Under an Open Sky.

Tree planting as a career is backbreaking and monotonous, and the job is never certain. For some, it's the only life they care to lead.

Just past dawn, crews gather at the edges of barren patches slashed into forests across the West. Each worker straps on a 40-pound basket, grabs a hoedad and heads out across the denuded mountainsides. By the end of the day, they have collectively placed more than 5 million new seedlings in the ground, tiny sprigs of hope for future forests.

These are America's industrial tree planters: men and women, Anglo and Latino, blue collar and college-educated, East Coast-, West Coast-, and foreign-born. They perform the most basic act of restoring forests to health on the nation's most devastated lands. It is physically demanding labor that requires toting, bending, digging, and tamping-a primitive ritual repeated hundreds of times a day, once for each seedling. It pays $8 to $20 an hour and, in addition to uncommon physical stamina, demands a tolerance for long commutes, nasty weather, crude working conditions, and a complete lack of job security.

"When I started I thought it was the worst job you could ever do. When it wasn't miserably cold and wet and muddy, it was miserably hot," says Wayne Fitzpatrick, who is a 23-year veteran of the industry.

Why Fitzpatrick and thousands of others return to tree planting season after miserable season is a combination of altruism and addiction-and needing a job. Many are drawn by the powerful satisfaction of restoring life to the land. Others are hooked on the process-the way it strips life down to its fundamentals. Fitzpatrick calls it "meditative torture."

"You put yourself into a sort of trance and get a rhythm going. You blank your mind out to the physical hardship. It becomes spiritual. When you stop tree planting, you miss it," says Fitzpatrick, who grew up in inner-city Chicago.

The simplicity of the task and its primitive purity lured Cece Headley into a career she could not have imagined as a philosophy major at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. When Headley began tree planting in 1978, "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven," she says.

"You're out there on a mountain, covering ground, working with other people. Every tree planted is one out of your bag. It's immediate gratification-nothing virtual about it."

Some tree planters simply want jobs. Fast workers can gross $120 a day, good money for a job with little investment beyond a pair of boots and a strong back. That's appealing to the Latinos who comprise at least 90 percent of the current workforce. Most grew up in rural Mexico; the woods work is familiar and does not require advanced language skills, says Ruben Lopez, a tree planter since 1976. "We're used to working hard, and we feel free out there."

Whatever their motivation, industrial tree planters put more than 500 million seedlings into more than a million acres of American soil in 1998, enough to reforest Rhode Island stem to stern. Most of that land is owned by private timber companies. Tree planting on national forest lands totaled 146,887 acres.

For professionals, most days begin with a two-hour pre-dawn trip to the work site, jostling elbow to elbow in a van with the 10 or so people on the crew. At the planting site they divide the batch of refrigerated seedlings into double-pocket harnesses and bag up, hoisting the harnesses onto their shoulders.

Planting tools vary: hoedads, foot-long flat blades mounted on handles for scraping down to bare mineral soil around each planting site; long or short-handled shovels; pointed dibbles and augers for digging the hole.

Out on the mountainside it's a daylong dance of bend and scrape, bend and dig, bend and plant, bend and tamp. Walk a little and begin again. industrial tree planting is backbreaking, monotonous, and painstaking.

The work takes planters to the most damaged lands, where clearcutting or wildfires have left moonscapes of the ecosystem. Without the work these planters do, soils would erode, hillsides would slide into streams, and entire habitats would be devastated. Tree planting is the last step in a seriously disturbed environment, the first in its renewal.

Americans have been planting trees since the days of Johnny Appleseed, but tree planting on an industrial scale began in the mid-1930s, when FDR sent unemployed young men onto public lands with shovels and seedlings. The Civilian Conservation Corps, commonly called the CCC, planted 2.3 million acres in the decade before World War II.

Since then tree planting has risen steadily, reaching an annual peak in 1988, when 3.4 million acres were reforested. Ten years later, 2.6 million acres were planted on land whose owners range from moms and pops with only a few acres to the U.S. Forest Service and timber companies with their vast million-acre stands. The increases are most dramatic on private nonindustrial land, where volunteers and the landowners themselves do much of the planting. The hardest work on the most difficult sites is done by the industrial planting crews.

Despite the significance of their contribution, industrial tree planters are all but invisible. They are taken for granted, a labor force without recognition or respect.

It's not just that their "office" is on a remote mountaintop isolated by winding dirt roads and single-lane bridges. Tree planters also are separated from the landowners and the policies guiding their work by an employment system that reduces their involvement and limits their role to labor. Most do not work directly for the landowner but for independent contractors who bid on the work. Instead of being direct employees of the Forest Service, for example, they are hired and paid by the contractor, who also arranges their transportation to the planting site and their housing when the commute from home is too distant.

