Trees talk to each other, have sex and look after their young
 

Trees are social creatures that mother their young, talk to each other, experience pain, remember things and have sex with each other, a bestselling author has said.

If that persuades you to go and hug the nearest tree, then great, said Peter Wohlleben. Just avoid a birch: “It is not very sociable. Try a beech.”

Wohlleben was at the Hay literary festival in Wales to talk about a book, The Hidden Life of Trees, which has become a bestseller in his native Germany and, remarkably, prompted an online petition against it from scientists.

A former state forester, Wohlleben believes the world has been misled about how humans should treat trees, but he told Hay his anthropomorphising of them had aggravated the forestry industry.

Two scientists from the University of Göttingen started the online petition, calling for “facts not fairytales”, he said. The petition states: “It is very unfortunate … that, through this book, so many people obtain a very unrealistic understanding of forest ecosystems because the statements made here are a conglomerate of half-truths, biased judgments, and wishful thinking derived from very selective and unrepresentative sources of information.”
Wohlleben said he deliberately anthropomorphised trees but everything he wrote was based on science.

“At university we were told that cutting down trees was good for the environment,” he told Hay. “That we are renewing forests. I believed it … it took time to get that brainwash out of my head.”

The wisdom has been to cut down a big tree so the younger trees have more space to grow, he said, but apply that to human society and … “it would be OK to kill the parents? The children will have more space in the house afterwards?”

He criticised the supposedly green policy of power stations replacing the burning of coal with wooden pellets. “We destroy trees to prevent climate change?”

Wohlleben wants society to be more aware of trees’ “feelings”. Trees that are close to street lights, which burn all night, will die earlier, he said.

Pollarding trees – removing the upper branches to promote a dense head of foliage – is also a bad thing. “It is like cutting your fingers, it hurts and it damages the tree very heavily. A wound more than 3cm deep can cause a fungal infection and perhaps 10 or 20 years later the tree will rot.”

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So if I like birch beer, what am I doing, drinking the tears of a tree?


:wtf:

What about maple syrup.

It's blood! :eek:

Damn you Canada & Vermont which might as well be Canada it's close enough! :evillol

I'm not reading this bullshit. I'm just trying to get my post count up.