MICHAEL PERLMAN (1957–1998)
Michael Perlman was an imaginal psychologist, an originator of Archetypal Ecology, and a tireless supporter of environmental causes who taught psychology and environmental philosophy at Norwich University. He is the author of Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima and Hiroshima Forever: The Ecology of Mourning.
THE POWER OF TREES
The Reforesting of the Soul
Second edition, 254 pages, $22
ISBN: 978-0-88214-986-8
Kindle/Apple Books, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-987-5
As we witness the daily destruction of forests, a sadness afflicts the roots of the soul. This book by the psychologist and ecologist MICHAEL PEARLMAN is the first to connect trees’ symbolism with the personal meaning of their beauty—and their loss in hurricanes, forest fires, clear-cut timberlands, and wars. Perlman goes beyond the psychological interpretations of trees in myths and fairy tales. Rather, like Studs Terkel, he interviews and reports what actual people think and feel about the trees they know. Their words resonate alongside quotes from the writings of Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Mari Evans, Homer, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, C. G. Jung, Aldo Leopold, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Tim O’Brien, Rainer Maria Rilke, Harold Searles, J. R. R. Tolkien, Michel Tournier, and Walt Whitman.
The cover of this new edition features one from a series of “spirited” tree images by the Japanese photographer TOKIHIRO SATO made between 2008 and 2009 in the Shirakami-Sanchi and Hakkoda mountains in northern Honshu, Japan. Sato’s Trees continue his unique photographic technique he calls “photo respiration,” a reference to the meditative quality of repetitive choreographed gestures he enacts in front of the camera by making lengthy exposures lasting from one to three hours while moving throughout the described landscape flashing a mirror at the sun and thereby reflecting its light into the camera lens.
The new edition also features large initial letters that drop below and rises above the first line of each chapter created with the font NYC Trees, which is based on the New York City Tree Alphabet designed by the visual artist and environmental activist KATIE HOLTEN. The New York City Tree Alphabet is an alphabetical planting palette that allows us to rewrite the urban landscape by planting messages around the city with real trees.
