[Anne Strainchamps]: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
[Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson.
[Steve Paulson]: Sometimes I wonder what it's like to be a tree, to grow by branching and rooting, reaching for air and sunlight, standing in one place year after year.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Living an entangled life.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Trees can seem like utterly foreign species, but we literally came from them.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Eons ago, our hominid ancestors lived in trees, so maybe their way of being is somehow familiar to us.
[Steve Paulson]: And maybe if we got closer to trees, our own lives would look different.
[Robert Moor]: I think a tree person is a kind of a tree obsessive, a person who thinks about trees and sees trees in a way that other people don't.
[Anne Strainchamps]: This is Robert Moor, author of the new book, In Trees.
[Robert Moor]: There's a condition I think you're probably familiar with
[Robert Moor]: called plant blindness, which is that most of us walk around and plants are just this green backdrop to our daily lives.
[Robert Moor]: And tree people are those unusual individuals who notice trees, who see them, who love them, who study them.
[Robert Moor]: And I became one of those people once I moved here to British Columbia and trees sort of jumped into the foreground of my mental landscape.
[Steve Paulson]: Robert Moor is the kind of writer who takes an obsession to levels that most of us would never dream of.
[Steve Paulson]: So when he wanted to cultivate a more intimate relationship with trees, he didn't just study their biology.
[Steve Paulson]: He became a serious tree climber and went up into the canopies of some of the tallest trees on Earth.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Then he went off to Africa to sleep in the wild in a chimpanzee nest.
[Steve Paulson]: Rob is fascinated by the way time slows down in trees and how branching and pruning can become life lessons.
[Steve Paulson]: He says his goal is not to anthropomorphize trees, but to arborize humanity.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Arborize humanity.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I love the phrase, but what does it mean?
[Steve Paulson]: Well, I'm not exactly sure, and this may not be an answer, but we're in Vermont for the summer, surrounded by trees.
[Steve Paulson]: And you know that trail loop up into the woods that I walk?
[Anne Strainchamps]: The really steep one where you and the dog go?
[Steve Paulson]: Yeah.
[Steve Paulson]: So I go up there several times a week, and there are certain trees I always look for, like that cluster of really tall maples, six of them growing within a few feet of each other.
[Anne Strainchamps]: The ones we call the sisters.
[Steve Paulson]: Yeah, I always stop to look at them, and sometimes I press my hands into their bark, and the fact that they're so close together fascinates me.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, their roots and mycelial networks have to be completely entangled, and looking up, it appears that they have a single crown.
[Steve Paulson]: So there are all these things that I wonder about.
[Steve Paulson]: How much of their lives, their identities, do they share with each other?
[Steve Paulson]: What does it mean to know your neighbor in this wordless but very intimate way?
[Steve Paulson]: For me, these are not strictly biological questions.
[Steve Paulson]: There's something more, and I'm not sure what it is.
[Steve Paulson]: So this conversation with Rob Moor left me with lots of questions that I'm still mulling over.
[Anne Strainchamps]: There's also a backstory to how Rob came to write this book.
[Anne Strainchamps]: He'd been living in the East Village in New York, so very urban lifestyle, and then moved with his husband to a cabin in the woods in Smuggler Cove, British Columbia.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And they planned to stay a year, but it's been 13.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And those are the trees that inspired this book.
[Steve Paulson]: And on our Zoom call, I could see the forest just beyond the patio where Rob was sitting.
[Anne Strainchamps]: The trees were listening.
[Steve Paulson]: Rob, tell me what it's like being there.
[Steve Paulson]: Can you describe the place where you live?
[Robert Moor]: Sure.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, it's a provincial forest that backs up onto the Salish Sea.
[Robert Moor]: So you have a mix of cedars and Doug firs and alders.
[Robert Moor]: There's a couple of Pacific yews back there.
[Robert Moor]: It's not an old growth forest, but it's a beautiful forest.
[Robert Moor]: And
[Robert Moor]: It's become woven into my life.
[Robert Moor]: It's funny, the first couple of times we went hiking back there, my husband and I got lost.
[Robert Moor]: We ended up walking in circles for hours.
[Robert Moor]: And now the thought of that happening is just hilarious.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, you come to know a place so well that you can almost never get lost there.
[Steve Paulson]: Yeah.
[Steve Paulson]: So at the very beginning of your book, you say a tree is not just a thing that's made of bark and leaves and sap and wood.
[Steve Paulson]: It's a way of being.
[Steve Paulson]: And for me, that was the big takeaway from your book.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, there's the science of trees.
[Steve Paulson]: There's also the history of how humans co-evolved with trees.
[Steve Paulson]: And it's worth mentioning, of course, that our ancient hominid ancestors were arboreal.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, we literally came out of a forest.
[Steve Paulson]: You also say trees embody
[Steve Paulson]: a certain kind of wisdom that we can learn from.
[Steve Paulson]: I'd love to have you talk a bit about that.
[Robert Moor]: That was, I think, the big discovery of writing this book.
[Robert Moor]: As you say, that relationship is incredibly ancient.
[Robert Moor]: We're descended from arboreal species.
[Robert Moor]: And to some degree, we remain an arboreal species.
[Robert Moor]: You know, we can still climb trees.
[Robert Moor]: And if you climb trees throughout your life, as, for example, the Mbuti people in the Congo do, you can still do it with incredible ease.
[Robert Moor]: It's something that comes very naturally to us.
[Robert Moor]: And I think that relationship's very deep.
[Robert Moor]: But when I started talking to tree biologists, and in fact I took a class in tree biology at the University of Victoria, what they began to explain to me is that a tree is actually really hard to define because plants have evolved a tree-like shape, a tree form, multiple times.
[Robert Moor]: It's actually something that plants do when they want to get tall.
[Robert Moor]: They develop woody tissues and they start branching out.
[Robert Moor]: And one of my tree professors, my tree biology professor Patrick von Otterkost, told me a tree is really just a growth form.
[Robert Moor]: That was his phrase, a growth form.
[Steve Paulson]: Does that mean it's just a tall plant?
[Robert Moor]: Well, it's just a way a plant grows, really.
[Robert Moor]: It's a way of being.
[Robert Moor]: And so once I started thinking of a tree as a process rather than as a type of thing, suddenly I started seeing them in new ways.
[Robert Moor]: I thought, well, what is a tree?
[Robert Moor]: If it's a way of being, if it's a way that a thing grows, how does it grow?
[Robert Moor]: Well, it branches out, it prunes back what doesn't work, it gnarls around what does work.
[Robert Moor]: And then by the end of the book, I discovered the sort of missing piece to all that, which is it sends down deep roots, that it's deeply rooted,
[Robert Moor]: to its local ecology and to the community of life in that place.
[Steve Paulson]: I think we all have an image of what a tree looks like, you know, how it branches out.
[Steve Paulson]: And one thing that's striking is it looks a lot like images I've seen of a brain, how the neurons branch out and go in all these different directions.
[Steve Paulson]: How far can we take that analogy?
[Robert Moor]: Well, you know, that's actually something that you find throughout the literature of neuroscience is the language of trees.
[Robert Moor]: You know, they refer to one part of the neuron as a dendrite, which of course comes from Latin for tree.
