The Greatest Science Books of 2016
9.THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES
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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