1 00:00:00,597 --> 00:00:02,041 [Anne Strainchamps]: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. 2 00:00:03,604 --> 00:00:04,586 [Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps. 3 00:00:04,957 --> 00:00:05,897 [Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson. 4 00:00:06,518 --> 00:00:16,442 [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. 5 00:00:16,822 --> 00:00:18,923 [Anne Strainchamps]: Living an entangled life. 6 00:00:19,784 --> 00:00:24,826 [Anne Strainchamps]: Trees can seem like utterly foreign species, but we literally came from them. 7 00:00:25,486 --> 00:00:33,390 [Anne Strainchamps]: Eons ago, our hominid ancestors lived in trees, so maybe their way of being is somehow familiar to us. 8 00:00:33,830 --> 00:00:38,173 [Steve Paulson]: And maybe if we got closer to trees, our own lives would look different. 9 00:00:38,453 --> 00:00:45,438 [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. 10 00:00:45,878 --> 00:00:49,540 [Anne Strainchamps]: This is Robert Moor, author of the new book, In Trees. 11 00:00:50,021 --> 00:00:52,783 [Robert Moor]: There's a condition I think you're probably familiar with 12 00:00:52,803 --> 00:00:58,767 [Robert Moor]: called plant blindness, which is that most of us walk around and plants are just this green backdrop to our daily lives. 13 00:00:59,507 --> 00:01:05,489 [Robert Moor]: And tree people are those unusual individuals who notice trees, who see them, who love them, who study them. 14 00:01:06,250 --> 00:01:14,153 [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. 15 00:01:14,560 --> 00:01:19,925 [Steve Paulson]: Robert Moor is the kind of writer who takes an obsession to levels that most of us would never dream of. 16 00:01:20,526 --> 00:01:25,370 [Steve Paulson]: So when he wanted to cultivate a more intimate relationship with trees, he didn't just study their biology. 17 00:01:25,811 --> 00:01:31,436 [Steve Paulson]: He became a serious tree climber and went up into the canopies of some of the tallest trees on Earth. 18 00:01:31,916 --> 00:01:35,540 [Anne Strainchamps]: Then he went off to Africa to sleep in the wild in a chimpanzee nest. 19 00:01:35,941 --> 00:01:43,065 [Steve Paulson]: Rob is fascinated by the way time slows down in trees and how branching and pruning can become life lessons. 20 00:01:43,626 --> 00:01:48,729 [Steve Paulson]: He says his goal is not to anthropomorphize trees, but to arborize humanity. 21 00:01:49,289 --> 00:01:51,050 [Anne Strainchamps]: Arborize humanity. 22 00:01:51,490 --> 00:01:52,911 [Anne Strainchamps]: I love the phrase, but what does it mean? 23 00:01:53,452 --> 00:01:59,195 [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. 24 00:01:59,755 --> 00:02:02,217 [Steve Paulson]: And you know that trail loop up into the woods that I walk? 25 00:02:02,384 --> 00:02:04,264 [Anne Strainchamps]: The really steep one where you and the dog go? 26 00:02:04,444 --> 00:02:04,745 [Steve Paulson]: Yeah. 27 00:02:05,305 --> 00:02:14,987 [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. 28 00:02:15,087 --> 00:02:16,407 [Anne Strainchamps]: The ones we call the sisters. 29 00:02:16,767 --> 00:02:24,249 [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. 30 00:02:24,429 --> 00:02:31,971 [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. 31 00:02:32,711 --> 00:02:34,333 [Steve Paulson]: So there are all these things that I wonder about. 32 00:02:34,733 --> 00:02:38,376 [Steve Paulson]: How much of their lives, their identities, do they share with each other? 33 00:02:38,857 --> 00:02:43,541 [Steve Paulson]: What does it mean to know your neighbor in this wordless but very intimate way? 34 00:02:44,242 --> 00:02:47,164 [Steve Paulson]: For me, these are not strictly biological questions. 35 00:02:47,184 --> 00:02:48,966 [Steve Paulson]: There's something more, and I'm not sure what it is. 36 00:02:49,466 --> 00:02:54,191 [Steve Paulson]: So this conversation with Rob Moor left me with lots of questions that I'm still mulling over. 37 00:02:54,761 --> 00:02:57,942 [Anne Strainchamps]: There's also a backstory to how Rob came to write this book. 38 00:02:58,382 --> 00:03:08,606 [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. 39 00:03:09,126 --> 00:03:12,147 [Anne Strainchamps]: And they planned to stay a year, but it's been 13. 40 00:03:12,807 --> 00:03:14,908 [Anne Strainchamps]: And those are the trees that inspired this book. 41 00:03:15,288 --> 00:03:19,509 [Steve Paulson]: And on our Zoom call, I could see the forest just beyond the patio where Rob was sitting. 42 00:03:19,829 --> 00:03:21,030 [Anne Strainchamps]: The trees were listening. 43 00:03:22,135 --> 00:03:23,536 [Steve Paulson]: Rob, tell me what it's like being there. 44 00:03:23,556 --> 00:03:25,217 [Steve Paulson]: Can you describe the place where you live? 45 00:03:26,398 --> 00:03:26,678 [Robert Moor]: Sure. 46 00:03:26,698 --> 00:03:30,921 [Robert Moor]: I mean, it's a provincial forest that backs up onto the Salish Sea. 47 00:03:31,021 --> 00:03:36,225 [Robert Moor]: So you have a mix of cedars and Doug firs and alders. 48 00:03:36,245 --> 00:03:38,567 [Robert Moor]: There's a couple of Pacific yews back there. 49 00:03:39,187 --> 00:03:42,189 [Robert Moor]: It's not an old growth forest, but it's a beautiful forest. 50 00:03:42,410 --> 00:03:42,550 [Robert Moor]: And 51 00:03:43,270 --> 00:03:46,212 [Robert Moor]: It's become woven into my life. 52 00:03:46,732 --> 00:03:50,574 [Robert Moor]: It's funny, the first couple of times we went hiking back there, my husband and I got lost. 53 00:03:50,855 --> 00:03:53,136 [Robert Moor]: We ended up walking in circles for hours. 54 00:03:53,676 --> 00:03:56,478 [Robert Moor]: And now the thought of that happening is just hilarious. 55 00:03:56,498 --> 00:04:00,200 [Robert Moor]: I mean, you come to know a place so well that you can almost never get lost there. 56 00:04:00,680 --> 00:04:00,980 [Steve Paulson]: Yeah. 57 00:04:01,300 --> 00:04:08,682 [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. 58 00:04:08,822 --> 00:04:10,423 [Steve Paulson]: It's a way of being. 59 00:04:10,523 --> 00:04:13,684 [Steve Paulson]: And for me, that was the big takeaway from your book. 60 00:04:13,704 --> 00:04:15,244 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, there's the science of trees. 61 00:04:15,284 --> 00:04:19,065 [Steve Paulson]: There's also the history of how humans co-evolved with trees. 62 00:04:19,145 --> 00:04:23,927 [Steve Paulson]: And it's worth mentioning, of course, that our ancient hominid ancestors were arboreal. 63 00:04:24,107 --> 00:04:26,067 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, we literally came out of a forest. 64 00:04:26,947 --> 00:04:28,568 [Steve Paulson]: You also say trees embody 65 00:04:29,348 --> 00:04:31,870 [Steve Paulson]: a certain kind of wisdom that we can learn from. 66 00:04:31,950 --> 00:04:34,111 [Steve Paulson]: I'd love to have you talk a bit about that. 67 00:04:34,991 --> 00:04:38,674 [Robert Moor]: That was, I think, the big discovery of writing this book. 68 00:04:38,854 --> 00:04:41,235 [Robert Moor]: As you say, that relationship is incredibly ancient. 69 00:04:41,275 --> 00:04:43,296 [Robert Moor]: We're descended from arboreal species. 70 00:04:43,336 --> 00:04:45,898 [Robert Moor]: And to some degree, we remain an arboreal species. 71 00:04:45,918 --> 00:04:47,519 [Robert Moor]: You know, we can still climb trees. 72 00:04:48,039 --> 00:04:54,463 [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. 73 00:04:54,743 --> 00:04:56,364 [Robert Moor]: It's something that comes very naturally to us. 74 00:04:56,384 --> 00:04:57,985 [Robert Moor]: And I think that relationship's very deep. 75 00:04:58,525 --> 00:05:16,530 [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. 76 00:05:16,570 --> 00:05:19,951 [Robert Moor]: It's actually something that plants do when they want to get tall. 77 00:05:20,011 --> 00:05:22,752 [Robert Moor]: They develop woody tissues and they start branching out. 78 00:05:23,452 --> 00:05:30,306 [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. 79 00:05:30,406 --> 00:05:31,849 [Robert Moor]: That was his phrase, a growth form. 80 00:05:32,370 --> 00:05:33,993 [Steve Paulson]: Does that mean it's just a tall plant? 81 00:05:34,898 --> 00:05:37,219 [Robert Moor]: Well, it's just a way a plant grows, really. 82 00:05:37,259 --> 00:05:38,239 [Robert Moor]: It's a way of being. 83 00:05:38,359 --> 00:05:46,101 [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. 84 00:05:46,161 --> 00:05:47,201 [Robert Moor]: I thought, well, what is a tree? 85 00:05:47,221 --> 00:05:50,522 [Robert Moor]: If it's a way of being, if it's a way that a thing grows, how does it grow? 86 00:05:50,742 --> 00:05:56,203 [Robert Moor]: Well, it branches out, it prunes back what doesn't work, it gnarls around what does work. 87 00:05:56,703 --> 00:06:03,085 [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, 88 00:06:03,565 --> 00:06:06,866 [Robert Moor]: to its local ecology and to the community of life in that place. 89 00:06:07,606 --> 00:06:11,608 [Steve Paulson]: I think we all have an image of what a tree looks like, you know, how it branches out. 90 00:06:11,748 --> 00:06:21,751 [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. 91 00:06:22,451 --> 00:06:24,072 [Steve Paulson]: How far can we take that analogy? 92 00:06:25,017 --> 00:06:31,421 [Robert Moor]: Well, you know, that's actually something that you find throughout the literature of neuroscience is the language of trees. 