The Man Who Saved the Trees: Portrait of Whistleblower Thomas Brail

Even if he is known as the white wolf by the defenders of the forest, do not call him an environmental activist or an activist: Thomas Brail does not recognize himself there. The star landscape arborist on social networks is not content to fight to save plane trees, oaks or birches. Originally from the Tarn, growing like a wild grass between the beeches, oaks, ashes, poplars or maples of the area, it speaks in their ears. Before climbing on their branches, he asks their permission. He confesses it in « The man who saved the trees » (ed. Arthaud), a small manifesto and autobiographical story written with the help of our colleague Florence Besson, the greenest journalist of ELLE. He caresses the trees too, like running a hand over the neck of a dinosaur: « The bark of the old oak, rough, tannic and powerful, reminds me of my father’s hand, » he whispers. My son’s hand would be the smooth, soft bark of the still frail young beech tree, which trembles in the slightest wind. My mother, that of the willow, supple and energetic. »

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However, the act that made this competitive pruner famous is not really poetic: in August 2019, he perched 28 days for 17 meters in a plane tree on Boulevard Saint-Germain, in Paris. , under the nose of the Ministry of Ecological Transition . At the foot of his tree, the police kept an eye on him, the journalists interviewed him while raising their heads, the neighbors brought him food, a spontaneous support committee explained his gesture, signed petitions. Juliette Binoche visited him. Illuminated, really? Thomas Brail denounced the felling planned by the mayor of Condom, a small town in the Gers, of sixteen plane trees over 100 years old, for the purposes of urban development. In defiance of article L.350-3 of the Environmental Code which prohibits, unless dispensed with, the felling of trees forming part of an alignment. Because in Condom as elsewhere this law is never applied, because elected officials sacrifice dozens of species each year, sometimes more than a century old, to satisfy voracious promoters or urban planners unaware of their benefits, he founded the National Tree Monitoring Group (GNSA), which has since spun off into seventy ultra-vigilant local groups. “In Paris in 2020, fifteen thousand trees were cut down,” he denounces, as one destroys a bench or a bus shelter. Sometimes, for a so-called good cause, building a bike path for example! « Trees in the city, he pleads, are not only the absorption of CO2 and the suffocation of noise, but also more heat in winter, freshness in summer, a shelter for the rain, a refuge for birds and other species. It is also what humanizes urban landscapes. »

“Each tree that we cut is a little oxygen that we take away from our children”

Incarnation of the « Perched Baron », the hero of Italo Calvino who chooses life in the peaks, Thomas Brail, 47, does not surf on the ecological sensitivity of the time, nor on the vogue for best-selling books, even less on that of “sylvotherapy”, this new fashion for therapeutic forest baths. The son of a worker and a bus driver mother, he grew up wild in the Black Mountain forest, opposite his town of Mazamet, a small knife in one pocket and a headlamp in the other. School wasn’t his cup of tea? We directed him to BEP Green Spaces, he was the city gardener for ten years. How did he come into resistance, this nature lover who gathered his friends on Friday evening around his rock band? In May 2019, he learns that the town hall of Mazamet plans to raze a dozen 120-year-old plane trees along a departmental road. All this for what ? Make a business more visible from the street. For him, who took care of them for years, pruning and treating their wounds, it’s a shock, and the beginning of a visceral fight. He will save the plane trees of Mazamet, not those of Condom. Since then, he has been active on the Web where he posts videos, crisscrosses France for civic actions or educational conferences to explain tirelessly that « each tree that we cut is a little oxygen that we take away from our children”. To say that we replant it to compensate is an ecological aberration: « To have the equivalent in terms of shade or CO2 absorption of a 100-year-old tree, he explains, you have to one hundred and one hundred and fifty saplings. And it will take fifty years for two small trees to reach the same mass of foliage as a large one! In his house in Mazamet, there is a robust oak tree, dozens of fruit trees, sheep and a vegetable garden… And also his little boy, this adored son to whom he dedicates his battle.

The fight is noble, and time-consuming. Since the Parisian episode, his companion has turned on his heels. His activity as an independent arborist turns less, his salary has been halved. But nothing beats his certainty of being right. Sometimes, of course, he is depressed by the destructive fury of the world or the latest IPCC report, which gives us three years to reverse the trend in CO2 emissions before being exposed to unsustainable warming. So this man who loved trees dropped everything and left, like in a Giono novel, to recharge his batteries under the foliage of his dear Montagne Noire: « I like the silence of the forest, just the wind in the leaves, it’s my own church. »

“THE MAN WHO SAVED THE TREES”, by Thomas Brail (ed. Arthaud).