[Robert Moor]: But also the way that they describe the brain growing is blossoming and pruning.
[Robert Moor]: Which is such a beautiful, poetic phrase.
[Robert Moor]: And it's really true.
[Robert Moor]: You know, when our brains first grow, when you're a baby, your brain is maximally branchy.
[Robert Moor]: It's as branchy as it will ever be.
[Robert Moor]: You have the most neurons, you have the most neural connections, and most of your life is spent pruning away those connections, pruning off some of those neurons that you don't need or those connections that actually aren't serving you.
[Robert Moor]: And that's how we get a sense of clarity.
[Robert Moor]: It's not perfect.
[Robert Moor]: We live in this optimization-obsessed culture in which everything is striving towards perfection.
[Robert Moor]: But that's really not how a lot of life is.
[Robert Moor]: We're just we're surviving and we're growing around our past mistakes.
[Robert Moor]: And in fact, I have come to see that as sort of part of the beauty of life.
[Robert Moor]: That's what gives our lives character.
[Steve Paulson]: So I got this very strong impression from reading your book that you don't want to just think about trees.
[Steve Paulson]: You seem to have a compulsion to be in trees.
[Steve Paulson]: And you say there was a day when you suddenly got this urge to climb a Douglas fir that was near your house.
[Steve Paulson]: Can you tell me about that day?
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, it's true.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, I climbed trees as a kid.
[Robert Moor]: I'm sure you did as well.
[Steve Paulson]: I climbed trees all the time as a kid.
[Steve Paulson]: And I always felt like I could always keep going up further and further as long as I could reach another branch.
[Steve Paulson]: And I kind of did this into my 20s and 30s, but then I stopped.
[Steve Paulson]: And I definitely have this image of tree climbing is for kids, not for adults, unless you're an arborist.
[Steve Paulson]: But you went a different direction.
[Steve Paulson]: Yeah.
[Robert Moor]: Well, and I think you're actually unusual in continuing to climb trees into your 20s and 30s.
[Robert Moor]: Most people I know stop around 13 or 14.
[Robert Moor]: You get a little bigger and a little more awkward and other things take over your life and you get distracted and then you just don't ever resume doing it.
[Robert Moor]: And yet I think a part of us misses it, right?
[Robert Moor]: I mean, we remember the joy and the freedom that we felt up there.
[Robert Moor]: And this struck home to me.
[Robert Moor]: I was reading this book by Italo Calvino called The Baron in the Trees.
[Steve Paulson]: Oh, I have read that book.
[Steve Paulson]: This guy who basically goes up in a tree and spends the rest of his life climbing from one tree to the next.
[Robert Moor]: That's right.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah.
[Robert Moor]: He remains in the treetops for his whole life.
[Robert Moor]: And I was thinking about that and the beauty of that image.
[Robert Moor]: And I was sitting out by the seashore and I was looking at this old Doug fir that had this beautiful ladder of branches leading up.
[Robert Moor]: And I decided to just give it a go.
[Robert Moor]: I said, you know, why not?
[Robert Moor]: I'll try and
[Robert Moor]: climb a tree again.
[Robert Moor]: And I knew that I remembered how to do it.
[Robert Moor]: I'd done it so many times before, I figured it would be easy.
[Robert Moor]: And it turned out it wasn't easy at all.
[Robert Moor]: In fact, I hadn't lost the ability, but I'd lost that thing we have, that boldness that we have when we're kids that allows us to do it.
[Robert Moor]: I suddenly was full of
[Robert Moor]: fear and hesitation and it was a terrible feeling.
[Robert Moor]: I really felt very old in that moment.
[Robert Moor]: I felt like I had grown cautious, not just in terms of climbing trees, but in all sorts of realms of my life.
[Robert Moor]: I felt that boldness, that wildness I had as a child, it kind of withered.
[Steve Paulson]: So what did you do then?
[Robert Moor]: Well, this I think is what makes me unusual as a writer is that I set myself the task of relearning to climb trees from the best tree climber I could find.
[Robert Moor]: So I scoured the internet and I found a guy named Ben Atkinson who lives in England and
[Robert Moor]: who makes these videos of himself climbing trees.
[Robert Moor]: And he does it in this beautiful way.
[Robert Moor]: You know, he doesn't just climb up and down the trunk like most of us did as kids.
[Robert Moor]: He'll actually tiptoe out onto the branches like he's on a kind of a balance beam.
[Robert Moor]: And he'll jump from one branch to the next and he'll grab hold of that.
[Robert Moor]: He really explores the whole tree.
[Steve Paulson]: So you have to be so comfortable with your body and you have to, I guess, get over the fear of falling.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, that's right.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, that is one of the first things he told me is we have to get off what he calls the neurotic merry-go-round.
[Robert Moor]: Your brain is your own worst enemy.
[Robert Moor]: You'll overthink it and then you'll become nervous.
[Robert Moor]: This is one of the things that he taught me.
[Robert Moor]: I traveled to the Lake District of England and he brought me up into this beautiful sycamore tree.
[Robert Moor]: And we were standing there and my leg was shaking.
[Robert Moor]: Climbers call it sewing machine leg.
[Robert Moor]: It was just, you know, I couldn't stop shaking.
[Robert Moor]: And he said, let's play a game.
[Robert Moor]: I'm going to poke you in the chest and you swat my hand away.
[Robert Moor]: You know, we're 15 feet off the ground at this point.
[Robert Moor]: And he didn't poke me hard.
[Robert Moor]: He just did it gently.
[Robert Moor]: But I started swatting his hand away.
[Robert Moor]: And after a couple of times, he said, look down.
[Robert Moor]: And I realized that my leg had stopped shaking.
[Robert Moor]: He said, just let your body do it.
[Robert Moor]: Your body knows how to do this if your brain can get out of the way.
[Robert Moor]: And so that's what I tried to do.
[Robert Moor]: And I tiptoed out onto those branches like he did.
[Robert Moor]: I wasn't quite as good as he was, but I got better at it that day and started to feel that freedom and that wildness that I'd felt as a kid, as well as this feeling I'd forgotten, which is a kind of gratitude, a feeling of thankfulness that this tree was holding my life in its hands and that those branches, if they were to fall...
[Robert Moor]: I would fall too.
[Robert Moor]: I think that's a very deep feeling in us, a kind of philosophical feeling that we need to find our way back to.
[Robert Moor]: So we have a bit more gratitude and a feeling of maybe healthy precariousness in terms of our existence here on Earth.
[Steve Paulson]: So I'm just curious, when you were tiptoeing out to the edges of the branches, were you holding on to branches or were you just standing there?
[Robert Moor]: No, most of the time I was just balancing.
[Robert Moor]: And what you find is this intense focus.
[Robert Moor]: Rock climbers like Alex Honnold who do free soloing, they talk about this, that your brain is completely wiped free of all thoughts and you have this very intense, present tense awareness of what you're doing.
[Robert Moor]: Of course, my brain being a writer then immediately started analyzing that feeling and I started thinking all over again and then I lost my sense of calm.
[Robert Moor]: But I had it for a couple of seconds there.
[Robert Moor]: I felt that clarity.
[Steve Paulson]: So you really took this to another level, and I know later on you went and found another person who taught you how to climb really tall trees, and that requires different skills, I think.
