Forest Walking: discovering the trees and woodlands of North America by
Peter Wohlleben
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
Amazon.in Page
Out: April 26, 2022
Wohllebenâs
âThe Hidden Life of Treesâ was one of those rare books that profoundly changed the way I looked at the world, and so I was eager to read his forthcoming work. This book is at once narrower in focus (i.e. intended to appeal to the North American market, specifically,) but also much much broader (i.e. reflecting upon not just the trees but the other species that reside among them as well as how humans can best get around within the forest.) It might seem strange for Wohlleben (a German forester) to do a book on the North American forests, and I suspect thatâs one reason that his one-time translator / editor (Jane Billinghurst) became his co-author. [I donât know where Billinghurst is from, but she does add many North America-specific vignettes to the book.]
Like âThe Hidden Life of Treesâ this book is packed with intriguing insights into woodland environments. The twenty-one chapters arenât explicitly divvied up, but thereâs a clear logic to the grouping of chapters. An opening chapter focuses on the importance of having a multi-sensory experience in the woods, and then chapters two through five are concentrated on trees and their various parts.
Chapters six through eight explore species that work on, with, and against trees, with particular focus on fungi and other species that break down and recycle forest material. Chapters nine and ten turn the attention to how to help kids get the most out of their forest experience. The next couple chapters consider how to get the most of seeing the forest at unconventional times, i.e. night and during varied seasons. Then there are a few chapters investigating how to observe other lifeforms of the forest, particularly animals and insects.
Several chapters follow that explore how humans can survive and thrive in wooded ecosystems, including everything from wilderness survival / primitive living skills to dressing to save oneself from ticks and chiggers.
I learned a lot from this book. As I mentioned, itâs full of intriguing little tidbits about the forest.
The opening sentence of the bookâs Introduction did mention it being intended as a book one would take into the forest with one, and I would say itâs not that book at all. Itâs the kind of book one reads before going out (and probably returns to after coming back) but itâs just not organized in such away to make it worth lugging around (i.e. itâs not like a field guide â set up to allow one to rapidly find what one is interested in on the fly.)
That said, youâll learn a lot from reading it, and Iâd highly recommend it.
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