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Peter Wohlleben: Science, Wilderness and emotion

Science, Wilderness and emotion

Science is the concerted human effort to understand, or to understand better, the history of the natural world and how the natural world works…

Wilderness is a natural processes govern Wilderness core zones meeting the European Wilderness Quality Standard and Audit System. Wilderness is composed of native habitats and species, and large enough for the effective ecological functioning of natural processes. They are unmodified or only slightly modified and without intrusive or extractive human activity, settlements, infrastructure or visual disturbance.

Emotion is an affective state of consciousness in which joy,sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness. It is any of the feelings of joy, sorrow, fear, hate, love, etc. 

How these 3 important elements are linked together?  Peter Wohlleben, a german forester ranger very nicely summarised that when he said:

Scientific language removes all the emotion, and people don’t understand it anymore…

but when he craning his neck to look at the leafless crowns, black against a gray sky he says,

These trees are friends… You see how the thick branches point away from each other? That’s so they don’t block their buddy’s light…Trees suckle their children…

everyone knows immediately what he means.

It seems that there are many things that we still do not know, about Wilderness, emotion and  trees growing around us. Life long experience of Peter Wohlleben provide a very good guidance how to balance and correctly interpreted and understand this complex subject. The more about the hidden life of trees, what they feel, how they communicate can be read here.

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