93 00:06:31,441 --> 00:06:36,024 [Robert Moor]: You know, they refer to one part of the neuron as a dendrite, which of course comes from Latin for tree. 94 00:06:36,444 --> 00:06:40,867 [Robert Moor]: But also the way that they describe the brain growing is blossoming and pruning. 95 00:06:41,147 --> 00:06:43,529 [Robert Moor]: Which is such a beautiful, poetic phrase. 96 00:06:43,569 --> 00:06:44,890 [Robert Moor]: And it's really true. 97 00:06:44,910 --> 00:06:49,695 [Robert Moor]: You know, when our brains first grow, when you're a baby, your brain is maximally branchy. 98 00:06:49,775 --> 00:06:51,036 [Robert Moor]: It's as branchy as it will ever be. 99 00:06:51,096 --> 00:07:01,545 [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. 100 00:07:01,565 --> 00:07:02,986 [Robert Moor]: And that's how we get a sense of clarity. 101 00:07:03,796 --> 00:07:04,557 [Robert Moor]: It's not perfect. 102 00:07:04,597 --> 00:07:09,040 [Robert Moor]: We live in this optimization-obsessed culture in which everything is striving towards perfection. 103 00:07:09,060 --> 00:07:11,202 [Robert Moor]: But that's really not how a lot of life is. 104 00:07:11,402 --> 00:07:15,865 [Robert Moor]: We're just we're surviving and we're growing around our past mistakes. 105 00:07:15,926 --> 00:07:19,909 [Robert Moor]: And in fact, I have come to see that as sort of part of the beauty of life. 106 00:07:19,969 --> 00:07:21,330 [Robert Moor]: That's what gives our lives character. 107 00:07:21,983 --> 00:07:27,469 [Steve Paulson]: So I got this very strong impression from reading your book that you don't want to just think about trees. 108 00:07:27,830 --> 00:07:31,073 [Steve Paulson]: You seem to have a compulsion to be in trees. 109 00:07:31,414 --> 00:07:36,860 [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. 110 00:07:37,841 --> 00:07:38,942 [Steve Paulson]: Can you tell me about that day? 111 00:07:40,255 --> 00:07:41,276 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, it's true. 112 00:07:41,296 --> 00:07:43,898 [Robert Moor]: I mean, I climbed trees as a kid. 113 00:07:43,938 --> 00:07:45,259 [Robert Moor]: I'm sure you did as well. 114 00:07:45,639 --> 00:07:47,961 [Steve Paulson]: I climbed trees all the time as a kid. 115 00:07:48,361 --> 00:07:52,824 [Steve Paulson]: And I always felt like I could always keep going up further and further as long as I could reach another branch. 116 00:07:52,864 --> 00:07:56,667 [Steve Paulson]: And I kind of did this into my 20s and 30s, but then I stopped. 117 00:07:56,907 --> 00:08:02,691 [Steve Paulson]: And I definitely have this image of tree climbing is for kids, not for adults, unless you're an arborist. 118 00:08:02,791 --> 00:08:04,993 [Steve Paulson]: But you went a different direction. 119 00:08:05,013 --> 00:08:05,113 [Steve Paulson]: Yeah. 120 00:08:05,545 --> 00:08:10,106 [Robert Moor]: Well, and I think you're actually unusual in continuing to climb trees into your 20s and 30s. 121 00:08:10,186 --> 00:08:12,967 [Robert Moor]: Most people I know stop around 13 or 14. 122 00:08:14,267 --> 00:08:21,710 [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. 123 00:08:21,750 --> 00:08:23,370 [Robert Moor]: And yet I think a part of us misses it, right? 124 00:08:23,410 --> 00:08:27,271 [Robert Moor]: I mean, we remember the joy and the freedom that we felt up there. 125 00:08:27,851 --> 00:08:29,132 [Robert Moor]: And this struck home to me. 126 00:08:29,152 --> 00:08:32,513 [Robert Moor]: I was reading this book by Italo Calvino called The Baron in the Trees. 127 00:08:32,953 --> 00:08:33,873 [Steve Paulson]: Oh, I have read that book. 128 00:08:34,073 --> 00:08:40,259 [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. 129 00:08:40,639 --> 00:08:41,019 [Robert Moor]: That's right. 130 00:08:41,059 --> 00:08:41,400 [Robert Moor]: Yeah. 131 00:08:41,460 --> 00:08:43,462 [Robert Moor]: He remains in the treetops for his whole life. 132 00:08:44,202 --> 00:08:47,705 [Robert Moor]: And I was thinking about that and the beauty of that image. 133 00:08:48,446 --> 00:08:53,991 [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. 134 00:08:54,011 --> 00:08:55,592 [Robert Moor]: And I decided to just give it a go. 135 00:08:55,612 --> 00:08:57,074 [Robert Moor]: I said, you know, why not? 136 00:08:57,154 --> 00:08:57,995 [Robert Moor]: I'll try and 137 00:08:58,575 --> 00:08:59,636 [Robert Moor]: climb a tree again. 138 00:08:59,676 --> 00:09:01,999 [Robert Moor]: And I knew that I remembered how to do it. 139 00:09:02,039 --> 00:09:04,562 [Robert Moor]: I'd done it so many times before, I figured it would be easy. 140 00:09:05,082 --> 00:09:06,264 [Robert Moor]: And it turned out it wasn't easy at all. 141 00:09:06,424 --> 00:09:14,152 [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. 142 00:09:14,172 --> 00:09:15,073 [Robert Moor]: I suddenly was full of 143 00:09:16,034 --> 00:09:19,538 [Robert Moor]: fear and hesitation and it was a terrible feeling. 144 00:09:19,558 --> 00:09:21,760 [Robert Moor]: I really felt very old in that moment. 145 00:09:21,780 --> 00:09:27,726 [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. 146 00:09:28,006 --> 00:09:31,530 [Robert Moor]: I felt that boldness, that wildness I had as a child, it kind of withered. 147 00:09:32,290 --> 00:09:33,652 [Steve Paulson]: So what did you do then? 148 00:09:34,786 --> 00:09:45,870 [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. 149 00:09:45,990 --> 00:09:51,032 [Robert Moor]: So I scoured the internet and I found a guy named Ben Atkinson who lives in England and 150 00:09:51,472 --> 00:09:54,334 [Robert Moor]: who makes these videos of himself climbing trees. 151 00:09:54,654 --> 00:09:56,055 [Robert Moor]: And he does it in this beautiful way. 152 00:09:56,075 --> 00:09:59,318 [Robert Moor]: You know, he doesn't just climb up and down the trunk like most of us did as kids. 153 00:09:59,758 --> 00:10:03,701 [Robert Moor]: He'll actually tiptoe out onto the branches like he's on a kind of a balance beam. 154 00:10:04,322 --> 00:10:07,144 [Robert Moor]: And he'll jump from one branch to the next and he'll grab hold of that. 155 00:10:07,504 --> 00:10:09,305 [Robert Moor]: He really explores the whole tree. 156 00:10:09,605 --> 00:10:15,810 [Steve Paulson]: So you have to be so comfortable with your body and you have to, I guess, get over the fear of falling. 157 00:10:16,855 --> 00:10:17,855 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, that's right. 158 00:10:17,875 --> 00:10:22,836 [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. 159 00:10:23,096 --> 00:10:24,457 [Robert Moor]: Your brain is your own worst enemy. 160 00:10:24,477 --> 00:10:26,577 [Robert Moor]: You'll overthink it and then you'll become nervous. 161 00:10:27,037 --> 00:10:29,078 [Robert Moor]: This is one of the things that he taught me. 162 00:10:29,438 --> 00:10:34,219 [Robert Moor]: I traveled to the Lake District of England and he brought me up into this beautiful sycamore tree. 163 00:10:34,239 --> 00:10:36,260 [Robert Moor]: And we were standing there and my leg was shaking. 164 00:10:36,380 --> 00:10:37,700 [Robert Moor]: Climbers call it sewing machine leg. 165 00:10:37,720 --> 00:10:39,480 [Robert Moor]: It was just, you know, I couldn't stop shaking. 166 00:10:40,000 --> 00:10:41,281 [Robert Moor]: And he said, let's play a game. 167 00:10:41,561 --> 00:10:44,261 [Robert Moor]: I'm going to poke you in the chest and you swat my hand away. 168 00:10:44,341 --> 00:10:46,482 [Robert Moor]: You know, we're 15 feet off the ground at this point. 169 00:10:47,162 --> 00:10:48,244 [Robert Moor]: And he didn't poke me hard. 170 00:10:48,264 --> 00:10:49,065 [Robert Moor]: He just did it gently. 171 00:10:49,085 --> 00:10:50,726 [Robert Moor]: But I started swatting his hand away. 172 00:10:51,107 --> 00:10:52,869 [Robert Moor]: And after a couple of times, he said, look down. 173 00:10:53,049 --> 00:10:55,151 [Robert Moor]: And I realized that my leg had stopped shaking. 174 00:10:55,921 --> 00:10:57,301 [Robert Moor]: He said, just let your body do it. 175 00:10:57,321 --> 00:11:00,262 [Robert Moor]: Your body knows how to do this if your brain can get out of the way. 176 00:11:01,022 --> 00:11:02,963 [Robert Moor]: And so that's what I tried to do. 177 00:11:03,063 --> 00:11:05,443 [Robert Moor]: And I tiptoed out onto those branches like he did. 178 00:11:05,463 --> 00:11:23,767 [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... 179 00:11:24,287 --> 00:11:25,088 [Robert Moor]: I would fall too. 180 00:11:25,108 --> 00:11:30,793 [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. 181 00:11:30,853 --> 00:11:37,839 [Robert Moor]: So we have a bit more gratitude and a feeling of maybe healthy precariousness in terms of our existence here on Earth. 182 00:11:38,540 --> 00:11:46,587 [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? 183 00:11:46,943 --> 00:11:49,625 [Robert Moor]: No, most of the time I was just balancing. 184 00:11:50,366 --> 00:11:52,708 [Robert Moor]: And what you find is this intense focus. 185 00:11:52,788 --> 00:12:04,397 [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. 186 00:12:04,457 --> 00:12:12,684 [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. 187 00:12:12,704 --> 00:12:14,606 [Robert Moor]: But I had it for a couple of seconds there. 188 00:12:14,626 --> 00:12:16,007 [Robert Moor]: I felt that clarity. 189 00:12:16,525 --> 00:12:28,013 [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. 190 00:12:28,033 --> 00:12:30,675 [Steve Paulson]: You know, technical skills, how to do this, and also equipment. 