By John DeFore

They claim not to have been inspired by anybody in particular, but it’s hard to imagine that childhood Disney ballads of Johnny Appleseed weren’t lurking somewhere in Grant Gardner’s and Matt Cortina’s heads when they decided, sitting in a New Jersey coffee shop in December of 2006, to travel the breadth of the nation leaving newly planted saplings in their wake.

The plan, which grew into the formalized effort Planting America, was more ambitious than they understood at the time: They’d make the trip on bicycles (this was expanded to allow for a certified EMT trailing them in a car carrying equipment); and by the end of the trip they’d have left one million new trees behind (except when it comes to inflation-era dollars, a million is a much bigger number than most people realize).

What’s more, neither young man was much of a cyclist or eco-activist before the plan was made. “We both wanted to do something progressive, and wanted it to include something physical,” says Gardner, a business student at Virginia Tech. “We were both very active when we were in high school, then in college there wasn’t much for us to do — we both go to big schools and we can’t make the football teams,” he laughs.

The particulars of the plan rested on the assumption that the labor would be the hard part, with donations of seeds easy to come by. “We’d heard there were a lot of free trees out there, which turned out not to be true,” Gardner recalls. “Or we haven’t found them. State nurseries have been very difficult with us, unfortunately. Even places like Oregon” — which they imagined would bend over backward to help idealistic tree-planting kids — “we called and they said, ‘we’re shutting down our state nurseries, so we can’t help you.’ We were very surprised. It’s interesting to see how few outlets there are for people to get trees.”

That’s something the pair will consider working on once this summer’s voyage is over. “We’re going to progress in two ways,” says Cortina, who studies English at Rutgers. “One is to possibly create or fund different environmental projects, not having to do with trees; the other is to keep Planting America going, to purchase seeds every year, and give people resources where they can buy saplings at a discounted rate.”

But first they’ll have to survive a schedule that begins May 14 in Yorktown, Virginia, winding toward Oregon with stops in a half-dozen states including Kansas, Colorado, and Montana. If all goes well, they’ll finish up on August 23. They’ve made some trial runs, according to Gardner: “We wanted to get our feet wet. We’re working with elementary schools,” learning how to corral large groups of hyperactive volunteers.

“We want to target the younger demographic for a lot of reasons. They’re the most fun to work with, but one of our biggest things is inspiring people. Matt and I, when we were children, never had anybody come out and show us this stuff. We want kids to have somebody to come out, and to get hands-on interaction, and inspire them to do something progressive when they get older.”

Children, though, won’t be the lynchpin of Planting America’s long-term maintenance strategy. “We are pretty strict as far as where our trees go,” Gardner continues. “A lot of people think it’s kind of random ‘how do you know if your trees are going to survive?’ — but our main goal is to work on private property, where people will maintain and keep after it. We’re not just going to go into the woods and randomly plant trees to see if they survive or not. We emphasize households, schools where they have maintenance crews, companies — things where we know people will watch after them.” (They’ve coordinated with nurseries along the route to ensure that what they’re planting has the best chance of growing in that region.)

Being enterprising young men, they’ve also worked out some smart sponsorships: Gardner works for Warner Brothers, and they hope the company can help arrange for a super-efficient support vehicle that will have only a bit more environmental impact than their bikes; Cortina is trying to borrow video equipment from his school so the two can document the voyage. Already, he says “we have three early sponsorships: Raleigh bicycles gave us two new 2008 road bikes; Patagonia gave us about $2,000 worth of apparel; and the Adventure Cycling Association, which makes maps for cross-country routes, donated a series of maps to get us across the country.”

They’ve also, though no effort of their own, landed a much bigger fish: As Cortina recalls, “We got a contact from a woman in Georgia who had planted trees for us. She said she was watching the Martha Stewart show one day, and she did a Green show. She emailed the producer, and about four months later, the producer called Grant; they asked us a couple of questions and then we didn’t hear from them for a couple of months. Then in late February, they called and told us we were going to be on the show, and it would air on Arbor Day, April 25.”

The men hope an appearance on Stewart’s show will result in a bit more financial help for the project, but they’d be elated for hands-on assistance as well. “We’re hoping for something called the ‘Forrest Gump’ effect,” Cortina admits, “in the movie, when he runs across the country and people follow him. That would be awesome, that would be great. We don’t necessarily need a following like that, but it would be so cool; we’d have extra hands.”

Planting a million saplings, after all, is a big task for two college kids to commit to while under the influence of Christmas-break idealism and a belly full of coffee.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media