Brilliant and enlightening piece on how we humans cannot "plan" nature (in time, it always fails) but we should be humble enough to embrace what nature offers us from their eternal wisdom.
Last summer, Friederike and Jörg von Beyme stood on a bramble-covered, Sun-blasted slope outside this small town in eastern Germany. Just 4 years ago, the hillside, part of a nearly 500-hectare forest the couple bought in 2002, was green and shady, covered in tall, neatly arranged Norway spruce trees the couple planned to cut and sell.
During January 2018, however, a powerful storm felled many of the trees. Then, over the next 3 years, a record drought hit Germany and much of Central Europe, stressing the spruces that still stood. The back-to-back disasters enabled bark-boring beetles that had been munching on dead trees to jump to drought-weakened ones. Beetle populations exploded. In just 3 weeks, towering spruces that had seemed healthy were dead.
The von Beymes salvaged what they could, rushing to log and sell the dead and diseased trees. But thousands of other forest owners did the same, causing the timber market to collapse. The couple’s piles of logs were worth less than what it had cost to cut and stack them. Now, they don’t expect to earn a profit from logging spruces for 20 years. “We have a big forest now with big problems,” Jörg von Beyme says.
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It's no exaggeration to say modern industrial forestry was invented in Germany. In the early 1700s, mining official Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who lived not far from where the von Beymes live today, became alarmed by devastating timber shortages caused by demand from mining and smelting. In response, he penned a 1713 treatise proposing that forests be managed sustainably. Wood harvests should be limited to what the land could produce, von Carlowitz wrote, and trees should be assiduously replanted to ensure a future supply. (Of course, Indigenous people around the world had been applying similar ideas for millennia.)
German forests started to recover as landowners adopted the approach. And Germany’s scientific approach to forestry—planting fast-growing species in neat rows, perfectly spaced for maximum timber production—became an international model. After World War II, with Germany in ruins and Allied nations demanding shipments of timber for reparations, foresters doubled down on von Carlowitz’s vision. Areas where deciduous trees such as beech and oak would have grown naturally were planted in monocultures of fast-growing evergreen spruce and pine. The trees were so essential to Germany’s economy that they became known as the brotbaums or “bread trees.”
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Just a few years ago, the plot—part of a forest owned by the small town of Treuenbrietzen—was covered by Scotch pines, a common plantation species in regions with sandy soils. In the hot, dry summer of 2018, however, fires torched some 400 hectares of the pine forest, closing highways and forcing hundreds of people to flee their homes; smoke even reached Berlin. In the past, such large fires were almost unheard of in mild Central Europe.
In this plot, charred trees were removed, replaced by newly planted pines. But the drought, which continued through 2020, killed many of the puny seedlings, Blumröder pointed out as she surveyed the site. And even the survivors were struggling to keep up with fast-growing poplar saplings, some already 3 meters tall, that had sprouted on their own. The poplars’ vigor indicates that replanting is not necessary, Blumröder and Ibisch argue. “The problem is, foresters don’t wait,” Ibisch says. “They always say they think in long-term scales. But when calamity happens … they panic.”
In some other burned plots, Ibisch and Blumröder persuaded Treuenbrietzen’s forester to deviate from usual practices. On one tract, he left charred trunks standing and didn’t replant, allowing forest succession to proceed on its own—a rare practice. In others, he cleared some of the snags and planted rows of oaks—which many researchers believe could be more resilient to future climate change—instead of pines.
In preliminary results, the new approaches are producing promising outcomes. In areas where some or all burned trees were left standing, for example, Ibisch and Blumröder have found more plant, fungus, and insect species than in cleared tracts. Soil temperatures in the uncleared tracts are lower on hot days, and winds calmer, helping the soil retain moisture. Moss is beginning to cover the ground where fallen trees have started to rot, preventing erosion and stimulating the growth of underground soil fungal networks. The lesson for Germany’s foresters, Blumröder believes, is that they should “step back, let the system do [its thing] first, and then learn from it.”
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