For the Nature and Environment book group but I couldn’t make the meeting so didn’t flag many passages. I found it frustrating overall; the underlying science is amazing enough, but Wohlleben (unless the translator is partly to blame, but I don’t think so) dresses it up far too much with inappropriately-anthropomorphic and extremely value-laden language. Lab Girl is on the exactly-right side of that (of course subjective) line (and yikes, that post is still in draft as of 3/31/2018…). This is full of things that are “awful” and “painful” for trees and cause “suffering.” Some examples, good and bad:
- He calls urban landscaping trees “street kids,” because they live rough, sometimes-short lives away from their forest families and need to be tough survivors. Great, love that—colorful, memorable, accurate.
- In a very interesting passage about why leaves are green—the chlorophyll “green gap”—he ends up calling green a “trash color” (from the point of view of the trees). Borderline I guess; it’s sticky certainly.
- “Whereas most deciduous trees leap at chances to grab more light, most conifers stubbornly refuse. They vow to grow straight or not at all.” Leap, stubborn, vow all feel a little cliched as well as unnecessary to me.
I was also struck by his airy assurance that even a softwood monoculture will quickly turn into a healthy forest. He says that sure, most of the trees will die quickly from bark beetle infestations and look ugly for a while, but fire doesn’t even seem to be on his radar. That makes sense from his personal forestry experience in Germany, because apparently ” the ecological importance of forest fires in central Europe is relatively low,” but in most parts of the world that’s a recipe for damaging fires and subsequent erosion.