"Forest Walking," Peter Wohlleben

 My wife and I feel fortunate to live where we do, where the woods are accessible with paths that make it easy on aging legs – a place and a time to escape. 

 

There are other books that carry this theme, like Thoreau’s Walden and Bill Bryson’s more recent, humorous Walk in the Woods, a story of his hiking the Appalachian Trail. Forest Walking belongs on the same shelf.

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

Forest Walking, Peter Wohlleben

June 10, 2023

 

“Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.”

                                                                                          John Muir (1838-1914)

                                                                                          John of the Woods: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

                                                                                           Edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, 1938

 

Most people look at a tree as a source of shade, or something to tap in the spring if a Sugar Maple, a risk to power lines in winter, or a wonder of beauty if a White Oak, Copper Beech, or Giant Sequoia. Like Thoreau, Peter Wohlleben looks deeper. In the introduction, he writes: “When I talk of the forest, I’m talking about a community. In a forest left to its own devices, trees of different ages and different species grow in the places they choose and that suit them best.” The pleasure from reading Mr. Wohlleben’s book justifies the sacrifice some conifer had to make to provide the paper on which the book is printed. 

 

Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees (reviewed January 14, 2017), has been criticized for anthropomorphizing trees, which he delightfully does. In an interview, a few years ago, at the Yale School of Forestry, he said: “Trees have just as much character as humans do.”  It is his passion for individual trees, his love for the forests he manages, and his joy in the woodlands he walks through, which suffuse his writing and causes readers to smile. To him, trees are generational: “In an intact ancient forest, huge trees shade the ground, using nearly all the sunlight that falls on their canopies to generate food to fuel their growth, while the younger trees wait patiently in the shadows below.”

 

With Jane Billinghurst, editor, publisher, and translator of his earlier books, Peter Wohlleben embarked on a series of hikes through several national parks in Canada and the United States: Lake Livingston State Park in Texas, Florida’s Highlands Hammock State Park, Letchworth State Park in New York, South Carolina’s Sumter National Forest, Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, and others. We are told how we can identify trees by their bark, how dead trees (“snags’) are “apartment buildings for the forest’s maintenance crews,” and the advantages of winter hiking when the woods are quiet, the hikers few, and the mosquitoes and midges “peacefully slumbering.”

 

Mr. Wohlleben is a lively, informative companion, as one walks through the forest. We are told that the largest fungus found so far is a honey fungus in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, spread “over three and a half square miles,” that “trees get fatter at night,” and that on “a hot day, a mature tree sucks up to 130 gallons of water from the ground.” He writes of the symbioses of nature, of predator and prey. But he adds: “To keep the forest healthy, we need to look beyond partnerships to what biologists are now calling guilds – arrangements of give-and-take that involve different winners and losers depending on the day or season but together keep the whole system running smoothly.” 

 

This is a book of advice, with chapters titled: “Forest Activities with Children,” “Seasonal Walks,” “Comfort in the Forest,” and “Choosing Your Wardrobe.” It is a book that proves the adage: ‘learning can be fun.’ And that is why you will enjoy a stroll through the woods with Peter Wohlleben.

"Walking"

 

This is the week of Passover; today is Good Friday and Sunday is Easter – a time to celebrate and to be thankful for the greatness of God. As for those of us who do not always get our religion packaged, a walk through the woods, to commune with nature, provides a sense of reverence – for a Being or a Spirit that is greater than anyone of us.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

April 7, 2023

“Walking”

 

“I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of

gear…I know that I shall only have to call in my doctors, and I shall be well again.”

                                                                                                                George M. Trevelyan (1876-1962)

                                                                                                                Clio, A Muse and Other Essays, 1913

 

6,198 steps. That is what my iPhone tells me I have done so far today, at 3:00pm on April 4. But that is more than most days; I averaged 4,911 steps in March. Of course, the weather was worse then, and today is beautiful. Nevertheless, I am a piker compared to my wife. She just returned with the news that her Fitbit has her at 14,883 steps. Walking is healthy for the body and the mind. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” 

 

Bertrand Russell reviewed George Trevelyan’s essay in the December 4, 1913 issue of The Cambridge Review. In it he wondered whether Providence had placed Oxford and Cambridge “at exactly the right distance from London for a comfortable day’s walk.” The philosopher Russell, who died in 1970 at the age of 97, must have had a strong constitution and long legs, as each city is about 60 miles from London’s center – 15 hours at four miles per hour! Even an Olympian, walking at a record pace, could not make the trek in under eight hours.

