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WORK TITLE: The Hidden Life of Trees
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1964
WEBSITE: http://www.peter-wohlleben.de/english/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY: German
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/12/peter-wohlleben-man-who-believes-trees-talk-to-each-other * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wohlleben
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2011070109
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Wohlleben, Peter, 1964-
Birth date: 1964
Field of activity: Human evolution Trees Ecology Forests and forestry
Found in: Evolution 2.0, 2010: t.p. (Peter Wohlleben) cover flap (b.
1964)
The hidden life of trees, [2016]: jacket (spent over twenty
years working for the forestry commission in Germany
before leaving to put his ideas about ecology into
practice)
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PERSONAL
Born 1964, in Bonn, Germany.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Forester and writer. Worked for Germany’s forestry commission for twenty years; has worked as a ranger; Hümmel, Germany, forest manager. Appeared in the documentary Intelligent Trees.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Peter Wohlleben is a German forester and ranger who worked for the forestry service for more than twenty years before writing a popular-science book based on his knowledge of trees. The German-language book was a surprise best seller, and it was translated as The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate in 2016. In the book, Wohlleben combines his own hard-earned knowledge and observations with several lauded scientific studies, though he writes in plain language and anthropomorphizes his subjects to explain how trees exhibit communal behaviors. Scientists have in fact proven that plants and trees communicate via “the woodwide web,” sending signals via interconnected root systems. Trees are also able to communicate with one another by secreting specific scents or via sound/vibration. These systems, the author explains, are used to warn of herbivores, insects, drought, or lightning. Fungal networks that grow at the tips of tree roots are also employed to send messages between trees. Given their abilities, Wohlleben openly considers the possibilities that trees might be intelligent or sentient, and he provides several compelling examples of behaviors suggesting as much. For instance, the author writes, smaller trees in the forest will stunt their growth to avoid overcrowding, while larger trees with more access to sunlight will share their nutrients with the smaller trees.
While most critics lauded The Hidden Life of Trees, Nature columnist Richard Fortey stated: “It is rather extraordinary to read a book centred on co-evolution without a mention of natural selection. After a while, the urge to attribute motivation to the behaviour of trees becomes irksome. It is not so far away from hugging trees to connect to a supposed deeper reality.” He added: “Trees are splendid and interesting enough in their own right without being saddled with a panoply of emotions. The anthropomorphism in this otherwise compelling book is more spice than it needs.” As Brian Bethune explained in Maclean’s, Wohlleben’s subjects “are anthropomorphized to a degree that infuriates scientists and delights hundreds of thousands of readers. ‘I am a human being, I use human language. Scientific language is full of insight and fascinating facts, but take the emotion out of your speech and the people you are talking to don’t feel what you are saying,’ Wohlleben says in an interview. Thus his trees are both individuals and social beings: they nurse sick neighbours, lavish love and attention on their children, and even at times take care of their dead—keeping stumps alive through a sugar solution delivered from their roots to the stumps.” Bethune went on to comment that “the effect on readers is utterly charming, but what keeps the experts grumbling well short of denunciation is that Wohlleben also has the science down.”
Offering praise for the book in the San Francisco Chronicle, Kate Galbraith remarked: “This book made me look at trees through a child’s eyes, full of wonder and curiosity. I wanted to amble through a forest and search for its secrets. For this reason, The Hidden Life of Trees may be the most important environmental book of the year. ‘Only people who understand trees,’ Wohlleben writes, ‘are capable of protecting them.’ This book must get into the hands of schoolchildren as well as adults.” Tim Lusher, writing in the Guardian, was also positive, advising: “A book called The Hidden Life of Trees is not an obvious bestseller but it’s easy to see the popular appeal of German forester Peter Wohlleben’s claims–they are so anthropomorphic. Certainly, a walk in the park feels different when you imagine the network of roots crackling with sappy chat beneath your feet. We don’t know the half of what’s going on underground and beneath the bark, he says: ‘We have been looking at nature for the last 100 years like [it is] a machine.’
As Ashley Hay put it in the Sydney Morning Herald, Wohlleben’s book presents “knowledge accrued by careful and particular attention. All of which allows him to draw readers into ‘a wonderland,’ as Tim Flannery writes in the foreword to the English-language editions of the book. ‘His deep understanding of the lives of trees reveals a world so astonishing that if you read his book, I believe that forests will become magical places for you, too.'” Hay added: “‘Magical’ is an interesting choice of word for an endorsing scientist, and it’s an apt one. There is often something staggering in the behaviours that Wohlleben describes.” Offering further applause in the New Statesman, John Burnside declared: “The Hidden Life of Trees is a wonderful, provocative book that draws together half a century of much-neglected and misunderstood plant science and frames it within field observations by an acute and empathetic forester. At times, it challenges the more rigorous limits of hard science, but it also widens our understanding and appreciation of trees–and if Hawking can get away with talking about God in a work of popular science, it seems only fair to allow Wohlleben the suggestion that plants deliberately nurture and even ‘talk’ to one another.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Bookpage, September, 2016, Catherine Hollis, review of The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.
Library Journal, July 1, 2016, Kelsy Peterson, review of The Hidden Life of Trees, p. 104.
Maclean’s, September 19, 2016, Brian Bethune, “Whispering Pines: From Nursing Sick Neighbours to Taking Care of Saplings, a ‘Wood Wide Web’ is Fuelling Personal Connections in the Forest,” p. 62.
Nature, September 15, 2016, Richard Fortey, review of The Hidden Life of Trees, p. 306.
New Statesman, December 16, 2016, John Burnside, review of The Hidden Life of Trees, p. 95.
New York Times, January 30, 2016, Sally Mcgrane, “Where We See Tangled Trees, He Sees Social Networks,” p. A4.
Publishers Weekly, July 25, 2016, review of The Hidden Life of Trees, p. 64; September 26, 2016, Carolyn Juris, “Forest Service,” p. 17.
ONLINE
David Paul Kirkpatrick Web site, http://www.davidpaulkirkpatrick.com/ (November 20, 2016), review of The Hidden Life of Trees.
Irish Times Online, http://www.irishtimes.com/ (January 21, 2017), John Banville, review of The Hidden Life of Trees.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (September 12, 2016), Tim Lusher, review of The Hidden Life of Trees.
Peter Wohlleben Home Page, http://www.peter-wohlleben.de/ (April 25, 2017).
San Francisco Chronicle Online, http://www.sfgate.com/ (November 10, 2016), Kate Galbraith, review of The Hidden Life of Trees.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, http://www.smh.com.au/ (September 16, 2016), Ashley Hay, review of The Hidden Life of Trees.
Peter Wohlleben
Wär die Arbeit mit dem Wald nicht mein Beruf, so wär sie mein Hobby
Welcome!
To work with trees is my life. I was born in 1964 in the city of Bonn/Germany, studied forestry and spent over twenty years as a civil servant in the forestry commission. I gave up my job because I wanted to put my ideas of ecology into practice, and I now run an environmentally friendly municipal piece of woodland in the village of Huemmel. I hold lectures and seminars and have written books on subjects pertaining to woodlands and nature protection so you can accompany me through the forests of my homeland and the whole world.
Über mich
Geboren 1964 verbrachte ich meine ersten Lebensjahre in der Innenstadt von Bonn. Trotzdem oder vielleicht gerade deswegen hatte ich mir schon als Sechsjähriger vorgenommen, Naturschützer zu werden.
Aufgewachsen in Sinzig am Rhein studierte ich später an der Fachhochschule für Forstwirtschaft in Rottenburg am Neckar. Es folgten zwei Jahrzehnte als Beamter in der Landesforstverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz.
Nach wenigen Jahren als Büroleiter eines Forstamtes wurde ich in mein Traumrevier versetzt: Die Wälder der kleinen Eifelgemeinden Hümmel und Wershofen, durch die staatliche Forstverwaltung betreut, wurden mein berufliches Zuhause.
Ökologie und Ökonomie
Schon bald musste ich feststellen, dass die klassische Forstwirtschaft unsere Wälder nicht schützt, sondern ausbeutet. Das hatte ich mir ganz anders vorgestellt. Gemeinsam mit den Waldbesitzern begann die Suche nach neuen, sanften Wegen. Auf Exkursionen im In- und Ausland lernte ich, dass es durchaus einige wenige Forstbetriebe gibt, die Ökologie und Ökonomie in Einklang bringen. Die Gemeinden Hümmel und Wershofen beschlossen, mit meiner Hilfe diesen Weg einzuschlagen.
Urwaldähnliche Laubwälder
15 Jahre eines steinigen Weges, gepflastert mit Widerständen der Jagdlobby und Forstverwaltung, führten zum Erfolg: Mein Revier ist heute eines der wenigen, die konsequent den Weg zurück zu urwaldähnlichen Laubwäldern beschreiten. Pferde statt Holzerntemaschinen, Buchen statt Fichten, völliger Verzicht auf Chemieeinsatz, keine Kahlschläge mehr: Die Natur rund um Hümmel und Wershofen atmet auf.
Die Fesseln der Verwaltung
Damit ich weiterhin ohne Kompromisse wirtschaften und auch über die Hintergründe der Mißwirtschaft anderenorts erzählen konnte, kündigte ich am 1. Oktober 2006 meine Beamtenstelle auf Lebenszeit bei der Forstverwaltung. Da zeitgleich auch die Gemeinden Hümmel und Wershofen das staatliche Korsett ablegen wollten, stiegen wir gewissermaßen zusammen aus, wobei ich in ein Angestelltenverhältnis übernommen wurde.
Mit der Sicherheit des Beamtendaseins legte ich zugleich auch die Fesseln einer großen Verwaltung ab. Neue Ideen konnten von nun an noch mehr Raum greifen. So wurde ein uralter Buchenwald unter Schutz gestellt, indem wir ihn zu einem Urnenfriedhof umwidmeten. Der friedliche Urwaldnachfahre wird nun von Naturliebhabern als letzte Ruhestätte genutzt, wodurch die Bäume in den nächsten 100 Jahren nicht mehr angetastet werden können.
Neue Wege
Blockhüttenbau sowie Seminare zu den Büchern sind neue Formen von Waldevents, die mir viel Freude machen. Dazu habe ich im Dezember 2016 mit meinen Kolleginnen Lidwina Hamacher und Kerstin Manheller eine Waldakademie gegründet. Mit dieser Akademie sind wir schwerpunktmäßig im Revierteil Wershofen aktiv, weil sich hier besonders gute Möglichkeiten für Outdooraktivitäten ergeben. Und auch das Schreiben von Büchern ist erst durch diesen beruflichen Wandel möglich geworden.
GOOGLE TRANSLATE:
Peter Wohlleben
If work with the forest was not my profession, it would be my hobby
About me
Born in 1964, I spent my first years in the city center of Bonn. In spite of this, or perhaps precisely because of this, I had planned to become a conservationist as a six-year-old.
