German forester Peter Wohlleben has had a love affair with trees for decades.
His keen insights have captured the interest and imagination of scientists, scholars, environmentalists, students, and anyone passionate about our natural world
Many of his observations come from study and research done in his native Germany. A majority of trees in Wohlleben’s world live in the temperate zone, in the second largest biome on the planet, covering some 25 percent of the world’s forest area—beeches, oaks, spruce, and maples to name a few—but his concern for all of nature’s trees is undisputed.
Hallowed and Historic Ground
Wohlleben’s unique, sensitive writing style is an important part of his approach to protecting and preserving the world’s forests. He humanizes those acres of trees. He makes the reader sympathetic to those tracts cut clear by heavy machinery in the name of progress and profit.
Readers of “The Power of Trees: How Ancient Forests Can Save Us if We Let Them” will no doubt be touched when learning how root systems communicate and share their knowledge with other tree species, how mother trees will shade and protect young saplings, and how a forest has the capacity to regrow and renew itself if left on its own.
Old trees, like human parents and grandparents, pass on their wisdom to their offspring. For trees, this is a slow process, but nevertheless their ability to adapt and learn is something Wohlleben finds fascinating and hopeful.
More than merely gatherings of trees, forests hold myriad ecosystems that include thousands of different species from animals to fungi and bacteria. When a tree is lost, a whole host of life is affected.
While steeped in his own brand of forest management, Wohlleben goes against a lot of what contemporary forest management programs advocate. This often pits him against owners of tree plantations, where a forest is planted for high-volume production of wood, which usually involves planting one type of tree as a monoculture forest, or clearcutting, an extreme logging method by which resilient natural forests are harvested and replaced with man-made tree plantations.
Wohlleben trusts the wisdom of the trees and believes that human arrogance stands as an impediment to the future life of forests. In many cases, he points out where modern forestry management is heading in the wrong direction. Wohlleben would opt for the quiet reverence of natural forest restoration over the loud blaring of heavy equipment laying waste not only to trees but also to the soil sustaining them.
Natural Air-Conditioning
Wohlleben has walked in many woods. He is a distiller of all the information that trees hold. He seems to have decoded their language and is proud to speak on their behalf. He does so with passion and conviction, essentially offering a blueprint for a new kind of forestry that is more focused on saving old-growth forests than planting new ones.He shares the latest emerging scientific research that shows how trees adapt to changing environmental conditions, passing this knowledge down to their offspring. Trees help cool the environment locally and across continents, and old-growth forests may be the most effective.
With a very altruistic and classical approach to forest preservation, Wohlleben offers convincing data about deciduous forests and how they can help cool the climate over open landscape, and he explains why finding a balance with forest-dependent industries is a challenge.
If you aren’t familiar with Wohlleben’s other books, you’ll enjoy discovering his knowledge and sensitivity about the world of trees and appreciate his passionate voice. He offers a compelling message, a compassionate plea, to preserve nature’s bounty—not just for the trees, but for us as well.
The book is written in a well-paced narrative and conversational style. The chapters are short, and each packs a punch.
I highly recommend this read.
