A forester and best-selling author makes the case for trees and their extraordinary abilities.
There are reasons why we anthropomorphize trees; they stand tall like people, they sway, for torsos they have trunks and for arms, branches. But are there more similarities between trees and people than those that meet the eye?
Peter Wohlleben is one of a number of experts who believes this to be the case. Wohlleben is a German forester and the best-selling author of The Hidden Life of Trees. He has spent decades working with our arboreal cohabitants and getting to know their secrets.
It may come as little surprise that we’ve written about the tree-whispering Wohlleben before. First there was Trees in the forest are social beings, followed by Trees can form bonds like an old couple and look after each – and thus it appears that whenever I read another interview with Wohlleben, I can’t help but to write again. The following comes from an exchange with Richard Schiffman at Yale e360. The whole interview is poetry (hey, poetree!) but I especially love when he talks about trees and memory.
Trees and Memory
Wohlleben has been taken to task by other scientists complaining about his tendency to anthropomorphize, but he does so very intentionally. When scientists remove the emotion from writing, it loses its impact. “Humans are emotional animals," he says. “We feel things, we don’t just know the world intellectually. So I use words of emotion to connect with people’s experience. Science often takes these words out, but then you have a language people can’t relate to, that they can’t understand.”
Some Trees Form Friendships
And certainly speaking of trees as having special friendships will raise an eyebrow for some; but why does the definition of friendship have to be exclusive to humans? We may have created the language to describe friendship as it pertains to people, but we should also be intellectually expansive enough to broaden our horizons. I have known trees that I am certain were friends, even if they don’t go out for coffee with each other. Wohlleben agrees:
We May Not Fully Understand Trees
Now of course it would be easy to ascribe all of this to pure biological mechanics – but how egregiously species-centric that would be. Just because we don’t speak their language doesn’t mean trees don’t communicate – even if they do so with chemical and electrical signals, as Wohlleben explains, also noting that trees are badly misunderstood:
You can read more from this wonderful interview at Yale e360 … and in the meantime, don’t forget to hug a tree. It may even remember that you are a friend.
Via Boing Boing
