By Caroline Grass
After a few years of work as a forester in Germany in the 1980s and 90s, Peter Wohlleben knew that cutting down trees and spraying insecticides on the 3,000-acre woodlot he oversaw wasn’t treating the trees with respect. These trees had stories, especially the oldest ones. The established ones with gnarled trunks, countless branches reaching up toward the sunlight and innumerable deep emerald leaves. In forestry terms, these trees aren’t worth anything, an old tree should have been cut down years ago.
Wohlleben, whose job it was to assess a tree’s suitability for the lumber mill, grew disheartened with the system, which he believes looks at the well-being of a forest simply for optimizing the lumber industry. The forests were alive and the trees, in conversation with one another. To ignore that would be to ignore humanity, he thought.
A belief that has sparked controversy among scientists.
Forestry reimagined
Wohlleben decided to research other approaches to forestry and soon “brought in horses, eliminated insecticides and began experimenting with letting the woods grow wilder,” according to New York Times reporting. This did not please his state forestry bosses. “But within two years, the forest went from loss to profit, in part by eliminating expensive machinery and chemicals.”
Even though he had planned to move to Sweden and hang up his civil-servant coat after nearly a decade of conflict surrounding his unorthodox practices, at the last minute, the municipal owners of the forest hired Wohlleben to manage the forest directly, instead of the state forest administration. He’s been doing it ever since and started writing about his findings in 2015.
Wanting to share his new-found hope for alternative forestry practices and his belief that trees are social beings, Wohlleben wrote “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from a Secret World.” It was a sensation in Germany, then was translated into English in 2016 and became a New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal bestseller.
Wohlleben’s work of creative nonfiction braids his observations of the forest he works in with scientific research about how trees communicate with one another, concluding that the forest is a social network. He delights readers with touching descriptions of trees talking to each other, learning, remembering, and nursing their children and neighbors, all through a fungal network within their root systems.
Fact or fairy tale?
While popular to ‘lay people,’ critics write, Wohlleben’s work has not been met with complete enthusiasm. In fact, it “has infuriated professional forestry scientists,” according to a book review from Sharon Elizabeth Kingsland, professor of the history of science and technology at Johns Hopkins University. The Guardian wrote a critical article titled sarcastically, “The man who thinks trees talk to each other.” And two German scientists launched an online petition titled, “Even in the forest, it’s facts we want instead of fairy tales,” describing the book as a “conglomeration of half-truths, biased judgments, and wishful thinking” and arguing that many of the claims in the book are “not based on scientific evidence.”
Wohlleben defends his work. Like Siegfried in the acclaimed German opera, Wohlleben can understand the birds and forest that houses them. He’s slayed the dragon, having convinced his bosses and readers that his forestry methods are good for business but most importantly are essential to maintain the health of the forest community.
Wohlleben has dedicated his life to sustainable forestry and viewing the trees as communicators has only aided his understanding of them, so why he can’t describe it as so to his readers? Wohlleben puts it simply, telling The New York Times, “I use a very human language. 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.”
The science
The research Wohlleben cites was groundbreaking when it was published in 1997 and the newspaper El PaÍs said Wohlleben’s book was instrumental in spreading the research. The discovery of a mycorrhizal fungi and tree root network which allows trees to communicate, and exchange nutrients and warning signals by Suzanne Simard described a ‘wood wide web’ of sorts and was published in the journal Nature.
Since then, Simard has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles in addition to presenting at countless conferences around the world. She’s a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and currently studies how the forest networks contribute to ecosystem resiliency against humans and climate change. In short— Simard is legit.
It seems that the criticism of Wohlleben’s writing style also criticizes and devalues Simard’s scientific discoveries, the crucial one being that sugars are transferred between trees and plants surrounding them. But does that description— a transfer of sugars between trees— or the even more jargon-heavy abstract of Simard’s paper, spark joy and wonder or make anyone stop to think twice about how we use trees in our lumber industry?
Excerpt of Simard’s 1997 Abstract in the paper, Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field: “Different plant species can be compatible with the same species of mycorrhizal fungi and be connected to one another by a common mycelium. Transfer of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus through interconnecting mycelia has been measured frequently in laboratory experiments.”
How far is too far?
Science writing and science communication to educate the public and include them in the conversation is critical. It has been throughout history, from “perhaps the first mass-market popular science book” Conversations of the Plurality of Words by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in 1686, to the creation of a National Association of Science Writers (NASW) in the U.S. in 1934 to help professionalize the field. Now countless articles, books, and media are dedicated to the craft, including “The Hidden Life of Trees” (which has also been adapted into a film of the same name).
As science progresses each day and continues to grow immensely complex, we need translators who can get people to care. But creative writing isn’t a license to misrepresent the truth. NASW’s code of ethics states that “science writers should strive to be accurate in their professional work, including verifying the accuracy of their information and checking sources’ credentials and their potential conflicts of interest” which Wohlleben does in his writing. His book has over 75 citations and he’s clear when he expresses an opinion versus a scientific finding. Like Francis Bacon championed, objective truth is important but the only way to communicate the knowledge of the world is through storytelling.
Sharing his message
Wohlleben hasn’t let the controversy over his first book stop him from sharing his story and advocating for tree conservation. He’s continued to write, publishing seven more books for adults and four children’s books all focused on trees, animals and environmental networks. Wohlleben founded a Forest Academy to continue education and advocacy as he teaches ecologically conscious forestry.
And when he’s not writing or teaching, Wohlleben continues to takes walks through his woods every day. The trees, perhaps with branches swaying, sunlight dappling through the canopy and leaves rustling on a breezy afternoon, continue to talk to each other on the land. And Wohlleben listens.
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