[Steve Paulson]: You know, technical skills, how to do this, and also equipment.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, you need ropes, and you need a way to sort of haul yourself up.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, so there's a tree climber named Tim Kovar who leads these courses in Oregon, and what he will teach you is how to climb big trees with ropes.
[Robert Moor]: And so essentially you...
[Robert Moor]: shoot a line up over a tall branch, either with a bone arrow or a crossbow or a slingshot, and then you pull a climbing rope up into the branches of that tree, you secure it, and then you climb up and down on that rope.
[Robert Moor]: And you can actually climb all around on the branches as well without falling, you know, without fear of falling.
[Robert Moor]: And it allows you to climb just immensely tall trees and get into these new worlds that you never even knew existed.
[Steve Paulson]: So you're just hauling yourself up hand over hand, climbing up the rope, or is there anything else that kind of pulls you up?
[Robert Moor]: No, it's just you use what are called ascenders.
[Robert Moor]: The ones I use are actually from caving.
[Robert Moor]: They're not for rock climbing, but it looks like a staple gun, and it has these little teeth that grip the rope when you pull down on it, but it allows you to slide it up.
[Robert Moor]: So you slide one ascender up.
[Robert Moor]: That one connects to your waist harness, and then you stand up in your foot stirrups.
[Robert Moor]: You slide the foot ascender up and hand, foot, hand, foot.
[Robert Moor]: You just inchworm up the rope.
[Robert Moor]: It's very straightforward, really.
[Steve Paulson]: So I know you ended up hanging out with a lot of tree people, you know, fellow climbers.
[Steve Paulson]: And I got the sense that they share certain personality traits.
[Steve Paulson]: Free spirits, nonconformists, and they seem to have a really intimate relationship with the natural world.
[Steve Paulson]: Was that your impression?
[Robert Moor]: That's absolutely my impression.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think that spending time around trees changes you, especially spending time in the treetops.
[Robert Moor]: I do think it makes you a little bit more tree-minded.
[Robert Moor]: I think you get a little branchier, you get a little more open-minded, but also you become very rigorous.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, being up there requires a seriousness because your life is in your own hands.
[Robert Moor]: I also think that they just appreciate the otherness of a tree, and they appreciate the otherworldliness of being up in the treetops.
[Robert Moor]: There's something they call tree time.
[Robert Moor]: Being up in the branches, your understanding of time starts to change.
[Robert Moor]: Time melts, and you lose track of time.
[Robert Moor]: It slows down, and it speeds up.
[Robert Moor]: you really feel very disconnected from the ground world.
[Robert Moor]: It's an entirely different phenomenological state of being up there.
[Robert Moor]: And it's one that I think is very healthy.
[Robert Moor]: It sort of jostles us out of our everyday existence and makes us appreciate life a little bit more.
[Steve Paulson]: So then there was a time when you became part of this team that was climbing up giant sequoias, part of a David Attenborough nature documentary, is that right?
[Robert Moor]: That's right.
[Robert Moor]: It was called The Green Planet.
[Robert Moor]: And my friend Steen, who I'd taken that tree climbing course with,
[Robert Moor]: He gave me a call one day and just offered me this opportunity to work as part of the crew.
[Robert Moor]: We didn't get paid or anything, but what we did get was an opportunity to climb the giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park, which normally is not something people are allowed to do.
[Robert Moor]: They don't let you just climb up into General Sherman or something.
[Steve Paulson]: These are the biggest trees in the world.
[Robert Moor]: It's true.
[Robert Moor]: By mass, they're the largest trees on Earth.
[Robert Moor]: They're incredibly ancient, you know, more than, I think, 3,000 years old and incredibly tall.
[Robert Moor]: And so the chance to climb these trees was just awe-inspiring.
[Robert Moor]: It truly was.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, it was also terrifying.
[Robert Moor]: As I say in the book, when I got to the top of one, I looked down and felt an adrenaline rush so powerful I actually tasted...
[Robert Moor]: metal in my mouth.
[Robert Moor]: It was just an intense rush of fear and awe all at once, but it was such a privilege.
[Steve Paulson]: And isn't there a whole science of tree canopy biology?
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, like the scientists who really look at the very tops of these huge trees, and there's a different ecosystem up there.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, with all kinds of stuff that's living that we would never know from just looking from the ground.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, it was once assumed that the treetops were an ecological desert.
[Robert Moor]: And so they didn't really study them.
[Robert Moor]: And that began to change, I believe, with the work of Steve Sillett.
[Robert Moor]: And when he started climbing up into the Coast Redwoods, which are the tallest trees on Earth, he discovered there are entire ecosystems up there.
[Robert Moor]: There were plants growing up there.
[Robert Moor]: There were huckleberry bushes.
[Robert Moor]: There are aquatic animals.
[Robert Moor]: There are salamanders you find up there.
[Robert Moor]: There are all kinds of different species.
[Robert Moor]: that are actually exclusively growing up there, living up there in the treetops.
[Robert Moor]: It's kind of a forest atop a forest.
[Robert Moor]: And I discovered this one day while tree climbing with a bonsai artist named Ryan Neil.
[Robert Moor]: We climbed a coast redwood and we discovered a tan oak
[Robert Moor]: which is about a foot tall.
[Robert Moor]: It's probably 30 years old, growing in this tiny patch of soil that accumulated in the branches of a redwood.
[Robert Moor]: It was just astonishing.
[Robert Moor]: And what these scientists are finding is that trees are doing all these things up there we didn't know, that we could have never imagined.
[Robert Moor]: So...
[Robert Moor]: The coast redwoods, for example, have learned to drink the fog through their needles so that they don't have to pull the water up from the roots.
[Robert Moor]: And bigleaf maples have learned to extend roots out of their branches into these patches of moss so that they can drink in water and nutrients.
[Robert Moor]: There's amazing things going on up there above our heads.
[Steve Paulson]: And we have this image that trees are big.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, most of them.
[Steve Paulson]: And yet then there are bonsai trees, which seem to go against much of what we're talking about.
[Steve Paulson]: And I know you became fascinated by bonsai trees.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, this tradition of growing and shaping these tiny trees that people in Japan have been doing for centuries.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, I did become fascinated with bonsai trees, first just because I bought a bonsai.
[Robert Moor]: And I was trying to keep it alive.
[Robert Moor]: It's actually a dwarf garden juniper.
[Robert Moor]: It's not even a tree, it turns out.
[Robert Moor]: It's more of a shrub.
[Robert Moor]: But in trying to keep that little tree alive, I really learned to appreciate...
[Robert Moor]: the art of bonsai, which is the art of care.
[Robert Moor]: It's the art of keeping these trees, sometimes for a thousand years, these trees alive in tiny pots and shaping them into living works of art.
[Robert Moor]: It's a real paradox that trees are...
[Robert Moor]: trees because they can grow large, right?
[Robert Moor]: That is one of their defining features.
[Robert Moor]: And yet you can keep one small just by restricting its root base more or less indefinitely.
[Robert Moor]: And then the other thing that's amazing that I learned was when my little bonsai started to die, my bonsai teacher said, just plant it back in the soil and it will sprout back up.
[Robert Moor]: So you can take a bonsai, any bonsai out of its pot, plant it back in the soil.
