Show Notes
Robert Moor is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Emergence, and The New York Times. His first book, On Trails, won the National Outdoor Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize. He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia. His new book is 'In Trees'.
Topics
00:00 Welcome, and the new SAND course
00:04 A tree is a verb, not a noun
00:06 Branching, brains, and why AI has no roots
00:13 Pruning, gnarling, and the beauty of wounds
00:16 The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya
00:19 From On Trails to In Trees
00:22 Tree thinking and the tree of contents
00:27 Intelligence without anthropomorphizing
00:34 Cedars, Haida Gwaii, and deep time
00:38 Branching futures, many apocalypses, and grief
00:47 Hierarchy, the rhizome, and the Korowai
00:52 Rootedness and relationality
Robert Moor
In Trees: An Exploration (Simon & Schuster, April 2026)
On Trails: An Exploration
Robert Moor at Hill Nadell Literary Agency
Books mentioned
Songs for Relinquishing the Earth by Jan Zwicky. Originally hand-sewn by the author on recycled stock and distributed by request; later won the Governor General's Award for Poetry.
Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees by Nalini Nadkarni
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano
The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge, source of the "big plant with a stick up the middle" definition
Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land by Brian Burkhart
Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta
A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, source of the rhizome
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, source of the buffered and porous self
“Ancient Green” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
People mentioned
Patrick von Aderkas, tree biologist at the University of Victoria, who described a tree as "a growth form"
Jeff Lichtman, neuroscientist and Dean of Science at Harvard
Robert J. O'Hara, who coined the term "tree thinking"
Umeek (Richard Atleo), Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief and philosopher, author of Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview
Michael Pollan, on the distinction between sentience, intelligence, and consciousness
John McPhee, on structural experimentation in nonfiction
Stephen Tamatea King, the first known tree sitter, who climbed totara trees in New Zealand in the 1970s
Joanna Macy, "there is no away to throw things to"
Places and peoples
Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Haida Gwaii
The Korowai of Papua, treehouse dwellers with almost no hierarchy
Nuu-chah-nulth communities of Vancouver Island
The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, a Ficus religiosa replanted from the offspring of the original
Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis fossil in Ethiopia
Purgatorius, the ground-dwelling ancestor of mammalian life
From SAND
Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory, and Practice, the new nine-month course with Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Eduardo Duran, Linda Thai, Daniel Foor, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, and Dr. Bayo Akomolafe. Scholarships available for 20 to 30 percent of seats.
Sila, a nonlinear documentary following Inuit women through 300 years of Danish colonialism, available to watch now
The Eternal Song film series
Previous episodes with Monica Gagliano and Tyson Yunkaporta
Contact SAND
Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member
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