The title is a misnomer. This new book by German forester Peter Wohlleben should have been called in English “How Forests Can Save the World”. It was first published in German in 2021 with a long title, which, translated word for word, is “The long breath of trees: how trees learn to deal with climate change and why the forest will save us if we allow it”.
Forests, or the forest? Would just any forest save us? Or is the author writing about a specific forest or type of forest, such as the deciduous woodland in Rhineland-Palatinate at Westhofen, where he has established a forest academy? The gist of his argument is in favour of preserving ancient native woodland, and against monoculture plantations of spruce or fir, or even experimenting in northern Europe with trees from warmer climes that might withstand hotter seasons.
The science of forestry
Forestry is a science. The author builds the arguments in detail from current observations of what is happening to trees around him in Germany. An early chapter describes how horse chestnuts in urban streets reacted to drought (they dropped their leaves too early). He goes on to analyse in detail the seasonal life of trees, and how they survive the winter by storing up sugar, calibrating their leafing with the weather and light, and also their leaf colouring to protect against the insects that have co-evolved with them.
In recent years, since 2018, forest plantations have suffered die-offs. Not only the plantations, but even huge native trees, of beech and oak are being felled because of die-off, weakened by bark beetle, wind and fire. The reaction of forest managers is mostly to move in the chain-saw team and clear-cut the area. This is disastrous for several reasons. Firstly, for deciduous forests, it removes biomass from the soil and hinders regrowth from tree seedlings. The heavy machinery for logging also compacts the soil.
Forestry in industry
Forestry is part of the timber industry, supplying the basic material needed for construction, furniture making, paper, etc. When a lot of low-quality timber from damaged trees is dumped on the market, the price is lowered, to the distress of forest owners. Many are owned by the Länder or the local state authority. But his argument is not mainly in favour of the timber industry. In fact, towards the end of the book, he cites some examples of collusion that show even forest scientists distorting the science to serve the industry, similarly to the way the big oil industry has paid for climate change denialism.
One wonders what the solutions are for the timber industry. I began to feel guilty about my wood furniture and oak floors. Should we ethical consumers start to abstain from timber as well as meat? This author certainly has strong arguments against both meat-eating and the timber industry. Using land for cattle rather than forests harms the planet, and forestry devoted to timber production neglects the most valuable function of trees, namely, the way they breathe into the environment.
How trees breathe and cool us
‘Breath’ is in the original title. But this covers a range of functions that trees perform: they take in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen; they also hold an amazing amount of moisture in their crowns, their trunks and their roots. This lowers the temperature noticeably around trees; even a single tree makes a difference. Trees in urban areas cool the hot concreted areas. There is a moving story of how during the recent drought, various community activists set up watering teams to preserve the trees in their streets.
How trees support each other
In his earlier book “The Hidden Life of Trees”, Wohlleben described how trees support each other. A mother tree protects for years the seedlings growing nearby by controlling the temperature, the moisture and the nutrients in the soil. In recent decades, research into fungal hyphae in the soil has revealed how trees communicate and shift nutrients to the weaker members, as explained in “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake.
As a forester, Wohlleben now deplores the practice of chopping down mature trees for timber sale and to speed up growth by getting more light into the forest, when what is needed is to allow ancient deciduous trees to grow for their full potential (500 years or more for some), all the while nurturing their young descendants, and then when they fall to lie as biomass on the forest floor, food for the other co-inhabitants of the forest.
‘Leave it alone’
His arguments against current German forestry practice come to a crescendo in the closing chapters. He is very much against plantations of fir and spruce. Many of these were planted for quick growth after the war when the country needed timber urgently for reconstruction. But now, with die-offs, wildfires and gales, such plantations are a wasted effort. He describes how owners are frantically clearing the sites of damaged trees, only to replant more of the same! He points out that the most reliable way of reforesting is simply to leave the land to rewild. At first it will fill with grassland, nettles and brambles. But within a few years, the indigenous tree seedlings of beech, birch and oak will root and grow strong.
This ‘leave it alone’ message is not well received by the timber industry or by the forest scientists intent on predictable growth of trees for timber. With the rate of climate change, “more knowledge and more technology will not protect us”, so it is best to proceed slowly and with caution.
“Nature is not a simple clockwork mechanism that ticks at the same rate in perpetuity. Rather, forests are complex systems that process information. They are places where information about solutions to problems are stored in the genetic material of organisms and in their interplay with each other. As the forest evolves, this knowledge is constantly being tested and added to. This means you can, literally, talk of ecosystem intelligence.”
This is why the title of this book should be about the life of forests rather than just trees. It is not the individual tree, but all the other beings that co-inhabit the forest, plants, insects, animals and fungi, that sustain its ongoing life.
Forestry and history
The forest that the writer is managing is ancient deciduous woodland (beech, birch and oak) surviving from the huge forest, the Hycynae, that stretched across this part of Europe in Roman times behind the frontier of the Danube and the Rhine. Germanic tribes were migrating into Gaul, and this provoked the Romans into battle with them.
There was a historic battle in 9CE (in the Teutoburg forest, north of modern day Osnabruck/Kalkriese), which was won by the German leader Arminius. A Latin manuscript of Tacitus’ annals about this surfaced in the sixteenth century, and since then, Arminius and his warriors have become national heroes, in the twentieth century rather too closely linked to Nazism. However, with woodland awareness so dominant in history, literature and poetry, German national sentiment still links patriotism and forests.
Thus, forests are strongly supported by public sentiment and resources. Forestry as science has a good reputation. Indeed, as Wohlleben points out, many other countries, such as India, have adopted German forestry practices. So, what German foresters now say, write and do has an influence on the rest of the world. What his book says, now translated by Jane Billinghurst into English, is let the old forests regrow. Let rewilding happen. The old trees know how to adapt the forest even to climate change. Forests actually alter the climate, and can thus save the world.