[Robert Moor]: And as long as those roots can grow, it will regrow into a full-size tree.
[Steve Paulson]: So what is the art of
[Steve Paulson]: of the master bonsai artists.
[Steve Paulson]: What is it that they do?
[Robert Moor]: They describe what they're doing is creating nature in miniature.
[Robert Moor]: The art of bonsai was developed in Japan as Japan began urbanizing so that people could have a bit of nature inside their homes.
[Robert Moor]: And they would tend to their bonsai.
[Robert Moor]: Often they were seasonal plants which would flower or fruit.
[Robert Moor]: They would change out the accent plant and the scroll behind the bonsai to represent the seasons.
[Robert Moor]: You know, the Japanese have not just four seasons, but 72 micro seasons called ko.
[Robert Moor]: And so they're profoundly attached to seasonality.
[Robert Moor]: And the idea of the bonsai was really that you would take that natural wild landscape that maybe you didn't have access to in a city or in your house, and you'd shrink it down so that you had a taste of it.
[Robert Moor]: At one point in this New Yorker article, I described bonsai as bouillon.
[Robert Moor]: You know, it's the reduced essence of nature.
[Robert Moor]: It's not an exact reflection.
[Robert Moor]: It's sort of the flavor of nature.
[Steve Paulson]: So you went to Japan and you met some master bonsai artists, especially this guy named, was it Masahiko Kimura?
[Robert Moor]: Kimura is a remarkable figure.
[Robert Moor]: They call him the Picasso of bonsai, or some people call him the magician of bonsai.
[Robert Moor]: He really modernized the art of bonsai and in some ways completely broke it apart because he started using power tools for the first time.
[Robert Moor]: And what he discovered by using these power tools was that he could take fairly young trees and radically transform them.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, he would carve their trunks using these power sanders.
[Robert Moor]: He would sometimes flip them upside down and turn the roots into branches and the branches into roots.
[Robert Moor]: He did all these incredible things.
[Robert Moor]: that really blew people's minds and initially created a lot of controversy.
[Robert Moor]: People were not fond of it.
[Steve Paulson]: Right, I mean, this doesn't sound natural, I guess.
[Robert Moor]: No, it was a very quiet art form before Kimura came around.
[Robert Moor]: And, you know, some people said, this isn't bonsai, it's sculpting.
[Robert Moor]: You know, that he was doing something too aggressive.
[Robert Moor]: But as his artwork began to gain more admirers, you know, he had this one beautiful tree that I've seen called the Flying Dragon that was undeniably a masterpiece.
[Robert Moor]: He began to win people over.
[Robert Moor]: And now I would say he's at the apex of the art form.
[Robert Moor]: He's revered as a kind of master artisan.
[Steve Paulson]: I've seen photos of some of his trees.
[Steve Paulson]: They are amazing.
[Steve Paulson]: And they're essentially living sculptures.
[Steve Paulson]: Yeah.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, I mean, being able to walk through his garden in Tokyo, just outside of Tokyo, is an astonishing experience.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, some of these trees are well over 500 years old, and they're larger than you would think.
[Robert Moor]: They probably go up to your waist.
[Robert Moor]: But what's amazing about them is the complexity and the elegance of his designs.
[Robert Moor]: I've often noticed that bonsai artists, when they look at bonsai, they kind of crouch down and they tilt their head to the side, and they climb...
[Robert Moor]: the tree with their eyes.
[Robert Moor]: They're trying to see what the artist has done, and they're following that line of the trunk.
[Robert Moor]: And what Kimura's trunks do is just astonishing.
[Robert Moor]: You almost can't follow the lines because they're so complicated.
[Robert Moor]: It really brings to mind, you know, smoke rising up from a wildfire that's all curling and involuting.
[Robert Moor]: It's just gorgeous.
[Steve Paulson]: So we've been talking about how so many people love trees.
[Steve Paulson]: And of course, they've been hugely important in the environmental movement.
[Steve Paulson]: But one of the recurring themes of your book is that environmental thinking has a really complicated history.
[Steve Paulson]: And we celebrate great writers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.
[Steve Paulson]: But when you start digging into their writing...
[Steve Paulson]: sometimes they come across as kind of out-and-out racist.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, sort of like, wouldn't it be wonderful, these forests, if the native inhabitants, the people, just weren't living there?
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think that a love of nature, if it's not framed correctly, can really start to lead to a disgust with human beings.
[Robert Moor]: And I think a lot of us have felt this.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, who hasn't walking through some, you know, quote-unquote pristine natural landscape and seeing some
[Robert Moor]: some litter there beside the trail.
[Robert Moor]: I thought, God, I hate people.
[Robert Moor]: And this is something that you find in the writing, especially of John Muir, looking at Native people, Native American people, as kind of a blight on the land, kind of dirty and an eyesore.
[Robert Moor]: He did not have a great love for the Indigenous people.
[Robert Moor]: of California.
[Robert Moor]: And he also didn't have a very great respect for the amount of stewardship that had gone into creating these landscapes that he enjoyed so deeply, that he loved so deeply.
[Robert Moor]: He didn't see the history of, for example, prescribed burning and tending to all of these various plants and animals that really led those landscapes to be the way they are.
[Robert Moor]: He was blind to that.
[Robert Moor]: He liked to see it as a sort of Garden of Eden.
[Robert Moor]: that was perfectly designed when the white man came traipsing out of nowhere.
[Robert Moor]: That is something that I think many of us, hopefully in the environmental movement, have learned to grow beyond that way of seeing.
[Steve Paulson]: But that's a thread that has continued up to today.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, there are people who just want pristine wilderness, and they do see humans as the problem.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, if just humans could be removed, we would have pristine nature.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think that's right.
[Robert Moor]: And I think that that is a trap.
[Robert Moor]: It's an intellectual trap.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, you'll hear it even sometimes.
[Robert Moor]: My friends will say, you know, these are the ones who really love nature.
[Robert Moor]: And I think their heart is in the right place.
[Robert Moor]: They'll say, well, if humans, you know, go extinct because of climate change or whatever, at least the earth will still be around.
[Robert Moor]: At least, you know, other species will survive.
[Robert Moor]: And I think that that actually reveals a profound flaw in our thinking.
[Robert Moor]: One of the things that indigenous philosophers and indigenous thinkers often talk about is relationality, that the indigenous worldview is based on maintaining relationships between living things, that there's a sort of
[Robert Moor]: web of relations, and you have to tend to that web of relations, otherwise the world will get worse.
[Robert Moor]: And not only will other beings suffer, but you'll suffer.
[Robert Moor]: You'll get sick and all sorts of calamities will befall you.
[Robert Moor]: I think that we have fallen away.
[Robert Moor]: Somehow we've drifted away from that relational worldview, which I call the rooted worldview.
[Robert Moor]: I think we're a profoundly uprooted culture.
[Robert Moor]: And that is a symptom of it, right?
[Robert Moor]: That we think it would be fine if human beings died off
[Robert Moor]: because other species will survive.
[Robert Moor]: Well, sure.
[Robert Moor]: But the idea is, the hope is that we will live in right relation with those species, that we will all be connected in this web of relationality and we'll all be flourishing together.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, there is this really problematic and you might call sort of shadow history that comes with environmental thinking.
