Robert Moor, a writer of nonfiction, sits down with co-hosts Christian Barter and Jennifer Maritza McCauley to discuss his latest volume, In Trees, and the notion of “tree thinking,” a term introduced by the evolutionary biologist Robert J. O’Hara. Moor describes how this mode of thought centers on branching, expansion, and pruning rather than strict hierarchies, and he demonstrates how these patterns show up in the works of writers like Tolstoy and Wordsworth. He investigates the giant sequoia’s influence on the emergence of modern conservation and shares passages from his own tree-centered experiences, from Papua New Guinea to Vancouver, Canada, where he joined activists in a tree-sitting protest against an oil pipeline. He reflects on the ethics of climate activism and how tree thinking could help reshape the environmental movement for a contemporary era. He also reads from In Trees.
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To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell.
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Robert Moor
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In Trees by Robert Moor | Moon Palace Books • On Trails by Robert Moor | Moon Palace Books
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Others
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The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino • “The Trouble with Wilderness” by William Cronon • On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin • Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson • How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm • Walden by Henry David Thoreau • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 9, Episode 56: Matthew Wolfe on the Secret History of Radical Environmentalism
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EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT MOOR
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Christian Barter: The book is arranged around concepts tied to trees. Chapters bear names like branching, pruning, gnarling, rooting, and so forth. The branching chapter, in particular, reads almost like literature and sparked a lot of thought. You compare two authors to illustrate the distinction between narrowing and branching—Wordsworth and Tolstoy. Could you explain this comparison and why you selected those two writers?
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Robert Moor: Certainly. To give a bit of context, the chapter begins when I attempt to climb a tree near my home—something I did as a child, as you mentioned. I suspect most people do that too, and yet, curiously, many people stop after a while. This seems to be a cross-cultural pattern. I was reading Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees at the time, which you’ve likely encountered, and I found myself pondering why I stopped climbing trees. It’s the story of a boy who climbs up and never comes down, spending his life up there.
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So I went to climb this tree, and almost immediately I was seized by a vertigo-like sensation, a cautiousness. It wasn’t merely a fear of heights; it was a question of why I was doing something so foolish. I had misplaced that wild, fearless tree-climber’s spirit, and that nervousness—this narrowing—began to seep into other parts of my life, including my writing. I started taking fewer risks. I felt myself slipping into a routine carved by habit. As you know, when you reach your 30s and 40s you tend to contract toward the things you excel at and the expectations you’re urged to follow. This led me to explore the neuroscience behind it: early in life the brain is highly branched, and around the age of two you have the most neural connections you’ll ever possess, after which the brain gradually prunes away connections.
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So I became obsessed with keeping that branching alive. Neuroscientists actually encourage us to push beyond our comfort zones so that we retain a wider array of neural connections, preserving flexibility rather than letting life prune us down. Returning to your question, this phenomenon is quite evident in William Wordsworth’s life. He was a remarkable poet, a founder of the English Romantic movement, and a progenitor of the reverence for nature that many of us still carry today.
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We inherit his way of perceiving the world, but as he aged, achieved success, and faced personal losses, his worldview and mind gradually narrowed. Emerson reportedly described him as a very narrow person when they met. Some critics even argue that if Wordsworth had died at thirty, most of his best poems would still have been written, implying he had already begun a downward trajectory. That is certainly something most of us want to avoid, both in creativity and in moral vision. He shed much of the progressive radicalism of his youth and, like many of us, grew increasingly cautious.
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So you might assume this is a universal aging trend toward narrowing, and to some extent that is true. It’s a fundamental aspect of our neurological makeup. Yet, when you look at other writers, you find those who resist this narrowing. Some become more branchy with age, or at least retain enough youthful branching to bloom into extraordinary genius, which is how I read Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy maintained a vast curiosity about life in all its facets, even physical pursuits—he reportedly learned tennis in his seventies, swam in ice-cold seas, and once got into a bear-fight that left a facial scar. What stands out is his deep care for others, especially the powerless, such as the serfs in Russia. He argued that devotion to aiding others unsettles the narrow mindset and sustains a broad, engaged way of living in the world.
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Jennifer Maritza McCauley: You also describe how, throughout history, trees have been tied to spiritual, mystical, and religious sentiments. We touched on sequoias earlier. The sense of awe they inspire contributed to concrete changes in environmental policy. Could you explain a bit more about the role of sequoias and how their public emergence helped spark the American environmental movement?
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RM: Yes, that’s correct. When I looked back through this history, and considered our attitude toward trees as a lens for understanding the broader environment—a convenient lens because many people equate trees with the health of ecosystems—we can see that the act of cutting down a tree was not always viewed as the ultimate desecration it’s taken to be today. There was a time when that reverence for trees hadn’t taken hold the way it does now.
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You can trace this reverence to figures like Wordsworth and the German Romantics such as Goethe, and then to Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir, with the sentiment gradually diffusing into the American public. People began to treat trees as temples of nature, sacral spaces whose destruction would be a violation. The hurdle, however, was the power of capitalism. Trees had monetary value, and convincing the public to spare them proved difficult. This tension endured until the era of westward expansion brought attention to the giant sequoias. These trees were extraordinary in scale and awe-inspiring, yet their timber value was limited. They tended to fall and splinter, which made them less suitable for lumber—unlike the nearby coastal redwoods, which were highly prized for timber. Their worth lay elsewhere, for instance in oil piping and railroad ties, among other uses.
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Sequoias defied that logic. Once the environmental movement began to embrace these colossal trees, they could use them to challenge the industrial capitalist framework. In fact, California Senator John Conness proposed preserving the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias within what would become Yosemite National Park, while other senators questioned the precedent for setting aside trees simply to let them stand. Conness replied that there was no precedent because there are no other trees on Earth like them; from the protection of the giant sequoias, he argued, the broader American conservation movement would take shape.
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Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Whitney Terrell. Photograph of Robert Moor by Remi Morawski.
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