We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful John Roland Stahl. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with John Roland below.

John Roland, appreciate you joining us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

My parents always allowed me the freedom to form my own ideas and opinions. They had their own ideas, but they were always careful to allow me to make up my own mind about any idea or question that I might have. This has allowed me to develop an open mind to consider all sides of any question without being constricted into any kind of smaller box.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Evolving my ideas has been the work of a lifetime. It began in very early youth, around the age of seven or eight. My father was a Methodist minister, but I couldn’t understand what he was telling me about his God. My first question was “Where does the sky end ?” Pretty soon I was up to: “Where did it all come from ?” Followed by the inevitable, “But who made God ?” His reply that God always existed was a logical impossibility, but any “beginning” of either God or the universe just begged the question, without advancing the argument in any way.
In fact, this question of the origin of the cosmos is the most important unresolved question of philosophy, science, religion, or metaphysics. Scientists will cheerfully give you a description of the beginning of the cosmos, starting twelve millionths of a second after the “Big Bang,” but that tells us nothing whatever of the actual beginning. Once the Big Bang be given, the rest of the unfolding of the cosmos is just grunt work for the apprentices, since the Master has already performed the principle mystery.
So I began a search for the answers, wading through everything from Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Hermetic philosophy, Kabbalah, and everything else. I kept a notebook on a trip to India undertaken when I was about 22, and by the time of my return to Montreal, where I had been living since the start of the Vietnam war, I had a manuscript of about 250 pages in which I laid out my findings. Trying to publish this proved to be impossible, and so The Evanescent Press was born. Having taken a print shop class in Junior High School, I purchased a small table-top printing press (an Adana with a 5”x8” chase), and also purchased a few fonts of type and equipment and began the work of condensing my 250 pages into something I could type-set and print by hand. Going through my manuscript, I discovered that most of the ideas could be sorted into categories. There were ideas relating to the Number One, ideas relating to the Number Two, ideas based on the Number Three, and ideas of the Number Four. This was the beginning of a metaphysics which I have worked on and refined all my life. My first book was printed up in 1971 in Montreal, Symposium by God and the Devil. The first copy was bound “while the ink was still wet,” within a week of buying the press and fonts of type. After moving to San Francisco, other books followed, such as four editions of the Lapis Philosophorum, which were evolutions in presentation of the same ideas.
At the same time, Kathryn and Howard Clark started making handmade paper in San Francisco. They moved to Indiana to start Twinrocker handmade paper, but some people who had worked with them continued making handmade paper in San Francisco, under the sponsorship of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, under the names of Crackerjack and Waterwheel Paperworks. The idea was to rehabilitate junkies by giving them something more interesting to do. I loved the paper, and I began providing printing services for their clients who wanted business cards or wedding invitations, or something. I was immediately hooked on the luxurious three dimensional aspect of relief printing embossed into the thick texture of handmade paper, and so I began to print my books on the handmade paper, especially Theophany, the Pattern of Order in 1979, printed by hand-set letterpress on hand-made paper, and hand bound over cords in leather covers, gold tooled and gilt edged, with four illustrations in three colors and three halftones. Eventually I set up my own papermill and printshop in Mendocino county, California in 1988.
Most of my work up to this point had been focused on philosophy and metaphysics, but then I began to turn my attention to applications of the ideas to solving the problems of the world. I concluded that the biggest mistake of the human race was the destruction of the ancient forest, the primary cause of the climate change which is only now beginning to become evident, although the seeds of the destruction of our biological environment have been persistently sown for the past thousand years, reaching a head in the past two centuries. Reversing this degradation of our biosphere will probably take 2000 years or more, assuming we address the challenges with the speed and urgency required. Anything less than that will lead to a steady deterioration of the biological health of our planet leading to chaos, darkness, and death. We are seeing the early stages of our planet’s biological collapse with symptoms of global warming, tropical storms, floods, pandemics, and declining consciousness leading to ever increasing war and conflict all over the globe. Consequently, in 1992 I set up The Church of the Living Tree to promote the cause of the Tree, and advocate the planting of more trees by the millions, by the billions, and by the trillions, following in the footsteps of Richard St. Barbe Baker, who, over the course of his life, and “with a little help from his friends,” planted over 26 trillion trees.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

All of my work has been focused on the survival, growth, and flourishing of life on earth. Specifically, while I have many ideas about the future development of the planet, the over-riding consideration has always been the restoration of the ancient forest, the foundation of life on earth.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

In all of my researches far and wide, I have encountered nothing as impressive as the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu. Two of many excellent translations are the ones by D.C. Lau, and Stephen Mitchell.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.tree.org
• Other: www.gaiaaura.com
  www.tree.org/CV.htm
  www.tree.org/Selected Articles.pdf
  www.tree.org/One Planet Makeover.pdf

Image Credits

all photos by John R. Stahl