Environmental activist and tree expert. That’s how Peter Wohlleben, 60, defines himself today. He no longer calls himself a forester, for a simple r

Peter Wohlleben, the world’s most famous forester: ‘In cities, trees are treated like street furniture’

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2024-11-17 19:00:03

Environmental activist and tree expert. That’s how Peter Wohlleben, 60, defines himself today. He no longer calls himself a forester, for a simple reason: “I no longer manage forests. I don’t have time,” he explains during a Zoom interview from his home in Hümmel, a small town an hour from the city of Cologne, Germany.

The Bonn-born Wohlleben is dedicated body and soul to making the true nature of forests known. He does this from the forestry academy he created in 2014, in Wershofen, less than three miles from his house.

It’s something like his second life, after more than two decades working as a forest ranger. He began his career in the service of the Rhineland-Palatinate state government in 1987. But, little by little, his professional vision of the forest as an exploitable reality changed. He began to abhor the management system imposed by the authorities, based on the massive felling of century-old trees by using heavy machinery to then replant perfectly aligned pines.

From then on, Wohlleben waged a long and courageous battle with what he calls “the German forest lobby” by refusing to treat the trees in the forest as “factory farms.” He eventually resigned from his government post in 2006. But then, when he was about to leave Germany, the mayor of Hümmel entrusted him with the management of the 1,200 hectares of local beech forest, which had previously been the responsibility of the state forestry authorities.

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