Robert Moor Climbed a Tree. He Stayed There for a Decade.

By Andy — 2026-09-10 — Literary News

There's a tree near Robert Moor's house. He climbed it one afternoon almost on impulse.

What happened next became a decade-long project that bounces across continents, through history books, into tree-houses occupied by activists, and back to first principles about what it means to be alive at all.

The climb itself was meant to be casual. Moor had done this as a kid. Most of us have. Then something shifts—we stop. The reasons blur together: you get bigger, busier, afraid of looking stupid. Near his home in Halfmoon Bay, Canada, he felt it immediately. Vertigo, yes, but something meaner: the creeping sense that you're doing something pointless.

Weak.

This narrowing business, as it turns out, is neurology. The brain starts maximally wired at around age two, then spends the rest of your life pruning those connections away. Less neural clutter. More efficiency. More cautiousness. More fitting into the grooves you've already carved.

Moor became obsessed with the question of why some people stay branchy and others just... don't. William Wordsworth, the great Romantic poet who made half the modern world fall in love with nature, is a case study in collapse. He was brilliant early. Radical. Open. Then success came, and tragedy, and a kind of moral freeze-frame. By forty, he'd lost the plot. Ralph Waldo Emerson met him and thought: this man is narrow. Critics reckon if Wordsworth had died at thirty, almost all his best work would still exist. The rest of his life was just marking time.

Leo Tolstoy went the opposite direction.

He taught himself tennis in his seventies. Swam in icy seas. He fought a bear, actually, and carried the scar on his face. What kept him branchy, Moor suggests, was something less flashy than daring: a deep regard for people, especially the powerless. That devotion, that constant reaching toward others, kept him from the narrowness that swallows most of us by middle age.

The architecture of this matters for the environmentalism conversation, which is where Moor's book—also called *In Trees*—does something darker and more useful than you'd expect from a meditation on nature. The giant sequoia, for instance, was basically the poster child that built modern conservation. Those trees inspired such an overwhelming sense of awe that it moved people to protect them. To create the very concept of wilderness preservation. But something got lost in translation. That spiritual reach. That sense of being broken open.

Moor found himself at an oil pipeline protest in British Columbia, living in tree houses with activists, reading Andreas Malm's *How to Blow Up a Pipeline* in a forest library. He'd come to write about trees. He stayed to watch what hope actually looks like when it has nowhere left to run.

There's a tension the book doesn't quite resolve—actually, that's not quite right. It doesn't try to resolve it. Moor seems more interested in pointing out that our environmental movement might have taken a wrong turn somewhere, traded branching for narrowness, traded the experience of being undone by nature for talking points and carbon accounting.

Not that those things don't matter.

But they're not enough. The narrowness is contagious. It spreads from us into the way we think about saving anything at all, and by then the tree climbing has stopped long before we ever got old enough to understand what we'd lost.

Source: "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." — Literary Review of Canada