What trees can teach us about life (w/ Robert Moor)

What can we learn from trees? Robert Moor thinks that the path to a well-lived life lies in trying our best to live like a tree. Branch out, prune what doesn’t work, and make use of the spots where we’ve been injured or broken. Robert talks to Chris about his decade-long project to write a book about the wisdom of trees, which took him from a thousand year old bonsai in Tokyo to a tree-climbing teacher in England and living in the canopy of an old growth forest in Canada to try and prevent its logging. This is an adventurous, far-ranging episode about what it means to be a human and why the answer to that question might just lie in the top branches of the nearest tree. Featured guest Follow Robert Moor on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/robertmoor_/, X https://x.com/robertmoor_, Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/robertmoor.com and at robertmoor.com/ https://www.robertmoor.com/Buy In Trees: An Exploration https://www.amazon.com/Trees-Exploration-Robert-Moor/dp/1476739250 Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDPods https://www.youtube.com/@TEDPodsFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksVote for our show in the Signal Awards for Best Advice & How To https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2026/shows/genre/advice-how-to podcast! For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Fill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 https://bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 2:15Speaker 00

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. A lot of times on this show, people have talked about how meaningful it has been for them to spend time in nature. But very few people have talked about what they learned from nature itself. And I don't think anyone before today's guest, Robert Moore, has ever talked about what they learned about being human by learning about trees. In fact, Robert says that we should forget about being a better human and instead try and be more like a tree. That's an idea that at first, when I heard it, sounded ridiculous. It made me laugh. But the more I thought about it after talking to Robert and reading his book, In Trees, the more I have become convinced that maybe that is what we need to do. Maybe we need to be shooting for tree-like rather than

• 2:59Speaker 00

  human-like. And to explain what it even means to be a tree, what does the word "tree" mean? Here's Robert reading a passage from his book.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  A tree is not just a thing made up of bark and leaves and sap and wood. At its core, a tree is not even really a noun. It is more like a verb. A tree is what a tree does. It is hard for us to perceive this fact, however, because most of the time, a tree does what it does so slowly. A mature oak tree, which might live for 1,000 years, appears to be as unchanging as a mountain. But if we could watch the full life cycle of an oak play out in a few seconds, it would look as violent as a fireworks display. A single green tendril slithers up from the shell of an acorn and thrusts itself through the soil. It unfurls tiny leaves, then it sprouts

• 3:51Speaker 04

  branches, and then those branches branch and branch and branch again. Some branches starve away or are torn off, pruned by wind, rain, ice, fire, pests, disease, and the gravitational pull of the earth itself, while others thicken and strengthen. Upward, this thing, this process erupts until, in its final days, just before it comes crashing back down to earth, a keen botanist would be able to read it like a book, gleaning its entire history from its shape alone. A tree, in other words, is not only a living being, it is also a way of being. Put very simply, that way of being, what

• 4:37Speaker 04

  philosophers call arborescence, consists of three simultaneous processes: branching, pruning, and gnarling. The result is something inventive, exacting, and long-lasting. Something wise.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  We are going to hear a lot more about the wisdom of trees and how we can live more like them in just a moment. But first, a quick break.

• 5:13Speaker 00

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• 8:21Speaker 00

  And we are back. Today, we're talking about trees with Robert Moore.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Robert Moore. I'm the author of On Trails and my new book, In Trees. And my work centers on the intersection of humans and the natural world.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  You know, this show is called How to Be a Better Human, and I think that many people, if they haven't read your book, and I told them we were going to interview a person who has spent a decade researching trees, would say, "Well, that sounds like not a topic for How to Be a Better Human, but in fact, a topic about trees," or like a nature documentary. In fact, your book, I think, is in so many ways, a direct answer to the question of what can we humans learn from looking at trees and understanding trees? So can you give us a brief taste of some of the lessons that you've learned?

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah, I mean, that really is the mission of the book. One of the things I say is that I'm not trying to anthropomorphize trees, I want to arborize humanity.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  I love that line. That's one of my favorite lines in the whole book, yeah.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  And I believe it. I mean, I think that by studying trees closely, you know, the anthropologist Claude Levy Strauss famously said that animals are good to think with. You know, it's this sort of cognitive tool that humanity has always used to make sense of ourselves is by thinking about these species that are not ourselves. And I think that trees are, in some ways, our most generative tool of thought, because they push us to really grow beyond ourselves, right, to become wild or more creative, more rigorous, and most importantly, more rooted, human beings. And so that is what I'm trying to guide the reader toward, is how can you live like a tree? And so, as I say in that passage, for me, a tree is made up of these various processes that are all happening simultaneously.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  They're branching out wildly, they're trying everything, they're pruning back what doesn't work. So they're not just a big amorphous cloud that has no sort of rigor or selecting process. They gnarl around what works. And they really embrace their flaws, in some ways. And then, as I discover in the end of the book, they set down deep roots. And in some ways, that's the most important and the hardest lesson for someone like me to internalize.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  What do you say for someone like you?

