The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly Robert Moor on Trees
Robert Moor, journalist and essayist best known for long-form explorations, guides a wide-ranging journey through trees. He recalls relearning to climb, examines arborescence as a way of thinking, visits bonsai masters and Korowai treehouses, and probes mycorrhizal networks, fire ecology, and why humans left the trees. Short, vivid vignettes branch into history, culture, and the biology of growth.
01:27:17
Relearning Risk By Climbing Trees
- Moor relearned tree climbing with Ben Atkinson in the Lake District to reclaim risk tolerance and craftful movement.
- He describes Atkinson tiptoeing, jumping, and treating climbing as an art that reshaped his own fear and writing practice.
Trees Lock Mistakes Into Their Wood
- Trees lock past growth into wood so they cannot straighten mistakes, creating permanent gnarling that records time.
- Robert Moor compares this to human brains and history where neurons and events remain crooked and we must grow beyond them rather than erase them.
Prune With Bonsai Rigor
- Learn rigorous pruning from bonsai: decide what to keep and what to delete with deliberate precision.
- Moor notes bonsai artists apply strict, time‑tested editing to create poetic naturalness and demand zero bullshit.
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Intro
00:00 • 3min
Why a Book About Trees?
03:25 • 2min
Climbing Trees and Relearning Risk
05:21 • 2min
Arborescence as a Way of Being
06:53 • 2min
The Bodhi Tree’s Violent Botany
08:40 • 1min
The Wood Wide Web: Hype and Limits
09:45 • 1min
Trees, History, and Gnarling
11:14 • 3min
What Makes a Tree a Tree?
13:54 • 3min
Childhood Impulse to Climb
16:41 • 2min
Bonsai: Pruning as Discipline
18:47 • 2min
Bonsai Aesthetics and Cultural Naturalness
20:42 • 2min
The Green Revelation and Romanticism
23:06 • 2min
Forests, National Parks, and Rarity
25:17 • 25min
Tree Planting, Monocultures, and Carbon
49:50 • 4min
Fire, Indigenous Management, and Resilience
53:25 • 3min
Treehouses, Tourism, and the Korowai
56:07 • 10min
Our Arboreal Ancestors and Leaving the Trees
01:05:54 • 2min
Human Nature, Violence, and Cooperation
01:08:23 • 6min
Rootedness, The Great Uprooting, and Place
01:14:29 • 8min
Death, Burial, and Returning to Soil
01:22:26 • 3min
Outro
01:25:41 • 50sec
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In Trees
An Exploration
Robert Moor
In Trees: An Exploration by Robert Moor is a wide-ranging investigation into trees and the human relationship with them, combining travel, natural history, and philosophical reflection.
Moor climbs into canopies, studies bonsai in Japan, visits treehouses in Papua New Guinea, and explores chimpanzee nests and human evolutionary history to understand arborescent patterns.
The book considers scientific research on communication and mycorrhizal networks, cultural histories like the Bodhi tree and the Green Revelation, and practical topics such as pruning and tree planting.
Throughout, Moor draws metaphors—gnarling, pruning, rooting—to reflect on time, memory, and how people live.
The work is both personal and investigative, aiming to teach readers to think with and learn from trees.
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• Mentioned in 2 episodes
Landscape in Memory
Simon Schama
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• Mentioned in 11 episodes
The Hidden Life of Trees
Peter Wohlleben
Benjamin Flouw
Peter Wohlleben's "The Hidden Life of Trees" explores the complex social lives of trees, revealing their communication methods, symbiotic relationships, and intricate ecosystems.
Wohlleben challenges traditional forestry practices and advocates for a more holistic approach to forest management.
The book uses scientific research to illustrate the surprising intelligence and interconnectedness of trees, highlighting their ability to cooperate and support each other.
It emphasizes the importance of preserving old-growth forests and understanding the vital role trees play in maintaining a healthy planet.
The book's accessible style and captivating storytelling have made it a bestseller worldwide.
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• Mentioned in 3 episodes
The Songlines
Bruce Chatwin
The Songlines is a 1987 book by Bruce Chatwin that delves into the Australian Outback and the Aboriginal notion of 'songlines' or 'dreaming tracks'.
The book is part adventure, part novel of ideas, and part spiritual autobiography.