191 00:12:30,695 --> 00:12:34,597 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, you need ropes, and you need a way to sort of haul yourself up. 192 00:12:34,817 --> 00:12:43,203 [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. 193 00:12:43,563 --> 00:12:44,684 [Robert Moor]: And so essentially you... 194 00:12:45,184 --> 00:12:56,193 [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. 195 00:12:56,213 --> 00:13:00,837 [Robert Moor]: And you can actually climb all around on the branches as well without falling, you know, without fear of falling. 196 00:13:00,957 --> 00:13:07,203 [Robert Moor]: And it allows you to climb just immensely tall trees and get into these new worlds that you never even knew existed. 197 00:13:07,503 --> 00:13:13,408 [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? 198 00:13:14,164 --> 00:13:16,785 [Robert Moor]: No, it's just you use what are called ascenders. 199 00:13:16,886 --> 00:13:18,787 [Robert Moor]: The ones I use are actually from caving. 200 00:13:18,987 --> 00:13:26,551 [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. 201 00:13:26,691 --> 00:13:28,552 [Robert Moor]: So you slide one ascender up. 202 00:13:28,572 --> 00:13:33,375 [Robert Moor]: That one connects to your waist harness, and then you stand up in your foot stirrups. 203 00:13:33,535 --> 00:13:36,636 [Robert Moor]: You slide the foot ascender up and hand, foot, hand, foot. 204 00:13:36,656 --> 00:13:38,117 [Robert Moor]: You just inchworm up the rope. 205 00:13:38,157 --> 00:13:39,458 [Robert Moor]: It's very straightforward, really. 206 00:13:39,774 --> 00:13:44,057 [Steve Paulson]: So I know you ended up hanging out with a lot of tree people, you know, fellow climbers. 207 00:13:44,357 --> 00:13:49,121 [Steve Paulson]: And I got the sense that they share certain personality traits. 208 00:13:50,602 --> 00:13:57,007 [Steve Paulson]: Free spirits, nonconformists, and they seem to have a really intimate relationship with the natural world. 209 00:13:57,407 --> 00:13:58,188 [Steve Paulson]: Was that your impression? 210 00:13:58,817 --> 00:13:59,998 [Robert Moor]: That's absolutely my impression. 211 00:14:00,018 --> 00:14:06,683 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think that spending time around trees changes you, especially spending time in the treetops. 212 00:14:06,703 --> 00:14:09,926 [Robert Moor]: I do think it makes you a little bit more tree-minded. 213 00:14:09,966 --> 00:14:15,370 [Robert Moor]: I think you get a little branchier, you get a little more open-minded, but also you become very rigorous. 214 00:14:15,690 --> 00:14:20,934 [Robert Moor]: I mean, being up there requires a seriousness because your life is in your own hands. 215 00:14:21,795 --> 00:14:28,818 [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. 216 00:14:28,838 --> 00:14:30,338 [Robert Moor]: There's something they call tree time. 217 00:14:30,798 --> 00:14:35,040 [Robert Moor]: Being up in the branches, your understanding of time starts to change. 218 00:14:35,340 --> 00:14:37,941 [Robert Moor]: Time melts, and you lose track of time. 219 00:14:37,981 --> 00:14:39,622 [Robert Moor]: It slows down, and it speeds up. 220 00:14:40,402 --> 00:14:43,685 [Robert Moor]: you really feel very disconnected from the ground world. 221 00:14:43,765 --> 00:14:48,490 [Robert Moor]: It's an entirely different phenomenological state of being up there. 222 00:14:48,850 --> 00:14:51,153 [Robert Moor]: And it's one that I think is very healthy. 223 00:14:51,253 --> 00:14:56,678 [Robert Moor]: It sort of jostles us out of our everyday existence and makes us appreciate life a little bit more. 224 00:14:57,551 --> 00:15:08,816 [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? 225 00:15:09,536 --> 00:15:09,896 [Robert Moor]: That's right. 226 00:15:09,916 --> 00:15:11,857 [Robert Moor]: It was called The Green Planet. 227 00:15:12,057 --> 00:15:15,679 [Robert Moor]: And my friend Steen, who I'd taken that tree climbing course with, 228 00:15:15,999 --> 00:15:22,144 [Robert Moor]: He gave me a call one day and just offered me this opportunity to work as part of the crew. 229 00:15:22,224 --> 00:15:32,391 [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. 230 00:15:32,411 --> 00:15:35,474 [Robert Moor]: They don't let you just climb up into General Sherman or something. 231 00:15:35,954 --> 00:15:37,155 [Steve Paulson]: These are the biggest trees in the world. 232 00:15:37,696 --> 00:15:38,056 [Robert Moor]: It's true. 233 00:15:38,076 --> 00:15:40,018 [Robert Moor]: By mass, they're the largest trees on Earth. 234 00:15:40,078 --> 00:15:45,584 [Robert Moor]: They're incredibly ancient, you know, more than, I think, 3,000 years old and incredibly tall. 235 00:15:45,764 --> 00:15:49,688 [Robert Moor]: And so the chance to climb these trees was just awe-inspiring. 236 00:15:49,728 --> 00:15:50,389 [Robert Moor]: It truly was. 237 00:15:50,409 --> 00:15:51,570 [Robert Moor]: I mean, it was also terrifying. 238 00:15:51,610 --> 00:15:57,617 [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... 239 00:15:58,137 --> 00:15:59,118 [Robert Moor]: metal in my mouth. 240 00:15:59,198 --> 00:16:06,122 [Robert Moor]: It was just an intense rush of fear and awe all at once, but it was such a privilege. 241 00:16:06,462 --> 00:16:10,345 [Steve Paulson]: And isn't there a whole science of tree canopy biology? 242 00:16:10,465 --> 00:16:17,750 [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. 243 00:16:17,770 --> 00:16:22,593 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, with all kinds of stuff that's living that we would never know from just looking from the ground. 244 00:16:23,090 --> 00:16:26,412 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, it was once assumed that the treetops were an ecological desert. 245 00:16:26,512 --> 00:16:28,473 [Robert Moor]: And so they didn't really study them. 246 00:16:28,953 --> 00:16:32,735 [Robert Moor]: And that began to change, I believe, with the work of Steve Sillett. 247 00:16:32,795 --> 00:16:38,819 [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. 248 00:16:38,879 --> 00:16:40,820 [Robert Moor]: There were plants growing up there. 249 00:16:40,860 --> 00:16:42,461 [Robert Moor]: There were huckleberry bushes. 250 00:16:42,921 --> 00:16:44,542 [Robert Moor]: There are aquatic animals. 251 00:16:44,562 --> 00:16:46,063 [Robert Moor]: There are salamanders you find up there. 252 00:16:46,243 --> 00:16:48,464 [Robert Moor]: There are all kinds of different species. 253 00:16:49,065 --> 00:16:53,149 [Robert Moor]: that are actually exclusively growing up there, living up there in the treetops. 254 00:16:53,189 --> 00:16:55,591 [Robert Moor]: It's kind of a forest atop a forest. 255 00:16:56,192 --> 00:17:00,797 [Robert Moor]: And I discovered this one day while tree climbing with a bonsai artist named Ryan Neil. 256 00:17:00,817 --> 00:17:04,020 [Robert Moor]: We climbed a coast redwood and we discovered a tan oak 257 00:17:04,801 --> 00:17:05,942 [Robert Moor]: which is about a foot tall. 258 00:17:05,982 --> 00:17:13,805 [Robert Moor]: It's probably 30 years old, growing in this tiny patch of soil that accumulated in the branches of a redwood. 259 00:17:13,925 --> 00:17:15,445 [Robert Moor]: It was just astonishing. 260 00:17:15,545 --> 00:17:21,208 [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. 261 00:17:21,268 --> 00:17:21,508 [Robert Moor]: So... 262 00:17:21,808 --> 00:17:28,875 [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. 263 00:17:29,015 --> 00:17:36,802 [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. 264 00:17:37,263 --> 00:17:39,345 [Robert Moor]: There's amazing things going on up there above our heads. 265 00:17:40,718 --> 00:17:42,739 [Steve Paulson]: And we have this image that trees are big. 266 00:17:42,839 --> 00:17:43,480 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, most of them. 267 00:17:43,740 --> 00:17:50,685 [Steve Paulson]: And yet then there are bonsai trees, which seem to go against much of what we're talking about. 268 00:17:50,725 --> 00:17:53,366 [Steve Paulson]: And I know you became fascinated by bonsai trees. 269 00:17:53,386 --> 00:17:58,750 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, this tradition of growing and shaping these tiny trees that people in Japan have been doing for centuries. 270 00:17:59,652 --> 00:18:03,936 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, I did become fascinated with bonsai trees, first just because I bought a bonsai. 271 00:18:04,036 --> 00:18:06,098 [Robert Moor]: And I was trying to keep it alive. 272 00:18:06,499 --> 00:18:09,882 [Robert Moor]: It's actually a dwarf garden juniper. 273 00:18:10,022 --> 00:18:11,583 [Robert Moor]: It's not even a tree, it turns out. 274 00:18:11,623 --> 00:18:12,764 [Robert Moor]: It's more of a shrub. 275 00:18:13,305 --> 00:18:18,190 [Robert Moor]: But in trying to keep that little tree alive, I really learned to appreciate... 276 00:18:18,690 --> 00:18:20,731 [Robert Moor]: the art of bonsai, which is the art of care. 277 00:18:20,772 --> 00:18:30,538 [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. 278 00:18:31,079 --> 00:18:33,761 [Robert Moor]: It's a real paradox that trees are... 279 00:18:34,421 --> 00:18:36,402 [Robert Moor]: trees because they can grow large, right? 280 00:18:36,522 --> 00:18:37,902 [Robert Moor]: That is one of their defining features. 281 00:18:38,042 --> 00:18:43,004 [Robert Moor]: And yet you can keep one small just by restricting its root base more or less indefinitely. 282 00:18:43,144 --> 00:18:52,628 [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. 