• 10:34Speaker 04

  I'm a rambling man. My family has always moved around, you know, one of the chapters of the book, we trace our family tree. And my dad and I, and we, you know, discovered that we've just been kind of floating around the American South for hundreds and hundreds of years. And obviously, before that, we came from overseas, from England and Scotland and other parts of Europe. And, I mean, I grew up in Illinois, and I don't have a single family member who still lives there. And I live in Canada now, and that never seemed strange to me, really, you know? And it's kind of a symptom of how uprooted we are as a culture, but especially as an individual, how uprooted I am. And it wasn't until I started talking deeply with First Nations people in Canada, who,

• 11:14Speaker 04

  you know, have been in one place for 10,000 years or longer, and have built these incredibly deep relationships with the ecology and the communities of that place, that I started to realize that I have this deep lack in myself. And it's so, it was so deep that I didn't even know I was missing it.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  I found one of the most powerful parts of your book, and something that I just kind of keep thinking about since I read it, is the idea of those three processes, right? The branching that we are constantly exploring and trying to find new things and grow, and not just stay put, that we can't, in fact, survive if we never grow and expand even throughout our lives. And then pruning, that we also can't constantly be exploring. We have to be cutting back to the things that make sense, that are efficient, that are useful, that matter. But the one that really has stuck with me, because it's the one that I kind of didn't think of or know really about with a tree, is the gnarling. The idea that a tree has wounds, has injuries, that it strengthens around, that become some

• 12:14Speaker 00

  of its strongest points, and that those, in many ways, are the identity of the tree. I found that to be such a really moving connection to how we, as humans, are informed by the often terrible things that have happened to us.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's something about it that I initially found kind of disappointing. You know, we live in such an optimization-based culture, in which we're supposed to always be moving towards perfection. And in my first book, which was about trails, that was kind of a big theme, is that trails are always evolving toward a state of elegance, right? So if you trace an ant trail, for example, there's a famous story of Richard Feynman doing this on his bathtub, sort of using these crayons to trace the trails of ants. And at first, they'll be really windy, and each ant that follows that trail, the trail gets sleeker and sleeker, because they're shaving off those inside curves. It just, just through, you know, the basic animal mechanism, trying to find the path of least resistance and not waste energy.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  And so I kind of saw that as perfusing all of nature, this will to elegance. And the truth is, it doesn't. There's a lot of realms of life that are very gnarly. And one of them is our own brains, right? Our neurons, this is one of the first shocks I had researching this book, is that our neurons grow in a very crooked way, they're very inefficient, and they never straighten out throughout our lives. And so our brains are just full of this kind of inelegance. And if you think about our own lives, the same thing is true. You can't go back in time and change the painful parts of your life. You have to learn to grow around them, and ideally, outgrow them.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  I am really allergic to the idea that, like, there's a silver lining in every cloud, right? That, like, bad things happen. But actually, it's a good thing, because look at the ways it's made your life full of other opportunities. I'm like, sometimes it's just bad. And yet, while I hold that belief so deeply, you can't say that the things that happen to you don't change you and inform who you are. Thinking about that in the context of a tree, to me, was really, again, it was like, I found myself very emotional about the idea that a tree has that point, that point of suffering and pain and struggle, and that it actually is the strongest and most beautiful part of the tree.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think that there is a way in which, it maybe is helpful to differentiate between the kind of wound that wounds you mortally, like, I call it a maiming, you know, in the book, that this thing that is, you know, and I know so many people have this, whether it's chronic pain, or it's some kind of trauma, that they just can't, they can't outgrow, right? And it really does hamper their growth. And then there's another kind of challenge in life, which you can manage to grow beyond, or at least allows you to keep thriving. And there's a line there, and I'm sure it's a fuzzy line, but so long as you can continue growing as a person, that challenge actually does strengthen you and makes you more interesting, right?