I grew up in Sinzig am Rhein later on at the Fachhochschule for forestry in Rottenburg am Neckar. It followed two decades as an official in the Landesforstverwaltung Rhineland-Palatinate.
After a few years as the office manager of a forestry office, I was transferred to my dream office: the forests of the small Eifelgemeinde Hümmel and Wershofen, managed by the state forest administration, became my professional home.
Ecology and economics
I soon realized that the classical forestry did not protect our forests, but exploited them. This I had imagined quite differently. Together with the forest owners, the search for new, more gentle ways began. On excursions in Germany and abroad, I learned that there are quite a few forestry companies that bring ecology and economy into harmony. The communities of Hümmel and Wershofen decided to go this way with my help.
Forest-like deciduous forests
15 years of a rocky road, cobbled with the resistance of the hunting lobbies and forestry management, led to the success: Today my area is one of the few which consistently go back to jungle-like deciduous forests. Horses instead of wood harvesting machines, beech instead of spruce trees, complete abandonment of chemical use, no more shards: Nature around Hümmel and Wershofen breathes.
The shackles of the administration
In order for me to continue to work without compromise and to tell about the background of the mismanagement elsewhere, I announced on October 1, 2006, my official position on life time in forest management. Since the municipalities of Hümmel and Wershofen wanted to remove the state corset, we were certainly together, and I was taken over into an employment relationship.
With the security of the official case, I also laid the shackles of a great administration. From now on, new ideas could take more space. Thus an ancient beech forest was placed under protection, by turning it into an urn cemetery . The peaceful primeval forest is now used by nature lovers as the last retreat, which means that the trees can not be shed in the next 100 years.
New ways
Block hut building as well as seminars on the books are new forms of Waldevents, which give me much pleasure. To this end, I founded a Waldakademie in December 2016 with my colleagues Lidwina Hamacher and Kerstin Manheller. With this academy, we are mainly active in the Wershofen district because of the good opportunities for outdoor activities. And the writing of books has only become possible through this professional change.
Peter Wohlleben
Born Bonn
Occupation Forester, author
Notable work The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate
Peter Wohlleben born in Bonn, 1964, is a German forester and author who writes on ecological themes in popular language.[1] After graduation from forestry school in Rottenburg am Neckar, he took up a job as a government wood ranger in the Rhineland-Palatinate in 1987. As he grew more familiar with the woodlands he was overseeing, he became disenchanted with the technologies, including insecticides, employed to manage them, on observing the damage they caused.
In his 2015 book about natural forests, Das geheime Leben der Bäume:Was sie fühlen, wie sie kommunizieren - die Entdeckung einer verborgenen Welt,[2] he takes the perspective of the trees, much as Jacques Cousteau took the perspective of the inhabitants of the oceans. He uses storytelling to convey information from the scientific literature in a manner that echoes Nikko Tinbergen's writing on animals, or Carl Sagan's writing and public presentations about astronomy. Among other phenomena, this book introduces for a popular audience the "Wood-Wide Web", through which nutrition and signals are exchanged among trees.
Professionally, Wohlleben manages a beech forest on behalf of the municipality of Hümmel, Germany.[3] He has offered regular tours of local forests; in 2017 one is programmed for August based on The Hidden Life of Trees.[4]
Publications and News Coverage
Wohlleben began publishing books about his views on ecology and forest management in 2007. The appearance of his Das geheime Leben der Bäume through Random House's Ludwig imprint led to profiles[5][6] and reviews[7] in all the major German newspapers, including skeptical pieces in the business press.[8][9] The book was featured in a cover story in Der Spiegel and appeared on the Spiegel bestseller list.[10]
An English translation was published in September, 2016 under the title The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate with a foreword by Tim Flannery, published in partnership with the David Suzuki Institute.[11] Translations into other languages are in progress.[12]
The New York Times ran a profile of Wohlleben in January, 2016.[13] The article describes him as a forester who devotes his professional efforts to preserving the forest rather than managing it for lumber production.
The documentary film Intelligent Trees[14] features several of Wohlleben's observations. It portrays him alongside Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, whose research supports most of Wohleben's observations about communication among trees.
When the bough breaks
John Burnside
145.5345-5347 (Dec. 16, 2016): p95.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
The Hidden Life of Trees
Peter Wohlleben
Greystone Books, 288pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling]
Arboreal: a Collection of New Woodland Writing
Edited by Adrian Cooper
Little Toller, 333pp. 20 [pounds sterling]
Veterans of the more speculative end of environmental thinking may recall a book called The Secret Life of Plants, in which the former US intelligence officer Peter Tompkins and the expert dowser Christopher Bird claimed that plants were not only sentient, but also able to communicate with one another, especially when they sensed danger. That book appeared in 1973, to universal derision from established scientists. One botanist said that the entire enterprise should be "regarded as fiction".
Yet this was no deterrent in a time of burgeoning New Age ideas. "Live" demonstrations were staged at events such as the Mind Body Spirit Festival at the Olympia exhibition centre in London, where I stared in mute disbelief at injured or threatened plants whose distress signals (chemical and electrical) were made audible by a mysterious conversion program that turned hormonal emissions into screams. There was also a film with, perhaps inevitably, a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder.
For a time, the emergence of a new plants' rights movement seemed altogether feasible. Then the whole thing blew over and, until Peter Wohlleben's eloquent, thoughtful and far from New Agey book The Hidden Life of Trees appeared, I had forgotten about Tompkins and Bird altogether.
A pity, because if there is anything that our science community needs, it is true, unmanufactured quirkiness. For the best part, the response to Wohlleben's work has been less severe than it was for The Secret Life of Plants four decades ago, although he has been accused of misrepresenting established facts (and botanists have known much of what The Hidden Life of Trees has to tell us for some time) by using highly anthropomorphic language to suggest that plants resemble us more than they do.
Wohlleben--a trained forester who formulated his contribution to the science of plant communication while working in the beech forests of Germany--counters with a response that raises pressing questions about how conventional science is theorised and shared with the public. "I use a very human language," he told the New York Times in a recent interview. "Scientific language removes all the emotion, and people don't understand it any more. When I say, 'Trees suckle their children,' everyone knows immediately what I mean."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Although scientists are vexed by the use of metaphor, they depend on it to communicate their ideas. Stephen Hawking used it memorably in the conclusion to A Brief History of Time: "If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason--for then we would know the mind of God." Hawking seriously considered cutting that line; had he done so, as he later said, "The sales might have been halved."
In a series of forest portraits based on his observations, Wohlleben explores the surprising abilities that plants possess, albeit working in timescales too large (and so too "slow") for human beings to perceive without specialist instruments. He explains what we know so far about how plants respond to pain and warn other plants of danger, how they nurture others in their environs and build familial kinships within the forest ecology and, perhaps most intriguingly, how they respond in sophisticated ways to seasonal changes, predators and abnormal weather events.
We should not let the differing time frames or a queasiness about metaphor conceal this mysterious world from us. At a time when every kind of plant life is under threat, from peatland and savannah to forest, it is surely better that a general readership come to appreciate the richness of vegetal nature than continue in ignorance about the astonishing support systems that plants have evolved. There are even political lessons to be learned when we read how, when one tree goes through a tough patch (such as disease, or loss of water or nutrients), its neighbours contribute resources until it recovers, not for charity, but for the greater good of the finely balanced whole.
The Hidden Life of Trees is a wonderful, provocative book that draws together half a century of much-neglected and misunderstood plant science and frames it within field observations by an acute and empathetic forester. At times, it challenges the more rigorous limits of hard science, but it also widens our understanding and appreciation of trees--and if Hawking can get away with talking about God in a work of popular science, it seems only fair to allow Wohlleben the suggestion that plants deliberately nurture and even "talk" to one another. Might we even hope that, if we can begin to feel that trees are more like us than we previously thought, human beings might be less inclined to destroy their communities with barely a second thought?
The anthology Arboreal is a suitable companion to The Hidden Life of Trees, and happily, in a book of poems, lyrical prose and visual art, it is understandable that metaphor, sensory intelligence and empathy are allowed much freer rein (though the nagging question of why science goes to such lengths to exclude empathy from its workings is worth several books in its own right).
The volume is dedicated to the ecologist Oliver Rackham, whose writings, especially Ancient Woodland and The History of the Countryside, did so much to enhance our appreciation of British woodlands and pastures. Rackham died last year, and he would have appreciated this commemoration as being in the spirit of his work, in which observational rigour is balanced beautifully with imaginative appreciation. As its editor, Adrian Cooper, writes in his introduction, "We may be able to move through woodland, or climb up the branches of a particular tree, but it is the woods and trees which move into us, become entangled in our memories, taking root in our language."
With fine poems by Adam Thorpe and Jackie Kay, powerful prose from Jay Griffiths and Paul Kingsnorth and extraordinary artwork from the forest photographer Ellie Davies, this book would be the ideal gift for anyone interested in how we think about the natural world and how the imagination conspires with nature to form the world we inhabit--as far from the sclerotic end of science as it is from New Age fantasy.
