Each tree is cut individually and removed using horses, rather than heavy machinery, to avoid damaging underground networks of roots and fungi that allow trees to exchange resources and chemical signals. Wohlleben had been managing the forest for the municipality for almost three decades, and he had cared for it with unusual gentleness. Up in the canopy, the leaves were every possible hue of apple skin. We followed a logging road through a forest of beeches. (“When a structure is nice and vertical, it is difficult to upset its equilibrium,” he has written, of trees.) He wore muddy, size-15 army boots and a black fleece jacket that smelled of old woodsmoke. He had the slightly stiff bearing of a person who thinks often about the importance of uprightness. He’s a tall man with a long head and a short gray beard his vanishing hair was shaved close to the skull. One cold afternoon in the autumn of 2018, in a forest outside the tiny village of Hümmel, in Rhineland-Palatinate, I went for a walk with the German forester Peter Wohlleben.
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