Walks in the Wild Quotes

“Recent decades have seen merciless competition for our appetites. We are led by our palates in a search for calorific delicacies – this desire is our genetic heritage from the distant past. We instinctively crave foods that are fatty, sweet and salty, compressed carbohydrates. This urge would have made sense 10,000 years ago, after all, when a calorie bomb was a rare thing to find, and if you stumbled across one you had to eat it immediately. Faced with supermarkets crammed to the rafters with calories, there is no reason to binge eat in this way, but we struggle to switch off our pre-programmed instincts. Instead, our food has been improved and optimised to make it fit as closely as possible to our unconscious longing for taste and calories. Products only survive in the market when they tick these boxes, and even then they’re only popular until something even tastier emerges. The impact on our diet is that everything we eat tastes more or less the same.”
― Peter Wohlleben, Walks in the Wild: A Guide Through the Forest

“If you can identify the species in your local woods by their song, you can put together a very personal bird clock based on their dawn chorus.”
― Peter Wohlleben, Walks in the Wild: A Guide Through the Forest

“Not unlike the herbicide-spraying campaigns in Asia, Central Europe was also flown over by helicopters spraying chemicals intended to wipe out the deciduous forests, which had gone out of fashion. Beech and oak trees held very little value at that time; low oil prices meant that no one was interested in firewood. The scales were tilted in favour of spruce – sought after by the timber industry and safe from being devoured by the high game populations. Over 5,000 square kilometres of deciduous woodlands was cleared just in my local region of Eifel and Hunsrück, through this merciless method of dropping death from the air. The carrier for the substance, sold under the trade name Tormona, was diesel oil. Elements of this mixture may still lurk in the soil of our forests today; the rusty diesel drums are certainly still lying around in some places. Have things improved now? Not completely, because chemical sprays are still used, even if they’re not directed at the trees themselves. The target of the helicopters and trucks with their atomising nozzles is the insects that feed on the trees and wood. Because the drab spruce and pine monocultures give free rein to bark beetles and butterfly caterpillars, these are then bumped off with contact insecticides. The pesticides, with names like Karate, are so lethal for three months that mere contact spells the end for any unfortunate insects. Parts of a forest that have been sprayed with pesticide are usually marked and fenced off for a while, but wood piles at the side of the track are often not considered dangerous. I would therefore advise against sitting on them when you’re ready for a rest stop and look out for a mossy stump instead, which is guaranteed to be harmless. This is quite apart from the fact that freshly harvested softwood is often very resinous. The stains don’t come out in the normal wash; you need to attack it with a special stain remover. Stacked wood carries another danger: the whole pile is liable to come crashing down. When you know that a single trunk can weigh hundreds of kilograms, you tend to stay away from a precariously stacked pile. It’s not for nothing that the German name for a wood stack is Polter, as in the crashing and banging of a poltergeist. Back to the poison. In areas sprayed by helicopter I wouldn’t pick berries or mushrooms for the rest of the summer. Otherwise, the forest is low in harmful substances compared to industrial agriculture.”
― Peter Wohlleben, Walks in the Wild: A Guide Through the Forest