Posted in Blog on Aug 19, 2025.
Author: Debby Mercer
The communication of the climate crisis takes many different forms. Both The Man Who Planted Trees and How to Blow up a Pipeline are based on books and have a strong environmental message but are delivered in very different ways. While The Man Who Planted Trees has beautiful animation and a feel-good narrative with hope and positivity throughout, How to Blow up a Pipeline is a dark and gritty dramatization, questioning the validity and morality of extreme actions like property damage and terrorism.
The Man Who Planted Trees is an animated film based on a short story by Jean Giono, originally published in Vogue in 1954 under the delightful title “The Man Who Planted Hope and Grew Happiness”. Giono received no money for this work, despite it being published in many languages, however, this was largely the point of his allegorical story. In a letter to the Commissioner for Rivers and Forests of Digne, Giono says that his aim was to create a love for planting trees and that “Of all my works, it is the one I am most proud. It has not earned me a penny and this is why it has fulfilled the purpose for which it was written”. The animated short was released in 1987, 17 years after Giono passed away. Frederic Back’s adaptation is both visually stunning and narratively true to the original text, fully deserving of the 1987 Academy Award for Best Animated Short.
I was first shown this film in a Year 7 RE class, and I am forever grateful to Mr Stone for sharing this masterpiece. It resonated with me then as a child and I have never forgotten its stunning imagery and beautiful message.
As the film opens we are introduced to the narrator, a young man walking in a wild, abandoned, barren landscape of the Alps, however, he is not the main character. After searching for water in an abandoned village that becomes a signifier of environmental collapse, the narrator (we are never given his name) is found by Elzeard Bouffier, a shepherd who rarely speaks. The narrator stays with Elzeard Bouffier for a few days and sees his quiet life of tending to his sheep and planting trees. Every day he sorts acorns and plants trees. The narrator doesn’t stay for long and is soon back in the “civilized world”. No matter what happens in the narrator's life, Elzeard Bouffier is never far from his mind and he visits him every few years, each visit has a growing environment and signs of life returning to the area until the abandoned village is once again full of life, laughter and happiness.
Figure 1: Elzeard Bouffier planting acorns
Elzeard Bouffier is constantly adapting to the changing needs of his forest. Halfway through the narrator's story, when he returns to Elzeard Bouffier after the First World War, he finds that he is no longer a shepherd but a beekeeper! The sheep initially created resources for Elzeard Bouffier such as milk, cheese, fleece, and meat, and added fertilizer to the barren soil to help the acorns grow, but when the sapling started to protrude from the ground, the sheep became a hazard. Mountain sheep are as much browsers as they are grazers and in the sparse landscape Elzeard Bouffier inhabits with his ruminants, the fresh growth of the saplings would be irresistible. And don't for a minute think fencing would make a difference... nothing will stop a mountain sheep from eating a tree sapling! In order to continue in his forestry mission, Elzeard Bouffier employs some behaviour change and swaps his nibbly sheep for pollinating bees. This behaviour change is an important lesson to take from "the man who planted trees". what worked in the past has become detrimental to both the current environment and attempts to rejuvenate the landscape. This is the obstacle to sustainability today. The world is in need of behaviour change, we need to think about how we engage with the natural world and what we are discarding into it.
It seems like Elzeard Bouffier's actions are immense, panting an entire forest, but in reality, he is only giving his time. Sorting through the acorns and planting them only takes his time. He is also unbothered by the actions of others. He is not planting trees for acknowledgement, reward or even to inspire others. He does so simply because he wants to make a small impact on this desolate place.
The Elzeard Bouffier actions cause a ripple effect so large that those affected have no idea of the original cause. People are employed to protect the forest, government officials recognise it as a place worth protecting and people bring life and community back to the desolate villages. All the while, Elzeard Bouffier continues planting his trees and tending his saplings, gently living in the resilient environment he created.
