The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality
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.

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.

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The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality
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.

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.

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The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality

The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality

The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality

The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality

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Overview

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.

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798855802702
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Publication date: 06/01/2025
Series: Suny Environmental Philosophy and Ethics
Pages: 472
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.19(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Foreword
Joan Maloof

Introduction: The Wisdom of Trees
David Macauley and Laura Pustarfi

Trees as Beings

Interstice: Redwood

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

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

5. Vegetal Imagination: Schelling and Whitehead as Exemplars of Marder's Plant-Thinking
Matthew David Segall

Trees and Time

Interstice: Rings

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

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

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

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

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
Contributors
Index

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