Arborescence: Robert Moor

 Robert Moor is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Emergence, and The New York Times. His first book, On Trails, won the National Outdoor Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize. He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia. His new book is 'In Trees'.

Topics

• 00:00 Welcome, and the new SAND course
• 00:04 A tree is a verb, not a noun
• 00:06 Branching, brains, and why AI has no roots
• 00:13 Pruning, gnarling, and the beauty of wounds
• 00:16 The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya
• 00:19 From On Trails to In Trees
• 00:22 Tree thinking and the tree of contents
• 00:27 Intelligence without anthropomorphizing
• 00:34 Cedars, Haida Gwaii, and deep time
• 00:38 Branching futures, many apocalypses, and grief
• 00:47 Hierarchy, the rhizome, and the Korowai
• 00:52 Rootedness and relationality

Robert Moor

• In Trees: An Exploration (Simon & Schuster, April 2026)
• On Trails: An Exploration
• Robert Moor at Hill Nadell Literary Agency

Books mentioned

• Songs for Relinquishing the Earth by Jan Zwicky. Originally hand-sewn by the author on recycled stock and distributed by request; later won the Governor General's Award for Poetry.
• Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees by Nalini Nadkarni
• The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
• Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
• The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
• Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano
• The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge, source of the "big plant with a stick up the middle" definition
• Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land by Brian Burkhart
• Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta
• A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, source of the rhizome
• A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, source of the buffered and porous self
• “Ancient Green” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

People mentioned

• Patrick von Aderkas, tree biologist at the University of Victoria, who described a tree as "a growth form"
• Jeff Lichtman, neuroscientist and Dean of Science at Harvard
• Robert J. O'Hara, who coined the term "tree thinking"
• Umeek (Richard Atleo), Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief and philosopher, author of Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview
• Michael Pollan, on the distinction between sentience, intelligence, and consciousness
• John McPhee, on structural experimentation in nonfiction
• Stephen Tamatea King, the first known tree sitter, who climbed totara trees in New Zealand in the 1970s
• Joanna Macy, "there is no away to throw things to"

Places and peoples

• Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Haida Gwaii
• The Korowai of Papua, treehouse dwellers with almost no hierarchy
• Nuu-chah-nulth communities of Vancouver Island
• The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, a Ficus religiosa replanted from the offspring of the original
• Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis fossil in Ethiopia
• Purgatorius, the ground-dwelling ancestor of mammalian life

From SAND

• Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory, and Practice, the new nine-month course with Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Eduardo Duran, Linda Thai, Daniel Foor, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, and Dr. Bayo Akomolafe. Scholarships available for 20 to 30 percent of seats.
• Sila, a nonlinear documentary following Inuit women through 300 years of Danish colonialism, available to watch now
• The Eternal Song film series
• Previous episodes with Monica Gagliano and Tyson Yunkaporta

Contact SAND

• [email protected]
• Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member