• 15:01Speaker 04

  I mean, that's one of the things that bonsai artists kept telling me, is that young trees are really boring, because they haven't faced any challenges. So their trunks are just kind of straight up and down, whereas the ancient trees have these beautiful curves to them because of all the things life has thrown at them. You know, we used to call that character, like, having character. My husband suffered a stroke at the age of 40. He woke up one morning and was paralyzed on one side of his body, couldn't stand up, couldn't feel anything, couldn't speak. And it was terrifying for both of us. And, you know, with a lot of these kind of neurological crises, the recovery's very fast at first, and then it's very slow. And so he regained his speech within a day or two.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  He could resume, you know, walking and doing things with his body fairly soon, but he couldn't actually feel what he was doing. So there's a surreal period of time where I could throw him a ball, and he could catch it, but he couldn't feel his hand. So he said he felt like a marionette, like someone else was moving him around. And so, in a lot of ways, his life was very surreal and very challenging for years after that, as well as deeper things, right? Feeling like he'd lost his joy of living, and wondering why he was still alive, why he had survived this and others hadn't, you know? I mean, it raises a lot of existential questions, and when you're very close to someone who's going through that, you sort of go through it as well secondhand. It was a terrible thing to go through. It was a calamity. But at the same time, it pushed Remy in all these ways to reorient his life around what

• 16:27Speaker 04

  he really cares about, right? And to not be on autopilot. And I think almost anyone who's gone through a near-death experience will say the same thing, that it forced them to reevaluate their values and what, how they want to spend their remaining days. I mean, he says all the time, he feels like he's running on bonus time now. It's kind of a cliche to say, but it takes those kinds of experiences to make you understand those truths emotionally, which you might otherwise only understand intellectually.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  For people who haven't read the book, you can already understand this from this conversation, right? That, like, this is so much more than just a book about, like, a taxonomy of trees. I'd love to have you read one more passage, which is on page 14.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Sure. "A tree is a way of persisting in a world of wounds. Each tree begins its life with a number of limitations. It is born rooted to one spot, its flesh is hard, and its insides are mostly dead. All day long, the sun moves through the sky, and the rain falls in a diffuse scattering across the soil. If trees were animals, they would simply turn their heads to eat the sunlight and wriggle around their roots to suck up the rainwater wherever they could find it. They would duck lightning bolts, crush pests, and flee from fires. But they cannot. They must stay put. With all of these innate weaknesses, it seems incredible that trees have managed to survive at all.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  And yet, certain old trees have remained standing for millennia, while empires crest and crash in their shade. A tree overcomes its limitations by doing what trees do. It arboretises. It begins by branching outward in all directions, growing upward to explore the bright, dry air, and downward into the dark, wet soil. It eventually prunes back the limbs that snagged too much wind or failed to reach the light. What remains grows stronger over time, as each new layer of wood wraps around the old, locking those curves into place. Branch, prune, gnarl.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  In this way, a tree learns to live with and then outgrow its imperfections. Our brains work in much the same way. As an infant's brain is developing, it forms a lush profusion of neural connections, far in excess of what it needs. Then, as we age, we begin deleting the neural links we don't use. Neuroscientists have a lovely term for this process: blossoming and pruning. Though it should more accurately be called a process of blossoming, pruning, and gnarling, since what is retained is gradually strengthened, crooked though it may be."

• 19:11Speaker 00

  You mentioned already that you had seen bonsai. And I feel like one of the things that is really stunning about your work is this is not work that you did sitting in a chair, reading other books. I mean, there's certainly research component, but you are out in the field. You went to the World Bonsai Convention and you saw and met these master bonsai artists. For people who aren't super familiar, I think many people think of a bonsai as just like a small tree. What is a bonsai? And what did you learn in person in Japan from these master artisans who've been working on it for their entire lives?

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Bonsai is really just a miniature tree. It comes from the Japanese for tray and tree. So what really the definition of a bonsai is a tree in a very shallow pot. And that's an important point because that's what keeps the tree small. You restrict the root base and the tree will never grow up. And you can do this with almost any species. I think you can do with any species. As long as you keep those roots small, it's kind of one of these paradoxical things about trees is one of the things that defines them is that they can grow so large and yet we can also keep them small enough to hold in the palm of your hand for hundreds or even thousands of years. I mean, I saw a 1,000 year old bonsai at the World Bonsai Convention in Japan. And so that's what they often say about bonsai is that it's nature and miniature.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  It's a way of reducing the world, both in size, but also in complexity, down to something you can hold in your hand and kind of enjoy. You know, and I wrote a piece for The New Yorker as well about bonsai. And I said, you know, in culinary terms, bonsai is bouillon. You know, it's just reduced to its essence. And that has allowed people throughout the centuries, throughout the millennia, you know, monks who are in seclusion and don't have much access to nature, you know, the burgeoning Japanese middle class who are in these growing cities, they were cut off to have a little bit of nature in their home. And, you know, these trees would change throughout the seasons. There are bonsai that grow fruit. There are bonsai that have flowers, you know, that shed their leaves. And so it gave you this little window into the wild world that you might not otherwise have access to.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  And why are bonsai emotionally resonant for you rather than just intellectually resonant?

