The Heartbeat of Trees를 읽으면서 향후 기억으로 남기고 싶은 내용을 인용해 두고자 책 내용을 옮겨 적는다. 찰스 다윈 이후 ”적자생존(survival of the fittest)“이 지금까지 생물이 진화해 온 대전제로 여겨 왔고 이에 따라 식물들도 광합성을 위해 서로 햇빛, 물, 그리고 영양분을 위해 서로 경쟁하는 것으로 여겨왔는데 이런 관점을 바꿔놓는 내용이라 더 가치가 있는 것 같다.

Conventional foresters believe that they are protecting ecosystems and through their stewardship are imitating or at most speeding up natural processes. However, the understanding of these ecosystems is grounded in a different philosophy about natural processes, in short in a Darwin and his colleagues, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”. However, that doesn’t mean every life-form fights every other life-form and the strongest prevails. Rather, it’s more about being able to thrive in an environment and reproduce successfully. That is a completely different interpretation of “survival of the fittest” and means, for example, that social communication can also be very successful in nature.

Trees and wolves – and especially our own species – prove how successful social communities can be. A more accurate rendering of the phrase would be “survival of the most well adapted” (“fittest” in the sense of being the best fit rather than the strongest), which means survival of the species that manage best in the environment in which they find themselves. If that were not the case, evolution would mean that ever stronger and therefore perhaps also more aggressive species would be the ones that survived. Moreover, if you read the phrase as the strong species surviving best, you would expect earlier species to have been underdeveloped, whereas in reality they were well adapted to the conditions that prevailed at the time. But because nature is always in flux, continents wander, and climate changes, the appearance and disappearance of species is not evolution in the improvement but simply in the sense of adapting to new environmental conditions.

I, for one, used to interpret the phrase completely differently and thought that species were constantly improving until we finally go to us. And so, according to this outdated understanding, the logical conclusion was that humans stood at the pinnacle of creation. From a scientific point of view, however, this conclusion is incorrect. It’s current meaning can only be explained from a cultural and religious perspective. And when we get to trees, we have got the wrong end of the stick completely, just like many foresters.

Foresters believe that trees not only of different species but also of the same species fight each other for light, water, and food. In managed forests, foresters get involved in what they think is the fight that plays out in undisturbed forests. You could say they see themselves as the referees. In Germany, I have often heard them say that the native forests could not survive without foresters. And yet, trees have existed for more than 300 million years, modern humans for 300,000, and the profession of forestry for just 300. For most of the time, trees have managed very well without human referees – in no small part because they have not been fighting.