My third podcast in May of 2005 was a reading of the story The Man Who Planted Trees, based on the short story by Jean Giono, which I’d read some years earlier. It tells the tale of a man hiking the Alps who comes across an old man planting trees on a barren landscape. I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice to say that this story really hit me since at the time, I was really struggling with whether or not I was making any type of positive impact in the world. It helped to shift my thinking about how any one of us can change the world (or some spot within it).

Here’s my original May 2005 post with the full text and me reading it as an mp3…but the video below is much better and the visuals are what BoingBoing lauded today on this post. It seems the Canadian Broadcasting company produced a film version (which I never knew existed) using the sketch animation done by Oscar-winning animator Frédéric Back. It really brings the story to life. Christopher Plummer narrates, (Phillippe Noiret does the honors in the original French version).

As you know, YouTube limits a video to 10 minutes and this 28+ minute video is thus broken into three parts. Part 1 is below and 2 & 3 are after the jump. It is definitely worth watching:

[Read more...]