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I love the paradox of them. I play with that a lot in that chapter, the question of what is a tree? Bonsai really bring that that question to light because it is actually very hard to define a tree. A tree is, as one of my professors, Vatani, told me, it's just a growth form. It's really a way of being in the world. But also I think that bonsai artists are on the day to day, what they are engaged in is the art of pruning, right? And they're, not only are they pruning trees, they're pruning themselves and their lives. They're very rigorous people to almost an obsessive degree where I think some of them are a little bit overpruned, where all they're doing is bonsai. And, you know, one, one of the bonsai artists I spoke with told me his dream was just to

• 21:55Speaker 04

  lie in the grass and look at the sunshine one day because he's so busy all the time trying to keep all these trees alive, which is this really tragic irony, you know, that it's supposed to be this peaceful art form, but in order to make a living, you have to do it with hundreds or thousands of trees and you could lose them, especially with climate change. Every year it gets harder and harder to keep them alive. So there's just a lot of complexity there that I find absolutely fascinating.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  We're going to take a short break and then we will be back with even more fascinating complexity in just a moment. Don't go anywhere. This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in

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  court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them in and out of court, and that fight needs your support today. Donate at nrdc.org/human and your gift will be matched five times. This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Vail Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional, it's a philosophy

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• 25:36Speaker 00

  And we are back. I think when you ask people to imagine a tree, it does bring us to nature, but it also, there's a little bit of a sense of like a childlike wonder, the idea of climbing a tree or laying down under a tree or getting fruit from a tree. These are things that I think connect us to a youthful eagerness and curiosity about the world. In fact, there's a whole section where you talk about how you had lost the ability to climb trees and not necessarily the physical ability, but like you would start to climb a tree and then you get scared in a way you didn't when you were a kid and you used to climb trees. What did you do when you realized that you were maybe not as able to climb trees as you thought you had used to be?

• 26:15Speaker 04

  I tried to climb a tree. This was, I was maybe 33 at the time, I think. And, you know, I climbed trees as a kid. You probably climbed trees as a kid, right?

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Of course, yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's almost a universal. I mean, across cultures, I've really never run across a culture where kids don't climb trees. And I was no different. I love climbing trees in suburban Illinois where I grew up. And, and then at a certain point I stopped. And that also seems to be a universal is for some reason people fall away from our bodies, get bigger. And, you know, there's all sorts of reasons. You get obsessed first with, you know, being a teenager and your social scene and dating and all that. And it seems kind of childish and then you become an adult and you start working and you just forget to do it. There's this one tree I really love by the seashore and I just thought, you know, I'm going to give it a go. I'm going to try and, I'd been reading Calvino's The Baron and the Trees. I don't know if you know that book, but it's about a boy who climbs a tree and never comes back down. It's a wonderful novel. And I just, you know, got this wild spirit. I said, I'm just going to do it. I was all alone. I'll give it a try.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  And within, you know, two branches up, I was going to be 10 or 15 feet off the ground. I was gripped by this fear, this terrible fear and this sense of vertigo that I'd never had as a kid. And I was like, oh my God, where did that come from? You know, and this feeling of cautiousness. And then once I recognized that feeling in myself, I recognized that it was extending to other parts of my life. It was extending to my work. It was extending just to my, my overall way of being in the world, which is that I'd been kind of pruned back by, you know, just the day to day of trying to get good at what you do for a living and try to be a good family member and all that. The world pairs us back. And I think especially capitalism does it. It pushes us to specialize.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  And a fear of failure and fear of what happens if you go wrong. Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  And the fear of wasting time, right? Why would I go climb a tree? I'm not, it's not going to make me any money. It's not going to make me, you know, more successful. And so there's really a way in which the world can instrumentalize us. And I tried to resist that. I recognized the danger in that. And so I was thinking, what does it mean to have that tree climber spirit? What does it mean to have that wild spirit you have when you're a kid? And why do we allow it to wither as we get older? So I set myself this goal of finding myself a tree climbing teacher.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  I mean, this is the part that I love is so funny because it's like, you weren't just like, I'm going to climb trees more. You were like, I will find the single greatest tree climber and then I will learn from this tree climber.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. I love people who have gone so far down a particular road that they're like almost in a different world than the rest of us. That is my favorite thing to find and to write about. And so I found a guy in England named Ben Atkinson, who he's just an obsessive tree climber. He makes these videos of himself climbing trees and he climbs them in this really remarkable way where he's not just going up the trunk as most of us did as kids, you know, following the sort of ladder branches, but he walks out onto the branches and almost like tiptoeing on a balance beam and then he'll jump to another branch and climb up on that. And it was really beautiful to watch. It was, it was beautiful and almost, for me, almost like a spiritual thing to watch because he was doing it for no other reason than, than the beauty of it and the experience of it. And it's such a deep thing, right?