283 00:18:52,748 --> 00:18:56,650 [Robert Moor]: So you can take a bonsai, any bonsai out of its pot, plant it back in the soil. 284 00:18:56,690 --> 00:19:00,931 [Robert Moor]: And as long as those roots can grow, it will regrow into a full-size tree. 285 00:19:01,372 --> 00:19:02,212 [Steve Paulson]: So what is the art of 286 00:19:02,672 --> 00:19:05,793 [Steve Paulson]: of the master bonsai artists. 287 00:19:05,893 --> 00:19:06,813 [Steve Paulson]: What is it that they do? 288 00:19:07,293 --> 00:19:10,934 [Robert Moor]: They describe what they're doing is creating nature in miniature. 289 00:19:11,414 --> 00:19:19,997 [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. 290 00:19:20,357 --> 00:19:22,197 [Robert Moor]: And they would tend to their bonsai. 291 00:19:22,257 --> 00:19:25,018 [Robert Moor]: Often they were seasonal plants which would flower or fruit. 292 00:19:25,498 --> 00:19:30,363 [Robert Moor]: They would change out the accent plant and the scroll behind the bonsai to represent the seasons. 293 00:19:30,383 --> 00:19:34,967 [Robert Moor]: You know, the Japanese have not just four seasons, but 72 micro seasons called ko. 294 00:19:35,528 --> 00:19:37,810 [Robert Moor]: And so they're profoundly attached to seasonality. 295 00:19:38,799 --> 00:19:49,365 [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. 296 00:19:49,485 --> 00:19:53,488 [Robert Moor]: At one point in this New Yorker article, I described bonsai as bouillon. 297 00:19:53,648 --> 00:19:55,329 [Robert Moor]: You know, it's the reduced essence of nature. 298 00:19:55,349 --> 00:19:57,110 [Robert Moor]: It's not an exact reflection. 299 00:19:57,230 --> 00:19:59,091 [Robert Moor]: It's sort of the flavor of nature. 300 00:19:59,732 --> 00:20:07,737 [Steve Paulson]: So you went to Japan and you met some master bonsai artists, especially this guy named, was it Masahiko Kimura? 301 00:20:08,337 --> 00:20:10,198 [Robert Moor]: Kimura is a remarkable figure. 302 00:20:10,218 --> 00:20:14,061 [Robert Moor]: They call him the Picasso of bonsai, or some people call him the magician of bonsai. 303 00:20:14,581 --> 00:20:22,546 [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. 304 00:20:23,446 --> 00:20:30,312 [Robert Moor]: And what he discovered by using these power tools was that he could take fairly young trees and radically transform them. 305 00:20:30,352 --> 00:20:33,874 [Robert Moor]: I mean, he would carve their trunks using these power sanders. 306 00:20:34,315 --> 00:20:38,998 [Robert Moor]: He would sometimes flip them upside down and turn the roots into branches and the branches into roots. 307 00:20:39,018 --> 00:20:40,600 [Robert Moor]: He did all these incredible things. 308 00:20:41,413 --> 00:20:44,698 [Robert Moor]: that really blew people's minds and initially created a lot of controversy. 309 00:20:44,778 --> 00:20:45,779 [Robert Moor]: People were not fond of it. 310 00:20:45,819 --> 00:20:47,421 [Steve Paulson]: Right, I mean, this doesn't sound natural, I guess. 311 00:20:47,702 --> 00:20:50,906 [Robert Moor]: No, it was a very quiet art form before Kimura came around. 312 00:20:51,487 --> 00:20:55,272 [Robert Moor]: And, you know, some people said, this isn't bonsai, it's sculpting. 313 00:20:55,312 --> 00:20:57,515 [Robert Moor]: You know, that he was doing something too aggressive. 314 00:20:58,156 --> 00:21:10,641 [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. 315 00:21:10,661 --> 00:21:12,042 [Robert Moor]: He began to win people over. 316 00:21:12,062 --> 00:21:15,683 [Robert Moor]: And now I would say he's at the apex of the art form. 317 00:21:15,703 --> 00:21:18,804 [Robert Moor]: He's revered as a kind of master artisan. 318 00:21:19,305 --> 00:21:21,225 [Steve Paulson]: I've seen photos of some of his trees. 319 00:21:21,305 --> 00:21:22,466 [Steve Paulson]: They are amazing. 320 00:21:22,486 --> 00:21:24,727 [Steve Paulson]: And they're essentially living sculptures. 321 00:21:24,747 --> 00:21:25,247 [Steve Paulson]: Yeah. 322 00:21:25,763 --> 00:21:32,906 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, I mean, being able to walk through his garden in Tokyo, just outside of Tokyo, is an astonishing experience. 323 00:21:32,926 --> 00:21:38,728 [Robert Moor]: I mean, some of these trees are well over 500 years old, and they're larger than you would think. 324 00:21:38,748 --> 00:21:40,529 [Robert Moor]: They probably go up to your waist. 325 00:21:41,249 --> 00:21:45,490 [Robert Moor]: But what's amazing about them is the complexity and the elegance of his designs. 326 00:21:46,351 --> 00:21:52,093 [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... 327 00:21:52,533 --> 00:21:53,653 [Robert Moor]: the tree with their eyes. 328 00:21:53,673 --> 00:21:58,315 [Robert Moor]: They're trying to see what the artist has done, and they're following that line of the trunk. 329 00:21:58,996 --> 00:22:02,317 [Robert Moor]: And what Kimura's trunks do is just astonishing. 330 00:22:02,337 --> 00:22:05,358 [Robert Moor]: You almost can't follow the lines because they're so complicated. 331 00:22:05,838 --> 00:22:11,660 [Robert Moor]: It really brings to mind, you know, smoke rising up from a wildfire that's all curling and involuting. 332 00:22:11,680 --> 00:22:12,521 [Robert Moor]: It's just gorgeous. 333 00:22:13,241 --> 00:22:17,362 [Steve Paulson]: So we've been talking about how so many people love trees. 334 00:22:17,422 --> 00:22:20,763 [Steve Paulson]: And of course, they've been hugely important in the environmental movement. 335 00:22:21,364 --> 00:22:28,446 [Steve Paulson]: But one of the recurring themes of your book is that environmental thinking has a really complicated history. 336 00:22:28,526 --> 00:22:32,407 [Steve Paulson]: And we celebrate great writers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. 337 00:22:32,447 --> 00:22:35,088 [Steve Paulson]: But when you start digging into their writing... 338 00:22:36,208 --> 00:22:38,929 [Steve Paulson]: sometimes they come across as kind of out-and-out racist. 339 00:22:39,049 --> 00:22:46,370 [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? 340 00:22:47,390 --> 00:22:55,292 [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. 341 00:22:55,452 --> 00:22:56,692 [Robert Moor]: And I think a lot of us have felt this. 342 00:22:56,732 --> 00:23:02,173 [Robert Moor]: I mean, who hasn't walking through some, you know, quote-unquote pristine natural landscape and seeing some 343 00:23:02,933 --> 00:23:04,295 [Robert Moor]: some litter there beside the trail. 344 00:23:04,315 --> 00:23:05,877 [Robert Moor]: I thought, God, I hate people. 345 00:23:06,858 --> 00:23:17,050 [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. 346 00:23:17,871 --> 00:23:21,075 [Robert Moor]: He did not have a great love for the Indigenous people. 347 00:23:21,815 --> 00:23:22,675 [Robert Moor]: of California. 348 00:23:22,695 --> 00:23:34,440 [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. 349 00:23:34,480 --> 00:23:46,304 [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. 350 00:23:46,684 --> 00:23:47,504 [Robert Moor]: He was blind to that. 351 00:23:47,544 --> 00:23:49,385 [Robert Moor]: He liked to see it as a sort of Garden of Eden. 352 00:23:50,085 --> 00:23:55,308 [Robert Moor]: that was perfectly designed when the white man came traipsing out of nowhere. 353 00:23:55,988 --> 00:24:03,633 [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. 354 00:24:04,313 --> 00:24:07,115 [Steve Paulson]: But that's a thread that has continued up to today. 355 00:24:07,295 --> 00:24:12,518 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, there are people who just want pristine wilderness, and they do see humans as the problem. 356 00:24:12,718 --> 00:24:16,740 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, if just humans could be removed, we would have pristine nature. 357 00:24:17,312 --> 00:24:18,333 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think that's right. 358 00:24:18,373 --> 00:24:20,454 [Robert Moor]: And I think that that is a trap. 359 00:24:20,514 --> 00:24:21,555 [Robert Moor]: It's an intellectual trap. 360 00:24:21,575 --> 00:24:23,256 [Robert Moor]: I mean, you'll hear it even sometimes. 361 00:24:23,896 --> 00:24:27,198 [Robert Moor]: My friends will say, you know, these are the ones who really love nature. 362 00:24:27,238 --> 00:24:28,659 [Robert Moor]: And I think their heart is in the right place. 363 00:24:28,679 --> 00:24:35,383 [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. 364 00:24:35,423 --> 00:24:38,745 [Robert Moor]: At least, you know, other species will survive. 365 00:24:39,165 --> 00:24:44,953 [Robert Moor]: And I think that that actually reveals a profound flaw in our thinking. 366 00:24:45,133 --> 00:24:56,348 [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 367 00:24:56,948 --> 00:25:01,791 [Robert Moor]: web of relations, and you have to tend to that web of relations, otherwise the world will get worse. 368 00:25:01,951 --> 00:25:04,812 [Robert Moor]: And not only will other beings suffer, but you'll suffer. 369 00:25:04,992 --> 00:25:08,234 [Robert Moor]: You'll get sick and all sorts of calamities will befall you. 370 00:25:08,794 --> 00:25:11,255 [Robert Moor]: I think that we have fallen away. 371 00:25:11,336 --> 00:25:16,698 [Robert Moor]: Somehow we've drifted away from that relational worldview, which I call the rooted worldview. 372 00:25:16,718 --> 00:25:18,879 [Robert Moor]: I think we're a profoundly uprooted culture. 373 00:25:19,400 --> 00:25:20,660 [Robert Moor]: And that is a symptom of it, right? 