Government officials deal with the contractors and hold them responsible for work done by their crews. Forest Service planting contracts are not designed to benefit workers but to guarantee proper reforestation through requirements detailing species mixes, spacing, and survival rates, says Frank Burch, a Forest Service reforestation program manager in Washington, DC. That does not mean the Forest Service doesn't value the workers, he says. "We salute them. This is noble work they are doing, and it's vital work to us."

But despite reams of documentation on the number, location, and funding source for trees planted, the Forest Service does not keep track of the tree planters themselves. Nobody knows how many there are or where they live. The public rarely sees them in action. A barren area becomes a young plantation as if by magic, raw slope one day, a healthy young forest the next. By the time the neighbors notice, the crew has moved to another site. The work is seasonal. In the Pacific Northwest industrial tree planting begins in January on the coast, creeping inland and uphill as snows melt and higher elevations become accessible.

This combination of contract system and constantly shifting work sites has made it difficult for tree planters to participate in the decisions that affect their work. Some Latinos have additional language and cultural barriers. Many planters who have been working for 25 years have seen their wages freeze at $12 an hour. Most work without benefits and never know if they will have another job when the current one ends or how long it will last if they do.

To combat these problems, tree planters and other woods workers in 1998 organized the Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters. The nonprofit organization based in Molalla, Oregon, represents people who plant trees and pick mushrooms, florals and medicinals--the nontimber forest work that traditionally has been ignored by policymakers. The goal is to make workers visible and give them a voice in determining working conditions.

Some tree planters are taking their work issues to court, filing three class-action lawsuits claiming that corporate timberland owners have violated minimum wage and overtime laws.

Many tree planters simply have left federal contract work to direct their energy toward projects that offer more control over what they do. Marko Bey, who worked 10 seasons on a contract crew, planted more than a million trees in his career and loved the physical demands of the work. But he was unhappy about planting only Douglas-fir or ponderosa pine on a site, replacing the natural mixed species with a monoculture. He also objected to the government's low-bid system, which put pressure on the planters to get trees in the ground as fast as possible with little regard for their survival.

Working like that, on a clearcut all day every day, is "like working in a battered women's shelter," Bey says. To use his skills more holistically, he founded the Lomakatsi Restoration Project in Ashland, Oregon. The nonprofit combines watershed rehabilitation with community education. Since 1995 it has worked with 70 private landowners and organized scores of school and community groups to plant native trees, brush, and grasses along creeks.

Headley, who has planted trees in Alaska and throughout the West, moved from planting to forest surveys and data collection. It keeps her in the woods, which she loves, but offers better opportunities to use her experience. She is encouraged by some of the changes she has seen in her 22-year career. It's no longer the low-bid, race-for-the-bottom contract system of the 1980s. The Forest Service now awards bids on best-value, mixes species on a planting site and bases its payments on seedling survival. Planters have to decide how close to place seedlings on a particular slope and whether to put a Douglas-fir on the north or south side of a stump.

But the future of industrial tree planting is uncertain, a casualty of boom-bust timber policies. In the last decade the acreage planted by industrial crews has decreased on both timber company and federal lands. The reduction reflects a decline in timber harvests in general and clearcutting in particular. Since the 1980s the Forest Service has slashed its annual harvest volume four-fold, from 12 billion hoard-feet to around 3 billion. Instead of the clearcuts of the past, most cuffing today involves thinning, removing a tree here and there to improve forest health. These stands don't need replanting. The national forest acreage planted last year is less than half the acreage planted annually in the early 1990s, the lowest since 1960.

Juan Mendoza, cofounder of the Alliance of Forest Workers, sees opportunities for workers as federal agencies shift focus from timber volume to forest restoration. Tree planters' skills translate easily from extraction to stewardship, and many are trained in thinning and related forest health work. With a little more training they could do species inventories and botanical surveys critical to forest management. The barrier is the government's failure to recognize who the workers are and what they can do. "We need to jump up and say, 'Hello! Here we are.' We've been out there ail these years and we are not going to go away," says Mendoza.

Fitzpatrick, who now works as a tree-planting inspector, welcomes the shift toward forest restoration as a positive and long-needed change in forest management. But it does not mean an end to tree planting or the industrial crews doing the work. Millions of acres burned by wildfires need replanting. Last year's fires alone will take several seasons. Anywhere people roam, for recreation or for timber and nontimber forest products, requires management.

"We'll always be planting trees. As long as people are out there in the forests, we'll be out there putting life back into the ground."

Contributing editor Jane Braxton Little covers environmental topics from her home in Greenville, California.