• 29:08Speaker 04

  I mean, we are descendants of an arboreal species and to some degrees we remain an arboreal species and yet we've lost touch with that. And Ben is a guy who'd never lost touch with that. He's a full-time barefoot guy, you know, gathers a lot of wild food, eats roadkill. Like he's much more in touch with his wild roots than most of us. So I learned a lot going to climb trees with him in England, but mostly about that, about how to stay branchy, you know?

• 29:34Speaker 00

  You you talk about in the book and even just now about how much things have changed for us. We've lost some touch with nature, but you also talk really explicitly about how we as humans have damaged nature, have created climate change, have created situations where it's much more difficult for trees to survive than it has been in the past. And I found it really interesting that you are unsatisfied with the kind of typical tree hugger. I'm putting that in big quote, like you're unsatisfied with the typical, like, we should save the planet. And then I, you know, put a bumper sticker on my car or I just, you know, donate $20 to the environmental nonprofit. You're very unsatisfied with

• 30:19Speaker 00

  that. In fact, there's a, there's a chapter where you have gone to shoot a nature documentary. You're alongside David Attenborough, right? One of the most famous naturalists and you find yourself kind of unimpressed with the idea that the best we can do is to tell the story and then just hope that things will change. And it's not a critique of David Attenborough, but it's a critique of this way of thinking that like, things will just get better on their own. I think a lot of people listening are going to identify with that. So can you talk about that feeling? And then what, what that led you to actually think needs to happen?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, say, you know, one of the hallmarks of arboretic thinking is that it's non-binary, right? It's broader than than binaries. And this is one of the great instances of that, which is, it's not necessarily that I think that the, the nature philosophy of American environmentalism, stretching back to, you know, John Muir and before that, you know, Emerson and Thoreau and before that, to the English and German Romantic movements. It's not that I think that's bad. It's just that I, it's not enough. And we know now it's not enough. You know, any of us who are paying attention to the environmental crisis know it's not enough. And, and being in this beautiful grove of ancient sequoia trees within this national park, while wildfires were raging elsewhere in the state, and you could actually see the haze of those wildfires down below, really

• 31:33Speaker 04

  drove that home. I guess you'd say the settler colonial, you know, North American, European way of interacting with nature has, one of the things is produced is this surreal situation in which you have these beautiful national parks, these jewels, natural miracles, and then all around them, this sort of desecrated world and this feeling that everything's falling apart. And it's something that if you read native philosophers and indigenous philosophers, this irony they'll just highlight again and again, because it's, it's pretty strange to set aside a wild space within this, you know, little fenced area and say, that's pristine. Don't touch that. Everything else is, you know, run wild. And, you know,

• 32:14Speaker 04

  just, just desecrate it as much as you want. And, and so there's a much more entangled, involved way of being on the land that is, you know, deeply rooted, that, that I think we need to find our way to as a culture. And a lot of that has to do with, with reading and listening to indigenous thinkers, I think.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Just because you mentioned the idea of arboretic thinking, I want to give the quick definition for that, which is, you say in the book, "Tree thinking begins when you learn to see the world as the result of an ongoing pattern of growth. This perceptual shift is somewhat hard to make, but I've found it is worth the effort, because when it takes place, a cosmos of cold objects and abstract ideas is suddenly revealed to be a forest, entangled, ever-evolving, and eternally wild. Life, in short, is fundamentally arboretic. In order to make sense of it, it helps to think in trees." I do see what you're saying, that if we think about the world as there's a national park, and that's important to be protected, and then there's the rest of the world, which

• 33:14Speaker 00

  can be paved over, turned into a parking lot and a highway and a strip mall, that is not arboretic thinking. That's not tree thinking. That is thinking that there's this one little block and that that block is independent from the other block, rather than things are connected and intertwined.

