Masters of the “Bushido” Tree-Planting Technique: Dirk Brinkman, keynote speaker at Forests Ontario’s conference, on reforestation in Canada

Fifty years ago, Dirk Brinkman secured one of British Columbia’s first tree-planting contracts. Out on the rugged landscape, he would swing a hoedad blade attached to an adze handle to make a hole. Then he would pull a seedling from an old canvas bucket wired to his fireman’s belt, put its roots in the soil, and repeat.

A few years later he founded Brinkman Reforestation Ltd. The company has planted over one-and-a-half billion trees, making it Canada’s top tree-planting firm. Through a lifetime of example and advocacy, Brinkman has created a vision of how we can restore our natural landscape to enhance its resiliency in the face of climate change.

Dirk Brinkman will deliver the keynote speech at Forests Ontario’s 2021 Annual Conference, Growing Our Future. His address will look at ecosystem-based management as a way to guide the world’s forced march of adapting to climate change and its staggering array of unintended consequences. His voice is vital as the Government of Canada seeks to plant two billion trees over the next decade.

“Humanity is at a crossroads in how we treat our planet,” says Brinkman. “Either we take up the mantle of nudging all of our ecosystems back to abundance and resilience, or we condemn our children and children’s children to apocalyptic futures."

Born into battle-scarred Holland at the end of World War II, Brinkman grew up in southern Ontario. Over the decades, Brinkman has perfected planter tools, techniques, and wilderness work systems. He also played a key role in shifting the responsibility of reforestation from the government to the forest products sector.

“Governments used to see reforestation as an investment in the future,” he says. “Now, reforestation means replacing the capital taken, as a basic cost of harvesting.”

Brinkman has worked extensively with First Nations. “Through years of working with Canada's Aboriginal cultures, I began to see how millennia of skillful stewardship nudged ‘natural’ ecosystems throughout North America into incredible states of abundance.”

Brinkman knows how to motivate tree planters, whom he calls high-performance ‘forest athletes.’ “Understanding that we are managing acolytes of extreme sports, and that our main job is to give them land and time to perform, is why we remain the leading tree-planting organization today,” he said.

Brinkman cherishes fond memories of his planting tool. He swung the blade thousands of
times in the style of a Japanese Samurai warrior, he said, until one day it met a sad end.

“I planted 230,000 trees with that hoedad, which I called the Hummer,” he recalled. “It had
an excellent hickory adze handle with vertical grain. It bounced and danced off of rocks and logs, because we all learned the Bushido soft-tight sword grip that protected our tools —until one day I foolishly loaned the tool to a new planter.”

Join us virtually February 3-5, 2021 and learn how his experiences have helped shape and contribute towards a more sustainable future. Registration is open!

For inquiries related to Annual Conference or registration, please contact us at 416-646-1193 or info@forestsontario.ca.