Figure 2: Life returns to the desolate valley
The Man Who Planted Trees sits in stark contrast to Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow up a Pipeline, based on the book of the same name by Andreas Malm. First released in 2022, the film is a dramatization of Malm’s manifesto published just a year earlier. It is important to note that Malm’s book is not a “how to” manual in the vein of The Anarchists Cookbook, but a series of questions addressing the pacifism of the Green Movement and asking, “Would it be appropriate to take more violent actions or would that change the nature and morality of the movement?”
Goldhaber uses these questions to create a narrative, looking at the different motivations that might cause a group of people to take more violent and radical actions. The film follows 8 people from different backgrounds and grievances about the climate crisis during the planning and execution of an act of terrorism: blowing up an oil pipeline in West Texas.
It is certainly a challenge to take a non-fiction text with a heavy message of morality and the role of terrorism and turn it into a feature-length film with characters, dialogue, and plot. The film is very successful in drawing on the key points made by Malm, with both the book and the film opening with the slashing of SUV tires. While Malm asks why there aren’t more people taking this kind of simple, direct action, the film shows the main character, Xochitl, performing the act and leaving behind a single-page manifesto on the cars.
Figure 3: (left to right) Shawn (Marcus Scribner), Dwayne (Jake Weary), and Xochitl (Ariela Barer) making plans.
The timeline is not linear, with inserts delving into the background of each character disrupting the main timeline of events. While this is quite jarring, the combination of motivations is an interesting plot driver. It gives an insight into the myriad causes of the climate crisis and the reasons for the growing anger about the inaction against those destroying the environment. Interestingly, the “villain” of the film is not really visualised. The chemical and oil companies remain faceless and nameless with huge factories and plants looming ominously in the background of some scenes. While the short background scenes that interrupt the main storyline make the audience empathise with the characters who are losing homes, livelihood, health, and hope at the looming climate crisis, Alisha acts as the voice of the moderates. She alone voices opposition as their plan will have a significant impact on the general population. It's probably worth pointing out the plan here: they plan to blow up an oil pipeline in West Texas, with the aim of causing oil prices to spike worldwide by forcing them to close the pipeline to which global oil prices are indexed. I *think* this will impact the oil companies by causing stock prices to plummet, but I didn’t feel like the film explicitly laid out exactly how this violent action would impact the oil companies and their owners in a negative way. Alicia’s concerns seem valid to me, especially with the unconvincing attempt at preventing an environmental disaster with their actions by closing off the oil supply to the pipeline minutes, seconds even, before setting off the bombs. While the oil companies may experience a short dip in profits, it feels like an increase in oil prices will have a much greater effect on the general public and a significant effect on the poorest parts of society. And this is the dilemma that both film and book confront: How do we affect those at the top with harming those at the bottom? How do we take more drastic action without causing an environmental disaster? Is it even possible? Is it worth the risk? And, importantly, what are the repercussions? The film ends with another group of masked activists planting a bomb and leaving behind the same manifesto we saw in the opening scenes. But this time it is not on some environmentally damaging infrastructure, but a privet yacht in a Miami harbour. Is this really an act with the same moral drive and thoughtful execution as that performed by Xochitl, Alisha and the others? And yet it is a reasonable foreshadowing of events that would follow such an act of environmental terrorism.
Figure 4: Xochitl at the pipeline.
If I had to pick one of these films to recommend it would be The Man Who Planted Trees. It is a beautiful film, with a beautiful message and is filled with hope for the future. That is not to say that How To Blow Up A Pipeline is a bad film, it too is thought-provoking and shines a light on the anger and despair felt by many around the world. But I chose hope. The point that Malm, Goldhaber and others are making is that other revolutions like women's suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement had some elements of violence that helped to highlight the cause, and even though the people committing those acts were seen as terrorists at the time, through the lens of history we now view them as heroes and pioneers. The environmental movement, the green movement, the climate crisis agenda, whatever you want to call it, is creating a whole new world, a new way of looking at it and thinking about it in the modern age, so shouldn’t our revolution be equally new and innovative?
Both Elzeard Bouffier and Xochitl and her band of disenfranchised change the world, but I prefer the world created by Elzeard Bouffier.
The Man Who Planted Trees is available on YouTube here.
How to Blow up a Pipeline is available on Netflix.