374 00:25:20,700 --> 00:25:23,822 [Robert Moor]: That we think it would be fine if human beings died off 375 00:25:24,042 --> 00:25:25,784 [Robert Moor]: because other species will survive. 376 00:25:25,824 --> 00:25:26,184 [Robert Moor]: Well, sure. 377 00:25:26,204 --> 00:25:35,193 [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. 378 00:25:35,593 --> 00:25:43,802 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, there is this really problematic and you might call sort of shadow history that comes with environmental thinking. 379 00:25:43,862 --> 00:25:45,603 [Steve Paulson]: And one of the points that you make is that 380 00:25:46,444 --> 00:25:47,726 [Steve Paulson]: A tree is not just a tree. 381 00:25:47,746 --> 00:25:48,567 [Steve Paulson]: It's also a symbol. 382 00:25:49,028 --> 00:25:51,992 [Steve Paulson]: And it's become racially coded in some places. 383 00:25:52,213 --> 00:26:01,947 [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. 384 00:26:02,960 --> 00:26:07,504 [Steve Paulson]: But in the Jim Crow era, trees were used to lynch black people. 385 00:26:07,824 --> 00:26:11,288 [Steve Paulson]: And as you put it, they were refashioned to be murder weapons. 386 00:26:12,068 --> 00:26:20,216 [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. 387 00:26:21,377 --> 00:26:24,538 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, there's certainly a dark side to trees. 388 00:26:24,738 --> 00:26:26,218 [Robert Moor]: Hitler, for example, loved trees. 389 00:26:26,238 --> 00:26:30,799 [Robert Moor]: He loved the oak, the way that the sturdy, mighty oak represented the German people. 390 00:26:31,419 --> 00:26:37,881 [Robert Moor]: The coast redwoods, actually, were used by eugenicists as a symbol of the endangered white man, the noble white race. 391 00:26:38,561 --> 00:26:46,243 [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. 392 00:26:46,263 --> 00:26:50,644 [Robert Moor]: This is something I learned while traveling through Alabama with my Black cousin. 393 00:26:51,204 --> 00:26:59,648 [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. 394 00:27:00,048 --> 00:27:08,012 [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. 395 00:27:08,172 --> 00:27:09,413 [Robert Moor]: We don't see a dark side. 396 00:27:09,453 --> 00:27:11,774 [Robert Moor]: But for Black Americans, it's often different. 397 00:27:12,294 --> 00:27:13,995 [Robert Moor]: Amikajo calls it a double vision. 398 00:27:14,295 --> 00:27:17,997 [Robert Moor]: They see the beauty and the health in trees, but also they see this dark history. 399 00:27:18,777 --> 00:27:22,379 [Robert Moor]: And it's very hard not to because a lot of those trees are still around. 400 00:27:22,420 --> 00:27:30,725 [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. 401 00:27:30,965 --> 00:27:36,869 [Robert Moor]: So that is a living reminder of this painful past in which trees were very deliberately destroyed. 402 00:27:37,089 --> 00:27:39,951 [Robert Moor]: used not just as murder weapons, but used as symbols. 403 00:27:40,011 --> 00:27:50,837 [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. 404 00:27:50,938 --> 00:27:53,099 [Robert Moor]: You know, the fate of the dogwood tree, for example. 405 00:27:54,420 --> 00:28:04,866 [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. 406 00:28:10,738 --> 00:28:11,979 [Anne Strainchamps]: Hi, it's Anne. 407 00:28:12,279 --> 00:28:13,841 [Anne Strainchamps]: I am so glad you're joining us. 408 00:28:14,241 --> 00:28:17,224 [Anne Strainchamps]: We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead. 409 00:28:17,384 --> 00:28:18,766 [Anne Strainchamps]: I'm really excited about them. 410 00:28:19,186 --> 00:28:19,907 [Anne Strainchamps]: And here's a tip. 411 00:28:20,307 --> 00:28:30,418 [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. 412 00:28:30,918 --> 00:28:31,619 [Anne Strainchamps]: I hope you like it. 413 00:28:36,027 --> 00:28:37,028 [Steve Paulson]: This is Wonder Cabinet. 414 00:28:37,268 --> 00:28:38,089 [Steve Paulson]: I'm Steve Paulson. 415 00:28:38,529 --> 00:28:44,914 [Steve Paulson]: My guest is the essayist Robert Moor, who has just written a wonderful book called In Trees, An Exploration. 416 00:28:46,335 --> 00:28:53,280 [Steve Paulson]: So you are really taking this idea of the family tree in all kinds of directions, which is just totally fascinating. 417 00:28:53,620 --> 00:29:01,126 [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. 418 00:29:01,666 --> 00:29:04,168 [Steve Paulson]: You go way back in evolutionary history. 419 00:29:04,188 --> 00:29:09,752 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, the Darwinian family tree to our ancient hominid ancestors. 420 00:29:10,052 --> 00:29:13,774 [Steve Paulson]: And again, it's worth pointing out that we came out of trees. 421 00:29:13,914 --> 00:29:15,636 [Steve Paulson]: We co-evolved with trees. 422 00:29:15,696 --> 00:29:18,217 [Steve Paulson]: So why did you want to go so far back in history? 423 00:29:19,318 --> 00:29:29,687 [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. 424 00:29:29,707 --> 00:29:35,332 [Robert Moor]: This is a term that he coined, which is that we can't think about evolution as a linear story. 425 00:29:35,372 --> 00:29:42,478 [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. 426 00:29:42,838 --> 00:29:45,400 [Robert Moor]: That's the wrong way to think of evolution, because it's a straight line. 427 00:29:45,420 --> 00:29:47,342 [Robert Moor]: And it's what they call a teleology. 428 00:29:47,362 --> 00:29:49,544 [Robert Moor]: It implies that all of evolution was leading to us. 429 00:29:49,784 --> 00:29:53,047 [Robert Moor]: And the truth is, of course, it was this incredibly branchy process. 430 00:29:53,107 --> 00:29:55,769 [Robert Moor]: It was this Darwin's tree of life. 431 00:29:56,069 --> 00:29:58,492 [Robert Moor]: It's not entirely an accurate metaphor, but it's pretty close. 432 00:29:59,152 --> 00:30:07,920 [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. 433 00:30:08,120 --> 00:30:11,943 [Robert Moor]: And the most obvious one to me was to start looking at our evolutionary tree. 434 00:30:12,143 --> 00:30:18,148 [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? 435 00:30:18,849 --> 00:30:20,450 [Robert Moor]: What mark did that leave on us? 436 00:30:20,911 --> 00:30:22,812 [Robert Moor]: And so I went to Ethiopia first. 437 00:30:22,832 --> 00:30:26,616 [Robert Moor]: I got to visit Lucy, the fossil remains of Lucy, 438 00:30:27,356 --> 00:30:30,298 [Steve Paulson]: Which may be the most famous fossil discovery in history. 439 00:30:30,358 --> 00:30:32,439 [Robert Moor]: The grandmother of humanity, she's sometimes called. 440 00:30:32,499 --> 00:30:35,100 [Robert Moor]: And they keep her bones in a vault. 441 00:30:35,200 --> 00:30:38,341 [Robert Moor]: You know, they have a sort of replica that you can visit in Addis Ababa. 442 00:30:38,361 --> 00:30:44,104 [Robert Moor]: But I managed to sort of coax one of the paleoanthropologists there to bring her out of her vault. 443 00:30:44,164 --> 00:30:47,066 [Robert Moor]: And, you know, I asked him, you know, who'd you last bring this out for? 444 00:30:47,086 --> 00:30:49,067 [Robert Moor]: And he said, I think it may have been like Barack Obama. 445 00:30:49,347 --> 00:30:49,687 [Robert Moor]: Yeah. 446 00:30:50,147 --> 00:31:02,695 [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. 447 00:31:03,076 --> 00:31:09,200 [Steve Paulson]: And I know there are some mysteries in terms of how our ancient ancestors actually did come out of the trees. 448 00:31:09,220 --> 00:31:10,481 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, they, at one point... 449 00:31:11,081 --> 00:31:15,163 [Steve Paulson]: They were a tree species, which meant that they slept in the trees. 450 00:31:15,363 --> 00:31:20,586 [Steve Paulson]: There's some speculation that maybe they were actually bipedal while they were still living in the trees. 451 00:31:21,427 --> 00:31:28,511 [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? 452 00:31:29,591 --> 00:31:38,817 [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. 453 00:31:39,237 --> 00:31:42,700 [Robert Moor]: The real question is, how did we abandon sleeping in nests? 454 00:31:43,140 --> 00:31:47,383 [Robert Moor]: And this is a question I actually approached, again, in sort of unconventional fashion. 455 00:31:47,403 --> 00:31:49,704 [Robert Moor]: I decided to sleep in a chimpanzee nest. 456 00:31:49,744 --> 00:31:52,286 [Robert Moor]: I spent the night in a chimpanzee nest. 457 00:31:52,826 --> 00:31:54,527 [Robert Moor]: I will tell you, it was not a very comfortable night. 458 00:31:54,547 --> 00:31:55,128 [Robert Moor]: Yeah. 459 00:31:55,728 --> 00:32:00,889 [Steve Paulson]: Wait, so wait, you went to a place where chimpanzees were living, like a research site. 460 00:32:01,489 --> 00:32:07,071 [Steve Paulson]: You saw a chimpanzee climbing into a sleeping nest and decided, you know, I want to try sleeping there? 461 00:32:08,111 --> 00:32:12,732 [Robert Moor]: What happened was I ran across the work of a scientist named Fiona Stewart, and she does this. 462 00:32:12,772 --> 00:32:15,632 [Robert Moor]: She sleeps in chimpanzee nests, and then she sleeps on the ground. 463 00:32:16,313 --> 00:32:22,754 [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. 464 00:32:23,054 --> 00:32:25,556 [Robert Moor]: She's basically using her body as a scientific instrument. 465 00:32:25,816 --> 00:32:32,019 [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? 466 00:32:32,039 --> 00:32:33,640 [Robert Moor]: Sort of what are the pluses and minuses? 