Robert Moor is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Emergence, and The New York Times. His first book, On Trails, won the National Outdoor Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize. He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia. His new book is 'In Trees'.
Topics
- 00:00 Welcome, and the new SAND course
- 00:04 A tree is a verb, not a noun
- 00:06 Branching, brains, and why AI has no roots
- 00:13 Pruning, gnarling, and the beauty of wounds
- 00:16 The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya
- 00:19 From On Trails to In Trees
- 00:22 Tree thinking and the tree of contents
- 00:27 Intelligence without anthropomorphizing
- 00:34 Cedars, Haida Gwaii, and deep time
- 00:38 Branching futures, many apocalypses, and grief
- 00:47 Hierarchy, the rhizome, and the Korowai
- 00:52 Rootedness and relationality
Robert Moor
Books mentioned
People mentioned
- Patrick von Aderkas, tree biologist at the University of Victoria, who described a tree as "a growth form"
- Jeff Lichtman, neuroscientist and Dean of Science at Harvard
- Robert J. O'Hara, who coined the term "tree thinking"
- Umeek (Richard Atleo), Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief and philosopher, author of Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview
- Michael Pollan, on the distinction between sentience, intelligence, and consciousness
- John McPhee, on structural experimentation in nonfiction
- Stephen Tamatea King, the first known tree sitter, who climbed totara trees in New Zealand in the 1970s
- Joanna Macy, "there is no away to throw things to"
Places and peoples
- Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Haida Gwaii
- The Korowai of Papua, treehouse dwellers with almost no hierarchy
- Nuu-chah-nulth communities of Vancouver Island
- The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, a Ficus religiosa replanted from the offspring of the original
- Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis fossil in Ethiopia
- Purgatorius, the ground-dwelling ancestor of mammalian life
From SAND
- Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory, and Practice, the new nine-month course with Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Eduardo Duran, Linda Thai, Daniel Foor, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, and Dr. Bayo Akomolafe. Scholarships available for 20 to 30 percent of seats.
- Sila, a nonlinear documentary following Inuit women through 300 years of Danish colonialism, available to watch now
- The Eternal Song film series
- Previous episodes with Monica Gagliano and Tyson Yunkaporta
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