A review of Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World, trans. Jane Billinghurst. Foreword by Tim Flannery. Greystone Books, Vancouver and Berkeley, 2016.
In 2015, Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, published a popular book on the “hidden life of trees.” The English version, titled The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World, was published in 2016 and became a best-seller, but not without generating considerable controversy.
Wohlleben began his career as a professional forester whose job was to assess the suitability of trees for harvesting. He abandoned this line of work two decades ago to organize survival training and log-cabin tours for tourists, and his interactions with his visitors altered his views of the forest, making him aware of the need to adopt a more ecologically sophisticated
approach to forest management. Eventually, his community, the village of Hümmel in the Eifel mountains, hired him to manage their forest according to these ecological principles, which emphasize leaving the forest as undisturbed as possible, promoting diversity of species, and removing trees using animals rather than heavy machinery.