467 00:32:34,381 --> 00:32:39,824 [Robert Moor]: And what she learned is, you know, you get woken up a lot less when you're sleeping up in the treetops. 468 00:32:39,844 --> 00:32:42,485 [Robert Moor]: You actually get bitten by fewer mosquitoes as well. 469 00:32:43,005 --> 00:32:43,906 [Robert Moor]: And you're a lot safer. 470 00:32:44,106 --> 00:32:47,968 [Robert Moor]: You know, the tree is kind of a natural alarm system because the branches move. 471 00:32:47,988 --> 00:32:56,012 [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. 472 00:32:56,152 --> 00:32:59,514 [Robert Moor]: And so it's a very safe place to sleep. 473 00:33:00,235 --> 00:33:06,998 [Robert Moor]: And this is actually a real riddle for evolution because it turns out that human beings sleep differently from chimpanzees. 474 00:33:07,058 --> 00:33:08,639 [Robert Moor]: Chimps sleep longer than we do. 475 00:33:08,659 --> 00:33:10,480 [Robert Moor]: They sleep about 12 hours per night. 476 00:33:10,960 --> 00:33:14,341 [Robert Moor]: We only sleep, you know, about seven or eight, but we sleep much deeper. 477 00:33:14,461 --> 00:33:15,901 [Robert Moor]: We go into deep REM sleep. 478 00:33:15,962 --> 00:33:19,823 [Robert Moor]: And that is a really strange thing because it means we're paralyzed for a portion of every night. 479 00:33:19,843 --> 00:33:24,244 [Robert Moor]: We're lying there totally defenseless and paralyzed and we're sleeping on the ground. 480 00:33:24,944 --> 00:33:29,385 [Robert Moor]: So the question for evolutionary biologists is how did that ever take place? 481 00:33:29,425 --> 00:33:31,626 [Robert Moor]: How did we ever learn to sleep safely on the ground? 482 00:33:32,246 --> 00:33:43,632 [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. 483 00:33:43,652 --> 00:33:46,434 [Robert Moor]: This actually still takes place among the Hadza people of Tanzania. 484 00:33:46,914 --> 00:33:47,795 [Robert Moor]: It's just a natural thing. 485 00:33:47,815 --> 00:33:54,979 [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. 486 00:33:55,719 --> 00:34:06,504 [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. 487 00:34:06,664 --> 00:34:09,345 [Robert Moor]: All of these things, group sleeping, would have unlocked. 488 00:34:09,385 --> 00:34:13,707 [Robert Moor]: And it actually allowed us to then become the species that we currently are. 489 00:34:14,307 --> 00:34:17,269 [Steve Paulson]: Which means that it was all through being a group. 490 00:34:17,509 --> 00:34:20,350 [Steve Paulson]: That's really kind of the secret of human evolution, right? 491 00:34:20,370 --> 00:34:24,332 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, how our species has become so successful is that it's the social bonding. 492 00:34:24,853 --> 00:34:25,393 [Robert Moor]: I think that's right. 493 00:34:25,413 --> 00:34:28,915 [Robert Moor]: I think we are the most cooperative primates by far. 494 00:34:28,935 --> 00:34:34,718 [Robert Moor]: I mean, there is no other primate that will, for example, where a mother will entrust her child to another mother. 495 00:34:34,918 --> 00:34:38,520 [Robert Moor]: That's an incredibly dangerous thing to do if you're a chimpanzee, for example. 496 00:34:38,853 --> 00:34:40,674 [Robert Moor]: because there's a chance that mother will kill your child. 497 00:34:40,714 --> 00:34:43,435 [Robert Moor]: Humans do it all the time without even thinking, we'll hand our babies off. 498 00:34:43,795 --> 00:34:52,499 [Robert Moor]: There's all sorts of things that human beings do cooperatively that have allowed us to thrive in every ecosystem on earth. 499 00:34:52,879 --> 00:35:00,183 [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. 500 00:35:00,263 --> 00:35:03,544 [Robert Moor]: They stayed behind in the treetops in East and Central Africa. 501 00:35:04,044 --> 00:35:06,706 [Robert Moor]: And we didn't, we fanned out across the whole world. 502 00:35:06,726 --> 00:35:07,026 [Robert Moor]: And so... 503 00:35:07,446 --> 00:35:11,537 [Robert Moor]: We are really the species that abandoned arboreality to become arborescent. 504 00:35:12,116 --> 00:35:15,478 [Steve Paulson]: So I want to go back to you sleeping in a chimpanzee nest. 505 00:35:15,798 --> 00:35:18,059 [Steve Paulson]: So you said it was not very comfortable. 506 00:35:18,559 --> 00:35:20,861 [Steve Paulson]: How did you get into the nest and what was it like? 507 00:35:21,321 --> 00:35:23,502 [Robert Moor]: It was not so hard to get into. 508 00:35:23,642 --> 00:35:24,522 [Robert Moor]: I climbed up a rope. 509 00:35:24,542 --> 00:35:29,105 [Robert Moor]: I set a rope into an anchor and a higher branch and I sort of rappelled down into it. 510 00:35:29,205 --> 00:35:34,307 [Robert Moor]: And, you know, these nests are woven fresh by the chimpanzees every night. 511 00:35:34,347 --> 00:35:35,848 [Robert Moor]: So I really wasn't bothering the chimpanzees. 512 00:35:35,888 --> 00:35:37,189 [Steve Paulson]: They go to a new nest every night? 513 00:35:37,689 --> 00:35:38,549 [Robert Moor]: They build a fresh nest. 514 00:35:38,609 --> 00:35:40,270 [Robert Moor]: It's almost like, you know, like making their bed. 515 00:35:40,370 --> 00:35:42,091 [Robert Moor]: They just weave a new one together. 516 00:35:42,111 --> 00:35:47,053 [Robert Moor]: It only takes them, I don't know, maybe 20 minutes or something to weave one of these nests together. 517 00:35:47,073 --> 00:35:51,014 [Robert Moor]: And it's really quite amazing to watch because I realized I have no idea how they do it. 518 00:35:51,295 --> 00:35:58,037 [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. 519 00:35:58,698 --> 00:36:00,358 [Robert Moor]: And it's this kind of ovoid shape. 520 00:36:00,378 --> 00:36:00,458 [Robert Moor]: It's 521 00:36:02,359 --> 00:36:06,661 [Robert Moor]: when you sink down into it, those various branches will compress and it forms a kind of net. 522 00:36:06,781 --> 00:36:11,604 [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. 523 00:36:11,704 --> 00:36:16,566 [Robert Moor]: But the more you sink into it, the tighter those branches interlock until you feel quite secure. 524 00:36:16,586 --> 00:36:18,267 [Robert Moor]: And so I didn't feel... 525 00:36:19,167 --> 00:36:21,590 [Robert Moor]: scared of falling out of the nest. 526 00:36:21,670 --> 00:36:24,493 [Robert Moor]: The only real problem was just that it was too small. 527 00:36:24,873 --> 00:36:27,116 [Robert Moor]: My legs were too big and too gangly. 528 00:36:27,156 --> 00:36:32,161 [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. 529 00:36:32,581 --> 00:36:34,564 [Robert Moor]: I also kept getting that thing, you know, when you're 530 00:36:35,044 --> 00:36:38,925 [Robert Moor]: falling asleep on an airplane and you jolt awake. 531 00:36:39,025 --> 00:36:40,946 [Robert Moor]: I had that repeatedly throughout the night. 532 00:36:40,966 --> 00:36:43,367 [Robert Moor]: And I think that may be a very deep evolutionary thing. 533 00:36:43,387 --> 00:36:46,968 [Robert Moor]: I think it could go all the way back to our nest dwelling ancestors. 534 00:36:47,968 --> 00:36:50,649 [Robert Moor]: At one point I was lying there and I was so uncomfortable. 535 00:36:50,709 --> 00:36:55,631 [Robert Moor]: I mean, I was sure it was almost sunrise, you know, because I'd just been in there for an eternity. 536 00:36:55,671 --> 00:36:58,412 [Robert Moor]: And I turned on my phone and I checked the time and it was 11 p.m. 537 00:36:59,792 --> 00:37:02,453 [Robert Moor]: And so I thought, I can't do this any longer. 538 00:37:02,473 --> 00:37:04,494 [Robert Moor]: I'd been in the nest for, I think, five or six hours. 539 00:37:04,514 --> 00:37:06,075 [Robert Moor]: And I thought, I got to get out of here. 540 00:37:06,095 --> 00:37:11,918 [Robert Moor]: So I eventually abandoned my experiment and rappelled to the ground and crawled into my sleeping bag. 541 00:37:11,958 --> 00:37:16,820 [Robert Moor]: And I've never been more thankful in my life to have a sleeping bag. 542 00:37:16,880 --> 00:37:17,700 [Steve Paulson]: To be a ground person. 543 00:37:18,160 --> 00:37:21,842 [Robert Moor]: Yes, to be a ground sleeping ape was a wonderful blessing. 544 00:37:22,291 --> 00:37:27,576 [Steve Paulson]: So there's one final piece of your investigation of trees and tree people that I want to talk about. 545 00:37:27,656 --> 00:37:32,881 [Steve Paulson]: And that has to do with the people who sit in trees as acts of resistance. 546 00:37:33,001 --> 00:37:38,226 [Steve Paulson]: And this has become pretty popular in some sort of radical environmental circles. 547 00:37:38,266 --> 00:37:45,734 [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 548 00:37:47,836 --> 00:37:52,620 [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. 549 00:37:53,420 --> 00:37:55,162 [Steve Paulson]: But there's also legal peril. 550 00:37:55,182 --> 00:37:57,163 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, this is typically against the law. 551 00:37:57,183 --> 00:38:01,146 [Steve Paulson]: And you kind of got caught up in some of these circles. 552 00:38:02,007 --> 00:38:02,287 [Robert Moor]: Yeah. 553 00:38:02,327 --> 00:38:12,175 [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. 554 00:38:12,615 --> 00:38:16,737 [Robert Moor]: that runs from the tar sands in Alberta out to the coast where I live. 555 00:38:17,597 --> 00:38:19,778 [Robert Moor]: I'm opposed to that pipeline. 556 00:38:19,798 --> 00:38:28,282 [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. 557 00:38:28,982 --> 00:38:31,424 [Robert Moor]: So I had intended to just go interview these people. 