Amit Zohran's "Oakollective"

OAKOLLECTIVE

Conversations with Forests, Healing through Relationships and the Art of Being Wild

Prof. Amit Raphael Zoran

If you were to come across this lavishly illustrated work while browsing idly in a bookstore, you might jump to the conclusion that it’s another of those celebratory books about the wonder of trees. That would be a mistake. It does indeed celebrate trees and our relationship with them, but in a much more profound way than the average coffee-table book.

Professor Amit Zoran is a Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s School of Engineering and Computer Science, and his professional background is very much in digital technology, but he has come to understand its limits to creativity. In particular, he came to be concerned that our minds, originally shaped by the natural complexity of nature, are more and more forced to function within the constraints imposed by algorithms and the machines that host them. He wondered, as forests were one of humanity's earliest homes, would some kind of communion with them help to re-establish the link lost by our dependence on computers?

During an unsettling period in his life, Amit travelled to the Peruvian Amazon and to a shaman, Leo, who had been recommended to him. His goal was to investigate the plant-based healing regimes that the Amazon basin was becoming known for. Leo prescribed a decoction of the bark of the chuchuwasha tree, Monteverdia (formerly Maytenus) macrocarpa, explaining that Amit’s body would gradually absorb the scent and energy of the tree to the point where the forest would see no distinction between him and the chuchuwasha. Later in his stay, during an ayahuasca ceremony, Amit experienced a profound sense of communion: he had, in some way, become the tree. In his own words:

Early humans naturally sensed fine cues in their surroundings as messages from living forces or spirits, a way of seeing that modern society often dismisses as mere superstition. However, these animistic interpretations may reflect sophisticated intuitive perceptual mechanisms, finely attuned to ecological relationships. Naming wind as spirit or ants as messengers doesn't represent naive mysticism but a conscious recalibration of perception, intentionally assigning agency to the natural world . . .  

This perceptual flexibility, this ability to soften boundaries between self and environment, opens pathways to recognizing forms of intelligence beyond human-centered frameworks. Perhaps nowhere is this more profound than in our relationship with trees, those ancient beings whose mode of existence unfolds on vastly different timescales and through modalities unlike our own.

After his experience in South American rainforests, he next turned his attention to Israel and the Mediterranean, to see if he could gain the same level of connection to trees in cultural landscapes. The Mediterranean basin has the world’s oldest agricultural history, and the land has been shaped by human activity and a dry climate for millennia. While the rainforest epitomizes abundance, these landscapes speak of resilience, of hunkering down and waiting for the rain.

He acquired an intuitive understanding of a tree’s relationship with its environment through spending long periods contemplating a Tabor oak, Quercus ithaburensis. This led him to research the role of oak in ancient societies, finding that they were almost universally woven into the fabric of those cultures that lived with them. The “sacred grove” was a feature of many of these early societies, but the spread of monotheism led to a shift of concepts of the divine, away from the land into temples and other created spaces, so that the direct connection between trees and the sacred was broken. However, indirect connections often remain, as in the trees associated with the tombs of saints or (a personal thought) the yews in British churchyards. As Amit puts it, “The dialogue between humans and trees has not ended, but it has grown distant, waiting to be noticed again.”

Wanting to experience primeval temperate forests, he travelled to Białowieża Forest, a vast lowland woodland spanning eastern Poland and western Belarus. Here, through encounters with armed border guards searching for refugees from Belarus, in the land of his family’s roots, he endured memories of genocidal hatred. You can read his moving account of that experience here.

In a search for more intact Mediterranean oak forests than survive in Israel he went to the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, home to the endemic golden oak (Q. alnifolia), to the Cyprus gall oak (Q. infectoria subsp. veneris), and to the melancholic Anatolian black pines (Pinus nigra subsp. pallasiana). There he felt a sense of foreboding that perhaps foreshadowed events: he returned to Israel on October 7, 2023, to the outbreak of the war in Gaza.

There isn’t space here to give a full account of the further encounters with trees, but some of the more notable moments include: meeting the wild pistachio, Pistacia atlantica in the Negev desert; encounters with fireflies and a black bear in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the USA; the cloud forests of Costa Rica with their massive oaks, in particular Q. costaricensis and Q. bumelioides (syn. Q. copeyensis); investigating an ongoing question in oak taxonomy in Mata de Albergaria, an old-growth oak forest in Portugal’s Peneda Gerês National Park.

Each chapter of the book concludes with a practical exercise—what the author calls an invitation—to help deepen a reader’s connection with trees and forests. Many IOS members may feel that they already have that connection, but most of us were probably schooled in the reductionist, biologically-based understanding of trees. This book offers a different approach, “one instinctive and embodied,” in contrast to the “analytical and planned.” I hope that Amit’s wish, that his communion with forests would re-establish the link lost by dependence on computers, has been granted. For this reader the book highlighted the fact that there is no one "correct" way to appreciate trees. It also endorsed a profound sense of gratitude for a life spent in their company.

To purchase Oakcollective (hardcopy, paperback, or digital interactive flipbook), visit the book's website here.