• 33:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. At one point in the book, I refer to as segregationist thinking, which, which is sort of a, you know, provocative choice of words. But I do think that slicing the world up into these tidy categories and not seeing things as branching from, you know, being, being connected, being entangled, but also being, being alive and ever-evolving. This is something that is so deep, it's almost difficult to talk about, right? It's a really, really deep sort of philosophical intervention I'm trying to get across here. But, but it is a shift that once it clicks in your head, you just start seeing things differently. And you can, you can spot this kind of categorical, static way of thinking that wants to slice the world up into these clean, in little tidy boxes. And you just see that how false it is. You see what a ridiculous way it is of seeing the world. And, and most people

• 34:12Speaker 04

  who are engaged in a particular field, whether it's, you know, biology, for example, they'll tell you like, well, yes, species boundaries are actually kind of blurry. And, and of course, all species are ultimately related, right? I mean, that's the evolutionary tree of life is, is the most obvious way in which it's easy to see this. And this is actually what, how Darwin came across, you know, how he discovered his, the natural selection is he was thinking in trees. He was sitting and literally drawing trees in his notebook and thinking about genealogy and thinking about dog breeding and how various different things can all be related. That is what this evolutionary biologist, Robert J. O'Hara, he calls tree thinking, you know, and it's a really powerful tool. And so I'm trying to apply it to as many realms of life as I can, my own life and, and life, you know,

• 34:57Speaker 04

  with a capital L.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  And this is, again, what I love about you, Robert, is you are not just trying to make a philosophical shift in yourself. It's not just, oh, I'm going to think about things in tree thinking and that's enough. You went from saying, okay, I will be involved in telling stories of the earth and the importance of natural beauty and wild places, to thinking like, this is not enough. And you eventually found yourself literally living in the top branches of a tree, so that it could not be cut down by people with chainsaws who were hundreds of feet below you.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think that that was a moment when things really crystallized for me, because I had been spending years climbing trees, as, as you've been, you know, highlighting. I was climbing to the tops of giant sequoias. I'd taken this technical tree climbing class. I'd taken a, you know, I don't know, free climbing class and, and in England. And so I had this skill and I'd been using it. And I'd gone, you know, I've gone to Papua and visited these people who live in tree houses. I'd gone, I slept in a chimpanzee nest in Tanzania. I'd done all of these things to try to explore the idea of arborality and arboretic. And then I ran across this group of people who were building a treehouse in order to stop a new pipeline, an oil pipeline called the TMX Pipeline, near where I live in British Columbia. And I was dangling from this rope, talking with them, when suddenly

• 36:20Speaker 04

  I realized that I have this entire suite of skills from one, on the one hand, they didn't really have. I, I really had a lot of technical tree climbing experience at that point. And also I had a really powerful desire to just do something, you know, that had been growing in me year after year. And I think a lot of us feel this way with climate change, is this feeling of, of helplessness. And so there was this absurd moment where I thought, why, you know, why am I interviewing the guy sitting in the treehouse? Why am I not the guy sitting in the treehouse? I, I am perfectly suited to that. I have no kids. I have lots of free time. I don't have a fear of heights anymore. I can climb trees with ropes. And so I joined this movement and I spent, you know, this, the summer in these, in these shifts, you know, sneaking in essentially illegally into this site and

• 37:04Speaker 04

  occupying this treehouse so that they couldn't cut down the tree, they couldn't cut down the tree, they, they couldn't build the pipeline. And so we, we kept that tree up as long as we could.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  So eventually the tree does come down.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  What does that say about the worth of the time that you spent in the tree or the action or the movement?

• 37:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, that was a very hard day. And in some ways, kind of a funny day, because I was the last person to be arrested. I couldn't actually, I told them from the very beginning, I can't get arrested because I have, I was only a resident of Canada. I wasn't a citizen and I didn't want to lose my residency, you know, I own a home there. My, my husband's there. My whole life is there. And so they said, that's fine. You actually don't have to be willing to get arrested. They just have to think you're someone who's willing to get arrested. As long as they think you're someone who's willing to get arrested, it will slow them down immeasurably, because they have to put together this special tactical force to arrest you and retrieve you out of the tree and all these things. And so that's what we did, me and another guy by the name of Tim Takara, we're up in

• 38:07Speaker 04

  these two treehouses, just trying to drag it out as long as we could. And finally, one day, they arrived. They surrounded my tree. They'd surrounded it with all these steel fencing. And there was a tactical team of, of mountees down below, calling up to me, saying like, you have 10 minutes to vacate this tree, or we're going to arrest you. And so I called Tim, who was in the other treehouse. I said, what are you going to do? And he said, I'm going to run away. I mean, that, just like we said, I'm going to just live to fight another day, which he did. He later staged another tree set. And so I did the same. I rappelled out of the tree. I ran off into the forest. Police didn't chase after me. I was, I was home free. And then I realized that someone needs to document all this, that actually we need a journalist onsite to report video to send to TV stations.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  So I actually changed all of my clothes. I put on like a disguise. I borrowed a big camel hair coat from someone else who was walking in. And I came around the other side of the blockade, you know, and as I describe in the book, I say, I felt a bit like Spider-Man transforming back into Peter Parker, you know, as I was now in journalist mode. So I spent the whole day recording the felling of these tree houses. And it was a really sad day. I mean, it really was. It was, we'd, we'd put a year of work into trying to build a movement, right? Cause it wasn't just about the tree houses. The tree houses, any tree sit is just kind of the, the little visible apex of this much larger movement. And what you're trying to do is build a, a, a movement of resistance and get people to show up and get people to protest