558 00:38:31,444 --> 00:38:41,253 [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. 559 00:38:41,693 --> 00:38:44,436 [Robert Moor]: I'd heard about this since I was a kid, but I'd never seen it up close. 560 00:38:44,476 --> 00:38:53,684 [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. 561 00:38:53,724 --> 00:38:55,326 [Robert Moor]: And he was explaining to me how they do... 562 00:38:55,906 --> 00:38:57,387 [Robert Moor]: These blockades, they do it in shifts. 563 00:38:57,427 --> 00:38:58,948 [Robert Moor]: It's not like Julia Butterfly anymore. 564 00:38:58,968 --> 00:39:01,469 [Robert Moor]: It's really hard to find someone who can live in a tree for two years. 565 00:39:01,909 --> 00:39:07,872 [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. 566 00:39:08,533 --> 00:39:13,235 [Robert Moor]: And as I was interviewing this guy, I realized that I was actually perfectly suited to this. 567 00:39:13,275 --> 00:39:15,436 [Robert Moor]: By that point, I'd been climbing trees with ropes for years. 568 00:39:15,456 --> 00:39:16,717 [Robert Moor]: I was very comfortable up there. 569 00:39:17,357 --> 00:39:18,478 [Robert Moor]: I had no kids. 570 00:39:18,678 --> 00:39:23,500 [Robert Moor]: I have a very understanding husband who is okay with me being away for long spans of time. 571 00:39:24,260 --> 00:39:28,942 [Robert Moor]: And I think I knew a thing or two about storytelling and how to get a story out into the public. 572 00:39:28,962 --> 00:39:30,363 [Robert Moor]: And that's a big part of tree sitting. 573 00:39:30,383 --> 00:39:31,564 [Robert Moor]: It's not just sitting in the tree. 574 00:39:31,604 --> 00:39:32,284 [Robert Moor]: It has to do... 575 00:39:32,764 --> 00:39:42,114 [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. 576 00:39:42,274 --> 00:39:48,280 [Steve Paulson]: So you ended up staying in the trees for a long time, or at least in several different shifts. 577 00:39:49,100 --> 00:39:54,682 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think I ended up spending seven shifts in the tree, so more than a month in total over that summer. 578 00:39:54,742 --> 00:39:58,783 [Robert Moor]: And what eventually happened was people kept getting arrested. 579 00:39:59,243 --> 00:40:01,124 [Robert Moor]: It was illegal to be there. 580 00:40:01,144 --> 00:40:08,926 [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. 581 00:40:08,946 --> 00:40:12,187 [Robert Moor]: I wasn't a citizen and I didn't want to imperil my permanent residency. 582 00:40:12,207 --> 00:40:14,628 [Robert Moor]: I own a home here, my husband's here, my whole life is here. 583 00:40:15,288 --> 00:40:17,550 [Robert Moor]: So the thing they told me was, it's okay. 584 00:40:17,590 --> 00:40:20,691 [Robert Moor]: You actually don't have to be willing to get arrested. 585 00:40:20,752 --> 00:40:25,574 [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. 586 00:40:25,614 --> 00:40:29,937 [Robert Moor]: It means they have to put together this special tactical team to get you out of the tree. 587 00:40:30,337 --> 00:40:32,178 [Robert Moor]: And that'll take a lot of time and a lot of resources. 588 00:40:32,198 --> 00:40:33,299 [Robert Moor]: And that's the whole name of the game. 589 00:40:33,339 --> 00:40:34,360 [Robert Moor]: It's just buying time. 590 00:40:35,374 --> 00:40:39,796 [Robert Moor]: But what eventually happened was everyone else who could get arrested had been arrested. 591 00:40:40,117 --> 00:40:43,959 [Robert Moor]: And there was no one else left who could be in the tree besides me and this guy, Tim. 592 00:40:44,479 --> 00:40:48,101 [Robert Moor]: And so we were up in the trees and it was this cold, rainy morning. 593 00:40:48,141 --> 00:40:51,823 [Robert Moor]: And I wake up and look out of the treehouse and the police have surrounded my tree. 594 00:40:51,863 --> 00:40:54,104 [Robert Moor]: They built a fence around my tree, a steel fence. 595 00:40:54,124 --> 00:40:55,785 [Robert Moor]: And they built one around Tim's tree. 596 00:40:56,406 --> 00:41:00,428 [Robert Moor]: And they have a loudspeaker and they're calling up to me saying, you have 10 minutes to vacate the tree. 597 00:41:00,548 --> 00:41:02,309 [Robert Moor]: Otherwise, we're going to arrest you. 598 00:41:02,623 --> 00:41:04,324 [Robert Moor]: And so I called Tim on his cell phone. 599 00:41:04,344 --> 00:41:05,004 [Robert Moor]: I said, what are you going to do? 600 00:41:05,024 --> 00:41:06,465 [Robert Moor]: And he said, I'm just going to, I'm going to run away. 601 00:41:06,485 --> 00:41:08,005 [Robert Moor]: You know, I'm going to live to fight another day. 602 00:41:08,586 --> 00:41:09,986 [Robert Moor]: So he repelled out of that tree. 603 00:41:10,186 --> 00:41:11,047 [Robert Moor]: He didn't even really run. 604 00:41:11,067 --> 00:41:14,428 [Robert Moor]: He just sort of briskly walked away into the forest and they didn't chase him. 605 00:41:15,149 --> 00:41:16,809 [Robert Moor]: And so I did the same. 606 00:41:17,550 --> 00:41:18,470 [Robert Moor]: I repelled out of the tree. 607 00:41:18,730 --> 00:41:20,151 [Robert Moor]: I ran off into the forest. 608 00:41:20,751 --> 00:41:27,777 [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. 609 00:41:28,497 --> 00:41:30,559 [Robert Moor]: And so I went, I stashed all my gear. 610 00:41:30,599 --> 00:41:32,140 [Robert Moor]: I completely changed my outfit. 611 00:41:32,160 --> 00:41:33,642 [Robert Moor]: I actually put on a kind of a disguise. 612 00:41:33,702 --> 00:41:37,204 [Robert Moor]: I borrowed a camel hair coat from this guy I bumped into on the highway. 613 00:41:37,225 --> 00:41:41,128 [Robert Moor]: And I came back around the other side of the blockade now as a journalist. 614 00:41:41,148 --> 00:41:43,029 [Robert Moor]: And I documented all of it. 615 00:41:43,049 --> 00:41:46,932 [Robert Moor]: You know, in the book I say I felt like Spider-Man transforming back into Peter Parker. 616 00:41:47,013 --> 00:41:47,573 [Steve Paulson]: Right. 617 00:41:48,074 --> 00:42:00,637 [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. 618 00:42:01,500 --> 00:42:04,983 [Steve Paulson]: So, I mean, there's a question about these kinds of protests. 619 00:42:05,503 --> 00:42:06,984 [Steve Paulson]: Do they do any good in the end? 620 00:42:07,184 --> 00:42:17,132 [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, 621 00:42:17,832 --> 00:42:19,793 [Steve Paulson]: These trees do get cut, but maybe not always. 622 00:42:19,813 --> 00:42:20,454 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, I don't know. 623 00:42:20,514 --> 00:42:23,256 [Steve Paulson]: How do you gauge the effectiveness of these kinds of protests? 624 00:42:23,276 --> 00:42:24,216 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think you're right. 625 00:42:24,316 --> 00:42:25,697 [Robert Moor]: Most of the blockades do fail. 626 00:42:25,958 --> 00:42:41,188 [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. 627 00:42:41,228 --> 00:43:00,516 [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 628 00:43:01,136 --> 00:43:05,259 [Robert Moor]: that turned into the largest civil uprising in Canadian history. 629 00:43:05,379 --> 00:43:11,142 [Robert Moor]: 1,200 people showed up to be arrested, centered around these tree sits at the very top of the mountain. 630 00:43:11,182 --> 00:43:18,287 [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. 631 00:43:18,607 --> 00:43:23,330 [Robert Moor]: And hopefully the next tree sit or the next blockade will build upon that resistance 632 00:43:24,030 --> 00:43:28,673 [Robert Moor]: And over time, it will get to the point where some of these begin succeeding. 633 00:43:29,074 --> 00:43:40,882 [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. 634 00:43:41,182 --> 00:43:50,248 [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. 635 00:43:50,884 --> 00:43:55,229 [Steve Paulson]: You mentioned Julia Butterfly Hill, the most famous tree sitter of all. 636 00:43:55,249 --> 00:43:57,050 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, it's this astonishing story. 637 00:43:57,091 --> 00:44:00,154 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, she sat in this redwood tree for two years. 638 00:44:00,174 --> 00:44:04,198 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, sort of this really heroic thing that she did. 639 00:44:04,879 --> 00:44:05,920 [Steve Paulson]: You met her recently. 640 00:44:05,940 --> 00:44:07,141 [Robert Moor]: Tell me what she was like. 641 00:44:08,702 --> 00:44:11,143 [Robert Moor]: First, I'll say it was not very easy to meet her. 642 00:44:11,263 --> 00:44:12,784 [Robert Moor]: She did her best to wriggle out of it. 643 00:44:13,884 --> 00:44:20,526 [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. 644 00:44:20,546 --> 00:44:24,208 [Robert Moor]: And she said, I don't feel up to talking with you, which is totally understandable. 645 00:44:24,228 --> 00:44:28,929 [Robert Moor]: You know, she really became a national and international icon after her tree sit. 646 00:44:28,969 --> 00:44:32,871 [Robert Moor]: And I think she had a lot of people demanding her time and she's been very wary ever since. 647 00:44:33,391 --> 00:44:38,313 [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. 648 00:44:38,333 --> 00:44:40,034 [Robert Moor]: Do you feel comfortable talking with me? 649 00:44:40,494 --> 00:44:51,999 [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. 650 00:44:52,579 --> 00:45:00,022 [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. 651 00:45:00,942 --> 00:45:03,183 [Robert Moor]: And this is something that, you know, of course I was excited to do. 652 00:45:03,203 --> 00:45:05,744 [Robert Moor]: It's a great idea to publish the book that way anyway. 