One Can Make a Difference (12 page)

For years now planting trees has been the main thing I do. In the last twenty-five to thirty years, I must have planted over 17,000 of them. I see trees I planted long ago that are so big now that I can only just get my hands around them, trees that are twenty-five to thirty feet tall. Of all those I've planted, fewer than twenty haven't survived.

It feels wonderful to know that they will outlive me. I feel better when I'm around trees. Growing up, I lived in London. My parents quarreled a lot and were sometimes absent, so I ran around by myself in some really rough parts of the city. When I was about eleven or twelve years old, I went camping in the Welsh countryside, miles from anywhere. I was in awe. The mountains and fresh air were such a contrast to the grimy parts of London. At some point, my parents moved into a ramshackle farm, determined to be self-sufficient. That's when I started planting trees, to help them out. I instantly knew that planting trees fit me.

My favorite tree is probably the humble little birch. People tend to ignore it, but I've planted a lot of them.They are robust, vigorous, quick growers, they can cope with almost anything, and their foliage is fantastic. They show an iridescent green leaf in spring, and in autumn they give off golden hues. They are truly beautiful. I plant them and the other trees with my hands, down on my knees with my hands around roots. I use a shovel or spade, dig a hole, spread the roots to make sure it's comfortable in there, and put dirt around the tree to give it food early on.

In the years ahead, I believe there will be an increasing understanding of the need to offset auto and flight emissions by planting trees. In the future I think flying will be seen the way smoking is seen today; or at least flying without arranging for some offset will be looked upon as wrong. As kids, we never thought about some things we know are problems today. Human behavior can be so selfish and destructive; we can't keep putting our hands in the cookie jar. Everyone must get on the path to doing less and less damage. The way things are going, we must all start to offset, and it will become de rigueur.

The program is expanding and I feel immensely privileged and lucky every day to be able to advocate for the trees. If people want to do Treeflights in countries outside Wales, I'm all in favor, but it won't be me setting it up because I'd have to fly there, and that would be counterproductive, wouldn't it! Now I'm in my late forties and seeing my children gives me all the pleasure in the world. I'm a bit like a tree, I suppose, quite content to stay at home, be still, be quiet, and be immobile.

LARRY HARVEY

A Burning Desire to Connect

It may take a village, but these days there is no village, at least not in America.
That sense of a closely bound community has been lost as we drive about sealed
in our cars, “talk” to each other over the Internet, work in our cubicles, and often
do not know the names of our neighbors in an apartment block of hundreds of
other souls. Larry Harvey is the founder of Burning Man, an annual event in
the desert of Nevada, 100 or so miles north of Reno. Here, tens of thousands
of people from every conceivable walk of life congregate every summer to become
residents of Black Rock City, a temporary community where one of the rules
is that no one may buy or sell anything. It is not a statement against commerce
but against the “commodification” of imagination. Burning Man is often a
life-changing lesson in getting along, in interconnectedness and the liberation
of your soul. Larry Harvey's vision now extends to China, South Africa, and
all over the world as the ridiculously simple yet phenomenally liberating idea
of burning a large stick-figure man in a wide-open space catches fire in people's
imaginations. He belongs in this book because he has used the idea of “one can
make a difference” to empower thousands.

I
can't think of anything more immediate, more accessible than burning a human figure. I mean, you could burn the figure of a tortoise, but you can't get in touch with your tortoise-self very easily, can you? But watch a man go up in flames, and something happens inside you. I discovered this about twenty years ago on a beach in San Francisco. I wanted to do something cathartic over a relationship, to heal my broken heart, so my friend Jerry and I built a human figure out of scrap lumber and hauled it down to the beach, poured gasoline all over it, and set it on fire. We didn't have a permit. It was impromptu and spontaneous and, as far as we conceived of it, a one-off gesture.Then people came running.

The flames rose like a second sun brought down to this earth.They transfixed us. Someone started singing a song about the fire, a hippie with a guitar, then a woman ran toward the figure. The wind had suddenly shunted the flames to one side. She took its hand on the other side and held it. We felt an immediate bond with these strangers. A day or two later when Jerry and I discussed this, I sensed that if we'd gone to a friend's backyard or to a formal exhibition space, it wouldn't have affected us so deeply. We'd made this happen in the company of people whom we'd never met, and their response seemed so authentic—immediate and unconditional. Subconsciously, I think this made us feel that we'd encountered something larger than ourselves. The Man grew out of that.

