Nice story about the balancing of saving trees and farming them.
An excerpt.
Rolling Stones are tree guru's night gig
By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff WriterPublished 12:00 am PST Sunday, November 5, 2006
BULLARD, Ga. -- One afternoon not long ago, a silver-haired man in black denim jeans stepped out of his truck, grabbed a long-handled saw and began pruning branches from a stand of pine trees.
It was a routine job -- the kind of work that never ends on a commercial pine plantation in the South. But there was nothing ordinary about the man sawing those limbs.
At 54, Chuck Leavell is one of America's leading tree farmers and conservationists. He is the author of two books about forests -- one of them for children. He is a charismatic speaker who has taken his forest gospel into classrooms across the United States, Congress, even the White House.
And oh yeah, he also plays keyboard for the Rolling Stones.
Celebrities regularly embrace environmental causes. But Leavell's passion is anchored in more than cause and conviction. It is rooted in the land itself -- in the lime-green pine forests of central Georgia, in a world of 'possums and wild pigs and 'gators and neighbors with names indigenous to the region: Baby Joe, Fat Daddy, Bushrod, Gussie Mae.
This backwoods outpost may seem like an unlikely refuge for a rocker, particularly one who has played with the likes of George Harrison and Chuck Berry and who began his career with the Allman Brothers three decades ago. His music, which sounds a bit like the tinkle of Sierra snowmelt, can be heard on scores of CDs, including Eric Clapton's Grammy-winning "Unplugged."
