Yearning for nature's embrace
Encountering profound beauty, the philosopher Iris Murdoch argues, is an "unselfing" experience. It can pull us out of ourselves, make us forget ourselves, and free us to be in service to something else. Not only is the encounter with the beautiful object life-giving to us, but it can also move us to dedicate ourselves to protecting the object. "As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life," Elaine Scarry says, "so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life."
Something like this marked the life of my latest podcast guest at an early age. When she was a child, Nalini Nadkarni found solace and a profound sense of safety in the branches of maple trees that lined her childhood home. In those treetops, she experienced a connection so deep that it led her to make a promise: to protect and care for the trees that had offered her refuge. This early vow became a guiding force of her life, leading her to pioneer the study of tree canopies and become one of the nation's leading advocates for the importance of trees.
Dr. Nadkarni has written more than 150 scientific papers and several books on the composition and ecological roles of canopy-dwelling communities, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. She also engages with those who do not or cannot gain access to science education. Her work is featured in journals ranging from Science to Playboy, and in public media such as Science Friday, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and RadioLab. In 2023, the National Geographic Society named her as one of their ten “Explorers at Large.” Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the AAAS Award for Public Engagement, the National Science Foundation Award for Public Service, The Rachel Carson Award for Conservation, The Wilson Award for the Advancement of Social Justice, and the Archie Carr Medal for Conservation.
In our conversation, Dr. Nadkarni describes the various methods used to access the forest canopy, from climbing ropes to construction cranes, and the discoveries she made about the interconnectedness of trees and canopy-dwelling plants. Nalini emphasizes the importance of understanding the systems and processes of ecosystems in order to make predictions and inform conservation efforts. She shares her experiences working in rainforests, including the dangers and challenges she faced. Dr. Nadkarni also talks about her public engagement work, such as the creation of "Treetop Barbie," and her efforts to share her research with religious communities. Additionally, she discusses her work with prisoners and artists. She emphasizes the power of conversation and encourages us to engage with others about the importance of trees and nature.
Dr. Nadkarni also shares with us the deeper longings that have propelled her work:
- for connection to nature: Nalini’s childhood experience with trees reflects a yearning for refuge and a sense of belonging and safety.
- to protect beauty: Encountering the beauty of trees sparked in her a deep desire to protect them. We yearn to preserve and share what we find beautiful.
- for exploration: Her pursuit of canopy research was driven by a yearning to explore the unknown, seeking out the beauty of uncharted realms in nature.
- for understanding: Her discovery of canopy roots exemplifies a deep longing to understand the interconnectedness of life.
- to make a significant contribution: Nalini’s scientific contributions and public engagement reflect our universal yearning to contribute to something greater than ourselves.
You can listen to our conversation below (in two parts) or watch the full video on YouTube. An unedited transcript follows.
Transcript:
Brandon: The last time I saw you, we were at this lovely dinner that I had hosted in Utah on beauty. We were talking about stories of childhood experience of beauty, and I really was struck by the story you shared, of one of your maybe early memories of encountering beauty, particularly the beauty of trees. I'm wondering if you could share that story with us.
Nalini: Yeah, sure. Well, I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland in suburbia. But my parents had a home that had these eight maple trees that lined the driveway. And for some reason, as a kid, I just really glommed onto those trees as they're being my place. I had four brothers and sisters. We had sort of a chaotic household. My dad is from India, a Hindu, a scientist. My mother is from Brooklyn, New York, an Orthodox Jew. And so we had pets and chores and homework. And so those times in the trees when I would go out and choose one of the eight maple trees after school to climb became kind of my place. My siblings didn't get up there. Certainly, my parents didn't get up there. And so I think I started climbing it almost as a refuge, as like, okay, I need to get away from the house for a little while.