 

Shortly after he died in May 1862, Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” was published in The Atlantic Monthly. His preference was to saunter, a word, he mused, that might be derived from idle people in the Middle Ages who, looking for handouts, claimed they going to the Holy Land, la Sainte Terre; thus, they became known as the “Sainte Terrers.” He added, however, others believed the word comes from sans terre, meaning without land, but in a good sense: “having no home, but equally at home everywhere.” “My vicinity,” Thoreau wrote, “affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day…I have not yet exhausted them.” The same could be said for where I live – a hundred acres of trails, abutting a thousand acre preserve.

 

In her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit wrote that Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett’s “solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social atmosphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think…” Seventy-eight years ago, following two and a half months of combat, my father had similar thoughts. Then with the 10^th Mountain Division and camped along Italy’s Lago di Garda’s eastern shore and having covered 250 miles on foot, he wrote my mother on May 3, 1945: “I was able to go for a little walk today and enjoyed myself. I discovered that when you walk without a pack or rifle you practically feel as if you were floating through the air.” 

 

Today, I enjoy woodland walks, with their seasonal marvels. In Forest Walking, Peter Wohlleben wrote of trees in springtime: “As they transition from a restful winter to being more active in spring, they are pushing more water than usual up their trunks.” Without pack or rifle, I have leisure to think. Often I bring pen and paper and jot down random thoughts, most of which get discarded, but every now and then one germinates and blossoms into an essay, like this one.

"The Heartbeat of Trees," by Peter Wohlleben - A Review

                                                                   Sydney M. Williams 

Burrowing into Book

“The Heartbeat of Trees”

September 6, 2021

 

“What blood is to people, water is to trees.”

                                                                                                                            Peter Wohlleben (1964 -)

                                                                                                                            The Heartbeat of Trees, 2021

 

This is the third book by Peter Wohlleben I have reviewed – The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) on January 14, 2017, and The Inner Life of Animals (2016) on August 14, 2018 – his first and second books. This is his ninth. In this he focuses more on climate change and our need to preserve forests, which absorb carbon dioxide. While he fascinates, he comes across as a bit of a scold, though he ends with a measure of hope not despair. I don’t want to be too critical, as he has much to teach, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

 

He writes, for example, of a single spruce seed that fell to the ground 9,500 years ago in the mountains of Sweden. The seed germinated and the tree that was born, “Old Tjikko,” survives today – the oldest known tree on the planet. It has seen the extinction of mammoths and the emergence of man from the Stone Age. Since its birth, he writes: “The climate had fluctuated from cold to warm and back again multiple times, but, unaffected by any of this, the spruce was still standing intact today in the place where it had been born.” 

 

As in his past books, Mr. Wohlleben is captivated by similarities between plants and animals, and the connection of humans with nature and the adaptability of the latter. He writes of the need for conservation, that “…with every step we take to help conserve the ecosystem that is the earth, we are at the same time protecting ourselves…”

 

In a chapter on forest bathing, a practice new to me but one that emerged in Japan in the 1980s (shinrin-yoku), he writes of going into the woods with his family for a picnic, walking through a deciduous stand of trees: “We lay there under the trees for one, maybe two hours…We chatted and relaxed and forgot time. And that is forest bathing. For me it was the most beautiful day in the forest that I can remember.” Take a moment, he tells us, to just sit on a stump or a log, which will bring one closer to the feel of the forest. He leaves us with hope: “It is by no means too late to protect nature. We are much too tightly bound to it.” 

 

The adaptability of nature fascinates him. He writes of the bog orchid, which grows in the north and has no bees to serve as pollinators; so, has learned to imitate the smell of humans to attract mosquitoes, which then serve as pollinators. And he writes of a vine that grows in South America that adapts to the tree it is climbing, even to imitating its leaves. If water is to a tree what blood is to us, how does it get from the roots to branches dozens of feet above the ground? The answer, he tells us, is a barely noticeable pump action. Researchers “determined that a tree’s trunk sometimes shrinks by about 0.0002 inches before expanding again.” That is the heartbeat of trees. Mr. Wohlleben is passionate about his forests, as his story attests. 

 

The woods are a good place to gain perspective. This book adds to our appreciation. Walking beneath “the elephants of the plant world,” we realize we are a small part of a large natural world, with its opportunities for us and of our responsibility to it.

"Lighten Up"

                                                                     Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Lighten Up”

August 8, 2021

 

“There’s a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing.”

