The Hidden Life of Trees

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Discoveries from a Secret World

Peter Wohlleben

What it’s about

Wohlleben, a German forester-turned-author, draws from decades managing an ancient beech woodland to argue that trees exhibit behaviors strikingly analogous to human and animal societies: they communicate, cooperate, share resources, warn each other of danger, raise their young, feel pain, form friendships, and even have "personalities." Trees thrive by embracing systemic interdependence amid scarcity (nutrients, water, light), adapting collectively to random threats (pests, storms) rather than competing to the death. Misallocate resources (break the network via logging), and the whole portfolio gets pruned. Echoes Nowak's Supercooperators (group-level selection), Pross's DKS (persistence through replication/networks), and our Blue Line: fairness/trust/learning as the pillars that let the global life form endure chaos.

Why I like it

I don’t know if the author would appreciate how I interpret the research and insights he shares, but in my view it provides evidence that trees are designed (in evolution) to honor the core principles of value creation while also demonstrating the use of the fully diversified portfolio perspective for assessing risk and value creation. The trees apparently care for each other, feel pain, and form relationships, but those traits don’t prevent them from honor the principles of value creation and pruning the investments that fail to create value from the well-diversified portfolio perspective, as represented by the forest in this book.