More than timber: Wohlleben, Stamets and Rosolie on the value of old forests
Peter Wohlleben describes a forest as a cooperative community with mother trees that grow slowly and share food, Paul Stamets presents the agarikon, an old-growth forest mushroom that can live for a century, as part of an old-growth library, and Paul Rosolie tells how an expedition stumbled onto untouched ancient forest beside a freshly cut logging road. Side by side, their accounts give readers reasons to value old forests for more than their timber.
An old forest is worth more standing than cut, and three accounts give three different reasons why: as a living community, as a store of compounds and genetic diversity, and as an untouched place that a single logging road can end.
Peter Wohlleben, a German forester who spent more than twenty years with Germany's forestry commission, describes a natural forest as a cooperative community. In his own beech woods he found a stump felled four or five hundred years earlier that was still alive, and concluded that neighboring beeches had been feeding it through their roots. Trees of the same species, he argues, share nutrients through fungal threads or roots grown together, so the strong support the weak. Mother trees about two hundred years old shelter young beeches that have waited eighty years in deep shade, and that slow growth lays down dense wood that resists fungi and storms. Thinning, in his view, breaks up these family bands and produces fast, soft, short-lived trees. An old, undisturbed forest also makes its own climate far better than a plantation, and one old-growth tree in a study he cites held more than 2,000 insects from 241 species. He is not against using wood; he wants old growth protected and an end to monocultures, heavy machinery and heavy thinning.
Paul Stamets, a mycologist, makes a different case with the agarikon, a mushroom that grows only in old-growth forest, can live for a century and is on Europe's red list. He says a defense biosecurity screen ranked it among the top ten against pox viruses, and he has built a library of 107 strains. Because less than 1% of old-growth forest remains, he calls these forests genomic libraries and argues they should be saved as a matter of international defense. He also describes a small, early study of agarikon and turkey tail taken around vaccination, but he says he can't make recommendations. Anyone thinking of taking mushroom products for their health should talk it over with a doctor first.
Paul Rosolie, a conservationist, tells a story rather than a theory. On an expedition in the Peruvian Amazon he walked through untouched ancient forest, with a mature mahogany, jaguar tracks and ironwood trees, then stepped onto a freshly cut logging road that meant the forest was next. A guest's offer and a fast fundraiser bought the land, and the loggers asked to stay on as rangers.
The three agree that old forest cannot be replaced by young forest, that most of what is lost is invisible from outside, and that cooperation matters as much as competition; Stamets would redefine evolution as "the extension of generosity of surplus beyond your own needs to help a neighbor or a friend." They differ on why the forest matters, and on how much wood to take: Wohlleben wants balance, Joe Rogan argues much logging is unnecessary, and Rosolie buys land so it is not logged at all. The science is not equally settled either: Wohlleben's wood wide web is seriously disputed, and Stamets' clinical data are early and small.
So look at old forests with fresh eyes, leave dead wood where it lies, avoid monocultures, don't pick agarikon, support protection that employs local people, and hold the disputed science lightly.