• 39:32Speaker 04

  and try to move the needle when it comes to public policy. And we had failed to do that. We, we just couldn't get the momentum going. And there was so much money and power on the other side. We, we sort of always knew it was a, it was probably going to be a doomed effort. But you still try and, and your hope is that even if that blockade doesn't succeed, you're sort of laying the groundwork for future movements, right? And you're, you're building a little bit more resistance to the next pipeline that they're trying to build it. They are now trying to build again in Canada. And you're helping get this broader realization out into the public that we, we can't keep building these, these oil pipelines that last, you know, 50 or a hundred years, when we're saying we need to transition away from fossil fuels in the next, you know, 10 or 20 or 30, it's an absurdity.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  And, and yet we continue doing it. It's one of those things. You hope you lost the battle, but you're, you're helping win the war. We, we don't know yet, but you know, at the very least, you, you do what you can do. Otherwise you do nothing.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think that is right there at the heart of it, right? Is to, to do what you can do rather than doing nothing. And I, I'll tell you one very vivid image from your book that is not connected to some sort of broader point. It is just a, a fact about trees that has really stuck with me is you talk about magnolia trees. How magnolia trees hold so much water that when chainsaws are used to cut them, they will occasionally spray a thick red, tan and rich liquid that eerily resembles blood.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  One of the things that I find fascinating about trees is that they seem to reside right on the boundary line between what we can empathize with and what we can't, you know? It gets very easy to empathize with a dog or even, you know, a bear or a squirrel or, or maybe even a spider, right? Some people don't like to kill spiders. They shoot them outside. I do that. My, my husband does that. And yet on the other side of that line is like moss, right? Like moss is a living thing. Algae is a living thing. We have no empathy for it whatsoever. We don't feel any, I mean, especially, you know, microbes. We don't even think about it. And for some reason, trees are seem to be the boundary line where some people find it really easy to extend their empathy to trees and see them as living beings and maybe even having a sense of interiority and personhood, and other people find it very difficult.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  And so I think that because they're in that liminal space, it's, it's really generative. It's really helpful for us to think about trees and, and to think about what is it like to be a tree? And what is the value of the life of a tree? I mean, this is a big thing in environmental philosophy, you know, does a tree have standing? It's like, what is a tree worth? And, and, and this extends back through religious traditions, you know? You've got sacred trees, but in, in the Buddhist tradition, which is the one I'm most familiar with, there, there's like a continual debate of can you be reborn as a tree, right? Is it possible to, to be reincarnated as a tree? Is it a karmic, you know, sin to cut down a tree? And what a lot of traditions seem to come to is that there are tree spirits, right?

• 42:22Speaker 04

  That, that there is actually a, a spirit that resides within the tree and, and that that spirit will survive beyond the tree. And it will actually haunt you if you, if you cut it down. That is something that, you know, I, I, growing up in a sort of, you know, atheist agnostic household was not raised with, but I find it really like a helpful way of thinking that it's not just that the tree is like a person in the enlightenment, European way of thinking of it, that whose life is the exact same as our own. It's this kind of strange, otherworldly thing. It is something that, that is, is other to us. And yet it may, it, it, there will actually be repercussions if you, if you harm it. And we know this now with wildfires and, you know, erosion.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  And if we do not respect those trees, if we do not respect their power to keep the living world healthy and stable, they will get their revenge on us and they are getting their revenge on us. It's happening right now.

• 43:15Speaker 06

  What are three things that you think a regular person who's listening to this podcast could do to arborize themselves? Like you say, how can a regular person make themselves more like a tree? How can they learn from trees?

• 43:33Speaker 04

  Obviously stay branchy. That's, that's the, the easiest thing. And I think for, in some ways, the most exciting thing to do.

