From Publishers Weekly
"Think globally, act locally" is the familiar, functional refrain of this earnest book, as exemplified by the author's life. Kidd, "The Tree Man," established a volunteer free-tree program that saw several million trees planted in a decade in the counties around his hometown of Canton, Ohio. The story of how he conceived, organized and accomplished his 1989 dream of reseeding thousands of parcels of mostly barren open land, from tiny backyards to acres of fallow fields, is inspirational: in the sections where he discusses his program, Kidd is as fervent about the nuts-and-bolts of wooing Rotary Club funding and finding sources for inexpensive seedlings as he is about grander themes of ecological degradation and a planet in peril. When his focus shifts away from "Re-growing America," however, the author often has too much to say about too little. While he offers unsentimental chapters on his experience serving in the Vietnam war, his tenor changes as he espouses the benefits of TM, or transcendental meditation, which he teaches, and offers a preachy, if amusing, explanation of his adventures with vegetarianism. Overall, this is a somewhat clunky hybrid-half an uncomplicated, scattered memoir of a progressive everyman, half a practical handbook of organizing principles for a new generation of grassroots activists. The former, at best well meaning, is of intermittent interest; the latter, disciplined and detailed, is a call for citizen commitment to good causes.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Description
Vietnam veteran and teacher-practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, David Kidd first learned about the issue of global warming in 1988. He decided to do something about it. He discovered that tree seedlings were relatively cheap, and began to coordinate the planting of trees—not merely in the tens, nor the hundreds, nor even the thousands, but in the millions.
In eleven years, Kidd, who worked with over fifteen hundred schools and citizen groups throughout his native Ohio, has managed to plant an astonishing 12 million trees. He is now an independent candidate for the Ohio House of Representatives and is a leading environmental activist, with projects in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, with new projects underway each year. As these projects are made available to citizen groups all over, since Kidd advocates local communities owning their own work.
Growing America is the story of an extraordinary man. It’s about a man who made a commitment to be nonviolent when serving in Vietnam; a man who looked for solutions rather than be overwhelmed by global problems; a man who went against the advice of forestry services and bureaucracy and inspired ordinary citizens and local government to make a difference in their neighborhoods, communities, and throughout the state.
More than that, Growing America is about civic involvement, of making communities vibrant and healthy, and inspiring all of us to help America flourish.