When people ask what Burning Man means I tell them you need to discover that for yourself. That's your task; you have to find the meaning it has for you. If you haven't been to Burning Man, it's difficult to explain the transformational aspect. Many people discover themselves there, discover what's inside them that needs to come out. You take it on faith that it'll happen if you heed the call. Nine times out of ten, people will say, “It changed my life.” I hear this constantly. People also say, “I loved the art,” or “I met some wonderful people.” Another thing I hear a lot is “I went home and quit my job.” This is a good thing. People find out that their job didn't fit them, that they were contorted by that job, that it crippled their vitality. They say, “I found something that suits me better.”

America was founded on independence, on liberty, but today the experience of community is disappearing from our society. Kids often have no idea what civics is. They've grown up in a landscape that is littered with big-box stores, commercial strips, and shopping malls, so they view society as one big vending machine. That kind of lifestyle has isolated us from life itself. You can conduct all of your affairs via a credit card, but that isn't a connective experience: it's an abuse of the principle of freedom. It comes with lots of liberty, but it reduces social capital. If you extract people from this environment and drop them into a city—Black Rock City—that generates millions of creative social interactions, it's like heaven on earth to them. At first, of course, it can be frightening to people: arriving in a wide-open desert, surrendering their ego to a void. But, if you can do that, you can open your heart. Many people are afraid they'll hemorrhage if they open up their hearts; it's a threat to their survival. Very often, we refuse to open our hearts until our pain is so great that it's the last choice we have. At Burning Man, we create an environment where you can open your heart easily and it needn't involve pain, unless you count the rigors of wilderness camping. It produces personal expression, communal involvement, and civic enthusiasm, not pain!

All that I do now comes from my childhood, from my earliest experiences, moments that are charged in my imagination with a numinous power. When I cast my mind back, all the things that engaged my imagination then inform what I do now. As a child, I didn't just play with toy dinosaurs, but built interactive theme parks around them. I planned these out in very practical detail. In school, I was a pint-sized impresario. I rounded up my classmates, identified their talents, and directed them in performances that eventually appeared before the whole school. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in a large open trailer. My older brother had assembled walls within it out of orange crates. They were stacked three, maybe four, courses high, yet to my eyes it might as well have been the Halls of Montezuma. Then rain came bucketing down and everyone fled. I lay there on the floor of the trailer, looking up, thrilled by the oncoming storm and the sheer monumentality of it all. Now I've helped create a city that is full of things that are not only monumental—in the emptiness of that flat landscape, they appear three times as tall as they really are!

Kids today should be taught that there's a greater world of possibility and that the opinions of those around them don't necessarily matter; they should be encouraged to ignore the pressure put on them to fit into the slot society affords them. We are beings, created things, each of us ineffably unique. How could conventional society possibly offer us enough choices? What did Freud say about Heinrich Schliemann discovering the site of Troy? Children of that era played with little metal soldiers, imagining themselves as ancient Greeks upon the field of battle. He said that Schliemann must be among the happiest of men on Earth. Freud thought that there is no true happiness in life except for the realization of a childhood wish, and I believe he was right.

I was always a lover of art and a voracious reader, but not being trained as an artist, not thinking I had “permission” to create art, I didn't. My standards were so high that I didn't want to do something that might fail. Then, living in San Francisco, I fell in with a Bohemian group of carpenters. One played Flamenco guitar and painted pictures, another was working on a novel. We drank wine together, had fun together, and they taught me what San Francisco teaches a lot of people: self-expression is good for your soul. They helped me to relearn what I'd known as a child: it's possible to do things passionately, simply for the sake of doing them.You can let your spirit ventilate and move out into the world and see what happens.

Suddenly, I had permission to create, and I stopped worrying about what others might say. Since then, I've made it a practice to relentlessly bring things out of myself and toss them into the world. I'm a fantasist, but anyone can creatively express himself. Anyone!

