The Wisdom of Trees Now Published!
Angel Oak, Johns Island, South Carolina. Image by Andrew Shelley.
The Wisdom of Trees is now published and available as a hardcover or e-book!
See below for links to purchase or request a copy for an academic course or review. I encourage you to ask your library about a copy of this book, especially if you are connected with a university or college.
About The Wisdom of Trees:
Pioneering essays that reveal the significance of new interdisciplinary understandings of trees and forests, especially in terms of their philosophical and ecological dimensions and their importance for addressing the climate emergency.
Description
This is the first book to apply philosophical thinking to trees. Through a series of sixteen diverse essays by leading scholars and writers, along with an in-depth introduction to the key issues and ideas, it examines the new and emerging understanding of trees in science and society. Contributors show how these developments encourage a revisioning of philosophical thought and a more sustainable relationship with trees and forests—a reconceptualization with important ecological and social implications for responding to deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, and the climate emergency. The interdisciplinary contributions in this collection investigate the many interconnected dimensions of arboreality, focusing on subjects related to time, mind, truth, memory, being, beauty, goodness, silence, wisdom, personhood, and death. The volume engages in a conversation about why trees matter, how they can best be protected, our obligations to them, and even what or who they are. Most of the chapters are informed by natural history or ecological science and many share a particular emphasis on continental philosophy and the environmental humanities.
David Macauley is Academy Professor and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Penn State University. Laura Pustarfi is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Religion as well as Director of the Certificate Program at the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
For scholars, click to request a desk or examination copy, or to request a media copy for review.
Review:
"This richly varied collection offers a fascinating path through a forest of ruminations on trees from a wide range of perspectives. Replete with vivid insights into the arboreal universe, the disciplinary range of the contributions is remarkably broad and their topics even more so. This is a unique contribution."
— Arnold Berleant, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, C. W. Post Center, Long Island University
Table of Contents:
Foreword — Joan Maloof
Introduction: The Wisdom of Trees — David Macauley and Laura Pustarfi
Trees as Beings
Interstice: Redwood (LP)
1. Arboreality: Trees as Ontologically Valuable Beings — Laura Pustarfi
2. In the Beginning She Was a Redwood: Rethinking Ontology through an Ecofeminist Materialism — Kimberly Carfore
The Language of Trees
Interstice: The Forest (LP)
3. Speaking Trees: The Language of Nature and Arboreal Communication — Luke Fischer
4. The Silence of Primeval Forests — Daniel O’Dea Bradley
Thinking (Like) Trees
Interstice: Arborescence (DM)
5. Vegetal Imagination: Schelling and Whitehead as Exemplars of Marder’s Plant-Thinking —Matthew David Segall
Trees and Time
Interstice: Rings (LP)
6. “Old Trees Hold Memory”: Aboriginal Australian Perspectives on Memory, Trauma, and Witnessing in the Arboreal World — John Charles Ryan
7. Birth and Death in Trees— Alphonso Lingis
The Place and Ecology of Trees
Interstice: Banyan (DM)
8. The Place of Trees: Taking Trees over the Edge — Michael Marder and Edward S. Casey
9. Organisms and Environments: What Alexander von Humboldt Learned from Trees — Dalia Nassar
Trees and Aesthetics
Interstice: Cypress (DM)
10. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Tree: Appreciating the Beauty of the Arboreal World — David Macauley
11. Do Trees Sing? — David Rothenberg
Trees and Ethics
Interstice: Apple (DM)
12. The Ponderosa Pines of Gold Creek: Discerning Arboreal Values for an All-Too-Human World — James Hatley
13. Wise Trees: Exemplars in the Arts of East Asia — Mara Miller
Legal and Political Trees
Interstice: Eucalyptus (LP)
14. Philosophers with a Peculiarly Instructive Aversion toward Trees — Sam Mickey
15. Trees as Legal Persons — Eric W. Orts
Afterword: The Sequoia Archipelago — Don Hanlon Johnson
Suggestions for Further Reading
