Trees

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 15 February 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Have you ever hugged a tree? In episode 45 of Overthink, Ellie and David head into nature to explore the philosophical side of trees. Often, trees have been ignored, even as they populate so much of the space around us. Why did Socrates say he could learn nothing from trees, and why did Nietzsche write so romantically about them? Deleuze and Guattari criticize trees for being too vertically organized, but Michael Marder argues that they're far more cooperative than we ever imagined. In that spirit, trees are clearly alive, but Peter Wohlleben goes as far as to say they could possibly be intelligent, and even have language of their own. Does that mean that trees deserve rights? Ellie and David get into the root of it in episode 45!

Works Discussed

Richard Powers, The Overstory
Plato, Phaedrus
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Aristotle, De Anima
Plotinus, Enneads
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life
Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate
Massimo E. Maffei and Wilhelm Boland, “The Silent Scream of the Lima Bean”
Monica Gagliano et al., “Learning by association in plants”
Monica Gagliano et al., “Plants learn and remember: let’s get used to it”
Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness
Christopher Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing?”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Michael Marder, “In (Philosophical) Defense of Trees”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm David Pena Guzman.
0:08.6	And I'm Ellie Anderson.
0:10.2	Welcome to Overthink.
0:12.0	The podcast were two friends, who are also professors,
0:15.0	put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
0:18.6	Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
0:30.0	The planet lost an area of tree cover, larger than the United Kingdom in 2020,
0:42.9	including more than 4.2 million hectares of primary tropical forests.
0:47.6	Yet another in the litany of very depressing tree statistics.
0:53.2	There are no more old growth forests in much of the world today.
0:56.9	And a study found that between 1915,
1:03.8	the entire world lost roughly a third of its old growth forest. And it seems that by the year 2030, we might only have about 10% of rainforests left, and it all is very likely to disappear in the next 100 years anyways.
1:16.6	This makes me want to go out and hug a tree.
1:19.6	Ellie, the philosopher, tree hugger.
1:22.6	No, I actually legit love tree hugging.
1:26.6	This is about to sound super California.
1:29.5	But my mom always encouraged me to hug trees as a kid.
1:32.1	She loves to hug trees herself.
1:34.1	And the feeling of hugging a tree is just so wonderful.
1:41.4	I mean, it really feels like you're hugging another being, right?
1:44.1	I mean, you are. Well, you are hugging another being. I know, it really feels like you're hugging another being, right? I mean, you are.
1:44.6	Well, you are hugging another being. I know, but I feel like tree hugging gets a bad rap.
	...

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