Waldsterben: the 1980s German panic with modern parallels

On the 'ecological Holocaust' that gripped the German public but had little basis in fact.

Dear Reader,

Anyone looking an antidote to the general sense of panic swirling around the country this summer could do worse than reading up on the hysteria that gripped Germany in the 1980s over the allegedly irreversible death of large swathes of its forests.

The panic reached such heights by 1983 that the CDU raised Waldsterben (tree die off) to “the most important task facing mankind”; environmentalists compared it to the Holocaust; scientists predicted that major forests were already terminally ill.

In fact, there was nothing particularly wrong with Germany’s forests - and they are still largely thriving today. The main problem was that the trees looked a bit threadbare due to the fact that they were recovering from a series of severe droughts in the 1970s.

What happened?

The obsession with Waldsterben was ignited by a couple of scientists who saw themselves as prophets, whose role it was to flag up a disaster that most people couldn’t see coming.

Bernhard Ulrich, a soil scientist in Göttingen, spent the 1970s gathering samples from a small forest in Lower Saxony. When he analysed them he made what seemed to him a shocking discovery. They contained traces of sulphur over 100 times higher than he had expected.

What was clear was that the sulphur was man made. It was emiited into the atmosphere by coal power stations and was returning to the earth’s floor in the form of acid rain. Ulrich feared that this was turning the ground acidic, which in turn was causing trees to fall ill and die.

After he published his thesis in 1979, a botanist from Munich by the name of Peter Schütt joined him. He had discovered unusual tree damage in southern Bavaria, which he described as “novel forest damage.” This seemed to indicate that the sulphur had spread far beyond Germany’s industrial heartlands.

The two men took their story to the media and had little trouble finding an audience.

Der Spiegel dedicated three entire issues to it. The cover of a November 1981 edition showed chimney’s pumping an bilious yellow smoke into the air above sick trees and a three-word headline: Die Wald stirbt. Dr. Ulrich gave the magazine a dramatic prediction: “The first large forests will die within the next five years. They can no longer be saved.” 

That hit home. In the ensuing panic no comparison seemed too absurd.

At the 1983 election, the CDU raised Waldsterben to “the most important task facing mankind”… the SPD released a video titled “...the forest dies and then you’re done for”… the Greens demanded an immediate end to coal power.

Not to be outdone, the BUND nature NGO said that the unsayable had to be said - this was an “ecological Holocaust.”

Germany’s ever earnest public heard the clarion call. They stopped buying Christmas trees to ensure that they wouldn’t be responsible for the deaths of any more innocent trees… every little helped.

Credit: Ari Stonewood

Politicians go into action

On assuming office in 1983, Helmut Kohl ordered the creation of a “forest damage report” which assessed the health of trees based on needle and leaf loss.

As no real research had been done into foliage loss in the past, no serious point of comparison existed. Nor did the methodology say anything about the causes of leaf loss. But, in a time of panic, the public demanded answers.

Helicopters dropped lime over the forests - a measure that was supposed to counteract acidification. Over the next 15 years, half a billion in Deutsch Marks was spent on research projects on forest die back. Meanwhile Kohl’s government set limits on sulphur emissions from power plants.

Perception and reality

In the English-speaking world, German theories about sulphur causing mass tree death were met with scepticism. In 1988, Nature magazine called for an end to use of the word Waldsterben, arguing that it crudely simplified a complex set of factors which was leading to stress on trees.

It was only in the mid-1990s that doubts started to be raised in Germany, too. When Ulrich’s prophesy about mass tree extermination failed to come true, the issue slipped down the political agenda. Then, in 1996, a report by the European Forestry Institute found that the forests of central Europe had actually been growing faster over the past half century than in the 50 years before that. 

The report even concluded that some industrial emissions were contributing to the increased growth. Extra carbon dioxide - a by-product of the burning of fossil fuels - was helping trees to photosynthesise; nitrogen from car exhaust fumes were fertilizing the ground.

One by one, German scientists started to say that they had never been convinced by Ulrich’s thesis.

“I was torn. I shared Ulrich's goal that pollutants needed to be reduced,” botanist Heinrich Spiecker admitted years later. “I wondered if it made sense to come out fully against his statement, which I shared in terms of political impact, but which I thought was scientifically untenable.”

Spieker himself had been studying fir trees in the Black Forest and could never establish a connection to sulphur contamination. The main cause of damage he saw was a severe drought in the late 1970s. This led to a magnesium deficiency in the forest floor, but foresters were able to solve the issue via the use of fertilizers.

The “novel forest damage” observed by Schütt in Bavaria tuned out to be nothing more than trees doing what they do when they don’t have enough water - shedding foliage in order to conserve energy.

Meanwhile, this natural process of trees dropping needles is times of drought only to regrow them when the rains return distorted the government’s annual tree damage report, which portrayed needle loss as a sign of ill health. But attempts to modify the report’s methodology led to attacks from nature organisations, who cried about a cover up.

So what role did acidification of the forest floor actually play in tree deaths in the 1980s?

That seems to still be heavily disputed. One botanist later concluded that sulphur contamination was responsible for the deaths of around 50,000 trees in the Ore Mountains in Eastern Germany. That number, while it might sound large, is 0.0006% of the country’s entire tree population.

‘Serious damage to science’

Ulrich eventually admitted that his prediction strayed beyond science into politics.

“I wanted something to happen politically. I had such an emotional undertone in it, and that was also intentional,” he told Die Zeit years later. But he conceded that “it was a big mistake to sell such speculation as scientific knowledge.”

Günter Keil, a forestry researcher for the federal government, later wrote a scathing critique of how scientists acted during the Waldsterben panic.

“Individual scientists succumbed to the temptation to perform for the media by making dramatic claims,” Keil wrote. “They were rewarded with public attention, and some of them quickly assumed a role as vigilant guards against colleagues who thought differently.”

Keil went on to say that “the damage to science is serious. Members of the public who experienced the panic whipped up by scientists and who saw the gradual collapse of their narrative will stop believing anything researchers say in the future.”

Waldsterben 2.0

It would be reassuring if one could claim at this point that lessons have been learned. But in the past couple of years the word Waldsterben has made a comeback after serious droughts have once again led to trees shedding leaves and needles.

For the mass media, this is Waldsterben 2.0 (they still haven’t accepted that the first one didn’t happen) and this time the culprit is climate change.

It is true that climate change is causing stress for German trees - but this is once again an oversimplification of a more complex problem. Media outlets claim for instance that recent droughts are a consequence of climate change, but they fail to mention that these dry years buck a trend of increased rainfall over the past half a century.

There are some 90 billion trees in Germany. These faces challenges such as the spread of bark beetles and are vulnerable to global warming due to the fact that much forestry is monoculture. But they are not on the point of extinction.

J.L.