John Burnside's books include "I Put a Spell on You" (Vintage)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Burnside, John. "When the bough breaks." New Statesman, 16 Dec. 2016, p. 95. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477992001&it=r&asid=85a4734e80ee7449f7b0f196617dcc53. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477992001
Forest service
Carolyn Juris
263.39 (Sept. 26, 2016): p17.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees, which examines the ways that trees in the forest behave like social beings, debuts at #6 on our Hardcover Nonfiction list. The book has been a bestseller in the author's native Germany since its May 2015 publication (in August, it was the # 1 nonfiction book in that country, according to our International Bestsellers list) and is poised to be the biggest release yet for Canada's Greystone Books, Wohlleben's North American publisher.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In January, the New York Times profiled the author, and a spate of English-language print, broadcast, and online coverage followed. Amid the buzz, Greystone cited a widely read Guardian article and the book's designation as a Powell's Pick of the Month as having had a big impact, as did a timely tweet by Michael Pollan.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Juris, Carolyn. "Forest service." Publishers Weekly, 26 Sept. 2016, p. 17. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465558162&it=r&asid=a22ecd21acc88e7a184dc4da3c54190d. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465558162
Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees
Kelsy Peterson
141.12 (July 1, 2016): p104.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees. Greystone. Sept. 2016.288p. illus. notes. ISBN 9781771642484. $24.95; ebk. ISBN 9781771642491. SCI
After a lifetime managing and studying forests in his native Germany, Wohlleben shares his distinct perspective on trees in this heartfelt homage. He traces the life cycles of typical trees in central European forests, combining his personal observations with elements of folkloric wisdom and the latest scientific research. In a touch of whimsy, the author likens plant behavior to familiar aspects of human actions: tree species nourishing members of the younger generation by feeding them soil nutrients are tree "mothers"; individual trees that protect and communicate with one another via a rich underground network have formed "friendships"; and urban trees growing up miles from traditional forests are dubbed "street kids." Wohlleben laments the many failings of traditional forest management practices, arguing that patience and ecological balance are essential to maximizing trees' beneficial role in the global ecosystem. In this spirited exploration, he guarantees that readers will never look at these life forms in quite the same way again. VERDICT Those with some background in biology or ecology will be best positioned to glean insight here, but even general readers will gain a rich appreciation of a forest's dynamism.--Kelsy Peterson, Forest Hill Coll., Melbourne, Australia
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Peterson, Kelsy. "Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees." Library Journal, 1 July 2016, p. 104. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302797&it=r&asid=7ef40ea009a765d986fd4f0a2fba64ff. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457302797
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate
263.30 (July 25, 2016): p64.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate
Peter Wohlleben, trans. from the German by Jane Billinghurst. Greystone (PGW, U.S. dist.; UTR Canadian dist.), (288p) $24.95 ISBN 978-1-77164-248-4
This fascinating book will intrigue readers who love a walk through the woods. Wohlleben, who worked for the German forestry commission for 20 years and now manages a beech forest in Germany, has gathered research from scientists around the world examining how trees communicate and interact with one another. They do so using a variety of methods, including the secretion of scents and sound vibrations to warn neighboring plants of potential attacks by insects and hungry herbivores, drought, and other dangers. The book includes a note from forest scientist Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia, whose studies showed that entire forests can be connected by "using chemical signals sent through the fungal networks around their root tips" and led to the term "the woodwide web." Wohlleben anthropomorphizes his subject, using such terms as friendship and parenting, which serves to make the technical information relatable, and he backs up his ideas with information from scientists. He even tackles the question of whether trees are intelligent. He hopes the day will come "when the language of trees will eventually be deciphered." Until then, Wohllenben's book offers readers a vivid glimpse into their secret world. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate." Publishers Weekly, 25 July 2016, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285541&it=r&asid=64725d2d5219868d96009b8900d48565. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285541
Whispering pines: from nursing sick neighbours to taking care of saplings, a 'Wood Wide Web' is fuelling personal connections in the forest
Brian Bethune
129.37 (Sept. 19, 2016): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www2.macleans.ca/
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Even small children know trees are living beings, says Peter Wohlleben, despite the fact you can burn them up in a cozy log fire. An amiable forester and the author of The Hidden Life of Trees, a bestseller in his native Germany--a country where forests are sunk deeply into the cultural DNA (think Grimms' fairy tales)--Wohlleben is not morally troubled by the consumption of trees. Or of animals, for that matter, as long as they are all treated with respect, in a way "appropriate to their species," including allowing some "to grow old with dignity and die a natural death. I've tried to show how animal--and even human-like trees are, to feel them empathetically."
That's why the trees in Wohlleben's book, now released in English, are anthropomorphized to a degree that infuriates scientists and delights hundreds of thousands of readers. "I am a human being, I use human language. Scientific language is full of insight and fascinating facts, but take the emotion out of your speech and the people you are talking to don't feel what you are saying," Wohlleben says in an interview. Thus his trees are both individuals and social beings: they nurse sick neighbours, lavish love and attention on their children, and even at times take care of their dead--keeping stumps alive through a sugar solution delivered from their roots to the stumps. The trees "talk" to each other, warning about pests and changes in the weather; they learn from experience and feel pain when injured. Deadwood they are not.
The effect on readers is utterly charming, but what keeps the experts grumbling well short of denunciation is that Wohlleben also has the science down. For a quarter-century, research, much of it conducted in Canada's West Coast rainforests--Suzanne Simard, a forest ecology professor at UBC, is quoted often and supplies an afterward to Hidden Life--has revealed the existence of the electrically alive fungal-root network now known as the Wood Wide Web. In British Columbia, where Simard has traced that web across species boundaries, birches and Douglas firs supply each other with carbon and nutrients, while taking seasonal turns as the dominant partner in the exchange. Tree "communication"--Simard writes as a professional--is now an established fact.
Wohlleben, 52, might not sound the same, but he too is a trained professional. He grew up in the 1970s in Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, when environmentalism was starting to become a mass national movement. He became a forester, he says, in part to save the world, though the forestry agency's paid internship didn't hurt. By 1987, Wohlleben was running a 1,200-hectare reserve in the Eifel region, near the Belgian border. "I followed all the normal practices, just as I was taught: the clear cuts, the machine logging, spraying insecticides. But I didn't want to--I knew inside it was killing the forest."
He became fixated on the way nearby private forests, in operation for hundreds of years, were not only run with ecological sensitivity, but made more money, because their trees were older and larger, and their operating costs so much lower. "Yes, it's true, what I said, well mostly," laughs Wohlleben when asked about one controversial remark. After adding a few qualifiers, he's happy to repeat himself: "Two very big, very high-quality trees from an old family forest will buy you a car; two spruce from a state forest isn't worth more than two, okay, three pizzas."
Eventually, fed up with his working life, Wohlleben talked the local municipal council into adopting the practices of private forest operations, with an additional twist: burial plots. For a fee, people could bury urns containing the ashes oftheir cremated loved ones under centuries-old trees bearing a name plaque, reducing the timber-felling required to turn a profit.
But he couldn't get permission where it mattered, at the state forestry agency, so after 15 years, Wohlleben quit his job. He, his wife and two children were going to emigrate to Sweden, in hopes of finding better forestry practices, when "the mayor said he'd break the arrangement with the government and hire me directly. Now I was free to do what my heart told me."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
So far, everyone is happy. There is less timber revenue--it will be a long time before Wohlleben can sell many trees worth half a car each--but costs are way down. He no longer uses expensive chemicals or machinery: all harvested trees are removed by horse power. And the "living gravestone" business is booming. "This is a Catholic area and the Church was very opposed at first, but not now. We already have 4,000 urns in the forest, with room for another 20 years of demand." Within two years of the switchover, the sustainable forest was earning a handsome profit, while creating six new jobs.
Commercially and professionally vindicated, Wohlleben speaks confidently, in his human language, about his rather human trees. He's seen the negative side of the Wood Wide Web: Twice Wohlleben has come across lightning-struck Douglas firs--the North American transplant is a staple of German commercial forests--and found, within a 15-m radius, other dead Douglas firs, "electrocuted" at the same time via their underground connection to the original victim.
The positive side, what Wohlleben calls the trees' commitment to social security, far outweighs the negative. In an undisturbed beech wood, the trees synchronize their photosynthesis so that each ends up growing "into the best tree it can be." That cuts against foresters' instinctive belief that the trees are competing against each other, but mutual support actually makes evolutionary sense. Many trees make for, well, a forest, and a forest--through its climate control--is on the whole a better environment for a tree, just as village life beats living alone for most people.
So far, even the least sentimental forester can nod along, but why would a stand of beeches in his forest keep providing nutrients to a stump, which by definition is no longer holding up its end of a social security regimen? Especially a stump that Wohlleben judges, by the disintegration of its central core, to have fallen "at least 400 years ago?" It doesn't happen often, he acknowledges, and never under commercial harvesting conditions. Perhaps, Wohlleben speculates--and he is always careful to note when he is about to step outside expert consensus--it indicates "friendship and affection" between trees, more a matter of grave-tending for an honoured member of the community than an evolutionary strategy.
Affection doesn't seem a step too far for Wohlleben, given what he calls the "individual characters" of trees. He likes to point to a trio of oaks sharing the exact same growing conditions. One, out of "anxiety'" he says, always drops its leaves weeks before the others, responding each fall to the decreasing hours of daylight rather than to the increasing number of warm days brought by climate change. A tree in full leaf, unable to let strong winds pass right through its canopy, is in danger of being toppled in a seasonal storm. Usually a sunny optimist, Wohlleben thinks the anxious tree has it right--sooner or later, the two laggards, greedy for maximum photosynthesis, will pay the price in an autumn gale.
But nothing brings out emotive language like the relationship between tree parents and their offspring. When Wohlleben took a close look at the number of tiny annual nodes on beech saplings that were between one and two metres tall, he realized that trees he had assumed to be no older than 10 were actually closer to 80. Given their growing capacity, the young beeches could have been 35 m taller. Why then were they so stunted? Because, the forester answers in deliberately chosen terms, "their upbringing prevents it for their own good."
They stand under 200-year-old mother trees, whose canopies block 97 per cent of the sunlight. That leaves just enough to keep them alive, when bolstered by sugar and other nutrients passed on to their roots by mothers "nursing their babies," as Wohlleben calls it. For decades then, energy not spent on growing taller is diverted to squeezing the air pockets out of inner cells, making the saplings both more dense and more flexible. That sets them up for a lifetime of storm protection and resistance to pests and injuries. When their elderly parents ultimately topple to the ground, the well-raised saplings-those that survive the crash, that is--race each other to fill the sun-drenched opening in the canopy.
In the end, it's the slow pace of tree life that stops us from treating them with the respect they deserve, argues Wohlleben. We can appreciate the surprising and intricate mutual support network, and accept (or not) the maternal love idea, but ultimately trees simply "exceed the human attention span." People do want to help, he says, but they want results. "It's hard to accept that helping means keeping our hands in our pockets, letting all the ugly, slow death and messy regrowth go on for 500 years." It needs to be done, though, Wohlleben adds, because forests are crucial, "in making our world the kind of place where we want to live."
An excerpt from The Hidden Life of Trees can be found on Macleans.ca
Caption: Complete sentience: Wohlleben believes trees 'talk,' feel pain, and learn from experience
Caption: Mysteries: Why would a stand of beeches keep providing nutrients to a stump, especially one believed to have fallen at least 400 years ago?
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bethune, Brian. "Whispering pines: from nursing sick neighbours to taking care of saplings, a 'Wood Wide Web' is fuelling personal connections in the forest." Maclean's, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 62. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466297299&it=r&asid=40d5e94af0c96556340090f30024f7f9. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466297299
Where We See Tangled Trees, He Sees Social Networks
Sally Mcgrane
(Jan. 30, 2016): News: pA4(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
HMMEL, Germany -- IN the deep stillness of a forest in winter, the sound of footsteps on a carpet of leaves died away. Peter Wohlleben had found what he was looking for: a pair of towering beeches. ''These trees are friends,'' he said, craning his neck to look at the leafless crowns, black against a gray sky. ''You see how the thick branches point away from each other? That's so they don't block their buddy's light.''
Before moving on to an elderly beech to show how trees, like people, wrinkle as they age, he added, ''Sometimes, pairs like this are so interconnected at the roots that when one tree dies, the other one dies, too.''
Mr. Wohlleben, 51, is a very tall career forest ranger who, with his ramrod posture and muted green uniform, looks a little like one of the sturdy beeches in the woods he cares for. Yet he is lately something of a sensation as a writer in Germany, a place where the forest has long played an outsize role in the cultural consciousness, in places like fairy tales, 20th-century philosophy, Nazi ideology and the birth of the modern environmental movement.
After the publication in May of Mr. Wohlleben's book, a surprise hit titled ''The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate -- Discoveries From a Secret World,'' the German forest is back in the spotlight. Since it first topped best-seller lists last year, Mr. Wohlleben has been spending more time on the media trail and less on the forest variety, making the case for a popular reimagination of trees, which, he says, contemporary society tends to look at as ''organic robots'' designed to produce oxygen and wood.
PRESENTING scientific research and his own observations in highly anthropomorphic terms, the matter-of-fact Mr. Wohlleben has delighted readers and talk-show audiences alike with the news -- long known to biologists -- that trees in the forest are social beings. They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the ''Wood Wide Web''; and, for reasons unknown, keep the ancient stumps of long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots.
''With his book, he changed the way I look at the forest forever,'' Markus Lanz, a popular talk show host, said in an email. ''Every time I walk through a beautiful woods, I think about it.''
Though duly impressed with Mr. Wohlleben's ability to capture the public's attention, some German biologists question his use of words, like ''talk'' rather than the more standard ''communicate,'' to describe what goes on between trees in the forest.
But this, says Mr. Wohlleben, who invites readers to imagine what a tree might feel when its bark tears (''Ouch!''), is exactly the point. ''I use a very human language,'' he explained. ''Scientific language removes all the emotion, and people don't understand it anymore. When I say, 'Trees suckle their children,' everyone knows immediately what I mean.''
Still No. 1 on the Spiegel best-seller list for nonfiction, ''Hidden Life'' has sold 320,000 copies and has been optioned for translation in 19 countries (Canada's Greystone Books will publish an English version in September). ''It's one of the biggest successes of the year,'' said Denis Scheck, a German literary critic who praised the humble narrative style and the book's ability to awaken in readers an intense, childlike curiosity about the workings of the world.
The popularity of ''The Hidden Life of Trees,'' Mr. Scheck added, says less about Germany than it does about modern life. People who spend most of their time in front of computers want to read about nature. ''Germans are reputed to have a special relationship with the forest, but it's kind of a clich,'' Mr. Scheck said. ''Yes, there's Hansel and Gretel, and, sure, if your marriage fails, you go for a long hike in the woods. But I don't think Germans love their forest more than Swedes or Norwegians or Finns.''
MR. WOHLLEBEN traces his own love of the forest to his early childhood. Growing up in the 1960s and '70s in Bonn, then the West German capital, he raised spiders and turtles, and liked playing outside more than any of his three siblings did. In high school, a generation of young, left-leaning teachers painted a dire picture of the world's ecological future, and he decided it was his mission to help.
He studied forestry, and began working for the state forestry administration in Rhineland-Palatinate in 1987. Later, as a young forester in charge of a 3,000-odd acre woodlot in the Eifel region, about an hour outside Cologne, he felled old trees and sprayed logs with insecticides. But he did not feel good about it: ''I thought, 'What am I doing? I'm making everything kaput.' ''
Reading up on the behavior of trees -- a topic he learned little about in forestry school -- he found that, in nature, trees operate less like individuals and more as communal beings. Working together in networks and sharing resources, they increase their resistance.
By artificially spacing out trees, the plantation forests that make up most of Germany's woods ensure that trees get more sunlight and grow faster. But, naturalists say, creating too much space between trees can disconnect them from their networks, stymieing some of their inborn resilience mechanisms.
Intrigued, Mr. Wohlleben began investigating alternate approaches to forestry. Visiting a handful of private forests in Switzerland and Germany, he was impressed. ''They had really thick, old trees,'' he said. ''They treated their forest much more lovingly, and the wood they produced was more valuable. In one forest, they said, when they wanted to buy a car, they cut two trees. For us, at the time, two trees would buy you a pizza.''
Back in the Eifel in 2002, Mr. Wohlleben set aside a section of ''burial woods,'' where people could bury cremated loved ones under 200-year-old trees with a plaque bearing their names, bringing in revenue without harvesting any wood. The project was financially successful. But, Mr. Wohlleben said, his bosses were unhappy with his unorthodox activities. He wanted to go further -- for example, replacing heavy logging machinery, which damages forest soil, with horses -- but could not get permission.
After a decade of struggling with his higher-ups, he decided to quit. ''I consulted with my family first,'' said Mr. Wohlleben, who is married and has two children. Though it meant giving up the ironclad security of employment as a German civil servant, ''I just thought, 'I cannot do this the rest of my life.'''
The family planned to emigrate to Sweden. But it turned out that Mr. Wohlleben had won over the forest's municipal owners.
So, 10 years ago, the municipality took a chance. It ended its contract with the state forestry administration, and hired Mr. Wohlleben directly. He brought in horses, eliminated insecticides and began experimenting with letting the woods grow wilder. Within two years, the forest went from loss to profit, in part by eliminating expensive machinery and chemicals.
Despite his successes, in 2009 Mr. Wohlleben started having panic attacks. ''I kept thinking, 'Ah! You only have 20 years, and you still have to accomplish this, and this, and that.''' He began therapy, to treat burnout and depression. It helped. ''I learned to be happy about what I've done so far,'' he said. ''With a forest, you have to think in terms of 200 or 300 years. I learned to accept that I can't do everything. Nobody can.''
He wanted to write ''The Hidden Life of Trees'' to show laypeople how great trees are.
Stopping to consider a tree that rose up straight then curved like a question mark, Mr. Wohlleben said, however, that it was the untrained perspective of visitors he took on forest tours years ago to which he owed much insight.
''For a forester, this tree is ugly, because it is crooked, which means you can't get very much money for the wood,'' he said. ''It really surprised me, walking through the forest, when people called a tree like this one beautiful. They said, 'My life hasn't always run in a straight line, either.' And I began to see things with new eyes.''
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: PETER WOHLLEBEN (A4); Peter Wohlleben, forester and author, whose book on trees, like these ancient beeches, is popular in Germany and is making the global rounds. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY GORDON WELTERS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (A8)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mcgrane, Sally. "Where We See Tangled Trees, He Sees Social Networks." New York Times, 30 Jan. 2016, p. A4(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA441754916&it=r&asid=4eceddf8d63e1a42c7eb27ad9686e835. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A441754916
The Hidden Life Of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
November 20, 2016 — Leave a comment
the-hidden-life-of-treesThe Hidden Life Of Trees by Peter Wohlleben was such an international phenomenon that the New York Times wrote about it nine months before its release in North America.
The non-fiction book about the social life of trees was originally written in German by German forest ranger, Peter Wohlleben. Now it has now been released into English speaking territories in all book-formats including a wonderful audio recording narrated by Mike Grady as if Grady were narrating a fairy tale.
But the book is not a fairy tale and is loaded with science and all its advancements. What is remarkable is the way Peter Wohlleben writes. He writes in a way that we non-scientists can understand. “When I say, ‘trees suckle their children’, everyone knows exactly what I mean,” Wohlleben told the New York Times.
“With his book, he changed the way I look at the forest forever,” Markus Lanz, a popular Italian talk show host, writes. “Every time I walk through a beautiful woods, I think about it.”
According to the research amassed through Universities and research foundations throughout the world, trees can count, learn and remember. They can nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network through their roots; and, for reasons unknown, keep the stumps of long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution.
“I have a room all my own,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. The room “is called nature”. The Hidden Life of Trees opens up this room into a vision that we humans seldom perceive.
With all the mind-numbing news over the last two weeks, it sometimes feels like we are living in a science-fiction world with no escape. Indeed, in the majority of Phillip K Dick’s startling science fiction works (including what has become known as Bladerunner or Minority Report ) the heroes end up fleeing the cities that men have built and returning to the woods for salvation.
If you are looking for a psychological healing balm today, in my mind, there is not a better salve than this book. It gives life and context to Tolkien’s race of Ents . And it provides the room in which we live a view we have never seen or heard before.
I would encourage a listen to the audio book, especially while taking a walk in the woods.
September 2016
The Hidden Life of Trees
How trees talk—and we can listen
BookPage review by Catherine Hollis
BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, September 2016
Already a runaway bestseller in the author’s native Germany, The Hidden Life of Trees now offers English-language readers a compelling look at the “secret world” of the forest. Peter Wohlleben, a forester, documents his conversion from lumber producer to tree whisperer, and in the process he reveals the highly communicative social networks of trees.
Wohlleben notes that as humans, we have been more inclined to identify with animals than plants: We recognize a kinship across species when we notice that monkeys indulge in social grooming rituals, or that elephants mourn their dead. Using the language of anthropomorphism, Wohlleben seeks to persuade us that trees too are social beings, in constant communication with one another, caring for their sick and nursing their young. He wants us to recognize our kinship with trees so we’ll be encouraged to preserve their ecosystems more readily.
Trees “speak” to one another through scent, as African acacia trees do when giraffes begin feeding off of them. The acacias being eaten send out a warning scent, which alerts other nearby acacias to produce the bitter toxin that will dissuade the giraffes from eating their leaves. Trees also communicate through a vast fungal network twined around their roots, which transmit electrical signals and chemical compounds. Through this “Wood Wide Web,” forests are truly an interconnected ecosystem—as Wohlleben demonstrates, trees in a community will send healing sugars to the roots of weak or ill trees, and some forests will keep the stumps of their elders alive long after their trunks and branches have disintegrated.
In part, Wohlleben wants to demonstrate how centuries of forestry have harmed trees, especially the practice of thinning out trees, which keeps them from establishing healthy underground communication lines. But even more, he wants to enchant readers into taking a walk in the woods and listening to the trees themselves.
This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
The man who thinks trees talk to each other
Beech trees are bullies and willows are loners, says forester Peter Wohlleben, author of a new book claiming that trees have personalities and communicate via a below-ground ‘woodwide web’
Trees a crowd … Peter Wohlleben and friends.
Trees a crowd … Peter Wohlleben and friends. Photograph: Peter Wohlleben
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Tim Lusher
Monday 12 September 2016 11.46 EDT
Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.11 EST
Trees have friends, feel loneliness, scream with pain and communicate underground via the “woodwide web”. Some act as parents and good neighbours. Others do more than just throw shade – they’re brutal bullies to rival species. The young ones take risks with their drinking and leaf-dropping then remember the hard lessons from their mistakes. It’s a hard-knock life.
A book called The Hidden Life of Trees is not an obvious bestseller but it’s easy to see the popular appeal of German forester Peter Wohlleben’s claims – they are so anthropomorphic. Certainly, a walk in the park feels different when you imagine the network of roots crackling with sappy chat beneath your feet. We don’t know the half of what’s going on underground and beneath the bark, he says: “We have been looking at nature for the last 100 years like [it is] a machine.”
There’s a touchy-feely warmth to the book – an “ouch!” when he describes trees having branches hacked, roots cut or being gnawed by insects – and he talks about “brainlike things” going on in trees that enable them to learn over their long lifetimes. He points to scientific research – by Aachen University, the University of British Columbia and the Max Planck Society – that he claims underpins all his vivid descriptions, but he writes as a conservationist and admits that much is still unknown. “It’s very hard to find out what trees are communicating when they feel well,” he says.
Wohlleben – it translates as “Livewell” – has developed his thinking over the past decade while watching the powerful but self-interested survival system of the ancient beech forest he manages in the Eifel mountains of western Germany. “The thing that surprised me most is how social trees are. I stumbled over an old stump one day and saw that it was still living although it was 400 or 500 years old, without any green leaf. Every living being needs nutrition. The only explanation was that it was supported by the neighbour trees via the roots with a sugar solution. As a forester, I learned that trees are competitors that struggle against each other, for light, for space, and there I saw that it’s just vice versa. Trees are very interested in keeping every member of this community alive.”
Humans have destroyed a tenth of Earth's wilderness in 25 years – study
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The key to it, he says, is the so-called woodwide web – trees message their distress in electrical signals via their roots and across fungi networks (“like our nerve system”) to others nearby when they are under attack. By the same means, they feed stricken trees, nurture some saplings (their “most beloved child”) and restrict others to keep the community strong.
“Trees may recognise with their roots who are their friends, who are their families, where their kids are. Then they may also recognise trees that are not so welcome. There are some stumps in these old beech reservations that are alive, and there are some that are rotten, which obviously have had no contact with the roots of supporting neighbours. So perhaps they are like hermits.” It sounds like living in a small village – as he does, in Hümmel, near the Belgian border.
He writes about the unforgiving woodland etiquette – no one likes a showoff who crowds everyone out and hogs the resources. When trees break the rules, you end up with a “drunken forest”. He describes “upright members of ancient forests … This is what a mature, well-behaved deciduous tree looks like. It has a ramrod-straight trunk with a regular, orderly arrangement of wood fibres.”
In Wohlleben’s analysis, it’s almost as if trees have feelings and character. “We think about plants being robotic, following a genetic code. Plants and trees always have a choice about what to do. Trees are able to decide, have memories and even different characters. There are perhaps nicer guys and bad guys.”
Plagues and pests beset our trees
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So which are good, bad and sad? Beeches and oaks form forests that last for thousands of years because they act like families, he says. Trees are tribal (“They are genetically as far away from each other as you and a goldfish”) and ruthlessly protect their own kind: “Beeches harass new species such as oak to such an extent that they weaken.” Douglas fir and spruce also bond within their species.
Willows are loners. “The seeds fly far away from other trees, many kilometres. The trees grow fast and don’t live very long. They are like Usain Bolt – always the first, then they can’t breathe any more after 100 years and then they are gone.” Poplars aren’t social either and “a birch will wipe other trees away so it has more space for its crown. That doesn’t sound very nice but I think birch has no other choice because that’s what it’s grown like because of its genes.” City trees are like street kids – isolated and struggling against the odds without strong roots.
Wohlleben, 52, used to work as a state forester, viewing trees as lumber, then began running survival training courses and log-cabin tours. Since 2006, he has managed the forest on behalf of the community, banning machinery and selling burial plots with trees as living gravestones. His book became a bestseller in Germany last year, charting higher than memoirs by the pope and former chancellor Helmut Schmidt. His accessible, chatty style made him a hit on TV chatshows but he doesn’t want to be seen as a tree whisperer, telling the Frankfurter Allgemeine: “I don’t hug trees and I don’t talk to them.”
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Peter Wohlleben on TV.
He talks about wood as “tree bones” and burns it for fuel at the forest home he shares with his wife, Miriam, where they grow their own vegetables and corn, and keep horses and goats. Every 15 minutes as we talk over Skype, we break off as an old German oak clock chimes loudly. (“I bought it on eBay. It had been in an English country house for over 100 years.”)
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He talks about the natural world admiringly, wondrously even, but unsentimentally. “The question for me is not should we use any living being but just how to deal with them.” He wants us to cut down our wood consumption and enjoy trees more – he describes them as “plant elephants”. Have we lost our connection with the natural world? “No, I don’t think so. Perhaps we have a little distance because scientists over the last 200 years have taught us that nature works without soul.”
The subtle
communication skills of
trees
By
By
Andrea Wulf
Andrea Wulf
October 7
October 7
Andrea Wulf is the author of “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von
Andrea Wulf is the author of “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von
Humboldt’s New World.”
Humboldt’s New World.”
A walk through a forest might never be the same again after reading this
A walk through a forest might never be the same again after reading this
elucidating book, which makes a case for trees as social beings that
elucidating book, which makes a case for trees as social beings that
communicate, feel and help each other. “The Hidden Life of Trees”
communicate, feel and help each other. “The Hidden Life of Trees”
explains that trees use scent to talk, “agree” to bloom together and take
explains that trees use scent to talk, “agree” to bloom together and take
communal action against pests. Bizarre as this might sound, the author
communal action against pests. Bizarre as this might sound, the author
Peter Wohlleben is not a New Age disciple who conjured up some crazy
Peter Wohlleben is not a New Age disciple who conjured up some crazy
esoteric visions but a forester in Germany who underpins (most) of his
esoteric visions but a forester in Germany who underpins (most) of his
ideas with hard scientific data. He refers, for example, to studies in which
ideas with hard scientific data. He refers, for example, to studies in which
scientists have discovered what one called the “wood wide web” — in
scientists have discovered what one called the “wood wide web” — in
which trees “exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers.”
which trees “exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers.”
Umbrella thorn acacias in the African savannah, for example, pump toxins
Umbrella thorn acacias in the African savannah, for example, pump toxins
into their leaves when giraffes munch them. Not only that, they also give
into their leaves when giraffes munch them. Not only that, they also give
off a gas to warn nearby trees that then immediately release toxic
off a gas to warn nearby trees that then immediately release toxic
substances to protect themselves — these are “arboreal early–warning
substances to protect themselves — these are “arboreal early–warning
systems,” as Wohlleben explains. Other species in temperate rain forests
systems,” as Wohlleben explains. Other species in temperate rain forests
in North America send chemical distress signals and electrical impulses
in North America send chemical distress signals and electrical impulses
through the fungal networks at their root tips when under attack from
through the fungal networks at their root tips when under attack from
insects, thereby alerting their neighbors to the impending danger.
insects, thereby alerting their neighbors to the impending danger.
10/10/2016, 06
:
07
The subtle communication skills of trees - The Washington Post
Page 2 of 4
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-subtle-communicatio...-73c3-11e6-be4f-3f42f2e5a49e_story.html?utm_term=.2a56c72d639c
Wohlleben explains that trees are connected through their root systems
Wohlleben explains that trees are connected through their root systems
and that they not only exchange nutrients but even help sickly neighbors.
and that they not only exchange nutrients but even help sickly neighbors.
They are, he writes, “superorganisms with interconnections much like ant
They are, he writes, “superorganisms with interconnections much like ant
colonies.” Together they balance out extreme weather (by creating
colonies.” Together they balance out extreme weather (by creating
microclimates), protect one another against storms and pests, store water,
microclimates), protect one another against storms and pests, store water,
and generate humidity. Each member in the community is valuable.
and generate humidity. Each member in the community is valuable.
He refers to research at the University of Bonn that indicates that trees
He refers to research at the University of Bonn that indicates that trees
have “brain-like structures” at their root tips that analyze toxic substances
have “brain-like structures” at their root tips that analyze toxic substances
and soil conditions and then send electrical impulses to redirect root
and soil conditions and then send electrical impulses to redirect root
growth. Many scientists doubt that this is enough to be called a brain, but
growth. Many scientists doubt that this is enough to be called a brain, but
Wohlleben welcomes the idea of blurring the boundaries between plants
Wohlleben welcomes the idea of blurring the boundaries between plants
and animals.
and animals.
“The Hidden Life of Trees” caused quite a stir when it was published last
“The Hidden Life of Trees” caused quite a stir when it was published last
year in Germany, where it is still on the bestseller lists. Wohlleben’s
year in Germany, where it is still on the bestseller lists. Wohlleben’s
Canadian publisher, Greystone Books, now hopes to achieve the same in
Canadian publisher, Greystone Books, now hopes to achieve the same in
the English-speaking world — and I think the firm might be right. Since its
the English-speaking world — and I think the firm might be right. Since its
release in the United States in September, the book has popped up on both
release in the United States in September, the book has popped up on both
the Washington Post and New York Times bestseller lists.
the Washington Post and New York Times bestseller lists.
I’m usually not keen on anthropomorphizing nature — and here trees are
I’m usually not keen on anthropomorphizing nature — and here trees are
“nursing their babies” and having “a long leisurely breakfast in the sun,”
“nursing their babies” and having “a long leisurely breakfast in the sun,”
while “alders flaunt their wealth” and fungus mushrooms are “rascals”
while “alders flaunt their wealth” and fungus mushrooms are “rascals”
who “steal” sugar and nutrients. These cutesy expressions make me cringe.
who “steal” sugar and nutrients. These cutesy expressions make me cringe.
Why can’t we see nature on nature’s terms? But I have to admit that
Why can’t we see nature on nature’s terms? But I have to admit that
Wohlleben pulls it off — most of the time — because he sticks with
Wohlleben pulls it off — most of the time — because he sticks with
scientific research and has a knack for making complex biology simple and
scientific research and has a knack for making complex biology simple and
thoroughly enjoyable. And frankly, right now, nature needs every little
thoroughly enjoyable. And frankly, right now, nature needs every little
help there is. So, if Wohlleben’s decision to anthropomorphize nature got
help there is. So, if Wohlleben’s decision to anthropomorphize nature got
more than half a million Germans to be excited about trees and ancient
more than half a million Germans to be excited about trees and ancient
forests, I do hope he can do the same for Americans.
forests, I do hope he can do the same for Americans.
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10/10/2016, 06
:
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The subtle communication skills of trees - The Washington Post
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-subtle-communicatio...-73c3-11e6-be4f-3f42f2e5a49e_story.html?utm_term=.2a56c72d639c
He writes about “youngsters,” their “mothers” and light deprivation, which
He writes about “youngsters,” their “mothers” and light deprivation, which
is part of their “strict upbringing.” In an undisturbed forest, the canopies
is part of their “strict upbringing.” In an undisturbed forest, the canopies
of old trees capture 97 percent of the sun, which doesn’t leave much for
of old trees capture 97 percent of the sun, which doesn’t leave much for
the young ones below, but that’s good because trees need to grow slowly in
the young ones below, but that’s good because trees need to grow slowly in
order to live long. Their wood gets denser (the inner cells hardly contain
order to live long. Their wood gets denser (the inner cells hardly contain
any air), which makes them less prone to breaking and more resistant
any air), which makes them less prone to breaking and more resistant
against fungi and pests.
against fungi and pests.
In one chapter, Wohlleben describes a beech as being very social to its own
In one chapter, Wohlleben describes a beech as being very social to its own
kind but a bully to others such as the oak. For my taste, it’s borderline
kind but a bully to others such as the oak. For my taste, it’s borderline
anthropomorphic, but he vividly explains the battle between trees: how
anthropomorphic, but he vividly explains the battle between trees: how
young beech saplings grow quietly in the shadow of a mighty oak. Below
young beech saplings grow quietly in the shadow of a mighty oak. Below
the surface, however, the little trees start using up space and water, which
the surface, however, the little trees start using up space and water, which
weakens the old tree, but only a little. Then, about 150 years later — as
weakens the old tree, but only a little. Then, about 150 years later — as
Wohlleben points out again and again, trees “live life in the slow lane” —
Wohlleben points out again and again, trees “live life in the slow lane” —
the beech, which can grow taller than the oak, finally overtakes it and
the beech, which can grow taller than the oak, finally overtakes it and
soaks up all the sunlight. The oak now finds itself in the shade, which
soaks up all the sunlight. The oak now finds itself in the shade, which
means that sugar production goes down. And so the old oak starves and
means that sugar production goes down. And so the old oak starves and
dies after a few more decades.
dies after a few more decades.
Wohlleben is a passionate advocate for ancient forests because what he
Wohlleben is a passionate advocate for ancient forests because what he
describes does not work in plantations, where trees start life with damaged
describes does not work in plantations, where trees start life with damaged
root systems (“the brain-like structures are cut off”) and without
root systems (“the brain-like structures are cut off”) and without
“learning” from the older generation. They are “loners,” as opposed to the
“learning” from the older generation. They are “loners,” as opposed to the
social beings in undisturbed forests. Wohlleben concludes his book with
social beings in undisturbed forests. Wohlleben concludes his book with
an evocative description of the transformation of a conifer plantation that
an evocative description of the transformation of a conifer plantation that
begins with the arrival of tiny bark beetles and ends with an ancient forest
begins with the arrival of tiny bark beetles and ends with an ancient forest
500 years later. Patience clearly is a virtue when it comes to forests.
500 years later. Patience clearly is a virtue when it comes to forests.
Much has been written in Germany about Wohlleben’s claim that trees
Much has been written in Germany about Wohlleben’s claim that trees
communicate with one another — which is fascinating — but “The Hidden
communicate with one another — which is fascinating — but “The Hidden
Life of Trees” is much more: It’s a declaration of love and an engrossing
Life of Trees” is much more: It’s a declaration of love and an engrossing
primer on trees, brimming with facts and an unashamed awe for nature.
primer on trees, brimming with facts and an unashamed awe for nature.
Most of all it’s a timely reminder that we know very little about trees —
Most of all it’s a timely reminder that we know very little about trees —
and that there is still so much more to learn.
and that there is still so much more to learn
Dendrology: The community of trees
Richard Fortey
Nature
537,
306
(15 September 2016)
doi:10.1038/537306a
Published online
14 September 2016
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Richard Fortey ponders a study that casts forests as exquisitely complex, multistorey networks.
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World
Peter Wohlleben Greystone: 2016. ISBN: 9781771642484
Buy this book: US UK Japan
Paul Colangelo/Natl Geographic Creative
Trees communicate with each other using chemical signals carried on the breeze.
The Ents — the tree beings in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings — conducted leisurely conversations that ignored mere human timescales. Years might pass to allow their deeper ruminations. Tolkien understood that arboreal time plays out over centuries. The Ents also had moral values and took sides, and were capable of exercising will, forging alliances and showing affection. After reading The Hidden Life of Trees, I suspect that German forester Peter Wohlleben regards beeches, his favourite trees, as not unlike Ents.
Much new science has been woven into this engaging natural history. Trees are networkers. Far from the solitary splendour of the ancient old stager, it turns out that trees communicate with one another through their roots. Underground fungi — mycorrhizae associated with the root network — form a sort of subterranean internet that connects trees, passing messages and even nourishment between neighbours. Nor do trees passively tolerate the onslaught of insects on their tasty young leaves. Chemical signals carried on the breeze from infested trees cause forest fellows to crank up their own chemical armouries. It's not a case of every tree for itself: the forest can behave as a single entity when it yields a great crop of acorns or beechnuts, or lies fallow for a year. Trees share a common response to weather and nourishment.
The hidden network allows for the nurturing of small trees in the understorey, where too little light penetrates for effective photosynthesis. The 'children' of a 'parent' tree bide their time until the oldster topples and the understorey underdogs at last get the chance to reach for the skies. Wohlleben's capable description of the leisurely drama of the forest through generations of trees idealizes an ecological progression too often interrupted by human felling and woodland management. It seems that trees are both more cooperative within a species and more complicated within a lifetime than prejudice might allow.
Wohlleben's vision of life among the trees has been developed during his decades-long stewardship of a chunk of forest dominated by beech in the Eifel, a mountain range straddling Germany and Belgium. He clearly desires woodlands to return to a state in which the slow life cycles of the trees are allowed to run without interference — a regrowth of the European 'wildwood' that grew up as the climate recovered after the retreat of the last Ice Age. He presents this as a golden age of arboreal life. Trees age at their own pace and die, to be replaced by 'family' that has been sheltering in their shadows for many years, nurtured on the mycelial teat. It's a kind of utopia for Ents. Not one such undisturbed ancient forest survives in Europe, except possibly in the Białowieża Forest of Poland. In Britain, woods have been managed since the Iron Age.
Whatever the virtues of this scenario, I have problems with Wohlleben's narrative approach. He describes trees as if they possessed consciousness. During times of drought they make “cries of thirst” or “might be screaming out a dire warning to their colleagues”. They experience “rising panic”. A seedling's growth is portrayed as fratricide as it sees off its siblings. It is rather extraordinary to read a book centred on co-evolution without a mention of natural selection. After a while, the urge to attribute motivation to the behaviour of trees becomes irksome. It is not so far away from hugging trees to connect to a supposed deeper reality.
Wohlleben sets out his stall quite specifically: “The distinction between plant and animal is, after all, arbitrary.” Well, no, it's not. It has been a fact of phylogenetic separation for more than 1.7 billion years, during which exceedingly long time the two kingdoms have followed their own paths. Yes, problems in common require comparable solutions: communication and nutrition are universals, as scholars such as the plant biochemist Anthony Trewavas have shown. It is of selective advantage to trees to share news of insect threats, just as antelope respond together to the twitch of a lion's tail.
Trees are splendid and interesting enough in their own right without being saddled with a panoply of emotions. The anthropomorphism in this otherwise compelling book is more spice than it needs. Trees ain't Ents.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben review: Alive to their roots
John Banville on a book of marvels persuasively making the case that trees are sentient and communal
Slow survivors: centuries-old giant sequoia trees in California. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty
Slow survivors: centuries-old giant sequoia trees in California. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty
John Banville
Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Jan 21, 2017, 06:00
Book Title:
The Hidden Lives of Trees
ISBN-13:
978-1771642484
Author:
Peter Wohlleben
Publisher:
Greystone Books
Guideline Price:
£16.99
Is there a distinction to be made between living and being alive? Certainly the language suggests there is. To be “merely” living is to be passive, and gradual to the point of inanition – as TS Eliot has it in The Four Quartets, “that which is only living / Can only die” – whereas to be alive is to be swiftly kinetic, primed with awareness, as when we say we “are alive to” this or that situation or phenomenon. Human beings are alive, so are animals, and so even, at one time, were the gods. We believe that our state, our “being alive”, is in contradistinction to that of so-called inanimate objects, such as rocks, rivers – and trees.
Peter Wohlleben, in his disarmingly candid and unemphatic fashion, begs to differ. He is a forester and environmentalist, who has the care of a forest of venerable beeches in the Rhineland municipality of Hümmel in central Germany, so he knows whereof he speaks. While he does not say so in so many words, he lets us know, in this marvellous book – literally, it is a book of marvels – that in his opinion, and in the opinion of an increasing number of specialists, trees are sentient: they are communal, they care for their young and for their neighbours; they remember, they can learn and they can count; they may even have emotions and feel pain.
Some might dismiss Wohlleben as a sentimentalist and a “tree-hugger”, but this would be a grave misapprehension; part of the pleasure of his book is his – literally, again – down-to-earth tone, and drily humorous prose style. Yet in his quiet way he is startlingly radical. He quotes with approval the constitution of Switzerland, which stipulates that citizens must take account “of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms”, and declares that, while others may disapprove of this blurring of the distinction between creatures that are alive and objects that are merely living, “I, for one, welcome breaking down the moral barriers between animals and plants”.
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Among the reasons for our failure to comprehend what remarkable things trees are, aside from our deplorable anthropocentrism – “God made the world for man’s use and benefit”, the Catechism breezily assures us – is the fact that on average they live their lives about 10 times more slowly than we do, and that they survive for so long. Wohlleben tells of examining a “young” beech in the forest he manages, which had a trunk about a third of an inch in diameter, but which he discovered to be at least 80 years old. Then there is the single small spruce in the Dalarna province of Sweden which researchers found to have been living for what Wohlleben describes as an “absolutely unbelievable” 9,550 years.
The author in his Introduction confesses that when he began his career as a forester he “knew about as much about the hidden life of trees as a butcher knows about the emotional life of animals”. Like so many others of his kind in those days, he considered it was necessary to protect the wellbeing of the forest purely for industrial and financial reasons. However, as he grew to know the forest more intimately, he began to understand the complexity of tree life and to follow its immensely subtle ramifications. He also tells us, with a refreshing absence of snobbism, how much he learned from the tourists who came to his forest. “Visitors were enchanted by crooked, gnarled trees I would previously have dismissed because of their low commercial value. Walking with my visitors, I learned to pay attention to more than just the quality of the trees’ trunks.”
He also benefited from the increase in tree research, especially when Aachen University set up investigative programmes in the forest he manages: “When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines.” He also came to know of the “wood wide web”, news of the discovery of which was published in the scientific journal Nature in 1997.
In a “Note from a Forest Scientist” appended to Wohlleben’s book, Dr Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology, describes how in the 1990s she and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver unearthed the fact that there is a vast, secret connection between trees by way of fungi that link up individual root systems. Puzzled as to why, in the patch of forest where she was working, the clearing of birches resulted in the decline of nearby Douglas firs, she found that the birches, “like carers in human social networks”, were encouraging the growth of the firs by supplying them with some of their own photosynthetic carbon-tree food. It appears, says Wohlleben, that such “nutrient exchange” to help neighbours in need is the forest rule.
