Tree People
When Peter Wohlleben went to forestry school, he learned that trees are resources to be managed for maximum commercial value. The forestry industry likes them tall, straight, and regularly spaced—easy to cut and easy to sell. In the professional forester’s eyes, every forest is destined for the lumber mill.
Wohlleben’s first job out forestry school was managing trees for the community of Hummel in Germany. As he interacted with visitors to his forest over the years, he made an interesting discovery:
“Visitors were enchanted by crooked, gnarled trees I would previously have dismissed because of their low commercial value.”
Seeing trees from their perspective led him to change his relationship with the forest and encouraged him to learn about trees in ways he was never taught in school.
In his bestselling book, The Hidden Life of Trees, Wohlleben presents a view of trees as living beings carrying on their own lives right beside us.
They may be rooted in place and unable to move around like we can, but trees are still aware and intentional. While they appear to be completely passive, they’re often actively carrying out the same life activities as humans. In healthy forests, trees communicate, migrate, share resources, parent children, have friendships, and make decisions about their lives.
But as the author points out, they do these things at such a slow pace it’s hard for us to notice—electrical signals run through a tree at a rate of only one-third of an inch per minute. They live on a completely different timescale than we do.
Trees Communicate
Like humans, trees have a variety of ways to communicate with each other. The most common methods they use to send messages are through the air and underground.
When a tree is being eaten by an animal or an insect, it immediately defends itself by pumping unsavory or toxic chemicals into its leaves. As it does this, it sends chemicals into the air to alert other parts of its own structure and the trees around it to prepare for an attack. In the case of an insect attack, the tree may also send out chemicals that tell the insect’s predators where to find it.
Trees don’t only rely on the air to transmit their messages though. They also connect to each other through fungal networks surrounding their root systems. So, as a tree is sending chemical alerts into the air, it can also send them out through its roots. The fungi then transmit the warning directly to the other trees.
“In the symbiotic community of the forest, not only trees but also shrubs and grasses—and possibly all plant species—exchange information this way.”
Trees Move
They don’t have legs or moving trucks to help them get from place to place, but that doesn’t stop them from moving. True to their slower pace of life, trees move one generation at a time.
They migrate by way of seed dispersal and each species has its own method and desired speed. Some have seeds that are light and feathery, designed to be carried long distances by the wind. Others have heavy, oily seeds, designed to be transported shorter distances by squirrels and birds. Whatever the method, trees move year by year and mile by mile, or quarter mile in the case of the beech, towards the most favorable conditions.
In the absence of human interference, overgrazing by herbivores, or inconveniently located mountain ranges, entire forests migrate across continents as the climate shifts.
Trees Share
I already mentioned that trees share messages with each other through their root systems. They share food and water in the same way.
In healthy beech forests, trees grow as a community. They appear to know that their individual well-being depends on the health of the forest as a whole—trees that are stronger than the rest or have better access sunlight and water moderate their performance. They send their own excess water or sugar to weaker or less favorably placed trees, so the entire forest grows at a similar pace.
Sometimes they do this with other species too.
If one tree falls,
“… the forest is no longer a single closed unit. Hot sun and swirling winds can now penetrate to the forest floor and disrupt the moist, cool climate.”
And that puts all the trees at risk.
From this new perspective, trees are far more than timber for the lumber mill. They’re more like “tree people” living full, intentional lives right beside us, but on an entirely different timescale.
I wonder what difference it would make if we started to see them as the author and the indigenous people do. Not as furniture and paper products in the making, but as living communities with their own intelligence, their own wisdom.
How would that affect our relationship with them and with nature as a whole?