The Power of Trees – out of the woods

Charles Foster in The Guardian:

Elon Musk has offered a prize of $100m for the best carbon capture and sequestration proposal. I can save his committee a lot of time. The money should go to Peter Wohlleben, the German forester whose book The Hidden Life of Trees was the most improbable and encouraging blockbuster of 2015. Wohlleben’s idea is this: leave forests alone. Stop fiddling with them, thinking that we can deal with climate change better than nature. If we fiddle, our Romes will burn.

The Hidden Life argued that trees are social and sensate. The Power of Trees shows that they can be our saviours. But it’s terribly hard to let ourselves be saved. We think we can be the authors of our salvation. We are doers by constitution. Of course, there are things we could and should be doing, but in terms of forestry practice, often what’s billed as part of the solution is part of the problem.

More here.