City Trees Suffer from Not Getting Enough Sleep
Treehugger (June 13, 2017)

From the "Trees, They're Just Like Us!" department, my favorite forester has weighed in on an issue I have long suspected: Urban trees, like much of the natural world, have a hard time when the lights are left on all night.

“They also have to sleep at night,” Peter Wohlleben told the audience at the Hay Festival of Literature in Wales. “Research shows that trees near street lights die earlier. Like burning a lamp in your bedroom at night, it is not good for you.”

And if anyone knows trees – and embraces anthropomorphising them – it's Wohlleben. The German forester and best-selling author doesn't shy away from talking about trees as if they were people. “I use a very human language," he says. "Scientific language removes all the emotion, and people don’t understand it anymore. When I say, ‘Trees suckle their children,’ everyone knows immediately what I mean.

Read the full article here.