But I think there was also a time, a moment, that I described to you and the others at that dinner where I was struck not only by a tree top as an escape but a tree top as a place and a place of curiosity, of beauty, of refuge, of offering others refuge. I remember this moment in the fall where the leaves, I realized, were dancing. They were creating their own dance of moving from the top of the tree through the wind. Scarlet gold leaves moving to the ground to create this river of gold on our driveway, covering the ugly gravel of the driveway. It struck me then, and that moment has stayed with me throughout my long, long life of working with trees. That trees are places of all of those things: refuge, beauty, offering of help and a sense of place. I guess for me, since I was the only one who climbed trees, there was a sense of self. There was a sense of, "This is my place. This is where I belong. This is where I am protected by being held by the strong limbs of these trees." Maybe some of that was missing in other parts of my life for different reasons. But that's why I did take a little oath when I was eight or nine years old saying, "Well, trees have been great for me. When I'm grown up, I want to do something that will help protect and be a refuge for trees as well."
Brandon: Wow.
Nalini: And those threads have continued because I think they were laid down in such a strong way when I was a little kid. I think as so many grown ups end up doing things that originated in their childhood, I don't think I'm unique at all in that regard. But that sure was a strong dose of treedom that helped me move towards my path now and what I chose to do.
Brandon: Wow. That's extraordinary. I think it's true about encountering beauty. There's a philosopher. Elaine Scarry says when we encounter beauty, something that's beautiful, we want to protect it. We want to share it. We want to preserve it and make sure it's available to others and so on, right? Particularly, I think encountering the beauty of nature is one of those things that moves us. So when you were young, did you say I want to go and become a biologist?
Nalini: Well, you know, that's really funny, Brandon. When I was a little girl, especially, I was a little girl back in the 1960s when there weren't that many women in science. And I was not even aware of, you know, I didn't become aware of the field of ecology until I went to college and took my first Biology 101 class. There was an ecologist talking about how people can just sit and observe nature and make a living doing it. So when I was that eight-year-old girl, I thought, oh, if I'm going to protect trees, I'm going to have to become a firefighter or a forest ranger or something that would help me directly protect trees. And as I said, it wasn't really until college and my encounter with higher education and academics that I became aware that we can help and protect nature by understanding it, by doing research on it, by sharing that knowledge with others, and by promoting good management or good stewardship of trees through our increased knowledge of trees. And so it really wasn't until college that I realized that that would be a potential pathway for me to fulfill that childhood oath of protecting trees.
Brandon: Wow. Then you went on to become one of the pioneers in the study of tree canopies, right?
Nalini: Yeah.
Brandon: Could you talk about what that was like, the beginnings in that field? How do you sort of embark upon studying something that no one pays attention to?
Nalini: Yeah, again, many people who are pioneers in their fields understand this. I think for me, it came, well, certainly, from this love of tree climbing and this desire to do something for trees and forests. At that time, this is the beginning of graduate school, where, as you know, everyone who goes and gets a PhD has to pick some sort of specialty within that general field. I was on a field course in Costa Rica. That was offered by a group called The Organization for Tropical Studies for graduate students to introduce them to the field of Tropical Ecology. I remember very well the first walk that we took through the tropical cloud forest of Monteverde Costa Rica where I ended up doing pretty much all of my research since then. My eyes just went up to the canopy, to the tree tops, as I think all of our eyes do when we go into a forest where our eyes and our spirit are drawn upward. I began seeing these plants: orchids, ferns, bromeliads and birds that were high above the forest floor. I asked my professors, like, what is going on up there? Shouldn't we be up there studying where sunlight turns into leaves and stored energy, and where birds are interacting and monkeys are running around, and plants are reproducing? They said, "Well, Nalini, we don't know how to get up into the canopy. We don't really know much about it." There's really no research that's going to— in fact, the canopy at that time was called "the last biotic frontier." When I realized that, I thought, well, that's my job, isn't it, as a scientist? It's to pursue studies of what is not known. And here was a very clear area of the forest which I loved. It involved climbing trees which I loved. And so it turned out to be the sort of the perfect matrimony between what I always wanted to find out about for the sake of filling holes in science and illuminating the black box of what was then the forest canopy with the activities that I actually was sort of preconditioned for.
