Lecture and Book Signing Event
219 S. 6th Street, Busch Room
Thursday, April 22, 2027 at 6:00 PM
To truly grasp the wisdom of a tree, you need to begin thinking like one…
From the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller On Trails comes a “gorgeous, honest, and soulful” (Bryan Stevenson) journey through the wilds of nature and the gnarls of history, exploring how trees—from the mightiest sequoia to the tiniest bonsai—can teach us to grow wise. One day, on a whim, Robert Moor set out to climb a tree near his home—unwittingly embarking on what would become a decadelong adventure of intellectual and spiritual transformation. Pursuing the hidden wisdom of trees, he’d scale to the top of a giant sequoia with Sir David Attenborough, trudge through swamps in Papua to reach a treehouse-dwelling tribe of huntergatherers, and travel to a remote research camp in Tanzania, where he’d spend one very uncomfortable night sleeping in a chimpanzee nest. Galvanized by a radical new outlook on both our gnarled past and our ever-branching future, he’d ultimately fall in with a ragtag clan of climate activists risking everything to halt construction of an oil pipeline and save an old-growth forest.
Along the way, Moor would learn the art of “tree-thinking,” which, he discovers, has the power to break open some of humanity’s oldest questions: How do we set down roots in an increasingly chaotic world? Can we ever learn to pursue our future in the farsighted, entangled manner of an ancient forest? A witty, relentlessly curious excursion through philosophy, history, science, and our far-flung world, what begins as an ode to the miracle of trees blossoms into a joyous, daring, and fiercely hopeful effort to “arborize humanity.”
In Trees, which was recently excerpted in The New Yorker and National Geographic, has been hailed as “brilliant” by Robert Macfarlane, "deeply thoughtful" by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and "the most life affirming book I've read in a long time" by John Vaillant.
Author Robert Moor