Knock on Wood

Robert Moor’s award-winning On Trails, from 2016, earned him a reputation as a writer unafraid to cross boundaries. With his follow‑up, In Trees, he takes turns as nature writer, travel writer, adventure writer, explorer, amateur anthropologist, wannabe primatologist, experiential reporter, journalist-activist, and collector of stories. But Moor is really a diarist. That’s because his account of trees always returns to its authorial source. So while his subtitle includes the word “exploration,” it’s really an open-ended self-exploration. This focus will appeal to some readers, but it raises serious questions about the author’s ethics.

There’s a lot to learn from Moor, who has read a lot of books, met a lot of people, visited a lot of places, and climbed a lot of trees. His latest work is a humane, erudite volume about trees and our place in them, written by a good, curious, and progressive gentleman. However, it’s also a class-bound meditation, at times too clever by half, on what a well-educated American transplanted to the Pacific shores of British Columbia thinks about trees and the possibilities of “rewilding” our brains and becoming ever more “arborescent.” How, he asks, might “thinking like a tree” make us less inclined to destroy life on the planet? To find answers, Moor visited a neuroscientist at Harvard, flew to England to learn about tree climbing, took in a major bonsai exhibit in Tokyo, climbed sequoias in California with the BBC, dined afterwards with David Attenborough, investigated what has happened to the Indigenous people of Papua, visited Ethiopia to stare at the three-million-year-old skull of Lucy, tracked down and interviewed the famous tree-sitter Julia “Butterfly” Hill, and more.

Some facts he shares are interesting. Did you know that “a single tree in the tropics can lift a thousand gallons of water from its roots to its leaves on a hot day”? I didn’t.

Performative complicity with ecocide has never sounded so smart, looked so pretty, or struck so many favourable poses. That’s because the unspoken privilege of Moor’s wanderings is very far from his project of imagining what it might mean to think or live like a tree. How else to explain, in this context, an entire chapter devoted to a lost branch of the author’s family tree and the scars of American slavery? Travelling to see Lucy’s skull and his pride in being among the few, like Barack Obama, to gain such access? Doggedly pursuing a meeting with a reclusive old bonsai master, whom he won over by “enlisting the help of a beautiful female translator (Kimura had a weakness for charming women, I had been told)”? Or the lovely but sometimes precious use of language: “heliated feeling,” “chelation of the soul,” “quercine mind,” and “Tartarian fug”? Or the inclination, finally, to invoke Calvino, Kant, and Tolstoy?

Smart is good. Peacocking isn’t — and, in any case, it runs counter to Moor’s ethics of being other-interested.

No one needs to take a trip to Africa or the South Pacific to understand stillness, trees, and arborescence. Or to climb a very tall tree, meditate in a tree house, and grow bonsai. Or to read Darwin and E. O. Wilson. Or to arrange to meet a select number of noteworthy personages. Not when we have inexpensive, convenient ways of collecting information and research, from the internet to libraries. Not when the raging forest fire called climate change is driven by carbon emissions — including from luxury travel around the world. And especially not when the tree, as Moor admits, “unlike an animal, cannot travel.”

In June 2024, I was lucky enough to experience the towering redwoods of Mill Valley and the Muir Woods National Monument near San Francisco. It struck me as a church of nature. So I understand why Moor would devote years of research, globe-trotting, and writing to trees; they are at once part of our ancient folklore and the subject of quasi-philosophical thoughts about human smallness and finitude. Like polar bears, redwoods and giant sequoias are the freshest faces of nature — a romance we honour in the breach. The real and mythic presence of great trees simultaneously invokes their disappearance, making them powerful symbols of what we are losing from all the droughts, floods, fires, infestations, and landslides of climate change.

But my own response to the climate crisis is very different. Moor circles the globe, is an inquisitive, kind, and (apparently) well‑off collector of people and stories. He’s someone who imagines life lived like a tree. His bright-eyed bonhomie is somehow served ice-cold. I’m a working-class homebody, a plebeian who thinks for a living. I imagine life after ecocide. My side-eyed observations are served red-hot.

We both want a better world, so we’re allies. I hope he sells some books and inspires people to care. But parts of In Trees are edutainment and nihilism looking for a villain. Here are two: capitalism and the Epstein class. True, Moor eventually admits that capitalism is a problem: “The goal is to sacrifice carbon capitalism itself, and to supplant it with something wiser.” But these remarks land as tactical afterthoughts, fig leaves of radicalism that form a weak response to Andreas Malm’s provocative How to Blow Up a Pipeline, from 2021.

Moor found Malm’s work in a tree-house library of protesters trying to stop the TMX pipeline expansion in B.C. — and just in time to lend his experiential storyline the gravitas it was missing. He was relieved to learn that Malm doesn’t mean what his title says. Just the same, Moor quickly dispatches with Malm’s call for targeted destruction of new pipeline builds and luxury emitters like megayachts, private jets, and big trucks. Moor didn’t go to Sweden to interview Malm, even though he flew off elsewhere with the slightest of excuses while writing In Trees. And he doesn’t report on what the protesters might think about the book, including one who — I do declare! — went to Yale and is a professor at “one of the nation’s best universities.” Why not? Moor fears losing “the moral and symbolic high ground” to Malm’s “positive radical flank,” which is missing from the tool box of climate activism today.

His fear is unfounded. Malm never claims that the pacifism of a Bill McKibben or the civil disobedience of Moor’s new tree-sitter friends is useless, and Moor’s characterization of Malm’s argument is misleading. No one wants violence, least of all progressives. Malm just insists that we’ve forgotten, as activists, that successful revolutionary politics has always included ugly tactics eschewed by the pathologically polite. But with no fight, you get no concessions from power. Ever.

So Moor is right that we need new stories, new ways of thinking, new ways of being. And his closing exploration of Indigenous cultures, decolonial complexities, and our “uprooted worldview”— ideas that deepen his thoughts about relational ethics — is the best part of this volume. But it’s an ethical prescription in search of a politics. Try this: Left populism, an anti-capitalist thinking of the people, by the people, and for the people. A politics of real democracy for the 99 percent.

In Trees isn’t for everyone. If you think that striking out on adventures to meet interesting people in far-flung and often exotic locales, then embracing civil disobedience to save trees and the planet so that you can write up the results for articles and books is a winning formula for avoiding mass extinction, then you’ll love it. If your tastes run toward National Geographic meets The New Yorker, then this is for you. But if you don’t, then read Malm and celebrate the brave people doing the dirty, forgotten, revolutionary work of saving us from ecocide. Better yet, read both: we’ll need a big tent if our politics is ever going to change anything.

To his credit, Moor is occasionally self-critical about the project of thinking like a tree. He’s also critical about the romanticism and exclusionary vision of environmental icons like John Muir, about our pervasive but wrong-headed ideas about human nature, and about the foibles and failings of some of his interview subjects. Even as a critic, though, he’s not able to see the forest for the trees, the ethico-political heft for the experiential awakening.

As for the supposed utility of occupying the symbolic high ground, like the arborescent thinking accomplished while sleeping poorly in an abandoned chimpanzee nest high up in the trees of Tanzania, it’s the last gasp of a privileged and careless class. Bless their hearts. They should enjoy their self-improvement and lousy sleep while they can. Because we’ll need more collectivism, better politics, and less classist self-exploration if we ever hope to get out of this era alive — and with some kind of civil society intact.