This 1-unit course was offered at CIIS for Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness as well as Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion students in the Summer 2022 semester.

Course Description:

Trees and forests as indispensable ecological partners have been central to human life since its inception. While, in Western culture, trees have often been treated as mere resource or scenery, nevertheless trees have their own unique modes of being separate from human purposes, and recent research increasingly demonstrates trees to have capacities including communication, intelligence, and agency. How would human interactions with trees and forests change if these arboreal capacities were recognized? In this course, we will examine such questions in an interdisciplinary and integral manner by attending to arboreality in Western thought and culture. We will discuss key ideas and thinkers in the emerging field of plant studies or plant humanities, including Matthew Hall (Plants as Persons), Michael Marder (Plant-Thinking), Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), and Monica Gagliano (Thus Spoke the Plant), and connect thinking on trees and forests globally the devastating environmental consequences of deforestation and climate change. Theoretical coursework will be grounded in our own personal and embodied experiences of trees, forests, and arboreality in all of its dimensions.