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IF YOU LOOK at the shared history of people and animals, the final decades of the twentieth century and the first decade or so of the twenty-first century have been positive. It’s true there are still factory farms, experiments done on animals, and other ruthless forms of exploitation; however, as we credit our animal colleagues with increasingly complex emotional lives, we are extending rights to them, as well. In Germany, a law that improved animal rights under civil law (referred to in Germany by the shorthand TierVerbG) came into force in 1990. The goal of this legislation is to ensure that animals are no longer treated as objects. More and more people are giving up meat altogether or giving more thought to how they buy meat to promote the humane treatment of animals.
I applaud these changes because we are now discovering that animals share many human emotions. And not just mammals, which are closely related to us, but even insects such as fruit flies. Researchers in California have discovered that even these tiny creatures might dream.73 Sympathy for flies? That’s quite a stretch for most people, and the emotional path to the forest is even more of a stretch. Indeed, the conceptual gap between flies and trees is well-nigh unbridgeable for most of us. Large plants do not have brains, they move very slowly, their interests are completely different from ours, and they live their daily lives at an incredibly slow pace. It’s no wonder that even though every schoolchild knows trees are living beings, they also know they are categorized as objects.
When the logs in the fireplace crackle merrily, the corpse of a beech or oak is going up in flames. The paper in the book you are holding in your hands right now is made from the shavings of spruce, and birches were expressly felled (that is to say, killed) for this purpose. Does that sound over the top? I don’t think so. For if we keep in mind all we have learned in the previous chapters, parallels can definitely be drawn to pigs and pork. Not to put too fine a point on it, we use living things killed for our purposes. Does that make our behavior reprehensible? Not necessarily. After all, we are also part of Nature, and we are made in such a way that we can survive only with the help of organic substances from other species. We share this necessity with all other animals. The real question is whether we help ourselves only to what we need from the forest ecosystem, and—analogous to our treatment of animals—whether we spare the trees unnecessary suffering when we do this.
That means it is okay to use wood as long as trees are allowed to live in a way that is appropriate to their species. And that means that they should be allowed to fulfill their social needs, to grow in a true forest environment on undisturbed ground, and to pass their knowledge on to the next generation. And at least some of them should be allowed to grow old with dignity and finally die a natural death.
What organic farms are to agriculture, continuous cover forests with careful selective cutting are to silviculture. In these forests (called Plenterwälder in German), trees of different ages and sizes are mixed together so that tree children can grow up under their mothers. Occasionally, a tree is harvested with care and removed using horses. And so that old trees can fulfill their destinies, 5 to 10 percent of the area is completely protected. Lumber from forests with such species-appropriate tree management can be used with no qualms of conscience. Unfortunately, 95 percent of the current forest practice in Central Europe looks quite different, with the use of heavy machinery and plantation monocultures.
Laypeople often intuitively grasp the need for a change in forest management practices better than forestry professionals do. The public is getting increasingly involved in the management of community forests, and they are insisting the authorities embrace higher environmental standards. We have the example of “forest-friendly” Königsdorf near Cologne, which reached a mediated agreement with the forest service and the regional ministry for natural resources and the environment that heavy machinery no longer be used and deciduous trees of a great age never be cut down.74 On the other side of the Atlantic, in Virginia, the mission of the nonprofit Healing Harvest Forest Foundation is to “address human need for forest products while creating a nurturing co-existence between the forest and human community.” The foundation supports community-based forestry initiatives and promotes the use of horses, mules, and oxen to remove felled trees and the practice of removing single trees that are struggling when harvesting timber, leaving the healthiest standing.75
In the case of Switzerland, a whole country is concerned with the species-appropriate treatment of all things green. The constitution reads, in part, that “account [is] to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.” So it’s probably not a good idea to decapitate flowers along the highway in Switzerland without good reason. Although this point of view has elicited a lot of head shaking in the international community, I, for one, welcome breaking down the moral barriers between animals and plants. When the capabilities of vegetative beings become known, and their emotional lives and needs are recognized, then the way we treat plants will gradually change, as well. Forests are not first and foremost lumber factories and warehouses for raw material, and only secondarily complex habitats for thousands of species, which is the way modern forestry currently treats them. Completely the opposite, in fact.
Wherever forests can develop in a species-appropriate manner, they offer particularly beneficial functions that are legally placed above lumber production in many forest laws. I am talking about respite and recovery. Current discussions between environmental groups and forest users, together with the first encouraging results—such as the forest in Königsdorf—give hope that in the future forests will continue to live out their hidden lives, and our descendants will still have the opportunity to walk through the trees in wonder. This is what this ecosystem achieves: the fullness of life with tens of thousands of species interwoven and interdependent.
And just how important this interconnected global network of forests is to other areas of Nature is made clear by this little story from Japan. Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at the Hokkaido University, discovered that leaves falling into streams and rivers leach acids into the ocean that stimulate the growth of plankton, the first and most important building block in the food chain. More fish because of the forest? The researcher encouraged the planting of more trees in coastal areas, which did, in fact, lead to higher yields for fisheries and oyster growers.76
But we shouldn’t be concerned about trees purely for material reasons, we should also care about them because of the little puzzles and wonders they present us with. Under the canopy of the trees, daily dramas and moving love stories are played out. Here is the last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered. And who knows, perhaps one day the language of trees will eventually be deciphered, giving us the raw material for further amazing stories. Until then, when you take your next walk in the forest, give free rein to your imagination—in many cases, what you imagine is not so far removed from reality, after all!