The Man Who Planted Trees (On Video)

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:

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About Steve Borsch

Strategist. Learner. Idea Guy. Salesman. Connector of Dots. Friend. Husband & Dad. CEO. Janitor. More here.

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Connecting the Dots Podcast

Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.