Trees Through Peter Wohlleben

I never read Peter Wohlleben (nor heard of him) but I am glad I did now. 

His 2015 book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from A Secret World and his new book The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them. 

I ordered both. 

Review of his new book; looks like trees are much wiser than us. They raise their kids to be anti-fragile plus they are anti-coddling.  

The Hidden Life argued that trees are social and sensate. The Power of Trees shows that they can be our saviours. But it’s terribly hard to let ourselves be saved. We think we can be the authors of our salvation. We are doers by constitution. Of course, there are things we could and should be doing, but in terms of forestry practice, often what’s billed as part of the solution is part of the problem.

Anyone who has planted a tree in their garden knows that it has a profound effect – it makes your garden cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Forests do that on a grand scale. A deciduous forest in summer is often as cool as a lake. Berlin is 15C warmer than the ancient forests nearby. The coniferous monocultures so beloved of commercial foresters are not such good coolers: they’re up to 8C warmer than their deciduous counterparts.

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Crucially, trees learn from their past traumas and produce offspring programmed with those lessons. Trees that have narrowly escaped drought are more prudent in the future: they slow their growth and ration their drinking. They have two main methods for influencing their children: the first is good parenting. Mother trees regulate their children’s growth by changing the rate at which they drip-feed them with sugar solution through root networks, and children growing in the rain and light shadow of the mother won’t drink heavily or overeat. The second is epigenetic inheritance, which enables useful behavioural traits to be passed on fast to future generations.

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If we don’t learn to leave the trees alone, the trees will eventually be alone anyway – but without us.