Robert Moor on Trees

About this episode

Robert Moor discusses the intricate relationship between trees and human life, exploring themes of growth and evolution.

“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…

People in this episode

Host: Donovan Hohn

Guest: Robert Moor

Topics covered

• trees
• human evolution
• nature
• neuroscience
• environment
• growth

Keywords

• trees
• Robert Moor
• neuroscience
• human evolution
• nature
• growth
• environment

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Lapham’s Quarterly

Books & works: In Trees: An Exploration, On Trails

Places: Lake District, Papua New Guinea

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