{"id":573,"date":"2018-03-31T17:55:36","date_gmt":"2018-03-31T17:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=573"},"modified":"2019-07-12T20:42:15","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T20:42:15","slug":"the-hidden-life-of-trees-what-they-feel-how-they-communicate-discoveries-from-a-secret-world-peter-wohlleben-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2018\/03\/the-hidden-life-of-trees-what-they-feel-how-they-communicate-discoveries-from-a-secret-world-peter-wohlleben-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate; Discoveries from a Secret World<\/i> &#8211; Peter Wohlleben, 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the <a href=\"http:\/\/mail.salticid.com\/mailman\/listinfo\/forbes_nature_environment_salticid.com\">Nature and Environment<\/a>\u00a0book group but I couldn&#8217;t make the meeting so didn&#8217;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&#8217;t think so) dresses it up far too much with inappropriately-anthropomorphic and extremely value-laden language. <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2017\/12\/lab-girl-hope-jahren-2016\/\">Lab Girl<\/a><\/em> 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&#8230;). This is full of things that are &#8220;awful&#8221; and &#8220;painful&#8221; for trees and cause &#8220;suffering.&#8221; Some examples, good and bad:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>He calls urban landscaping trees &#8220;street kids,&#8221;\u00a0 because they live rough, sometimes-short lives away from their forest families and need to be tough survivors. Great, love that&#8212;colorful, memorable, accurate.<\/li>\n<li>In a very interesting passage about why leaves are green&#8212;the chlorophyll &#8220;green gap&#8221;&#8212;he\u00a0 ends up calling green a &#8220;trash color&#8221; (from the point of view of the trees). Borderline I guess; it&#8217;s sticky certainly.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Whereas most deciduous trees leap at chances to grab more light, most conifers stubbornly refuse. They vow to grow straight or not at all.&#8221; Leap, stubborn, vow all feel a little cliched as well as unnecessary to me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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&#8217;t even seem to be on his radar.\u00a0 That makes sense from his personal forestry experience in Germany, because <a href=\"https:\/\/www.waldwissen.net\/waldwirtschaft\/schaden\/brand\/fva_waldbrand_wb1\/index_EN\">apparently<\/a> &#8221; the ecological importance of forest fires in central Europe is relatively low,&#8221; but in most parts of the world that&#8217;s a recipe for damaging fires and subsequent erosion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the Nature and Environment\u00a0book group but I couldn&#8217;t make the meeting so didn&#8217;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&#8217;t think so) dresses it up far too much with inappropriately-anthropomorphic and extremely value-laden language. Lab [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":879,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573\/revisions\/879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}