and their accompanying vegetation was the first step on the road to the spread of deserts. Howard drew attention to the way in which the Romans exhausted first their own Italian soils and then those of North Africa. In 1952, Baker led the First Sahara University Expedition, whose object was to carry out an ecological survey which would estimate the speed at which the desert was advancing towards the still-fertile lands on its southern perimeter. His account of the attempt to reclaim the Sahara through afforestation programmes can be read in Sahara Challenge (1954). This project got under way three years after Baker had presented the environmentalist manifesto the New Earth Charter.

Objectively speaking, Richard St. Barbe Baker and Sir Albert Howard were representatives of colonial power. But though they were equipped with Western scientific knowledge, Howard recognised that the established practices of Asian agriculture had a lot to teach those whose task was to improve it, while Baker’s combination of scientific skill and religious reverence enabled him to respect tribal traditions and see the value in rituals which would foster an attitude of stewardship towards the forests. Both men became sceptical about the industrial mindset which underlay the Western belief in progress, with its belief that nature was an enemy to be tamed and exploited for profit, rather than understood and worked with in obedience to natural law.

Richard St. Barbe Baker was the more radical of the two. At the end of his autobiography he offered his dream of world unity and rural regeneration; a sylvan economy rather than an industrial economy.

I picture village communities of the future living in valleys protected by sheltering trees on the high ground. They will have fruit and nut orchards and live free from disease and enjoy leisure, liberty and justice for all, living with a sense of their oneness with the earth and with all living things … then with St. Francis of Assisi we shall be able to say: ‘Praise be, my Lord, for our Sister, Mother Earth, which does sustain and keep us and bringeth forth divers fruits and flowers of many colours and grass’.

Philip Conford has written two volumes on the history of the organic movement in Britain: The Origins of the Organic Movement (2001) and The Development of the Organic Network (2011). His book about the Pioneer Health Centre and its influence, Realising Health, was published in 2020.