The Wisdom of Trees: A conversation with David Macauley and Laura Pustarfi

What are some new ways of thinking of trees and forests in the environmental humanities? How can we start to think of trees more sustainably and respectfully? Do we have ethical obligations to trees, and what are these?

Explore these and other questions with David Macauley and Laura Pustarfi, editors of the new book The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality published by SUNY Press.

The event will be moderated by Plant Initiative board member Keith Williams.

About The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality

This book contains 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.

Join us for this free interactive program!

There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. This free program will be livestreamed with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.

About David Macauley

David Macauley, PhD, is Academy Professor and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Penn State University, Brandywine. He has taught at Oberlin College, Emerson College, and New York University and was a Mellon Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Macauley is the author of Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas; editor of Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, co-editor of The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives; and co-editor of The Wisdom of Trees. He has published articles on ethics, aesthetics, politics, Greek philosophy, and Continental thought.

Macauley is completing a book entitled Walking the Earth: Philosophical and Environmental Foot Notes; putting together a collection of philosophical parables and myths called Re-storying Wisdom; and working on a book project entitled Discovering Beauty in Dark Times.

He currently lives in West Philadelphia, where he bikes, gardens, competes in distance races, and renovates a Victorian house but is relocating to Eureka, California this summer. He enjoys running beneath trees in forests, parks, and cemeteries.

About Laura Pustarfi

Laura Pustarfi, PhD, is adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her scholarly work examines trees and plants in Western thought with particular focus on philosophical literature in order to explore an arboreal and vegetal ontology and ethics that respects plants themselves.

Laura has presented at several academic conferences including those of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP), TORCH Oxford, the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition (PACT), and the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE).

She is Director of the Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research Certificate Program at CIIS and is responsible for the administration of the certificate program training mental health professionals in the field of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area on occupied Indigenous territory of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo, represented by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria.