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The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World

Peter Wohlleben

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jun 01, 2020
Category: Non Fiction

Our best teacher is Nature, though we frequently ignore it — even those of us who say, and know, “Nature always bats last.” The specific instructor here is trees, and how individual trees die young and communities of trees live long and well. And care for their sick. And even look after their dead. As a metaphor, I can’t think of any more exalted, more powerful, more appropriate to this moment.

Maybe you can sharpen razor blades by putting them inside a pyramid. Maybe the Illuminati really do place agents in business and government and are close to talking control of the world. Maybe aliens walk among us.

I doubt all that.

But I have read “The Hidden Life of Trees,” and I no longer doubt that trees communicate with one another. An individual tree is an endangered species, likely to die young. A community of trees is a forest, and there a tree can live for hundreds of years. (A spruce tree in Sweden is 9,500 years old.) In that community, “trees experience pain and have memories, and tree parents live together with their children.”

Who believes that? Forest ecologists you don’t know. And Peter Wohlleben, a 52-year old German forester who is a household name in Germany. After forestry school, he became a government wood ranger, choosing trees for lumber companies to harvest. Twenty years ago, he decided that trees were more than grist for tables and paper, and he began to lead tours of the forest.

He told the municipality there was a better way to deal with forests. He was convincing — he was hired to manage the forest. He immediately eliminated insecticides, brought in horses to drag felled trees from the forest, and let the wild things grow. The forest had been losing money. In two years under his direction, it was profitable. And he was on a mission to get closer to the forest — to talk with the trees that, he now knew, talked to one another. As he writes:

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.

“The Hidden Life of Trees” was at the top of the Spiegel nonfiction best-seller list for a year. It’s being translated into 19 languages. (It is a comment on American publishing that the English translation bears the imprint of a Canadian publisher.) There are films about his work. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

“The Hidden Life of Trees” is a closely reported book. “I use a very human language,” Wohlleben says. “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, a lot of it is more technical than the casual reader may like. But even the casual reader will grasp that this book is important because it’s about much more than trees. Consider:

Why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach the forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer.

Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance.

A tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.

To read that in a country with a President who despises nature and would unthinkingly sacrifice the future so businesses can extract every possible dollar from nature — it is to weep. And then it is to hope. Peter Wohlleben’s wisdom matters in Europe. Maybe it will come to matter here.

[Many thanks to M.K. and K.M.]

BONUS VIDEO

What happens when Nature is allowed to manage itself.