"You're sitting on wood chairs," Wohlleben disarmingly tells his students. That may just be a way to give us more of a sense of tree-time, rather than human-time. Perhaps in tribute to its subject matter, it is slow in spots. These moments are punctuated with visions of majesty and breathtaking beauty, including some time-lapse photography that gives us a glimpse of what it is like to live in tree-time. ![]() He approaches it with the passionate curiosity of a scientist but the respect of a fellow life form, understanding that to come close to it is to trample on its subtler extended growth. He has a chance to visit the oldest tree in the world, a surprisingly slight Swedish spruce that has been alive as far before the Bronze age as the Bronze age is before ours. Wohlleben reads a forest like a scholar reads a book, with complete attention and profound understanding. The documentary includes some classroom lectures and public appearances, a protest by environmentalists, and a lot of wandering through trees, pointing out their extraordinary qualities and also some heartbreaking damage, some of the most distressing well-intentioned but misguided attempts to help. But "they can only get very old in a community." And humans have been breaking up their communities since they discovered that wood could be used for fire and buildings. If we leave them alone and only if we leave them alone, they can thrive more than we have a chance to see. They are colonies, profoundly connected in the most literal and interdependent sense, "much like ant colonies" and, when left to themselves without human interference, they operate as superorganisms. ![]() Wohlleben wants us to appreciate "how social trees are," with "nutrient exchanges" between trees to help other trees of the same species when they are in need.
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