And so there were some resistance just from my own academic graduate committee, saying, well, there's no literature on the canopy. We don't know anything about it. It's going to be impossible to get funding for the canopy work. It's just Tarzan and Jane stuff. But I sort of persisted. There was some intuitive sense, I think. Although many scientists, including myself, sometimes dismiss intuition as a way of doing science, we believe in testing hypothesis based on facts. There was something intuitive about no I think I need to at least explore the possibility of this as an area of research. That then motivated me to learn about tree climbing and mountain climbing and getting myself up there safely and non-destructively and beginning some very, very preliminary, very basic research. It was really 19th century research of descriptive work. It wasn't experimental. It wasn't modeling. It wasn't always new stuff that was going on in science. It was like, who's up here? How much does it weigh? What is it made of? How much nitrogen is stored up here? It was these really stupid, simple questions that had to be laid down first, which then led and provided the foundation and the groundwork, so to speak, of doing more sophisticated work with experiments, with removing epiphytes, with understanding external disturbances like climate change and invasive plants and isolation and so forth. Those are the questions that I'm working on with my students now. But back then, it was pith helmet basic research of who's up there and and what's going on.
Brandon: How do you get up there? What does it take to — could you describe for us?
Nalini: Oh, yeah, sure. Well, there are many ways to get up there now. The early canopy researchers actually didn't go up in the canopy at all. They used fogging devices to study, say, insect diversity. So they would shoot up this insecticidal fog, harmless to humans but deadly to insects. It would get into the canopy, and these insects would die and sort of rain down and end up in the funnels of these collectors. But I really want you to get up there. It was really, to me, it was like the longing of marine biologists to study the benthos, to study marine organisms where they live, where they behave, where they reproduce, where they interact in the environment where all of that is going on. And scuba gear was invented, and they were able to really look up close and personal, not just what are the organisms. I mean, you can dredge those up really easily. But to understand what's going on with behavior in the environment where they are living was really important to me and to other canopy researchers.
And so we adapted just very simple mountain climbing techniques, treating a tall tree like a tall mountain or a tall rock cliff. We shoot lines up, into the forest canopy, a little thin fishing line with a slingshot or a crossbow or an air gun that goes up. And over the branch, we then tie a nylon cord, a quarter inch nylon cord to that. We pulled that and up and over the branch. Then we tie just a standard nine-millimeter climbing rope. That goes up and over the branch. We tie one end of that off to the trunk. We put on our climbing harnesses that you can get at REI. There are these little devices called descenders. We have one for our hands and one for our seat harness, and we alternate moving those up and down the rope. And so you can basically inch warm up the rope, not hauling yourself up with the strength of your arms but basically standing up, sitting down, standing up, sitting down until you've climbed the rope and you can get access to the branches above you. So it's fairly inexpensive. It's fun. It's not destructive to the tree. Because all you're doing is putting a line up there. You're not putting spikes in there the way the very early researchers used to do. You can put it all in one backpack. And there you are.
Since then, we've also applied other ways of viewing the canopy with walkways from one spot to another. We've been using construction cranes and installing those into old grove forests. There's 17 of those construction cranes that now exist around the world. The French developed a way to use hot air balloons to get up into the forest canopy. Very expensive, and you can't use them in windy places. So they're not very practical, but they sure look great. So really, I would say now, of course, we have a whole array of remote sensing tools. So we can use imagery from space. We can use drones. Those are being used now to fly over at a lower level. We have LiDAR, which is a sort of radar that bounces off the forest floor as well as the treetops. So I would say, amazingly, in the last 40 years, just the course of my own career, I've been able to observe the development of these canopy access techniques that now make canopy access just super accessible, super safe, non-destructive and allows us to ask a range of scientifically and socially important questions about forest canopies.
Brandon: That's amazing, yeah. An image that comes to mind is from The Hobbit movie. I don't know if you've seen this, but it's when after the Lord of the Rings, there was The Hobbit trilogy. There's a scene where Bilbo, I think, climbs all the way up to the top of the trees in this dark Mirkwood Forest and this whole other world of new species and light. Do you recall an early experience or your first experience of being actually on the forest canopy, and what was that like?
