Richard St. Barbe Baker

Richard St. Barbe Baker OBE (9 October 1889 – 9 June 1982) was an English botanist, conservationist, environmental activist, and author of several books. He is known for his leadership in worldwide reforestation and soil conservation. He was a vegetarian and a convert to the Bahá'í Faith.

Green Glory: The Forests of the World (1949)

• Pause in space and go back in time. Explore the genesis of life on this earth and gain a true perspective. A study of the story of the forests of the past is full of romance. How came they into being?
  • Green Glory: The Forests of the World. A. A. Wyn. 1949. p. 36. 

• Lydick proved that permanent, well-arranged tree plantings and crop shelter belts are as much of an asset as barns or plows. They are as essential to agriculture as modern factories are to industry.
  • p. 75 (In Burt County, Nebraska, Jonathan Jay Lydick (1887–1944) maintained a farm that was a showcase for how tree planting can conserve soil and provide habitat for wildlife.)

• ... New Zealand ... transformation of rain forest to sheep pasture and dairy land ...
  The student has an opportunity of studying the various stages of draining swamps, or witnessing a virgin forest turned into a sheep run. Even a neglected farm will provide valuable data and furnish splendid material for studies of great importance and intense scientific interest. It is possible in a day's ride to study the deterioration of land from virgin forest through successive years of farming or grazing to examples of erosion and landslides.
  • p. 88; p. 89, 1st 2 sentences; p. 89, last sentence

• The good forester will place nesting boxes to attract helpful birds, and farmers will do well to plant and protect hedgerow timber to provide nesting places for their feathered friends.
  Birds are great distributors of tree seeds ...
  • p. 89

• Felling big timber is dangerous work, especially when the tops of the mighty trees are entangled with creepers.
  • p. 194

Sahara Challenge (1954)

• The experience of the nomadic farmer was that he would find fertile land only in the forest and it was natural for him to make clearings, piling smaller bushes around the greater trees to fell them by burning. The wood ash provided rich fertilizer for a season's growth but the land exposed to the elements failed to retain its fertility. So, after reaping a few crops, the nomadic farmer would penetrate ever deeper into the virgin forest ...
  The next stage in forest degradation is so-called orchard bush, with large trees widely scattered. Then comes a type of fringing forest, which in time will deteriorate into savannah. After that there is ever sparser vegetation and sand-dunes, sometimes mobile but more often fixed; then follows the desert floor ...
  • Sahara Challenge. Lutterworth. 1954. p. 28.  1st sentence; 2nd & 3rd sentences; last 2 sentences

• ... during this expedition I was to trudge through sand wastes which had been my forest haunts when I had been in Africa thirty years ago. Here one could actually see all the process of degradation, from high forest through the stages of orchard-bush and savannah to drifting sand.
  When the forest is cleared for farming or other reasons, the debris is sooner or later burned up. Here we were standing on land where the humus which had been accumulated over thousand of years had been destroyed in a single season.
  • Sahara Challenge. p. 70.  1st 2 sentences; last 2 sentences

My Life—My Trees (1970)

• The Great War and Cambridge behind, I enlisted in the Green Front in Africa. In November 1920, the call came for me to go to Kenya under the Colonial Office.
  • My Life—My Trees. Luttleworth. 1970. p. 38. ISBN 0718817214. 

• Through Chief Josiah Njonjo, my righthand man, I called for volunteers, for men who would swear before N'gai, the High God, that they would protect the native forest, plant so many native trees each year and take care of trees everywhere. The volunteers were called the Watu wa Miti (Men of the Trees) ...
  • p. 40

Quotes about Richard St. Barbe Baker

• Baker was born in England, educated on the Canadian frontier and at Cambridge, wounded in World War I, and joined the Colonial Service as a forester in Kenya, where he co-founded Men of the Trees (now the International Tree Foundation) in 1922 to incite the Kikuyu to reforest their land. He came to appreciate the wisdom of indigenous peoples in protecting the land and forest, and was expelled from the Colonial Service for interposing himself and taking a blow intended for an African.
  • Arthur Dahl, (6 October, 2018)"book review of Man of the Trees: Richard St. Barbe Baker, the first global conservationist by Paul Hanley". International Environment Forum (iefworld.org).

• He was given this title of "The World's Greatest Conservationist" by ... Stewart Udall ...
  • Paul Hanley, (February 22, 2021)"Richard St Barbe Baker - Man of the Trees | Paul Hanley". Wilmette Institute, YouTube. (quote at 3:29 of 1:17:57)

External links

Media related to Richard St. Barbe Baker on Wikimedia Commons

• St Barbe – a man ahead of his time
• International Tree Foundation