[Steve Paulson]: And one of the points that you make is that
[Steve Paulson]: A tree is not just a tree.
[Steve Paulson]: It's also a symbol.
[Steve Paulson]: And it's become racially coded in some places.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, for a lot of white Americans, we tend to have very positive associations, you know, of nature, of tranquility, maybe a place of adventure.
[Steve Paulson]: But in the Jim Crow era, trees were used to lynch black people.
[Steve Paulson]: And as you put it, they were refashioned to be murder weapons.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, I'd never really thought about it that way, but I mean, trees became hugely symbolic in some really awful ways.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, there's certainly a dark side to trees.
[Robert Moor]: Hitler, for example, loved trees.
[Robert Moor]: He loved the oak, the way that the sturdy, mighty oak represented the German people.
[Robert Moor]: The coast redwoods, actually, were used by eugenicists as a symbol of the endangered white man, the noble white race.
[Robert Moor]: And then, as you say, in the Jim Crow South and before, trees were fashioned into murder weapons, into tools of racial terror.
[Robert Moor]: This is something I learned while traveling through Alabama with my Black cousin.
[Robert Moor]: Gia Gray, who I describe in the book, sort of rediscovering this branch of my family tree and returning to Alabama where our shared ancestors were from.
[Robert Moor]: And this is something that she and other Black Americans have driven home to me, is that for white people, trees are universally positive.
[Robert Moor]: We don't see a dark side.
[Robert Moor]: But for Black Americans, it's often different.
[Robert Moor]: Amikajo calls it a double vision.
[Robert Moor]: They see the beauty and the health in trees, but also they see this dark history.
[Robert Moor]: And it's very hard not to because a lot of those trees are still around.
[Robert Moor]: You know, there are instances in Alabama where the town's old lynching tree stands in front of the courtyard and it's still there to this day.
[Robert Moor]: So that is a living reminder of this painful past in which trees were very deliberately destroyed.
[Robert Moor]: used not just as murder weapons, but used as symbols.
[Robert Moor]: There were postcards, there were stories, there were jokes, all told about lynching trees that continually reminded Black Americans to stay in your place, otherwise you'll suffer.
[Robert Moor]: You know, the fate of the dogwood tree, for example.
[Steve Paulson]: We're going to take a short break, and when we come back, Rob will take a deep dive into evolutionary history and tell us why he traveled to Tanzania to sleep in a chimpanzee nest.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Hi, it's Anne.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I am so glad you're joining us.
[Anne Strainchamps]: We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm really excited about them.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And here's a tip.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I hope you like it.
[Steve Paulson]: This is Wonder Cabinet.
[Steve Paulson]: I'm Steve Paulson.
[Steve Paulson]: My guest is the essayist Robert Moor, who has just written a wonderful book called In Trees, An Exploration.
[Steve Paulson]: So you are really taking this idea of the family tree in all kinds of directions, which is just totally fascinating.
[Steve Paulson]: And you go not just to, you know, who you are related to today and who's been part of your family over the last century.
[Steve Paulson]: You go way back in evolutionary history.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, the Darwinian family tree to our ancient hominid ancestors.
[Steve Paulson]: And again, it's worth pointing out that we came out of trees.
[Steve Paulson]: We co-evolved with trees.
[Steve Paulson]: So why did you want to go so far back in history?
[Robert Moor]: So one of the light bulbs that went off in my head initially when I was researching this book was when I ran across a paper by an evolutionary biologist named Robert J. O'Hara who talks about tree thinking.
[Robert Moor]: This is a term that he coined, which is that we can't think about evolution as a linear story.
[Robert Moor]: If we think of it like that old illustration of sort of the chimpanzee rising up from a crouch and then becomes a human creature.
[Robert Moor]: That's the wrong way to think of evolution, because it's a straight line.
[Robert Moor]: And it's what they call a teleology.
[Robert Moor]: It implies that all of evolution was leading to us.
[Robert Moor]: And the truth is, of course, it was this incredibly branchy process.
[Robert Moor]: It was this Darwin's tree of life.
[Robert Moor]: It's not entirely an accurate metaphor, but it's pretty close.
[Robert Moor]: And so one of the challenges I set myself with this book was to start applying tree thinking to other parts of my life, to see the world in trees.
[Robert Moor]: And the most obvious one to me was to start looking at our evolutionary tree.
[Robert Moor]: So I decided to go as far back as I could and ask the question, how did human beings come down out of the trees?
[Robert Moor]: What mark did that leave on us?
[Robert Moor]: And so I went to Ethiopia first.
[Robert Moor]: I got to visit Lucy, the fossil remains of Lucy,
[Steve Paulson]: Which may be the most famous fossil discovery in history.
[Robert Moor]: The grandmother of humanity, she's sometimes called.
[Robert Moor]: And they keep her bones in a vault.
[Robert Moor]: You know, they have a sort of replica that you can visit in Addis Ababa.
[Robert Moor]: But I managed to sort of coax one of the paleoanthropologists there to bring her out of her vault.
[Robert Moor]: And, you know, I asked him, you know, who'd you last bring this out for?
[Robert Moor]: And he said, I think it may have been like Barack Obama.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah.
[Robert Moor]: It was quite an honor to get to see Lucy up close, these three million-year-old bones, and to stare into her face and think about that span of time and what she would think of how humanity turned out.
[Steve Paulson]: And I know there are some mysteries in terms of how our ancient ancestors actually did come out of the trees.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, they, at one point...
[Steve Paulson]: They were a tree species, which meant that they slept in the trees.
[Steve Paulson]: There's some speculation that maybe they were actually bipedal while they were still living in the trees.
[Steve Paulson]: And then there's this whole question of how did they come down to land and how did they sleep without getting killed by predators?
[Robert Moor]: So there was a long span of human history, early human history, where we were sleeping in the treetops, we were dropping down to the ground to go gather food, and we were learning to walk on two legs.
[Robert Moor]: The real question is, how did we abandon sleeping in nests?
[Robert Moor]: And this is a question I actually approached, again, in sort of unconventional fashion.
[Robert Moor]: I decided to sleep in a chimpanzee nest.
[Robert Moor]: I spent the night in a chimpanzee nest.
[Robert Moor]: I will tell you, it was not a very comfortable night.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah.
[Steve Paulson]: Wait, so wait, you went to a place where chimpanzees were living, like a research site.
[Steve Paulson]: You saw a chimpanzee climbing into a sleeping nest and decided, you know, I want to try sleeping there?
[Robert Moor]: What happened was I ran across the work of a scientist named Fiona Stewart, and she does this.
[Robert Moor]: She sleeps in chimpanzee nests, and then she sleeps on the ground.
[Robert Moor]: And at night, while she's sleeping there, she'll sort of count her bug bites, she'll take her temperature, she'll count how many times she wakes up throughout the night.
[Robert Moor]: She's basically using her body as a scientific instrument.
[Robert Moor]: She's trying to figure out why do chimps sleep in nests and how did early humans manage to sleep on the ground?
[Robert Moor]: Sort of what are the pluses and minuses?
[Robert Moor]: And what she learned is, you know, you get woken up a lot less when you're sleeping up in the treetops.
[Robert Moor]: You actually get bitten by fewer mosquitoes as well.
