Listening to Trees.

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Hellum brings decades of professional silviculture experience and a lifetime of passion to his plea for the world’s forests. He sees forests as places of grandeur and wonder, silence and sanctuary. Man has been exploiting and destroying forests at an unsustainable rate, he says, and it is time to listen to these majestic places from a position of humility, to observe and work with them rather than continue the path of destruction. Part of the problem is “armchair forestry”—forest management practiced in boardrooms remote from where logging takes place. Another contributing factor is failure to see that forests are more than groupings of trees, more than “wood factories.” There’s a failure to understand how ecosystems work and to embrace the holistic thinking needed to preserve the biodiversity that comes from complex interdependent relationships among trees, other plants, animals, and micro-organisms.

Hellum explores the meaning of ecological sustainability in forests, drawings examples and anecdotes from his extensive experience in Norway, Canada, and southeast Asia. The ongoing war between “forest and field” (agriculture) is discussed, as is the issue of plantation plantings after clear-cutting, and the subject of imported replacing native species. Wrong decisions in forestry, Hellum says, can have far-reaching economic and ecological consequences.

Hellum’s position is that as we remove forests we remove ourselves from our spiritual past and our connectedness with nature. The loss of a forest is a loss that is both physical and spiritual. He has “feelings of affinity” and great respect for forests and shares his “tormented feelings” about the forestry profession.

In some respects the book resembles a rambling university lecture that veers, alternately, into personal anecdote and scientific report. It is at places blurred by wandering into the philosophical and emotional; at other points these characteristics become its strength. There are a few drawings and sketches of trees by the author of trees, but otherwise the presentation is indifferent, and this, too, is a strike against the work’s effectiveness. With a good design and layout, some colour and visuals, the content could have come to life and Hellum’s powerful message delivered. Unfortunately that opportunity was missed.