@robertmoor.com
essayist, journalist, wandering-around-and-looking-at-stuff-ist books: On Trails; (upcoming) In Trees. magazine work: The New Yorker, Outside, NYMag, New York Times Book Review, Emergence, Lapham's Quarterly, n+1, Granta website: robertmoor.com
βThe tree house was not designed for beauty, or enjoyment, or whimsy. It was a tool.β Robert Moor writes about the summer he spent living in a tree house to fight against climate change.
newyorkermag.visitlink.me/SAp8Ks
Honored to have an excerpt from my book, "In Trees" (out 4/7) in the pages of this week's
@newyorker.com
This piece is about the summer I spent in a treehouse to blockade an oil pipeline, and why some protest movements change history, while others fade quietly into obscurity.
Ha, Iβll ask my dad and report back. Knowing him and his UT buddiesβthey once got Janice Joplin to play one of their college parties!βI have a feeling he has some storiesβ¦
We *just* binged LD as well. (Turns out my dad was college buddies with Bill Wittliff, & he was rhapsodizing about how it was the best series ever made.) Love the book, so naturally I loved the series, but man, a few scenes (e.g. the snakes) veer, unexpectedly, right into the realm of self-parody.
This may very well be true. It seems like the algorithm throttles engagement to almost zero, unless itβs a viral-ish tweet.
My guess is that, of the 14,000 followers I once amassed on there, there are *maybe* 100 left who might (somehow) see my tweets and buy my book. But 100 is more than zero, soβ¦
And thatβs not even getting into the (immediately noticeable!) political shift fasc-ward
Easily half of my TL is now profiles like this, whom Iβve never followed, who havenβt been RTed by any of my followers, and who may not even been real humans, posting TikTok vids and AI generated slop. Just a purely algorithmic unterwelt.
Preparing to spam my few remaining followers with shameless book promotion (and an excerpt in TNY coming out Monday!), I'm back on twitter for the first time in ages, and⦠man it's gotten weird. The people who've stayed there are the frog in the boiling water. It's melting their gd brains.
From your (digital) mouth to Godβs (presumably, very large) ear!
Now, a younger version of me might have felt compelled to point out that I donβt really consider what I do βnature writing.β But thankfully in my old age Iβve grown wise enough to know when to shut up and just take a damn compliment when I get one.
Just got the happy news that βIn Treesβ has been given a starred review by Publishers Weekly!
βSynthesizing reportage and philosophy, Moorβs nature writing is beautiful and refreshingly original,β they write.
β¨
www.publishersweekly.com/9781476739250
whereof one cannot skeet, thereof one must remain silent
IN TREES! Look at this beauty. I love that the Table of Contents is replaced by a TREE! Congrats @robertmoor.com, canβt wait to get lost in these pages.
Coming April 7th. Pre-order here: ptreyesbooks.com/book/9781476... #booksky #naturewriting #trees π
One should be in the mail!
Been looking forward to @robertmoor.comβs newest for a few years now! Publishes early April.
Honestly, thatβs a book I wish heβd finished. His apparent interest in the Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti figure as a way of taking Indigenous cosmologies and storytelling traditions seriously, as opposed to just as a goofy cryptid seen in grainy tabloid photos, seems really philosophically promising to meβ¦
I finished reading this book last week and I still find myself thinking about parts of it every day. Itβs quite simply one of the best biographies Iβve ever read, about one of the most fascinating writers of the 20th century.
Hats off to @lancerichardson.bsky.social for this Herculean achievement.
Eight years ago, I drove to Sag Harbor and sat down for tea with Maria Matthiessen, telling her I wanted to write a book about her late husband, Peter. She warned me against it: a Sisyphean task! I pushed on anyway. (Maria was right.) And today, miraculously, is publication day for TRUE NATURE.
This is one of the sharpest, most thoughtful adventure memoirs Iβve read in years. Reminded me of McPheeβs Coming Into The Country, but written in a time of melting glaciers and melting brains.
www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/ben-w...
βTis!
A collage of the covers of six recent books: Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane Becoming Earth by Ferris Jabr Living on Earth by Peter Godfrey-Smith Eat, Poop, Die by Joe Roman The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts Darwinizing Gaia by W. Ford Doolittle
𧡠I see my book Becoming Earth as one part of a larger emerging movement: a resurgence of holistic, planetary-scale thinking; an evolving Gaia as a modern coevolutionary framework for understanding Earth; and a renewed recognition of the animacy, agency, and rights of more-than-human living systems
This is the kind of review every good author dreams of one day receivingβdeep, careful, tough, but ultimately geared not toward scoring cheap points but rather toward illuminating the dark spaces between the sentences and the authorβs corpus as a whole. A real feat.
Also excited for this, in Vancouver, on June 18th.
writersfest.bc.ca/event/robert...
Is A River Alive by Robert Macfarlane
I finished this book two weeks ago and have been thinking about it ever sinceβa brilliant, turbulent, troubling feat of planetary writing.
There are passages in here that will freeze the air in your chest, and ideas that will crack your dead, calcified heart right open.
A big deal. And if you want to understand how a bunch of Virginians re-engineered Dominion's incentives such that building the country's biggest offshore wind project made more sense than building Appalachia's biggest fossil gas pipeline, I've got a book for you...
Thanks for this! Super helpful.
Having trouble finding sources that break the data down this way. But (assuming Iβm not misreading you) the idea that our cozy little woodstoves are, in the aggregate, emitting more CO2 each year than all our power plants is deeply disturbing.
@bsaxifrage.bsky.social Love your work. I have a quick q: when you write βthe number one use of harvested wood in Canada is burning it for energyββis this a reference to firewood to heat homes, or wood-pellet/biomass power plants? Or both combined? And of the two, which emits more net c02 annually?
When it comes to climate change, industrial logging in Canada is part of the problem, not the solution.