It follows Chatwin's search for the source and meaning of these ancient pathways, which are believed to have been sung into existence by the ancestors of the Aboriginal people.
The narrative is non-linear, with digressions on nomadic and settled ways of life, reflecting Chatwin's lifelong passions for travel, nomadism, and understanding human origins and nature.
#1270
• Mentioned in 33 episodes
A Thousand Plateaus
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Félix Guattari
Gilles Deleuze
A Thousand Plateaus is a key text in the 'Capitalism and Schizophrenia' series by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
It advances a unique philosophical approach that draws from but critiques both Freudian and Marxist theories.
The book is structured as a series of 'plateaus' that can be read in any order, each exploring different concepts such as rhizomes, stratification, and the distinction between smooth and striated space.
It is essential reading for those interested in critical theory, feminism, literary theory, and contemporary Western culture.
#1372
• Mentioned in 31 episodes
Entangled Life
How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
Merlin Sheldrake
In 'Entangled Life,' Merlin Sheldrake delves into the fascinating world of fungi, discussing their roles in decomposition, fermentation, nutrient distribution, and the production of psilocybin.
The book examines how fungi interact with plants and animals, including their ability to manipulate insect behavior and form vast underground networks known as the 'Wood Wide Web.' Sheldrake also explores the historical and modern uses of fungi, from food and medicine to their potential in environmental remediation.
The book is both a scientific exploration and a personal account, challenging traditional concepts of intelligence and individuality and offering a new perspective on the interconnectedness of life.
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• Mentioned in 12 episodes
Finding the Mother Tree
Suzanne Simard
In 'Finding the Mother Tree,' Suzanne Simard combines her personal narrative with scientific insights to reveal the complex, interdependent relationships within forest ecosystems.
The book highlights her research on the 'Wood Wide Web,' a network of mycorrhizal fungi that connects trees, allowing them to share nutrients and information.
Simard also shares her personal journey, including her upbringing in the rainforests of British Columbia, her struggles within the male-dominated logging industry, and her groundbreaking experiments that challenge conventional wisdom about forest ecology.
The book emphasizes the cooperative nature of trees, particularly the role of 'Mother Trees' as hubs in these networks, and explores the implications of this research for sustainable forestry and combating climate change.
#871
• Mentioned in 44 episodes
The Overstory
Richard Powers
The Overstory is a sweeping and impassioned work of environmental fiction that follows the lives of nine individuals whose paths are intertwined by their connections to trees.
The novel is structured in four parts – 'Roots', 'Trunk', 'Crown', and 'Seeds' – mirroring the parts of a tree.
It delves into themes of ecology, climate change, and the interconnectedness of trees and humans, using a blend of science, history, and magical realism.
The book advocates for the protection of trees and the natural world, posing critical questions about humanity's relationship with the environment and the long-term consequences of human actions.
#33786
• Mentioned in 2 episodes
On Trails
An Exploration
Robert Moor
In 'On Trails: An Exploration', Robert Moor delves into the history and significance of trails, from the earliest fossilized paths to modern digital trails.
He weaves together stories of his adventures with insights from science, history, philosophy, and nature writing, exploring how trails reflect human and animal interactions with the environment.
“The tree is this living skin wrapped around a dead core,” says Robert Moor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “You have this skin of living wood that’s being produced by the cambium, and it’s growing outward and inward simultaneously. Like a series of matryoshka dolls, each layer is encased within the next over time, which is why trees continue thickening. And that also leads to this mechanism I call gnarling: trees lock their errors in place. If a tree takes a strange turn, it can’t straighten out its wood. There are ways in which our lives are like that as well. We can’t choose to fix our past mistakes. We have to learn to grow beyond the past rather than hoping to travel back in time to make it something different.”
This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with journalist and essayist Robert Moor, author of In Trees: An Exploration, a follow-up and companion to Moor’s bestselling debut, On Trails, published in 2016. Their conversation—like Moor’s book—branches, and roots, and gnarls. We meet the neuroscientists researching the arborescence of the human brain, a tree-climbing expert in the Lake District of England, a renowned Japanese bonsai artist, a master Korowai woodsman living in a tree house in Papua New Guinea, and while considering the leafy, treetop nests of chimpanzees, Moor and Hohn explore the deep, distant evolutionary history of humanity’s relationship to trees.
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