Fungi are probably the tree’s best friend. For example, when a pine is suffering from a lack of nitrogen, its partner, the splendidly named fungus Laccaria bicolor, or bicoloured deceiver, will release a poison into the soil around the tree’s roots to kill off tiny organisms which, in dying, release the nitrogen contained in their bodies. Fungi, says Wohlleben, are “amazing”. Amazing they are, and prolific: a fungus in Oregon is estimated to be 2,400 years old, extends over 2,000 acres and weighs 660 tons.
Over the course of his deceptively simple-sounding narrative – translated, it seems, although the publisher chooses not to acknowledge the fact, by Jane Billinghurst – Wohlleben subtly leads us to follow him to his conclusions about the intelligence, resourcefulness and generosity of trees. Again and again he returns to the question of how it is that they can learn, and store what they have learned, since supposedly they do not have what could be called a brain. His guess is that the root system acts as a cognitive organ, and surely he is right. So next time you walk into a forest, keep in mind that you are not alone. And while you’re at it, as Wohlleben recommends, “take a closer look at what you might have taken for granted. Slow down, breathe deep, and look around”. In other words, be alive to the living things that stand about you on all sides.
John Banville’s latest book is Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir
The Hidden Life of Trees,’ by Peter Wohlleben
By Kate Galbraith Published 9:50 am, Thursday, November 10, 2016
"The Hidden Life of Trees" Photo: Greystone
Photo: Greystone
Image 1 of 2
"The Hidden Life of Trees"
An ode to trees sounds like something from the era of Emerson or even Keats. Perhaps those luminaries have found a modern prose equivalent. Peter Wohlleben, a forest conservationist in Germany, has written a magical book about fixtures that we walk by every day and take for granted. “The Hidden Life of Trees,” newly published in English after earlier acclaim in Germany, uses simple, fairy-tale words to endow beeches, oaks and other species with almost human qualities.
Trees are “misunderstood,” Wohlleben argues, because their growth is so slow. It’s measured in multiple human lifetimes. And yet “under the canopy of the trees, daily dramas and moving love stories are played out.”
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Those dramas take innumerable forms. Trees help each other out, sometimes channeling sugar and energy to the stump of an important tree, centuries after its death. Mother trees dole out tough love to offspring that grow nearby, providing them with shade so they do not grow too fast in the sunlight and exhaust themselves early in life.
Redwood trees in Europe may achieve only half the height of their wild counterparts in California, for example, partly because they are often planted apart from one another and grow too quickly, with thick trunks and branches that resemble “doped-up body-builders.” With this thick stature and shallow roots, they cannot continue shooting upward without the risk of toppling.
Trees support innumerable forms of life, each of which has its own story. “Many miles of fungal filaments” exist in a teaspoon of dirt, Wohlleben reports; the fungi perform many functions, like filtering out pollutants, and in return they take a cut of the sugar the tree produces. Toward the top of the tree, woodpeckers are constantly pecking to prevent fungi from making inroads to their homes, but eventually their hole widens so much that baby birds leaving their nests have trouble making it out. Then the woodpeckers vacate, and new species move in (subletters, in Wohlleben’s term).
Trees also make sounds, far beyond the hammering of woodpeckers or the crackling of the leaves swaying in the wind. In the spring, as new leaves unfurl, water flowing upward through trunks can be heard with a stethoscope, Wohlleben writes. Some trees contain about as much liquid in their trunks, roots and leaves as humans; others may be able to drink well over 100 gallons of water a day. When drought hits, it may be possible to use instrumentation to hear vibrations created when a tree is thirsty; Wohlleben likens it to a sound from vocal cords.
Occasionally, the trees-have-feelings element takes a real leap. Provocatively, Wohlleben poses the question of whether plants have a brain — most likely at the tips of the roots — and can think. Even as he articulates this possibility, he acknowledges that most plant researchers doubt that trees can serve as a repository for “intelligence, the faculty of memory, and emotions.” In countering that view, he argues that the distinction between plants and animals is “arbitrary and depends on the way an organism feeds itself.”
As he enumerates the dangers to his beloved trees, Wohlleben packages deforestation and climate change together, as of course they belong. “If we want to use forests as a weapon in the fight against climate change,” he writes, “then we must allow them to grow old.”
Old wood stores far more carbon dioxide than younger, slimmer trees. Perhaps surprisingly, though, he seems relatively unworried about the pest infestations resulting from cycles of drought: “A five-hundred-year-old tree has surely had a few surprises in its life,” he notes.
This book made me look at trees through a child’s eyes, full of wonder and curiosity. I wanted to amble through a forest and search for its secrets. For this reason, “The Hidden Life of Trees” may be the most important environmental book of the year. “Only people who understand trees,” Wohlleben writes, “are capable of protecting them.” This book must get into the hands of schoolchildren as well as adults, so that they may be inspired to care about trees — and ultimately, help save them.
Kate Galbraith is the assistant business editor of The San Francisco Chronicle. Her writing has appeared in the Texas Tribune, New York Times and the Economist. Email: kgalbraith@sfchronicle.com
The Hidden Life of Trees
What They Feel, How They Communicate
By Peter Wohlleben
(Greystone; 272 pages; $24.95)
eptember 16 2016
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Peter Wohlleben hears voices in his bestseller The Hidden World of Trees
Ashley Hay
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The Hidden World of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World
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Forester Peter Wohlleben in Hummel, Germany, turned from forestry to tree keeping.
Forester Peter Wohlleben in Hummel, Germany, turned from forestry to tree keeping. Photo: Gordon Welters/New York Times
Peter Wohlleben
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The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben.
In the north of Greece, from around 550BCE, there was a sacred grove. In Dodona priests interpreted the sounds made by beech leaves and oaks to determine which things should be done when. Second only to the oracle at Delphi, Dodona's history spanned around 200 years – two centuries of messages transmitted by the wind in the leaves.
We've been spending some time with Enid Blyton and her enchanted forest at our place recently, and in one story her characters realise that the "wisha-wisha-wisha" of the forest's trees is translatable – understandable – if they lay their ear to a trunk. For several days after we read that, I eyed the tree trunks in our garden differently, wondering what secrets I might hear if I pressed my ear close. From Dodona to Enid Blyton and beyond, perhaps we're geared to find stories through trees.
Peter Wohlleben has spent almost 30 years of his working life with a small subset of the world's trees, primarily those in 1200 hectares of forest in western Germany – beech, oak, fir, spruce and more – and he has found an extraordinary way of hearing, and telling, their stories.
Wohlleben worked first as a traditional forester, with an eye to their lumber, and is now an innovative and open-hearted advocate for the ways they might be thought of and encouraged to thrive. He has removed machines and insecticides from his forest. He has organised hikes and camps. He has offered his forest as a natural post-cremation burial ground. A decade ago, his municipality withdrew the contract for managing these trees from the German forestry commission to employ him directly.
Now, he has written The Hidden Life of Trees, a celebratory investigation of the minutiae of arboreal experience. He writes of their brains, their ability to hear, to learn, to remember. His chapters speak of things like "friendships", "language", "etiquette", "tree school" and "a sense of time" – words of surprising animation and vivacious interaction. And he speaks of his trees intimately, describing everything from the taste of cambium, "the actively growing layer between [a tree's] bark and wood" (it's "slightly like resinous carrots") to the reasons spruce shed their needles. This is knowledge accrued by careful and particular attention.
All of which allows him to draw readers into "a wonderland", as Tim Flannery writes in the foreword to the English-language editions of the book. "His deep understanding of the lives of trees reveals a world so astonishing that if you read his book, I believe that forests will become magical places for you, too."
"Magical" is an interesting choice of word for an endorsing scientist, and it's an apt one. There is often something staggering in the behaviours that Wohlleben describes. Thirsty trees scream. Living trees keep remnant stumps alive – for amazing lengths of time. A single Bavarian pine was found to harbour 2041 individual animals from 257 different species. A forest, he suggests, should be thought of not as a collation of individual trees, or species, or genera, but as one integrated superorganism "with interconnections much like ant colonies".
Trees have their own "wood wide web", as researchers have tagged it: social and communicative intersections facilitated by trees' roots and extraordinary networks of fungi. "The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping the trees exchange news about insects, drought and other dangers". And not just within species: "different tree species are in contact with one another, even when they regard each other as competitors". It's like the eloquence of Dodona or Blyton's forest realised; we've just found a new way to tune in.
The rhythm of Wohlleben's language comes through this translation as a pleasantly mannered and effective kind of plainsong, dotted with highlights of exquisite imagery. Trees look green, he explains, because we see the "green gap" – the light their leaves cannot absorb. And really, this is "waste light … beautiful for us; useless for the trees."
Beyond their beauty, his sentences also invoke intimacy and something approaching intention. Wohlleben writes about the prevalence of beech trees in Central Europe, "because [a yew tree] knows it can't hold a candle to the beech in the growth department, it has decided to specialise in the forest understorey". Because it knows. It has decided. Highly charged, these words are a long way from the usual language of scientific communication, and this is part of Wohlleben's gambit and design.
The book is already a German bestseller, topping non-fiction lists for months, and now destined for publication in another 19 countries.
"I use a very human language," he explained to a New York Times journalist this year. "Scientific language removes all the emotion, and people don't understand it anymore. When I say, 'trees suckle their children', everyone knows immediately what I mean."
My own reading moved from an initial discomfit – so much anthropomorphism; was this inching towards sentience? – to relish not only the richness of the data but the potential of its metaphors. Think on this one: "it is obviously not in a forest's best interests to lose its weaker members". Or this: "an organism that is too greedy and takes too much without giving anything in return destroys what it needs for life and dies out". You can take those messages a long way from a forest, if you like.
"Sometimes," Wohlleben writes, "I suspect we would pay more attention to trees and other vegetation if we could establish beyond a doubt just how similar they are in many ways to animals." Redressing the perceived distance between humans and trees is one of Wohlleben's root concerns, but the wealth of a forest's organisms and systems, its feedbacks and adaptations and limitations, are his concern too. "There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the face of the planet," he writes, and the vast and necessary richness of an ecosystem's complexity comes into sharper focus – a mass of potential as much as responsibility, in terms of stewardship and science.
Wohlleben might be an incarnation of the Lorax, that mythical Seussian creature who speaks for the trees. But he speaks, too, for a host of researchers worldwide, bringing their findings to a wider audience with passion and generosity. There's a quickening around these subjects, with many articles and programs about shrubspeak, the wood wide web, the legal rights of nature, and more.
