He gave tours of the forest, and made selective cuttings with low-impact harvesting methods, such as using horses and hand tools to extract trees. Instead of felling monoculture timber stands, he opened up the forest on more transcendental terms: offering the old-growth forest as a cemetery where people could pay to bury their dead. In the forest Wohlleben managed he saw that trees grew stronger when allowed to exist in natural communities. The book is the zenith of his rebellion from seeing the forest through the profit-centric lens of state forestry management-where a tree is a number and a forest a plantation-to an ecological ethos. In it, he draws upon decades of experience working in the Eifel Mountain forests in Germany. In 2015, the German’s unforeseen bestseller, The Hidden Life of Trees, was published in English. He has been called the world’s most famous forester. In the depths as at the furthest reaches of our knowing: symmetry. Ten to the negative fourteen: the ground floor of our atomic understanding a single proton with mysterious quarks oscillating wildly.
Ten to the negative ten confronts a world of storming electrons. At ten to the negative six we descend through the porous cell wall and find the primordial living script: double helixes of DNA. The Milky Way, concentric and spiraling-hurricane in a black sea-joins our satellite galaxies in a cosmic cloud.
Then it is but one vertex in crowd of geometric constellations, those forms mythologized from the view from earth since time immemorial. We move past orbital paths of Venus and Mars, and at ten to the eleventh, the solar system claims but half of our frame-for a moment. Soon the earth is lost in the sea of space, another faceless flicker. As ten to the sixth turns ten to the seventh, our Pale Blue Dot emerges unto a black canvas. Ten to the fourth and the entirety of the Great Lake takes shape the view serrated by streaking clouds. We see boats docked in lake Michigan to the east and hulking Soldier Field to the west. Another ten seconds and they conflate with the grass-ten to the second power, or 100 meters out.
From ten to zero to ten to the first, the picnic-goers begin to blur. Every ten seconds, the lens expands outwards by a power of ten. The Tour-de-force demonstration of scale and relativity, Powers of Ten, runs like this: a view of a lakeside picnic on the shore of Chicago in October at a one by one meter frame.
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