[Robert Moor]: And you're a lot safer.
[Robert Moor]: You know, the tree is kind of a natural alarm system because the branches move.
[Robert Moor]: So if a leopard, for example, is trying to sneak up on you while you're sleeping, you're going to feel that bounce in the limb and it'll wake you up.
[Robert Moor]: And so it's a very safe place to sleep.
[Robert Moor]: And this is actually a real riddle for evolution because it turns out that human beings sleep differently from chimpanzees.
[Robert Moor]: Chimps sleep longer than we do.
[Robert Moor]: They sleep about 12 hours per night.
[Robert Moor]: We only sleep, you know, about seven or eight, but we sleep much deeper.
[Robert Moor]: We go into deep REM sleep.
[Robert Moor]: And that is a really strange thing because it means we're paralyzed for a portion of every night.
[Robert Moor]: We're lying there totally defenseless and paralyzed and we're sleeping on the ground.
[Robert Moor]: So the question for evolutionary biologists is how did that ever take place?
[Robert Moor]: How did we ever learn to sleep safely on the ground?
[Robert Moor]: There's an anthropologist named David Samson who has a theory, which is that we did it through communal sleeping, that we slept in groups and throughout the night, one or more people would wake up and serve as a sentinel.
[Robert Moor]: This actually still takes place among the Hadza people of Tanzania.
[Robert Moor]: It's just a natural thing.
[Robert Moor]: You wake up throughout the night, you tend to the fire, you just sort of look out into the night and then you fall back asleep and you do this in natural shifts.
[Robert Moor]: And what that did was it unlocked this incredible cognitive breakthrough because it meant we were getting deeper sleep, which meant we had more emotional regulation and more creativity and better memories and better group cohesion.
[Robert Moor]: All of these things, group sleeping, would have unlocked.
[Robert Moor]: And it actually allowed us to then become the species that we currently are.
[Steve Paulson]: Which means that it was all through being a group.
[Steve Paulson]: That's really kind of the secret of human evolution, right?
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, how our species has become so successful is that it's the social bonding.
[Robert Moor]: I think that's right.
[Robert Moor]: I think we are the most cooperative primates by far.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, there is no other primate that will, for example, where a mother will entrust her child to another mother.
[Robert Moor]: That's an incredibly dangerous thing to do if you're a chimpanzee, for example.
[Robert Moor]: because there's a chance that mother will kill your child.
[Robert Moor]: Humans do it all the time without even thinking, we'll hand our babies off.
[Robert Moor]: There's all sorts of things that human beings do cooperatively that have allowed us to thrive in every ecosystem on earth.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, this is one of the amazing things to think about is we are so closely related genetically to the chimpanzees and the bonobos, but they stayed behind.
[Robert Moor]: They stayed behind in the treetops in East and Central Africa.
[Robert Moor]: And we didn't, we fanned out across the whole world.
[Robert Moor]: And so...
[Robert Moor]: We are really the species that abandoned arboreality to become arborescent.
[Steve Paulson]: So I want to go back to you sleeping in a chimpanzee nest.
[Steve Paulson]: So you said it was not very comfortable.
[Steve Paulson]: How did you get into the nest and what was it like?
[Robert Moor]: It was not so hard to get into.
[Robert Moor]: I climbed up a rope.
[Robert Moor]: I set a rope into an anchor and a higher branch and I sort of rappelled down into it.
[Robert Moor]: And, you know, these nests are woven fresh by the chimpanzees every night.
[Robert Moor]: So I really wasn't bothering the chimpanzees.
[Steve Paulson]: They go to a new nest every night?
[Robert Moor]: They build a fresh nest.
[Robert Moor]: It's almost like, you know, like making their bed.
[Robert Moor]: They just weave a new one together.
[Robert Moor]: It only takes them, I don't know, maybe 20 minutes or something to weave one of these nests together.
[Robert Moor]: And it's really quite amazing to watch because I realized I have no idea how they do it.
[Robert Moor]: There's no way, even with all of my supposed human intelligence, I could never weave one of those nests out of living branches, but they do.
[Robert Moor]: And it's this kind of ovoid shape.
[Robert Moor]: It's
[Robert Moor]: when you sink down into it, those various branches will compress and it forms a kind of net.
[Robert Moor]: And so it's kind of scary when you first are rappelling into it because you feel like you're going to fall through the bottom.
[Robert Moor]: But the more you sink into it, the tighter those branches interlock until you feel quite secure.
[Robert Moor]: And so I didn't feel...
[Robert Moor]: scared of falling out of the nest.
[Robert Moor]: The only real problem was just that it was too small.
[Robert Moor]: My legs were too big and too gangly.
[Robert Moor]: And so they would kind of dangle out of the nest and it made my back arch and my back started to cramp.
[Robert Moor]: I also kept getting that thing, you know, when you're
[Robert Moor]: falling asleep on an airplane and you jolt awake.
[Robert Moor]: I had that repeatedly throughout the night.
[Robert Moor]: And I think that may be a very deep evolutionary thing.
[Robert Moor]: I think it could go all the way back to our nest dwelling ancestors.
[Robert Moor]: At one point I was lying there and I was so uncomfortable.
[Robert Moor]: I mean, I was sure it was almost sunrise, you know, because I'd just been in there for an eternity.
[Robert Moor]: And I turned on my phone and I checked the time and it was 11 p.m.
[Robert Moor]: And so I thought, I can't do this any longer.
[Robert Moor]: I'd been in the nest for, I think, five or six hours.
[Robert Moor]: And I thought, I got to get out of here.
[Robert Moor]: So I eventually abandoned my experiment and rappelled to the ground and crawled into my sleeping bag.
[Robert Moor]: And I've never been more thankful in my life to have a sleeping bag.
[Steve Paulson]: To be a ground person.
[Robert Moor]: Yes, to be a ground sleeping ape was a wonderful blessing.
[Steve Paulson]: So there's one final piece of your investigation of trees and tree people that I want to talk about.
[Steve Paulson]: And that has to do with the people who sit in trees as acts of resistance.
[Steve Paulson]: And this has become pretty popular in some sort of radical environmental circles.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, you know, a favorite tactic of you want to sort of prevent an old growth forest from being cut down or maybe a pipeline going into a
[Steve Paulson]: You sit in trees and the people who want to cut down the trees are not going to cut them down if it's going to kill people.
[Steve Paulson]: But there's also legal peril.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, this is typically against the law.
[Steve Paulson]: And you kind of got caught up in some of these circles.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah.
[Robert Moor]: So the way that happened was I had been reading about there was a treehouse that someone had built, a treetop blockade to try to stop the construction of this oil pipeline called the TMX Pipeline.
[Robert Moor]: that runs from the tar sands in Alberta out to the coast where I live.
[Robert Moor]: I'm opposed to that pipeline.
[Robert Moor]: I think it's a terrible idea to be building out this infrastructure that'll last for 50 or 100 years and subsidize the dirtiest form of oil on earth.
[Robert Moor]: So I had intended to just go interview these people.
[Robert Moor]: I was really curious about this tree-sitting tactic, which, of course, is made most famous by Julia Butterfly Hill, the woman who lived in the tops of Coast Redwood for two years.
