A Dispute Takes Root
Americans have always celebrated tree planting. We made a folk hero of Johnny Appleseed, who wandered the frontier in a coffee-sack shirt and kitchen-pot hat 200 years ago, sowing apple orchards wherever he went. Later we created Arbor Day, to keep the spirit alive.
So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that, as politicians and schoolchildren prepare for the 125th anniversary of Arbor Day, two prominent tree-planting groups have begun flinging apple cores at each other in a jealous spat over name recognition.
The combatants are the Nebraska-based Arbor Day Foundation, the nation’s largest nonprofit tree-growing organization, and Ecology Crossroads, a small Kentucky cooperative that works out of an old school bus and promotes tree planting in communities ravaged by hurricanes and ice storms.
Their quarrel began tamely enough, when the Arbor Day Foundation asked Ecology Crossroads to drop the name “Arbor Day” in promoting its tree-planting program.
The tiff took an ugly turn after the foundation cried trademark infringement in a lawsuit filed in March. Ecology Crossroads’ executive director, David Wright, launched a counterattack from his Internet home page.
“The Grinch is trying to steal Arbor Day,” said Wright.
The dispute might have played out in the quiet confines of a Nebraska courthouse had it not come to the attention of the great-great-grandson of J. Sterling Morton, a former U.S. secretary of agriculture, governor of Nebraska, tree planter extraordinaire and founder of Arbor Day.
Celebrated on April 22, Morton’s birthday, Arbor Day is a legal holiday in Nebraska. It is unofficially observed on various days in all 50 states and in Washington with an annual tree planting on the grounds of the White House.
“My great-great-grandfather didn’t invent Arbor Day to have someone come along years later and try to hog the name,” said Wirt Morton, a Los Angeles film producer, who is organizing a celebrity fund-raiser to help pay Ecology Crossroads’ legal expenses.
Meanwhile, Wright has been denouncing the foundation as a bunch of fat-cat philanthropists preoccupied with entertaining celebrities, soliciting “elite potential contributors” and blanketing the country with junk-mail solicitations.
“No wonder they say the world needs trees,” said Wright, 29, who has been introducing himself as Col. David Wright since the state decided to salute his tree-planting work last year by commissioning him a Kentucky colonel. “John Rosenow [the foundation’s president] probably sits at a mahogany desk.”
Not to be outdone, the foundation’s Rosenow--who says he works at an oak table and rides a bicycle to work--has accused Ecology Crossroads of failing to deliver on a number of tree orders, in one case stiffing 50 underprivileged children who had hoped to plant the trees at their Chicago housing project.
As for Ecology Crossroads’ vaunted response to a recent North Carolina hurricane, Rosenow said the group sent out a batch of blue spruce seedlings that don’t grow in warm coastal climates.
Wright dismisses the charges as part of the foundation’s strategy to discredit his work.
It was only after people began blaming the miscues on the Arbor Day Foundation, said Rosenow, that his organization felt compelled to try to stop Ecology Crossroads from using the name “Arbor Day.”
Brandishing a government-issued “Arbor Day” trademark, the foundation sued Ecology Crossroads, claiming trademark infringement and contending that its reputation and base of support have suffered because the public is confusing its organization with the Kentucky group.
Ecology Crossroads, which has not formally answered the suit, argues that no one has an exclusive right to the name, although, at one point, the group made its own unsuccessful bid for an official Arbor Day trademark.
Wirt Morton agrees.
“You can’t trademark ‘Arbor Day’ any more than you can trademark ‘Mother’s Day,’ ” he said. “It belongs to the public and the grade-school kids I go out and plant trees with every year. Will they need a lawyer, too?”
Besides organizing the celebrity fund-raiser, Morton has put Wright in touch with a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in intellectual property law.
The lawyer, Stephen Rohde, said Ecology Crossroads may not have much to worry about.
“If the foundation is seeking to exercise a monopoly over the term ‘Arbor Day,’ I believe that violates trademark laws and the 1st Amendment right to free speech,” Rohde said. “Certain names fall into the public domain. I would think holiday names, even fairly obscure ones, would fall into that category.”
On the other hand, he said, if anyone used the name “Arbor Day” in order “to palm itself off” as the foundation, that would violate the foundation’s rights.
Wright scoffs at any suggestion that Ecology Crossroads might be trying to fool people into thinking it is the Arbor Day Foundation.
“We’re like David and Goliath,” he said.
The foundation occupies a rural estate in Nebraska City next door to a historic park that was once the home of J. Sterling Morton.
With a hotel and conference center and tentative plans for a golf course, the foundation operates on a budget of $18 million a year. It enjoys some corporate support but gets by mainly on dues and donations from its 1 million members, according to Rosenow.
He said the foundation is responsible for the planting of close to 10 million trees a year.
The foundation’s efforts to save rain forests and sponsor tree planting in more than 2,000 U.S. cities have drawn praise from government foresters from the East Coast to California.
Through workshops, management standards and other contributions, “the foundation has made a great contribution to the revival of urban forestry,” said David Neff, the Southern California resource program manager for the state’s department of forestry.
Headquartered in its old bus on a small tree farm in Berea, Ky., Ecology Crossroads, meanwhile, has been distributing 2 million to 5 million trees a year, Wright said. He said the group relies on monetary donations and on seedlings donated by nurseries.
“We really are a shoestring operation, and a lawsuit like this could put us out of business,” said Wright, who said he supplements his $18,000 annual salary by working as an auctioneer.
As for the accusations that Ecology Crossroads accepted donations without delivering the promised trees, Wright said he was reviewing all of last year’s receipts and would make sure everyone who ordered a tree got one.
But if there were mix-ups, he said, he was inclined to blame it on someone he hired to ship the trees who turned out to have close ties to the Arbor Day Foundation.
“I think we were sabotaged,” Wright said.
