I want to read this book ... but know it's not going to happen any time soon, so I'm saving this for a rainy day. In the mean time, the two articles below offer a happy taste.
The first comes from the remarkably thoughtful and rich offerings of BrainPickings.org, one of my favorite places on the web (host Maria Popova, says, "I'm a reader, writer, interestingness hunter-gatherer, and curious mind at large." This is just a snippet of a longer piece she wrote about the book.
"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.
The other article is actually a review from amazon.com:
Perfect Excellent Unforgettable
As
a young lad in Germany, Peter Wohlleben loved nature. He went to
forestry school, and became a wood ranger. At this job, he was expected
to produce as many high quality saw logs as possible, with maximum
efficiency, by any means necessary. His tool kit included heavy
machinery and pesticides. This was forest mining, an enterprise that
ravaged the forest ecosystem and had no long-term future. He oversaw a
plantation of trees lined up in straight rows, evenly spaced. It was a
concentration camp for tree people.
Wohlleben is a smart and
sensitive man, and over the course of decades he got to know the tree
people very well. Eventually, his job became unbearable. Luckily, he
made friends in the community of Hümmel, and was given permission to
manage their forest in a less destructive manner. There is no more
clear-cutting, and logs are removed by horse teams, not machines. In
one portion of the forest, old trees are leased as living gravestones,
where families can bury the ashes of kin. In this way, the forest
generates income without murdering trees.
Wohlleben wrote The
Hidden Life of Trees, a smash hit in Germany. It will be translated
into 19 languages. The book is built on a foundation of reputable
science, but it reads like grandpa chatting at fireside. He’s a gentle
old storyteller explaining the wondrous magic of beautiful forests to
befuddled space aliens from a crazy planet named Consume. He teaches
readers about the family of life, a subject typically neglected in
schools.
Evergreen trees have been around for 170 million years,
and trees with leaves are 100 million years old. Until recently, trees
lived very well without the assistance of a single professional forest
manager. I’m serious! Forests are communities of tree people. Their
root systems intermingle, allowing them to send nutrients to their
hungry children, and to ailing neighbors. When a Douglas fir is struck
by lightning, several of its close neighbors might also die, because of
their underground connections. A tribe of tree people can create a
beneficial local climate for the community.
Also underground are
mycelium, the largest organisms yet discovered. One in Oregon weighs
660 tons, covers 2,000 acres (800 ha), and is 2,400 years old. They are
fungi that send threads throughout the forest soil. The threads
penetrate and wrap around tree roots. They provide trees with water,
nitrogen, and phosphorus, in exchange for sugar and other carbohydrates.
They discourage attacks from harmful fungi and bacteria, and they
filter out heavy metals.
When a limb breaks off, unwelcome fungal
spores arrive minutes later. If the tree can close off the open wound
in less than five years, the fungi won’t survive. If the wound is too
large, the fungi can cause destructive rot, possibly killing the tree.
When a gang of badass beetles invades, the tree secretes toxic
compounds, and sends warnings to other trees via scent messages, and
underground electrical signals. Woodpeckers and friendly beetles attack
the troublemakers.
Forests exist in a state of continuous
change, but this is hard for us to see, because trees live much slower
than we do. They almost appear to be frozen in time. Humans zoom
through life like hamsters frantically galloping on treadmill, and we
blink out in just a few decades. In Sweden, scientists studied a spruce
that appeared to be about 500 years old. They were surprised to learn
that it was growing from a root system that was 9,550 years old.
In
Switzerland, construction workers uncovered stumps of trees that didn’t
look very old. Scientists examined them and discovered that they
belonged to pines that lived 14,000 years ago. Analyzing the rings of
their trunks, they learned that the pines that survived a climate that
warmed 42°F, and then cooled about the same amount — in a period of just
30 years! This is the equivalent of our worst-case projections today.
Dinosaurs
still exist in the form of birds, winged creatures that can quickly
escape from hostile conditions. Trees can’t fly, but they can migrate,
slowly. When the climate cools, they move south. When it warms, they
go north, like they are today — because of global warming, and because
they continue to adapt to the end of the last ice age. A strong wind
can carry winged seeds a mile. Birds can carry seeds several miles. A
beech tree tribe can advance about a quarter mile per year (0.4 km).
Compared
to trees, the human genome has little variation. We are like
seven-point-something billion Barbie and Ken dolls. Tree genomes are
extremely diverse, and this is key for their survival. Some trees are
more drought tolerant, others are better with cold or moisture. So
change that kills some is less likely to kill all. Wohlleben suspects
that his beech forest will survive, as long as forest miners don’t wreck
its soil or microclimate. (Far more questionable is the future of
corn, wheat, and rice, whose genetic diversity has been sharply reduced
by the seed sellers of industrial agriculture.)
Trees have
amazing adaptations to avoid inbreeding. Winds and bees deliver pollen
from distant trees. The ovaries of bird cherry trees reject pollen from
male blossoms on the same tree. Willows have separate male trees and
female trees. Spruces have male and female blossoms, but they open
several days apart.
Boars and deer love to devour acorns and
beechnuts. Feasting on nuts allows them to put on fat for the winter.
To avoid turning these animals into habitual parasites, nuts are not
produced every year. This limits the population of chubby nutters, and
ensures that some seeds will survive and germinate. If a beech lives
400 years, it will drop 1.8 million nuts.
On deciduous trees,
leaves are solar panels. They unfold in the spring, capture sunlight,
and for several months manufacture sugar, cellulose, and other
carbohydrates. When the tree can store no more sugar, or when the first
hard frost arrives, the solar panels are no longer needed. Their
chlorophyll is drained, and will be recycled next spring. Leaves fall
to the ground and return to humus. The tree goes into hibernation,
spending the winter surviving on stored sugar. Now, with bare branches,
the tree is far less vulnerable to damage from strong winds, heavy wet
snows, and ice storms.
In addition to rotting leaves, a wild
forest also transforms fallen branches and trunks into carbon rich
humus. Year after year, the topsoil becomes deeper, healthier, and more
fertile. Tree plantations, on the other hand, send the trunks to saw
mills. So, every year, tons of precious biomass are shipped away, to
planet Consume. This depletes soil fertility, and encourages erosion.
Plantation trees are more vulnerable to insects and diseases. Because
their root systems never develop normally, the trees are more likely to
blow down.
From cover to cover, the book presents fascinating
observations. By the end, readers are likely to imagine that
undisturbed forests are vastly more intelligent than severely disturbed
communities of radicalized consumers. More and more, scientists are
muttering and snarling, as the imaginary gulf between the plant and
animal worlds fades away. Wohlleben is not a vegetarian, because
experience has taught him that plants are no less alive, intelligent,
and sacred than animals. It’s a wonderful book. I’m serious!