                                                                                                                                Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

                                                                                                                                Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

 

 

It is not that I am without concerns, for everything that happens today is a ‘crisis.’ We live on a planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years. Over that time, it has been warm enough in Connecticut, where I live, to host dinosaurs and cold enough to place it under thirty feet of ice. By the time of the last ice age, man had been around for tens of thousands of years. He adapted. Yet today’s changing climate is said to present an existential challenge for the planet. “Woke” governments and large businesses demand diversity, equity and inclusion, but what they really mean are uniformity, unjustness and exclusion. Universities, once places for inquiring minds, have become venues for intellectual conformity. In sports, men, as transgender women, compete against biological women. Merit has fallen victim to social equity. What gives? The United States was founded on principles of personal liberty and the rule of law, derived from the Enlightenment. Should we let what has taken 250 years to create devolve into darkness? 

 

We should not. We need to lighten up. The political atmosphere has become nasty. In an essay (“Old Glory, new anger”) in the August issue of The Spectator, Peter Wood wrote: “There is the wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters.” As for the Right, he noted: “Their complaint lies far deeper as they see the purposeful destruction of American values by an elite that bullies and derides them.”  Friends and family members are no longer able to air political differences without one being called a racist and the other a toady. If we are to survive as a free, decent and independent people, composed of myriad races, religions and nationalities, political leaders, the media and universities must promote tolerance and mutual respect. To achieve this, they must encourage traditional American values, like family formations and public schools that teach. They must reaffirm the values of common sense, responsibility, hard work, merit and reintroduce civility and humor.

 

The political spectrum is linear, with autocracy at one end and anarchy at the other. Understanding that, we should know where on that line our own political philosophies lie. Fundamentally, our differences are simple. Progressives believe equitable progress is best achieved with more government involvement. Conservatives believe in what Margaret Thatcher said in Gdansk in 1988: “Economic freedom and personal freedom go hand in hand.” The first depends on the ability of a few hundred senior bureaucrats. The second relies on millions of people making millions of decisions. There are gradations of belief. A few extremists are clustered at either end, believing in either the benevolence of autocracy or the benignity of anarchy. Mainstream media would have us bunched (along with them) at extremes – the “woke” on one end and “deplorables” at the other. Most of us, however, lie within a few degrees of the center. But anger divides us, and communication is difficult.

 

Abetted by vitriolic, non-stop talk radio, biased cable and network news commentators, ignorant Hollywood and sports figures, sanctimonious university personnel, politicians who see both profit and votes in discord and “woke” corporations who just want to get along, we are being pushed, unwillingly, toward extremes. Our minders are puritanical, meanspirited, stupid and humorless. For students, fear of not being politically correct has meant withholding healthy emotional release. On college campuses political debate is discouraged and mental health distress is rising. A 2019 study by the American College Health Association found that 87% of college students expressed being overwhelmed. To improve conditions, the Association suggested empowering students, launching wellness campaigns and offering a “decision tree.” Absent from suggestions were open debate or fun and laughter, the latter being a well-known antidote to tension. Remember the old Reader’s Digest column, “Laughter the Best Medicine?” But in 2018, the threat of censorship kept Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock from performing on college campuses.

 

Humor that disparages should be shunned. But the ability to laugh is important. Mark Twain looked at politics through a lens of humor: “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress…But I repeat myself.” P. J. O’Rourke once wrote on the differences between Democrats and Republicans: “The Democrats are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then get elected and prove it.” Political correctness, which abjures humor, has infected all aspects of our lives, including the National Football League. Dan Mitchell, economist and former senior fellow at the Cato Institute, recently forwarded the following: “Redskins change name to ‘Lizard People,’ to better represent the population of Washington, D.C.” 

 

Would today’s politicians be offended and find jokes about them hurtful? Would they cry ‘Victim?’ Perhaps, but so what? They are public figures, light on wit but heavy with hubris, so subject to satire. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s quote in the rubric speaks to politicians whose dancing around truths can be a source of fun. Laughing at oneself can be endearing. Lyndon Johnson once said: “Being President is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but stand there and take it.” Ronald Reagan used humor to deflect criticism from opponents. In a 1984 debate with the 56-year-old Walter Mondale, the 73-year-old Reagan said: “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” In recent years, that self-abasing humor has been missing from political discourse. Obama, Trump and Biden are noted for egos, not for laughing at themselves. 

