 "The wood wide web of trees")
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES: WHAT THEY FEEL, HOW THEY COMMUNICATE
Author: Peter Wohlleben
Publisher: Penguin Allen Lane
Pages: 319
Price: Rs 499
The sub-title of this book is more intriguing than the title. It reads: "What they feel, how they communicate". The author is a veteran German forester, but one who has transcended what he feels is the narrow economic view of the forest. He was trained to see trees as lumber, and the forest as growing stock. But drawing on path-breaking work done by the Canadian scientist Suzanne Simmard in 1997, he rediscovered the very forests he knew by seeing connections between trees afresh.
The result is an epiphany, a lucid work that, eschewing technical terms, paints a portrait of the forest as a living entity pulsating with life. Simmard found that trees communicate via their root systems, or rather via fungi that live in them. This even involved the exchange of nutrients. A forest often has a wood wide web that transmits information via electric currents or chemical flows.
Some of these insights into life around us are not new. Over the past half century, new studies of animal behaviour have chipped away at the idea of human superiority. The primatologist Frances De Wall even has a charming book titled Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Really Are? (Norton, 2016). Put in a nutshell, it is only with detailed observation with advanced instruments that we learn how whales have individual songs and can learn a new tune from one another. Individuality, innovation and, to an extent, group learning are not a human preserve, even if we have moved far ahead in all these respects.
Now, to do the same with trees is a signal achievement. As the author readily admits, trees do not move. Yet, they can disperse seeds with wings or produce chemicals to deter insect attacks or time their flowering to attract bees. These are known to any school child. But even mundane facts take on a new life in this work as he deftly weaves fresh nuggets of knowledge in ways that will make sure you never look at a clump of wild trees as a disorderly path ever again.
Much of his work is on central Europe where he is among the pioneers of new low-intensive forestry that avoids compacting soil and tries not to disturb the community of forest trees and plants. A tree is a store house of foods but with many doors that bar the way. Insects and birds have evolved to open the store house, yet the trees retaliate in many ways. Tannins can make bark bitter, while pine needles exude chemical compounds known as phynotides that kill bacteria.
All this while the forest remakes the micro climate. A square mile of forest can breathe out 29 tonnes of oxygen a day. Depending on the species, transpiration can restore moisture to the air. There are deeper links with other life forms. Wohlleben recounts how the return of wolves to an American park has brought back beavers. The wolves controlled the deer herds, enabling aspen and birch to regenerate and the beavers soon came along.
There is a deep irony in the book, as Wohlleben is German and as Pradeep Krishen notes it was German foresters who led the British effort to remake India's forests in the late 19th century. Theirs was mostly a dictum of the narrow economic view and sadly this still largely prevails. In a largely tropical country with an amazing diversity of forest types, astonishingly little is still known about the ways water and soil, microbes and fungi, birds and mammals interact with trees, shrubs and bushes.
There are times when the text is lyrical but not at the cost of accuracy and empirical knowledge, a rare feat. Beech trees, the writer tells us, grow when there is light for 13 hours a day. But how do they know? The answer is disarmingly simple. He holds up beech leaves that, when young, "are transparent." This means even a tiny bit of light can provoke a response. He refers to weeds, where, "out in the fields all it takes is the weak light of the moon at night to trigger germination. And a tree trunk can register light as well."
Across the world there are moves afoot to move beyond the narrow view of forests as plantations with rows of saplings reared for harvest. This book is a sober reminder of how limited our world views are. A 200-year-old stand of beech are described as "youngsters". Rightly so, as a Swedish spruce tree can live over 9,000 years, or one hundred times a human lifetime, if not more. The longer view is as crucial as a holistic one. Nature-friendly forestry has made strides in Europe as well as in the Americas. It is also promoted on a small scale by voluntary efforts and community initiatives in India.
Yet, this is one larger philosophy that needs more adherents in the tropics. The book does not call for a hands-off policy in all forests. It shows how even setting two per cent of Germany's forests aside will free up 770 square miles for natural systems to work better. If anything, its insights can inform far more productive, as opposed to strictly protective, views of the forest space as well. Moving beyond monoculture can reduce the threat of insect pests and also enable a healthier, more productive forest.
All around us are trees, each with its own story, forests that are far more than the sum of their parts. This book would make a great beginning to look at them with a sense of wonder, a curiosity about life and its mysteries. This is natural history and science writing at its best: the prose flows as gently as leaves falling on the forest floor.
The reviewer teaches history and environmental studies at Ashoka University
