One Simple Man 08-18-15

Elzeard Bouffier was a simple shepherd living in the mountain heights of the French Alps. Back around 1913 the area was a barren and colorless land where nothing grew but wild lavender. Former villages were desolate, springs were dry, and over this high unsheltered wasteland the wind blew with unendurable ferocity.

While mountain climbing, a man named Jean Giono began searching for water and came to a shepherd’s hut. He was invited in for a meal and to spend the night. Giono tells of his host’s curious activity after the meal. “The shepherd went to fetch a small sack and poured out a heap of acorns on the table. He began inspecting them, one by one, with great concentration, separating the good from the bad.  When he had set aside a large enough pile of good acorns, he counted them out by tens, meanwhile eliminating the small ones or those which were slightly cracked. When he had selected one hundred perfect acorns he stopped and he went to bed.”

Giono discovered that the shepherd had been planting trees on the wild hillsides. In three years he had planted 100,000 acorns of which 20,000 had sprouted. Of the 20,000 seedlings, this quiet man expected to lose half to rodents or to the harshness of alpine nature. So there remained 10,000 oak trees to grow where nothing had grown before. At this time in his life, Elzeard Bouffier was 55  years old. But he said his work was just beginning.

Returning to the mountainside after World War I, a couple years later, Giono discovered an incredible forest and a chain-reaction in creation. The desolation was giving way to wild growth; water flowed in the once empty brooks, the wind scattered seeds, and the ecology, sheltered by a leafy roof and bonded to the earth by a mat of spreading roots, became hospitable. Willows, rushes, meadows, gardens, flowers were born. The desolate villages were re-inhabited. Life had been resurrected everywhere.

Giono returned again to the region after World War II. Thirty kilometers away from the battle lines, the simple shepherd had quietly and peacefully continued his work, ignoring the war of 1939 just as he had the war of 1914. The reformation and restoration had continued. Here’s how Giono described it:

“On the site of the ruins I had seen in 1913 now stand neat farms. The old streams, fed by the rains and snows that the forest conserves, are flowing again. Little by little the villages have been rebuilt. People from the plains where land is costly have settled here, bringing youth, motion, and the spirit of adventure. Along the roads you meet hearty men and women, boys and girls who understand laughter and have recovered a taste for picnics. Counting the former population, unrecognizable now that they live in comfort, more than 10,000 people (and an entire mountain creation) owe their joy and happiness and productivity to one simple man, Elzeard Bouffier.”

If one human being could make that kind of a difference in the restoration of the environment and the mutual nurturing of life, imagine what could happen if all of us took our stewardship that seriously.