[Robert Moor]: I'd heard about this since I was a kid, but I'd never seen it up close.
[Robert Moor]: And so I went out there to Burnaby, and I climbed up into this tree on a rope, and I was dangling there interviewing this guy named Tim Takaro, who was living in the treehouse.
[Robert Moor]: And he was explaining to me how they do...
[Robert Moor]: These blockades, they do it in shifts.
[Robert Moor]: It's not like Julia Butterfly anymore.
[Robert Moor]: It's really hard to find someone who can live in a tree for two years.
[Robert Moor]: So they do like four or five day shifts and then someone else will sneak in and climb up the rope and that person will rappel down and they switch out.
[Robert Moor]: And as I was interviewing this guy, I realized that I was actually perfectly suited to this.
[Robert Moor]: By that point, I'd been climbing trees with ropes for years.
[Robert Moor]: I was very comfortable up there.
[Robert Moor]: I had no kids.
[Robert Moor]: I have a very understanding husband who is okay with me being away for long spans of time.
[Robert Moor]: And I think I knew a thing or two about storytelling and how to get a story out into the public.
[Robert Moor]: And that's a big part of tree sitting.
[Robert Moor]: It's not just sitting in the tree.
[Robert Moor]: It has to do...
[Robert Moor]: It has to do with telling a story that the public can really get excited about and hopefully start to build a movement around the tree and shift public policy.
[Steve Paulson]: So you ended up staying in the trees for a long time, or at least in several different shifts.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think I ended up spending seven shifts in the tree, so more than a month in total over that summer.
[Robert Moor]: And what eventually happened was people kept getting arrested.
[Robert Moor]: It was illegal to be there.
[Robert Moor]: And one of the things I told the blockaders from the very beginning was, I can't get arrested because at that time I was only a permanent resident of Canada.
[Robert Moor]: I wasn't a citizen and I didn't want to imperil my permanent residency.
[Robert Moor]: I own a home here, my husband's here, my whole life is here.
[Robert Moor]: So the thing they told me was, it's okay.
[Robert Moor]: You actually don't have to be willing to get arrested.
[Robert Moor]: You just have to seem like the kind of person who's willing to get arrested because that will slow the police down.
[Robert Moor]: It means they have to put together this special tactical team to get you out of the tree.
[Robert Moor]: And that'll take a lot of time and a lot of resources.
[Robert Moor]: And that's the whole name of the game.
[Robert Moor]: It's just buying time.
[Robert Moor]: But what eventually happened was everyone else who could get arrested had been arrested.
[Robert Moor]: And there was no one else left who could be in the tree besides me and this guy, Tim.
[Robert Moor]: And so we were up in the trees and it was this cold, rainy morning.
[Robert Moor]: And I wake up and look out of the treehouse and the police have surrounded my tree.
[Robert Moor]: They built a fence around my tree, a steel fence.
[Robert Moor]: And they built one around Tim's tree.
[Robert Moor]: And they have a loudspeaker and they're calling up to me saying, you have 10 minutes to vacate the tree.
[Robert Moor]: Otherwise, we're going to arrest you.
[Robert Moor]: And so I called Tim on his cell phone.
[Robert Moor]: I said, what are you going to do?
[Robert Moor]: And he said, I'm just going to, I'm going to run away.
[Robert Moor]: You know, I'm going to live to fight another day.
[Robert Moor]: So he repelled out of that tree.
[Robert Moor]: He didn't even really run.
[Robert Moor]: He just sort of briskly walked away into the forest and they didn't chase him.
[Robert Moor]: And so I did the same.
[Robert Moor]: I repelled out of the tree.
[Robert Moor]: I ran off into the forest.
[Robert Moor]: And then I realized that actually we needed someone there on site to record the felling of these tree houses so we could send the footage to the news.
[Robert Moor]: And so I went, I stashed all my gear.
[Robert Moor]: I completely changed my outfit.
[Robert Moor]: I actually put on a kind of a disguise.
[Robert Moor]: I borrowed a camel hair coat from this guy I bumped into on the highway.
[Robert Moor]: And I came back around the other side of the blockade now as a journalist.
[Robert Moor]: And I documented all of it.
[Robert Moor]: You know, in the book I say I felt like Spider-Man transforming back into Peter Parker.
[Steve Paulson]: Right.
[Robert Moor]: It was a really surreal and strange day and ultimately a very sad day because these tree houses that we'd managed to keep up for more than a year came down and ultimately the pipeline was completed.
[Steve Paulson]: So, I mean, there's a question about these kinds of protests.
[Steve Paulson]: Do they do any good in the end?
[Steve Paulson]: As you say, the pipeline was put in, and I mean, there's many stories like this of tree sitters who will prevent the cutting for some time, but it seems like in the end,
[Steve Paulson]: These trees do get cut, but maybe not always.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, I don't know.
[Steve Paulson]: How do you gauge the effectiveness of these kinds of protests?
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think you're right.
[Robert Moor]: Most of the blockades do fail.
[Robert Moor]: Most tree sits ultimately result in the tree sitter being arrested and the tree being cut down, sometimes right in front of their eyes, which is a very painful thing for someone who has been growing so close with that tree over the course of however many months, sometimes or years, to then watch it collapse.
[Robert Moor]: cut down it's it's it's often a you know an exercise in heartbreak being a tree sitter. However, some of them do succeed Julia Butterfly famously succeeded There's one I recount in New Zealand that was very successful and there have been a couple more recently that that have been successful, including in Fairy Creek, a place in British Columbia where I live
[Robert Moor]: that turned into the largest civil uprising in Canadian history.
[Robert Moor]: 1,200 people showed up to be arrested, centered around these tree sits at the very top of the mountain.
[Robert Moor]: And I think that that is really the hope, that the tree sitter is just sort of a symbol for the movement as a whole.
[Robert Moor]: And hopefully the next tree sit or the next blockade will build upon that resistance
[Robert Moor]: And over time, it will get to the point where some of these begin succeeding.
[Robert Moor]: You know, if you look at, for example, Standing Rock, that blockade did not succeed, but it trained a whole generation of blockaders who then went on to start blockades elsewhere for other kinds of fossil fuel extraction.
[Robert Moor]: And so there's hope that every effort we make is not lost, that we're always building upon the past and that future generations will build upon what we did.
[Steve Paulson]: You mentioned Julia Butterfly Hill, the most famous tree sitter of all.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, it's this astonishing story.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, she sat in this redwood tree for two years.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, sort of this really heroic thing that she did.
[Steve Paulson]: You met her recently.
[Robert Moor]: Tell me what she was like.
[Robert Moor]: First, I'll say it was not very easy to meet her.
[Robert Moor]: She did her best to wriggle out of it.
[Robert Moor]: The first time I wrote to her, she wrote me back and she'd recently had a car accident and she'd suffered some personal losses.
[Robert Moor]: And she said, I don't feel up to talking with you, which is totally understandable.
[Robert Moor]: You know, she really became a national and international icon after her tree sit.
[Robert Moor]: And I think she had a lot of people demanding her time and she's been very wary ever since.
[Robert Moor]: But so I waited a year and I wrote to her again and I said, you know, hopefully things are a little bit better for you now.
[Robert Moor]: Do you feel comfortable talking with me?
