The Best Science Books of 2016
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9.
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES
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Trees dominate the world’s the
oldest living organisms. Since the dawn of our
species, they have been our silent
companions, permeating our most
enduring tales and never ceasing to inspire fantastical
cosmogonies. Hermann Hesse called them “the
most penetrating of preachers.” A
forgotten seventeenth-century English gardener wrote of how they “speak
to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons.”
But trees might be among our lushest
metaphors and sensemaking
frameworks for knowledge precisely because the
richness of what they say is more than metaphorical — they speak a
sophisticated silent language, communicating complex information via smell,
taste, and electrical impulses. This fascinating secret world of signals is
what German forester Peter Wohlleben explores in The
Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.
Wohlleben chronicles what his own experience
of managing a forest in the Eifel mountains in Germany has taught him about the
astonishing language of trees and how trailblazing arboreal research from
scientists around the world reveals “the role forests play in making our world
the kind of place where we want to live.” As we’re only just beginning
to understand nonhuman consciousnesses, what
emerges from Wohlleben’s revelatory reframing of our oldest companions is an
invitation to see anew what we have spent eons taking for granted and, in this
act of seeing, to care more deeply about these remarkable beings that make life
on this planet we call home not only infinitely more pleasurable, but possible
at all.
Brain Pickings
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