 

Peter Wood ended his piece: “Despair breeds wrath and that fire, once ignited, will engulf us all.” If our “betters” in politics, the media, campuses, “woke” corporations, the sports world and the entertainment industry fail to dispel the anger that envelopes our nation, which is my assumption and fear, then the responsibility to find light in this darkness falls upon ourselves. Turn down the news, pick up a Wodehouse novel, watch a Bob Hope movie, take a walk in the park, try “forest bathing,” as Peter Wohlleben wrote in The Heartbeat of Trees. Visit with family and friends. Just stay off politics and discover what you have in common. Laugh. Life is short. Those of us in the United States and in other free nations are fortunate to be alive and to live where and in the time we do. To go through life angry is self-defeating.

 

Most of us have beliefs that cluster toward the center of the political spectrum. It has been, more than anything else, the media, and especially social media, that has divided us. We are after all fallible. No one, not the President of the United States, not the senior Senator from Kentucky, not the Congresswoman from California’s 12^th District, knows what the future holds. But we should not let the darkness of despair overwhelm us. We should read, watch and listen to the news with healthy skepticism and a lively, restorative sense of humor. We must lighten up.

Burrowing Into Books - "The Inner Life of Animals"

Sydney M. Williams

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                    August 14, 2018

“The Inner Life of Animals”

Peter Wohlleben

“The goal is not to anthropomorphize animals,

but to help us understand them better.”

As a reminder to new readers, these scribblings are not reviews and certainly not critical ones. That’s left to those far more qualified. These essays are less an analysis and more a celebration of the pleasure of reading and learning.

Peter Wohlleben is a forester in Germany. In 1987, at age 23, he took a job as a forest ranger for the Rhineland-Palatinate state which includes the largest coherent forest in middle Europe. A few years ago he began to manage five square kilometers of forests in Hummel where he was free to experiment with eco-friendly forestry methods. Off those experiences, he wrote his first book, The Hidden Life of Trees, which was discussed in this series last year.

In The Inner Life of Animals, Mr. Wohlleben writes of the complexity and intelligence of animals: From the fruit fly, which in microseconds can dart back and forth, because their eyes are made up of “about 600 individual facets;” to crows who have been seen sliding off the roofs of houses, with deliberate pleasure: and to pigs that, according to researchers at Dresden University of Technology, can recognize distant relations. The reader marvels at life, nature and the extraordinary fact of evolution.

He writes of myriad emotions displayed: Maternal love, common to all species; instinctual fear that is endemic to all wild animals, and which keeps them alive. He writes of swallows who pursue sexual dalliances and Billy goats who take obvious pleasure in mating. He tells of the compassion of elephants for those that died, and the shame shown by dogs who have misbehaved. Mr. Wohlleben once observed a magpie who deliberately tried to deceive him, as to where he (she) had hidden an acorn.

From a personal perspective, having grown up with horses, goats, chickens, ducks, dogs and cats and having had, at different times during married life many of the same animals, I can attest to the accuracy of his assurance that animals are curious, smart and sensitive.

The author shares his knowledge and experiences. Many animals are both predator and prey. They kill and are killed. The Osprey feeds on menhaden, which, in turn, eats phytoplankton. Others are parasitic, like the tapeworm inhabiting the intestine of a cow. The planet is shared, and its inhabitants are, in fact, symbiotic. Over thousands of years, we, and they, have evolved, gaining knowledge and perfecting features and instincts. There are an estimated 8.7 million species that inhabit the Earth, many of whom have been around for millions – in some cases billions – of years. For most (perhaps all except man, domesticated animals and those we protect and provide for, like suburban herds of deer and city-dwelling racoons) it is the fittest that survive. It is natures’ way of ensuring that the strongest and most adaptable produce future generations.   

Mr. Wohlleben writes, easily and knowingly, of animals communicating with each other and with other species, including man. Anyone with a dog knows it can be trained to let people know when it needs to go out. He writes of researchers at ETH Zurich who “discovered that whinnies contain two basic frequencies. The first…indicates whether the whinny is communicating a positive or negative emotion. The second frequency indicates the strength of that emotion.” And some of us thought horses were dumb! He raises the question: Why does man, the most intelligent of all species, try to teach animals – domesticated and wild – to understand what he says and wants, rather than trying to learn animal-speak, as did the fictional Dr. Doolittle?

Peter Wohlleben concludes on the understandable but mournful note that man, like all species that cannot photosynthesize nutrients, must consume living entities to survive, plant or animal. He hopes that readers will be more thoughtful about what and how much they eat – that such habits will lead to “happier horses, goats, chickens and pigs.” The book is fun, short and informative.

‘.