In recent years, German forest engineer Peter Wohlleben has become something of a pop bard on the hidden connections of biodiversity. “Nature is like the mechanism of an immense clock. Everything works in a perfectly organized and interconnected way”, he writes at the opening of his book “The Secret Wisdom of Nature”, which has just arrived in Brazil.
The work is the third part of a bestselling trilogy — in previous books, Wohlleben has analyzed the behavioral complexity of trees and animals. No, the reader who doesn’t know his work hasn’t read it wrong: for Wohlleben, trees also have “behaviours”, even if their actions seem very slow in the eyes of hasty mammals like us.
After all, they also exchange information and nutrients with each other, using the fungal network that often connects the roots of different individuals in a forest. They also employ ingenious mechanisms to protect their “chicks” (the seedlings) that grow nearby or send chemical messages that alert other plants to the presence of “predators” (herbivorous animals).
“Forests all over the world operate by the same rules,” he told Sheet. When I comment that Brazilians tend to see the forests of Europe as simplified versions of those in the Amazon, he laughs and asks: “Don’t say that in Germany!” He then explains that despite the much greater biodiversity in the rainforest, several effects are the same in both places.
“Both here and there, we know that forests produce clouds, for example. People used to think that tropical forests were humid because it rains a lot in them, but today it is clear that the opposite is true: the rain is generated precisely by the presence of the forest”, highlights it.
In the new book, instead of analyzing just one type of forest creature, Wohlleben sets out to explore the unexpected connections between the different members of the plot of life, especially when the absence of any one of them triggers all kinds of domino effects.
One of the emblematic cases is the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, in the USA. As with almost every developed country throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, wolves were fiercely hunted in the American countryside and nearly disappeared. Thus, when the park was created, the large herbivores, such as moose, were protected within an area where this large predator no longer existed.
Result: an overpopulation of moose. The critters quickly devoured Yellowstone’s young trees. This triggered not only the disappearance of beavers (which depend on wood and other plant materials to feed themselves and build their dams) but also the erosion of the riverbanks in the park, as the trees provided stability to the ravines. It was enough for wolves to be reintroduced there, in the second half of the 1990s, for all these effects to begin to be reversed.
This is one of the reasons why Wohlleben has become one of the main critics of the intensive forest management to which German and European forests have been subjected. The process prevents the most characteristic species of the ancestral version of these forests, such as beeches and oaks, from reaching maturity, while stimulating the overpopulation of species.
“We managed to produce wood efficiently, but this is not the same thing as taking good care of forests,” he says.
“My fear is that future generations will come to think of Germany’s forests as green deserts. And when we talk about expanding forest cover, people here always respond: ‘Oh, yes, let’s do that… In Brazil, in Kenya etc.’ My reaction is always to say: wait a minute, we can do this right here in Germany too!”
Despite the vast amount of information that science has already obtained about the interconnections that exist between species in an ecosystem, Wohlleben says that mysteries still predominate. “When we enter a forest, it’s like we’re blind,” he compares.
“Even so, some simple data are useful to show us whether that environment is healthy, such as the temperature and humidity inside. This is enough to indicate whether forest management is being done properly.”
For Wohlleben, the best way to face pessimism in the face of global environmental problems is to keep in mind that it is possible to change negative situations in many cases.
“In the case of forests, the best we can do is put our hands in our pockets, avoid touching them as much as possible. But there are many things we can do. One of them is to reduce meat consumption”, he defends.
“It’s funny, because here in Germany meat is like guns in the US: nobody cares about touching it. I’m a vegetarian, but I don’t see any problem with people wanting to eat meat. The problem is the quantity, and also the fact that we want to criticize deforestation in countries like Brazil when we continue to consume this amount. We will have to choose: more forests or more meat.”