653 00:45:05,784 --> 00:45:06,904 [Robert Moor]: So I reached out to my publisher. 654 00:45:07,264 --> 00:45:10,986 [Robert Moor]: It turns out it's getting harder and harder to publish books on recycled paper. 655 00:45:11,006 --> 00:45:13,887 [Robert Moor]: There are fewer printers, it's more expensive, and so on and so forth. 656 00:45:14,227 --> 00:45:22,330 [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. 657 00:45:22,750 --> 00:45:27,854 [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? 658 00:45:27,874 --> 00:45:28,755 [Robert Moor]: And she said, no, sure. 659 00:45:28,795 --> 00:45:29,656 [Robert Moor]: Come down to California. 660 00:45:29,736 --> 00:45:32,298 [Robert Moor]: And so I came down to California. 661 00:45:32,939 --> 00:45:34,060 [Robert Moor]: I met her in Sausalito. 662 00:45:34,100 --> 00:45:41,886 [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. 663 00:45:41,926 --> 00:45:44,548 [Robert Moor]: She's had a number of bad accidents. 664 00:45:44,568 --> 00:45:49,172 [Robert Moor]: She has this degenerative disease, which makes it hard for her to walk and 665 00:45:49,312 --> 00:45:53,074 [Robert Moor]: But she still has such a bright spirit and such a fierce outlook on life. 666 00:45:53,114 --> 00:45:55,196 [Robert Moor]: I found it very inspiring talking with her. 667 00:45:55,216 --> 00:45:57,257 [Robert Moor]: I think she's really one of our great civil rights heroes. 668 00:45:57,878 --> 00:46:06,223 [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. 669 00:46:06,323 --> 00:46:07,143 [Steve Paulson]: And I'm quoting here. 670 00:46:07,203 --> 00:46:11,806 [Steve Paulson]: She said, I don't like to talk about hope because it usually doesn't lead anywhere. 671 00:46:11,866 --> 00:46:15,929 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, when people hear there is hope, that means there's an excuse to do nothing. 672 00:46:16,009 --> 00:46:18,451 [Steve Paulson]: If they hear there's no hope, they just give up. 673 00:46:19,273 --> 00:46:23,898 [Steve Paulson]: And then she goes on to say, hope only exists in this moment. 674 00:46:24,158 --> 00:46:27,002 [Steve Paulson]: Am I creating hope in this moment or am I not? 675 00:46:28,523 --> 00:46:30,145 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, isn't that a beautiful sentiment? 676 00:46:30,165 --> 00:46:33,469 [Steve Paulson]: It's just sort of like, wow, you couldn't say it any better than that. 677 00:46:34,292 --> 00:46:37,594 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, I think a lot of us struggle with that idea of is there any hope? 678 00:46:37,654 --> 00:46:39,875 [Robert Moor]: Is there any hope for the environmental movement right now? 679 00:46:40,095 --> 00:46:47,299 [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. 680 00:46:47,460 --> 00:46:53,283 [Robert Moor]: But I think that that sort of organic way of thinking about hope that Julia has, are we creating hope? 681 00:46:53,363 --> 00:46:54,924 [Robert Moor]: Are we creating hope right now? 682 00:46:55,284 --> 00:46:56,585 [Robert Moor]: Also, it's very arborescent. 683 00:46:56,625 --> 00:46:59,306 [Robert Moor]: One of the things I say about arborescence is it's non-binary. 684 00:46:59,506 --> 00:47:04,128 [Robert Moor]: If you're thinking of things as black and white, this or that, you're not thinking like a tree. 685 00:47:04,168 --> 00:47:07,930 [Robert Moor]: A tree thinks in branches, and there's multiple branches, and it's a process of growth. 686 00:47:07,970 --> 00:47:09,250 [Robert Moor]: It's not a categorical thing. 687 00:47:09,290 --> 00:47:12,592 [Robert Moor]: And I think she has a very arborescent way of looking at the future. 688 00:47:13,172 --> 00:47:13,372 [Steve Paulson]: Yeah. 689 00:47:13,793 --> 00:47:16,014 [Steve Paulson]: So Rob, I have one final question for you. 690 00:47:16,034 --> 00:47:17,694 [Steve Paulson]: Do you have a favorite tree? 691 00:47:19,665 --> 00:47:20,206 [Robert Moor]: I do. 692 00:47:20,246 --> 00:47:21,667 [Robert Moor]: I think I have one right now. 693 00:47:21,707 --> 00:47:22,968 [Robert Moor]: You know, it changes over time. 694 00:47:22,988 --> 00:47:23,848 [Robert Moor]: Maybe I have two. 695 00:47:24,268 --> 00:47:25,810 [Robert Moor]: One is the Bodhi tree. 696 00:47:25,970 --> 00:47:27,611 [Robert Moor]: I love the Bodhi tree in India. 697 00:47:27,731 --> 00:47:34,296 [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. 698 00:47:34,356 --> 00:47:36,577 [Robert Moor]: And, you know, that's the center of the Buddhist world. 699 00:47:36,597 --> 00:47:42,541 [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. 700 00:47:42,601 --> 00:47:48,526 [Robert Moor]: And it's such a beautiful thing to see how revered that tree is and how inspiring it is for people. 701 00:47:49,206 --> 00:47:51,767 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, that is one specific tree you're talking about? 702 00:47:52,247 --> 00:47:53,207 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, it's one tree. 703 00:47:53,287 --> 00:47:56,488 [Robert Moor]: It turns out it's not the tree that the Buddha sat beneath it. 704 00:47:56,568 --> 00:48:02,129 [Robert Moor]: Ficus religiosa doesn't live that long, but they keep replanting it from cuttings from the original tree. 705 00:48:02,149 --> 00:48:05,330 [Robert Moor]: And so it's a sort of descendant, maybe even a clone of the original tree. 706 00:48:05,970 --> 00:48:09,830 [Robert Moor]: And it's, to me, the most profound expression of a sacred tree. 707 00:48:09,870 --> 00:48:12,191 [Robert Moor]: You know, that's something you find across cultures everywhere. 708 00:48:12,451 --> 00:48:18,097 [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. 709 00:48:18,117 --> 00:48:25,844 [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. 710 00:48:25,884 --> 00:48:26,505 [Robert Moor]: Don't touch that. 711 00:48:26,525 --> 00:48:29,387 [Robert Moor]: And I find that really inspiring. 712 00:48:29,427 --> 00:48:36,314 [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. 713 00:48:36,554 --> 00:48:43,660 [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. 714 00:48:43,680 --> 00:48:47,583 [Robert Moor]: It's growing on the side of a cliff, and, you know, it looks so tenuous. 715 00:48:47,623 --> 00:48:56,070 [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. 716 00:48:56,850 --> 00:49:04,596 [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. 717 00:49:05,297 --> 00:49:06,058 [Robert Moor]: It just gives me hope. 718 00:49:06,098 --> 00:49:08,241 [Robert Moor]: It's this symbol of tenacity. 719 00:49:09,042 --> 00:49:12,627 [Steve Paulson]: Well, it's so interesting to hear you describe that tree because I have a favorite tree. 720 00:49:12,807 --> 00:49:17,073 [Steve Paulson]: I'm in Vermont right now, and there's in the woods above the house where we are. 721 00:49:18,209 --> 00:49:21,670 [Steve Paulson]: There's this old maple tree that has been hit by lightning. 722 00:49:21,770 --> 00:49:24,470 [Steve Paulson]: Most of it's lying on the ground, probably been for decades. 723 00:49:25,111 --> 00:49:26,231 [Steve Paulson]: It's all hollowed out. 724 00:49:26,271 --> 00:49:34,313 [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. 725 00:49:34,353 --> 00:49:39,354 [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. 726 00:49:39,954 --> 00:49:42,015 [Steve Paulson]: It's like a miracle that this tree is there. 727 00:49:42,035 --> 00:49:45,475 [Steve Paulson]: And as you say, it's like against all odds, it's surviving. 728 00:49:45,575 --> 00:49:46,296 [Steve Paulson]: It's still there. 729 00:49:46,396 --> 00:49:47,696 [Steve Paulson]: Every time I see it, it's like, 730 00:49:48,536 --> 00:49:50,958 [Steve Paulson]: Wow, that is just miraculous. 731 00:49:52,138 --> 00:49:53,659 [Robert Moor]: Yeah, that's the wisdom of a tree. 732 00:49:53,719 --> 00:49:55,440 [Robert Moor]: That is what we can learn from them. 733 00:49:55,480 --> 00:50:05,086 [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. 734 00:50:05,306 --> 00:50:08,008 [Robert Moor]: I think that is really what trees offer us. 735 00:50:09,869 --> 00:50:12,550 [Steve Paulson]: This has been so much fun to talk with you. 736 00:50:12,570 --> 00:50:13,251 [Steve Paulson]: Thank you so much. 737 00:50:14,111 --> 00:50:14,371 [Robert Moor]: Thank you. 738 00:50:14,391 --> 00:50:15,052 [Robert Moor]: This has been great. 739 00:50:15,985 --> 00:50:20,976 [Steve Paulson]: That's the essayist Robert Moor, talking from his home in Smuggler Cove, British Columbia. 740 00:50:21,357 --> 00:50:24,584 [Steve Paulson]: He's the author of two books, On Trails and In Trees. 741 00:50:25,432 --> 00:50:31,054 [Anne Strainchamps]: Wonder Cabinet comes to you from the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, and the woods and forests of Vershire, Vermont. 742 00:50:31,674 --> 00:50:37,056 [Anne Strainchamps]: Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer, Mark Riechers. 743 00:50:37,616 --> 00:50:38,497 [Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps. 744 00:50:38,797 --> 00:50:39,697 [Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson. 745 00:50:40,097 --> 00:50:41,018 [Steve Paulson]: We'd love to hear from you. 746 00:50:41,378 --> 00:50:47,460 [Steve Paulson]: Send questions or comments to us at wondercabinetproductions.com and sign up for the newsletter while you're there. 747 00:50:47,980 --> 00:50:48,480 [Anne Strainchamps]: Be well. 748 00:50:48,981 --> 00:50:49,641 [Anne Strainchamps]: See you next time.