You must have faith that there's a world out there that fits your innate gifts. It's all a matter of persistence. Your ideas may be wrong: you must be ready to accept that fact and try again.

But don't avoid pursuing your visions because someone says “that's silly,” or “that makes no sense.” Often, it's these very people who are most disappointed with their own lives. One day, perhaps by happenstance, you'll arrive at a place where all that is within you matches all that is without. Whenever that happens, the vision that's hovered before you, so often indistinct, will vividly snap into focus: everything will be animate, everything will feel real. You will be living the authentic life that you were meant to live. Burning Man is simply a context, a framework that allows this to happen. The rest is up to you. It always is.

DR. HENRY HEIMLICH

Sitting, Thinking, Creating, Saving

I am including Dr. Heimlich as an essayist because I not only admire him
and have enjoyed knowing him personally—he is full of good jokes and clever
thoughts and is staunchly opposed to animal experiments—but because he has
saved countless people's lives. In fact, while the Heimlich maneuver has saved
the lives of celebrities such as Cher, Goldie Hawn, and even former president
Ronald Reagan, it also probably saved mine.

One morning I was, as usual, doing too many things at once, dashing
about in the office, eating a breakfast sandwich, and putting paper in the copier,
when I choked. It was early and only the man who vacuums our carpets was in
the building, somewhere downstairs. I suddenly realized how difficult it would
be, even if I could find him quickly, to get him to understand that my airway
was blocked, that I couldn't breathe. Drawing on what I remembered of Dr.
Heimlich's advice, I thrust myself forward, with force, over a chair. That action
dislodged the bit of sandwich and I could breathe again.

Of course, everyone knows Dr. Heimlich for the Heimlich maneuver (and
if you don't have a “How to Do the Heimlich Maneuver” poster in your office,
please see the Resources section in the back of the book and get one from the
Heimlich Institute right away), but there is yet another way in which he has
changed the world for the better, and it began by his method of simply sitting
and thinking about a possible solution to a problem that came to his mind.

L
ooking back, I suppose there were always indications that I liked to think about things and that I liked to create. As a child, I would dismantle an old umbrella and make a sword out of the wire bits, that sort of thing. My mother laughed about how I would sit very quietly for hours alongside the little brook that ran in front of our house. My mother would give me a rod fashioned of something or the other with a bit of string dangling from it, but my sister told her I wasn't fishing, I was thinking. In fact, everything interested me, and every place; I found meaning in most things.

In my teens, I was admitted to Cornell Medical College a year early, which didn't often happen. And, back then, only about four Jews were allowed in out of about eighty to 100 students admitted each year, so I was surprised. In World War II, I became a Navy doctor. Although I had joined the Navy because I liked sailing, I ended up in one of the driest places on earth: the Gobi desert of Inner Mongolia! That is what I jokingly call a “typical Heimlich maneuver.”We had an old Dodge truck that carried a layer of 100 gallon gas tanks, then a layer of goods the driver was selling, then a layer of sleeping bags, and we traveled sitting on top of the bags. In the weeks it took to reach our headquarters in the desert, we visited ancient cities and met the last of the warlords. Our purpose: The weather in our location took three days to reach the Pacific; therefore our weathermen radioed a report daily to the Pacific fleet command enabling them to plan air and sea actions. My orders were to keep the Chinese on our side, since they had been occupied by the Japanese for nine years. I did that medically by treating hundreds of the local population. We were behind enemy lines, therefore we were protected by 250 Chinese soldiers. One day, I was presented with a young Chinese soldier who had been shot in the chest. Then, and for years after, a chest wound on the battlefield was a death sentence; there was nothing anyone could do. The lungs collapse and that's it. (In a hospital, a tube is inserted into the chest and it is attached to a regulated suction apparatus.) He died in my arms. Feeling terribly depressed, three of us rode out to the nearby village on our little Mongolian ponies to get something to eat and because I wanted a drink—they served Bi Jo, white wine—to take my mind off the situation. As we sat there, I spotted a pony trap (an open transport cart pulled by horses) in the distance. It had a wooden coffin on the back of it and I realized it had to be “my” soldier.