• 43:39Speaker 06

  That'd be great printed on a tie dye t-shirt. Stay branchy. That's great. Perfect right there.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's funny. I did it at an event at Esalen, which is a sort of new age retreat center. And that was their takeaway. They're like, so what you're saying is stay branchy. I'm like, I, yeah, in some ways that is what I'm saying. I'm also saying you have to prune. You have to be rigorous and you can't just, you know, believe everything everyone tells you. But I'm 41 now, and I think that's around the time where you really start to feel that neural pruning, which is happening, as I say in the book, it's happening on, you know, quite literally. Your brain is maximally branchy when you're, when you're a kid. And then every year of your life, you're pruning away some of those connections. And every neurologist you'll talk to will say that one of the most important things as you get older is to maintain some of that branchiness, because otherwise you get, you, you just don't have any, any sort of alternate routes in your neural network to do new things to, and you just get narrower and narrower and narrower until you die.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  So I think staying branchy, staying involved in the world, especially not just in like, you know, doing Sudoku or something, but being involved in your, your local community in ways that challenge you and, and in the living community. Being, you know, going out and being involved in the wild world, that helps keep us branchy and challenges us. And I think that's obviously something that's incredibly important. The reverse of that is, is pruning, you know, that, that we look really deeply at what kinds of things you've sort of unconsciously accepted into your life and into your mind that maybe you don't actually like and you don't want to hold on to. And to be rigorous with yourself and be a little merciless and, and cut those things out.

• 45:09Speaker 04

  Because you'll, you'll feel that weight that's lifted from you when you drop the things you don't need anymore. And then lastly, and most importantly is, is the rootedness thing. I mean, you know, in environmental writing and the kind of writing I do, there's always this question of like, where do we go wrong? What's, what is wrong with us? Like, is it capitalism? Is it industrialism? Is it consumerism? Is it extractivism? Like, there's all these isms that people try to put to it. And then when you dig into it, you're like, yeah, but the, the problem's older than that. The problem actually extends before the birth of capitalism. And the name I put to it is the great uprooting. And it is this kind of emergent property that keeps occurring throughout cultures. When you start getting mass agriculture and you start getting a stable food source, and you don't have to interact with the plant world and the animal world quite so much to stay alive.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  And you just start to drift away, drift away from the earth. And you drift away from that sense of, of what indigenous culture is called relationality. That you have to be in relation with everything and you can sort of be isolated. That is a really deep thing. And I, I feel like something that a, a lot of different realms of thought are trying to explore right now and find our way back to that sense of rootedness. So that we can feel connected to the world and connected to one another. It's a lifelong project. It might be a generations long project to fix that great uprooting.

• 46:26Speaker 06

  Robert, I, I, I seriously could talk to you for like 12 hours and not run out of things to want to talk about. We have not even scratched the surface of the book, much less your, your broader work. The great news is people can buy the book and read more and, and engage. And in fact, even in the end of the book, you say like, if you have questions or ideas, you put your email. It's printed in the book, like, reach out to you.

• 46:48Speaker 04

  A lot of writers don't like it when people write to them and tell them there's typos in their book. I love it. If you want to write in, you have critiques, you have typos, criticisms, I'm open to. I have very thick skin. I'm, I'm like a tree in that way. I've got a thick bark. So send me any thoughts you have. I, I love to hear it.

• 47:05Speaker 06

  Well, Robert Moore, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. I cannot say this more strongly. This book, In Trees, is so beautiful. It is such a gift. I really hope that people will read it as, as, not even because I hope it's a success for you, which I do, but I hope they will read it as a gift to themselves. Thank you so much for being here and thanks for talking to us.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  Thank you so much, Chris. This was a great conversation.

• 47:29Speaker 06

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. But first I have a correction to make. In the past, I have said that we were doing a listener survey and that you could just click a link in the episode description. It would take you right there. Turns out that I was wrong because that link did not make it in. There was a problem with the formatting. I think that we have figured that problem out now. So if you click the link in the episode description, you will go right to the survey. It takes a few seconds. It makes a huge difference if you fill it out. It helps us to plan the future of the show. It helps us to get funding and just to understand what you want. What do you want to hear more of? What is working for you? What do you wish we would do differently? We really value your opinion. You can click that link right in the show description or you can go to bit.ly/BHSurvey6.

• 48:11Speaker 06

  Also, if you can't click the link, which please, I really hope you can click it now, you could also go to bit.ly/BHSurvey6 and that should take you there. Now let's read the rest of the credits. This show is put together by a family tree of audio engineers, producers, editors, fact checkers and curators. My name is Chris Duffy. I am your host. You can find out more about me at chrisduffy.com. On the TED side, we've got some majestic redwoods like Daniela Bolarezo, Van Van Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Laney Lot, Tansika Sungmanivong, Antonio Lei and Joseph DeBryan. Ryan Lash puts together this video like a root system slowly extending underground. And Mateus Salas fact checks us from root to shoot.

• 48:52Speaker 06

  On the PRX side, they are perfectly pruned bonsais sitting in a beautiful solarium in the sun in New York City. It's Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you and all the trees around you for listening. We hope that you will share this episode with someone who you think would enjoy it. Listen to it under a tree together. Listen to it in a tree together. Share it with a tree. Whatever you want. We will be back next week with even more episodes of How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks for listening.

• 49:29Speaker 00

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