Alongside this book, I began Barkskins, Annie Proulx's vast and magisterial novel that opens with the colonial destruction of northern America's forests. As each tree dropped, writes Proulx, "the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered … and one by one the web strands snapped."
How do we make sense of the lives that trees lead? We come, we go, in tiny blips of scores of years against their centuries – many more of us now than there have ever been before, yet still far fewer than them: they're estimated to number more than three trillion across the face of the earth. They provide wood. They provide warmth. The provide paper. They breathe in so much extra CO2 – take it up; take it away – but we're not sure how much more of that they'll take.
On the edge of a putative new geological epoch, our web, our supportive filaments, seem often to flap and sunder in disarray. Which makes now seem an opportune time to tune in – again, and through these exciting new prisms of research – to the next stories trees might impart.
For Peter Wohlleben, trees and humans aren’t so different
From nursing sick neighbours to taking care of saplings, a ‘Wood Wide Web’ is fuelling personal connections in the forest
Brian Bethune
September 13, 2016
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Peter Wohlleben, Foerster und Buchautor, vor Buchen und Fiechten in seinem Forstrevier. Portraet, Einzelportraet. Europa. Deutschland, Rheinland-Pfalz, Eifel, Huemmel. 29.09.2015.
Peter Wohlleben, Foerster und Buchautor, vor Buchen und Fiechten in seinem Forstrevier. Portraet, Einzelportraet. Europa. Deutschland, Rheinland-Pfalz, Eifel, Huemmel. 29.09.2015.
Even small children know trees are living beings, says Peter Wohlleben, despite the fact you can burn them up in a cozy log fire. An amiable forester and the author of The Hidden Life of Trees, a bestseller in his native Germany—a country where forests are sunk deeply into the cultural DNA (think Grimms’ fairy tales)—Wohlleben is not morally troubled by the consumption of trees. Or of animals, for that matter, as long as they are all treated with respect, in a way “appropriate to their species,” including allowing some “to grow old with dignity and die a natural death. I’ve tried to show how animal- and even human-like trees are, to feel them empathetically.”
That’s why the trees in Wohlleben’s book, now released in English, are anthropomorphized to a degree that infuriates scientists and delights hundreds of thousands of readers. “I am a human being, I use human language. Scientific language is full of insight and fascinating facts, but take the emotion out of your speech and the people you are talking to don’t feel what you are saying,” Wohlleben says in an interview. Thus his trees are both individuals and social beings: they nurse sick neighbours, lavish love and attention on their children, and even at times take care of their dead—keeping stumps alive through a sugar solution delivered from their roots to the stumps. The trees “talk” to each other, warning about pests and changes in the weather; they learn from experience and feel pain when injured. Deadwood they are not.
The effect on readers is utterly charming, but what keeps the experts grumbling well short of denunciation is that Wohlleben also has the science down. For a quarter-century, research, much of it conducted in Canada’s West Coast rainforests—Suzanne Simard, a forest ecology professor at UBC, is quoted often and supplies an afterward to Hidden Life—has revealed the existence of the electrically alive fungal-root network now known as the Wood Wide Web. In British Columbia, where Simard has traced that web across species boundaries, birches and Douglas firs supply each other with carbon and nutrients, while taking seasonal turns as the dominant partner in the exchange. Tree “communication”—Simard writes as a professional—is now an established fact.
Wohlleben, 52, might not sound the same, but he too is a trained professional. He grew up in the 1970s in Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, when environmentalism was starting to become a mass national movement. He became a forester, he says, in part to save the world, though the forestry agency’s paid internship didn’t hurt. By 1987, Wohlleben was running a 1,200-hectare reserve in the Eifel region, near the Belgian border. “I followed all the normal practices, just as I was taught: the clear cuts, the machine logging, spraying insecticides. But I didn’t want to—I knew inside it was killing the forest.”
He became fixated on the way nearby private forests, in operation for hundreds of years, were not only run with ecological sensitivity, but made more money, because their trees were older and larger, and their operating costs so much lower. “Yes, it’s true, what I said, well mostly,” laughs Wohlleben when asked about one controversial remark. After adding a few qualifiers, he’s happy to repeat himself: “Two very big, very high-quality trees from an old family forest will buy you a car; two spruce from a state forest isn’t worth more than two, okay, three pizzas.”
Eventually, fed up with his working life, Wohlleben talked the local municipal council into supporting doing things that way, with an additional twist: burial plots. For a fee, people could bury urns containing the ashes of their cremated loved ones under centuries-old trees bearing a name plaque, reducing the timber-felling required to turn a profit.
But he couldn’t get permission where it mattered, at the state forestry agency, so after 15 years, Wohlleben quit his job. He, his wife and two children were going to emigrate to Sweden, in hopes of finding better forestry practices, when “the mayor said he’d break the arrangement with the government and hire me directly. Now I was free to do what my heart told me.”
So far, everyone is happy. There is less timber revenue—it will be a long time before Wohlleben can sell many trees worth half a car each—but costs are way down. He no longer uses expensive chemicals or machinery: all harvested trees are removed by horse power. And the “living gravestone” business is booming. “This is a Catholic area and the Church was very opposed at first, but not now. We already have 4,000 urns in the forest, with room for another 20 years of demand.” Within two years of the switchover, the sustainable forest was earning a handsome profit, while creating six new jobs.
Excerpt: How trees talk to one another
Commercially and professionally vindicated, Wohlleben speaks confidently, in his human language, about his rather human trees. He’s seen the negative side of the Wood Wide Web: Twice Wohlleben has come across lightning-struck Douglas firs—the North American transplant is a staple of German commercial forests—and found, within a 15-m radius, other dead Douglas firs, “electrocuted” at the same time via their underground connection to the original victim.
The positive side, what Wohlleben calls the trees’ commitment to social security, far outweighs the negative. In an undisturbed beech wood, the trees synchronize their photosynthesis so that each ends up growing “into the best tree it can be.” That cuts against foresters’ instinctive belief that the trees are competing against each other, but mutual support actually makes evolutionary sense. Many trees make for, well, a forest, and a forest—through its climate control—is on the whole a better environment for a tree, just as village life beats living alone for most people.
So far, even the least sentimental forester can nod along, but why would a stand of beeches in his forest keep providing nutrients to a stump, which by definition is no longer holding up its end of a social security regimen? Especially a stump that Wohlleben judges, by the disintegration of its central core, to have fallen “at least 400 years ago?” It doesn’t happen often, he acknowledges, and never under commercial harvesting conditions. Perhaps, Wohlleben speculates—and he is always careful to note when he is about to step outside expert consensus—it indicates “friendship and affection” between trees, more a matter of grave-tending for an honoured member of the community than an evolutionary strategy.
Affection doesn’t seem a step too far for Wohlleben, given what he calls the “individual characters” of trees. He likes to point to a trio of oaks sharing the exact same growing conditions. One, out of “anxiety,” he says, always drops its leaves weeks before the others, responding each fall to the decreasing hours of daylight rather than to the increasing number of warm days brought by climate change. A tree in full leaf, unable to let strong winds pass right through its canopy, is in danger of being toppled in a seasonal storm. Usually a sunny optimist, Wohlleben thinks the anxious tree has it right—sooner or later, the two laggards, greedy for maximum photosynthesis, will pay the price in an autumn gale.
But nothing brings out emotive language like the relationship between tree parents and their offspring. When Wohlleben took a close look at the number of tiny annual nodes on beech saplings that were between one and two metres tall, he realized that trees he had assumed to be no older than 10 were actually closer to 80. Given their growing capacity, the young beeches could have been 35 m taller. Why then were they so stunted? Because, the forester answers in deliberately chosen terms, “their upbringing prevents it for their own good.”
They stand under 200-year-old mother trees, whose canopies block 97 per cent of the sunlight. That leaves just enough to keep them alive, when bolstered by sugar and other nutrients passed on to their roots by mothers “nursing their babies,” as Wohlleben calls it. For decades then, energy not spent on growing taller is diverted to squeezing the air pockets out of inner cells, making the saplings both more dense and more flexible. That sets them up for a lifetime of storm protection and resistance to pests and injuries. When their elderly parents ultimately topple to the ground, the well-raised saplings—those that survive the crash, that is—race each other to fill the sun-drenched opening in the canopy.
In the end, it’s the slow pace of tree life that stops us from treating them with the respect they deserve, argues Wohlleben. We can appreciate the surprising and intricate mutual support network, and accept (or not) the maternal love idea, but ultimately trees simply “exceed the human attention span.” People do want to help, he says, but they want results. “It’s hard to accept that helping means keeping our hands in our pockets, letting all the ugly, slow death and messy regrowth go on for 500 years.” It needs to be done, though, Wohlleben adds, because forests are crucial, “in making our world the kind of place where we want to live.”
‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ by Peter Wohlleben
By
Bob Kronbauer -
February 19, 2017
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Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees is exactly the book you would expect to be co-published by the David Suzuki Institute and Greystone Books; two groups with a commitment to protecting the natural environment. While the review I published last week of Ian Gill’s No News is Bad News, published by the same duo, was critical of its slant and bizarre conclusions (I wholeheartedly disagree that subsidizing environmental reporting could save journalism in Canada) I have nothing but praise for this title. It is exactly what it’s presented as and by the end of it you will literally want to go out and hug a tree.
Originally published in german as Das geheime Leben der Bäume in 2015, it has since been translated into many different languages and become a bestseller around the world. It’s no surprise that it’s listed at number 1 on the BC Bestsellers List right now, as nearly all British Columbians love our trees. Who here wouldn’t be intrigued by a book presenting the idea that they actually feel things and communicate with each other?hidden-life-of-trees-peter-wohlleben
As a pragmatic conservationist I generally love what Greystone publishes. My first review in this series was of their book The Killer Whale Who Changed the World by Mark Leiren-Young, which actually changed my view on keeping cetaceans in captivity. However I had expected The Hidden Life of Trees to be some sort of gnomes-in-the-woods whimsy tale and didn’t believe I’d walk away believing any of it. I was wrong. This title is wonderful.
It winds us through a real-life fairytale of how trees are all parts of real life social networks: forests. They feel things, they remember things, they get scabies (!), they’re all connected by underground fungi chains (research which has previously published and named the “wood wide web“) and the facts that Wohlleben presents make it unquestionable that all is not as it seems in the forest.
If you don’t know anything about trees then you’ll learn the difference between conifers and deciduous ones, then you’ll be taken deep inside the world of a tree nerd, while not being bored at any juncture. I knew a bit about the subject but learned so much from reading this, and was reminded of all of the reasons why trees are important. It’s not only a… uh… human story of these social beings, but it teaches us science lessons about how they survive, and how they have survived. Like I said, it literally made me want to go out and hug a tree, and it’s crazy that I now believe that tree might be able to appreciate the fact that I’m doing that.