Deserted villages in a valley devoid of trees. A man haunted by the traumas of trench warfare. From this devastation emerges a vision for the greening of the earth, and a new era in human civilization committed to the sustainable management of nature’s bounty.
This lecture takes up the theme of deforestation from the production The Man Who Planted Trees, which is adapted from the short story by well-known French writer Jean Giono, whose career spanned the first half of the twentieth century. World War I had a lifelong impact on Giono—he served on the Western Front—and is a central plot element of The Man Who Planted Trees. The lecture will examine the devastating ecological impact of the First World War on the European landscape, as an extreme example of the power of modern industrialized societies to transform and potentially deplete the natural resources on which they depend.
Read the CHF Blog post about this program.
