The Hidden Life of Trees: Hard to See the Forest for the Twee

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C+

Back in 1973, a popular New Age book called The Secret Life of Plants claimed that plants were sentient, responded to music and emotions and, “might originate in a supramaterial world of cosmic beings which, as fairies, elves, gnomes, sylphs, and a host of other creatures, were a matter of direct vision and experience to clairvoyants among the Celts and other sensitives."

German forester Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, published in English in 2016, isn’t that outrageous. But its claims for plant sentience and anthropomorphism have created some backlash from the scientific community.

That controversy goes unmentioned in Jorg Adolph and Jan Haft’s film which celebrates the cheerful, professorial Wohlleben as he takes groups, including Korean tourists and screaming schoolchildren, through the forest, making home videos and perusing the woodland floor. “It certainly is nice to see rotten wood in various stages of decay.”

All in all, it’s a pleasant traipse through the forest. The film is full of lovely images, macro close-ups and time-lapse photography mixed in with some inspirational politics. A pro-environmental protest is thrown in and, in the last segment, Wohlleben joins Dr. David Suzuki onstage on Vancouver Island, where they discuss the short-sightedness of the logging industry. But by the end, this gentle meandering film about a man who loves forests feels at least half-nonsensical.

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Wohlleben started off as a forester himself, a career he compares to a butcher tending animals, and he works instead as a tour guide, educator, and author. He believes that forests should mostly be left alone, letting them age with dignity, working for greater diversity instead of the “monoculture” of forests planted to be harvested.

He is not, for the record, against cutting down trees for furniture, firewood, or the paper from which his books are made. He just wants it done more mindfully. Foresters are part of an organic system (what has been called “the wood wide web”) linked to organisms of different species, mammals, insects and especially soil fungi that exchange nutrients and communicate information between plants.

The problem here is the human communication, which gets increasingly fanciful as Wohlleben and the off-screen narrator describe trees as parents, friends, and couples. We are told that the trees “agree” about when to produced seeds, and how fungi “demand payment in exchange for their services” to the trees. Urban trees are “street kid” orphans, who grow up too fast and die young. And when nearby oak trees shed their leaves at different times, it’s because one is more “anxious and sensible” than the other.

At this point, I found myself feeling like I could no longer see the forest for the twee. I particularly have trouble with the ascription of “sentience” to trees, organisms generally understood to lack either central nervous systems or brains.

As plant physiologist Lincoln Taiz has noted, from an evolutionary perspective, plants neither possess nor require consciousness. In fact, having it would be downright cruel: “It’s unbearable to even consider the idea that plants would be sentient, conscious beings aware of the fact that they’re being burned to ashes, watching their saplings die in front of them.”

The Hidden Life of Trees. Directed by Jorg Adolph and Jan Haft. With Peter Wohlleben and several forests. Available in Toronto theatres September 24.