[Robert Moor]: And this time she said, well, I don't really feel that it makes a lot of sense for me to talk to someone about the importance of saving trees if they're going to go and publish a book which is printed on dead trees.
[Robert Moor]: So if you can get your publisher to agree to print the book on 30% or more recycled paper content, then I'll talk to you.
[Robert Moor]: And this is something that, you know, of course I was excited to do.
[Robert Moor]: It's a great idea to publish the book that way anyway.
[Robert Moor]: So I reached out to my publisher.
[Robert Moor]: It turns out it's getting harder and harder to publish books on recycled paper.
[Robert Moor]: There are fewer printers, it's more expensive, and so on and so forth.
[Robert Moor]: It took me another, I think it was two years of emails back and forth with my publisher before I finally got it in writing that they would publish the book on recycled paper.
[Robert Moor]: And then I came back to Julia and I said, all right, I've got this agreement from the publisher and can I talk to you?
[Robert Moor]: And she said, no, sure.
[Robert Moor]: Come down to California.
[Robert Moor]: And so I came down to California.
[Robert Moor]: I met her in Sausalito.
[Robert Moor]: She lives in this sort of solar powered van and her life has been pretty tough since she came down out of the trees.
[Robert Moor]: She's had a number of bad accidents.
[Robert Moor]: She has this degenerative disease, which makes it hard for her to walk and
[Robert Moor]: But she still has such a bright spirit and such a fierce outlook on life.
[Robert Moor]: I found it very inspiring talking with her.
[Robert Moor]: I think she's really one of our great civil rights heroes.
[Steve Paulson]: Well, one of my favorite passages in your book is when you asked if she has hope for the future, given all the damage that we've done to the planet.
[Steve Paulson]: And I'm quoting here.
[Steve Paulson]: She said, I don't like to talk about hope because it usually doesn't lead anywhere.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, when people hear there is hope, that means there's an excuse to do nothing.
[Steve Paulson]: If they hear there's no hope, they just give up.
[Steve Paulson]: And then she goes on to say, hope only exists in this moment.
[Steve Paulson]: Am I creating hope in this moment or am I not?
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, isn't that a beautiful sentiment?
[Steve Paulson]: It's just sort of like, wow, you couldn't say it any better than that.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think a lot of us struggle with that idea of is there any hope?
[Robert Moor]: Is there any hope for the environmental movement right now?
[Robert Moor]: We're in a moment of obviously of backsliding, you know, for the environmental movement at large and for the climate movement specifically.
[Robert Moor]: But I think that that sort of organic way of thinking about hope that Julia has, are we creating hope?
[Robert Moor]: Are we creating hope right now?
[Robert Moor]: Also, it's very arborescent.
[Robert Moor]: One of the things I say about arborescence is it's non-binary.
[Robert Moor]: If you're thinking of things as black and white, this or that, you're not thinking like a tree.
[Robert Moor]: A tree thinks in branches, and there's multiple branches, and it's a process of growth.
[Robert Moor]: It's not a categorical thing.
[Robert Moor]: And I think she has a very arborescent way of looking at the future.
[Steve Paulson]: Yeah.
[Steve Paulson]: So Rob, I have one final question for you.
[Steve Paulson]: Do you have a favorite tree?
[Robert Moor]: I do.
[Robert Moor]: I think I have one right now.
[Robert Moor]: You know, it changes over time.
[Robert Moor]: Maybe I have two.
[Robert Moor]: One is the Bodhi tree.
[Robert Moor]: I love the Bodhi tree in India.
[Robert Moor]: I spent more than four months living in the town of Bodh Gaya in a monastery, and I would visit the Bodhi tree almost every day.
[Robert Moor]: And, you know, that's the center of the Buddhist world.
[Robert Moor]: And so you just see these monks from all around the world in all these different robes performing these various rituals of respect.
[Robert Moor]: And it's such a beautiful thing to see how revered that tree is and how inspiring it is for people.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, that is one specific tree you're talking about?
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, it's one tree.
[Robert Moor]: It turns out it's not the tree that the Buddha sat beneath it.
[Robert Moor]: Ficus religiosa doesn't live that long, but they keep replanting it from cuttings from the original tree.
[Robert Moor]: And so it's a sort of descendant, maybe even a clone of the original tree.
[Robert Moor]: And it's, to me, the most profound expression of a sacred tree.
[Robert Moor]: You know, that's something you find across cultures everywhere.
[Robert Moor]: is these trees that are, that are deemed sacred and off limits, you know, don't, you know, trees are a source of timber and firewood.
[Robert Moor]: And so it's, we want to cut them down, but every culture says, not this one, you know, this species or this individual tree, this is sacred.
[Robert Moor]: Don't touch that.
[Robert Moor]: And I find that really inspiring.
[Robert Moor]: I find that, that hopeful that we aren't just this all consuming species, that we do have this reverence for certain trees.
[Robert Moor]: Then the other tree that I particularly love is just a bigleaf maple that's in the forest here behind my house that I often visit.
[Robert Moor]: It's growing on the side of a cliff, and, you know, it looks so tenuous.
[Robert Moor]: It has these forked trunks, and one of them is growing at this really perilous angle, and you can see its roots are exposed, and they're kind of snaking down the cliffside.
[Robert Moor]: And it seems like it's just barely holding on, but it's been doing that for decades, who knows how long, and every time I go back and it's still there.
[Robert Moor]: It just gives me hope.
[Robert Moor]: It's this symbol of tenacity.
[Steve Paulson]: Well, it's so interesting to hear you describe that tree because I have a favorite tree.
[Steve Paulson]: I'm in Vermont right now, and there's in the woods above the house where we are.
[Steve Paulson]: There's this old maple tree that has been hit by lightning.
[Steve Paulson]: Most of it's lying on the ground, probably been for decades.
[Steve Paulson]: It's all hollowed out.
[Steve Paulson]: There are various creatures that live in it, but there are still living branches that are shooting up to the sky and it's in a glade.
[Steve Paulson]: So I'm sort of hiking through this dark forest and I come out to this sunny spot and there's my tree.
[Steve Paulson]: It's like a miracle that this tree is there.
[Steve Paulson]: And as you say, it's like against all odds, it's surviving.
[Steve Paulson]: It's still there.
[Steve Paulson]: Every time I see it, it's like,
[Steve Paulson]: Wow, that is just miraculous.
[Robert Moor]: Yeah, that's the wisdom of a tree.
[Robert Moor]: That is what we can learn from them.
[Robert Moor]: That beautiful gnarledness, that tenaciousness, that grandness, that big open crown, and those deep roots, being deeply rooted to place and to life.
[Robert Moor]: I think that is really what trees offer us.
[Steve Paulson]: This has been so much fun to talk with you.
[Steve Paulson]: Thank you so much.
[Robert Moor]: Thank you.
[Robert Moor]: This has been great.
[Steve Paulson]: That's the essayist Robert Moor, talking from his home in Smuggler Cove, British Columbia.
[Steve Paulson]: He's the author of two books, On Trails and In Trees.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Wonder Cabinet comes to you from the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, and the woods and forests of Vershire, Vermont.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer, Mark Riechers.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
[Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson.
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[Anne Strainchamps]: Be well.
[Anne Strainchamps]: See you next time.