Nalini recounts what it was like to experience the forest canopy
Nalini: Yeah, it was exactly like Bilbo. Like, what? Because from the forest floor, you're looking up at this invisible, musically invisible. You see the bottoms of the branches, and then you see some green stuff. Then you see birds sort of popping around. But when you're sitting up in the canopy, on one of these large, beautiful, horizontal tropical tree branches that are covered with this upholstery of diverse orchids and ferns and bromeliads and piperaceae and then this underlying canopy soil underneath those plants, you realize, my gosh. And in the canopy soil are earthworms and larvae and beetles and mycorrhizae and fungi. And so what you're really seeing is this universe of arboreal life that is completely invisible to those who are walking on the forest floor. So I guess in terms of a sense of longing, when we climb into a tropical or temperate rainforest canopy, we satisfy a longing not only for self and connection. We're also, I think, satisfying this idea of curiosity, of discovery, of encountering a world that we were not aware of. And for human beings, I think that's both exciting and fulfilling because it means there's something beyond what we normally see, what we normally know, what we normally encounter. And how beautiful is that?
Brandon: So what surprised you in your research? I imagine there were a lot of pioneering discoveries that you all made. But are there things that stand out to you in particular, maybe the challenge received understanding at the time?
Nalini: Yeah, I'll tell you a really good example, Brandon. And I think this actually goes to a category of longing I think about with trees, which is the longing to connect. Of course, trees themselves are connectors. Because they connect the soil with the heavens, right? In fact, Tagore, he wrote this wonderful, tiny, little poem. Trees are the Earth's endless efforts to speak to the listening heavens. And so when I get ready to climb a tree, I note that I'm on the soil where the roots are, where the water is, where the nutrients in the soil are. But as I ascend up the trunk and go up into the forest canopy, I'm moving into this other space which is connected to the atmosphere. And in turn, the atmosphere, with its rain and its water and mist and cloud and the nutrients that are dissolved in those droplets, they get connected to the soil because the plants and the leaves and these canopy dwelling plants intercept that water and nutrients and funnel them back down to the ground. So trees themselves are these amazing connectors between earth and sky.
One of the discoveries that I made early on in my career made that longing to connect even more concrete. And I'll tell you what happened. So as I said, when I was starting at my work, I was just really asking these stupid basic questions. Like, how much material of these canopy dwelling plants is up there? What's their biomass, and what's their nutrient content? What are they storing up there? And so to answer that question, I had to cut off mats of these canopy dwelling plants and their accompanying soils and drop them through the forest floor. Then I would dry them and weigh them and grind them up and do the analysis and then extrapolate out to say, here's how much biomass is in the forest canopy. Well, as I was pulling those mats of living plants and this canopy soil that accumulates under them that are comprised of the dead and decomposing leaves and stems of the plants that live up there, I began seeing these roots. Roots? What are these roots doing here? They did not belong to the mosses and lichens that lived up there. This is in the temperate rainforest in Washington State. And so I began tracing these roots, and it turned out that they would end up starting in the branches and trunks of the host tree, of the maple trees that I was climbing. I went, like, wait, what? What? Roots are supposed to be down in the ground. But it turned out, as I kept on pulling these mats up, that there were these networks of living roots that belonged to the tree. The tree actually puts out these roots high above the forest floor, 100 feet above the forest floor, into these mats of canopy dwelling plants and their soils.
And so I took samples of them, and I showed them to my major professor. I said, "Hey, what's with these arboreal canopy roots?" They said, like, "What are you talking about? That wasn't canopy roots?" I said, yeah, they are. And so I rented a chainsaw the next time I'm on my study site. I hacked off these roots to show that they actually did originate in the tree trunk itself. I plopped them back on my major professor's desk. And I said, these are the roots I'm talking about. Well, it turn out nobody had ever discovered them before. As I began looking at other tree species, I realized, whoa, this is a generalized phenomenon that's going on where there's a connection between the plants that get their nutrients from the atmosphere. As they die and decompose, they create the soil. The tree becomes aware of that soil and actually gains access to them through these root systems.
We carried out experiments with radionuclides. We found that, in fact, they are capable of conducting. They have the same kinds of mutualisms that below ground roots do, like mycorrhizae, like nitrogen fixation. I put my backpack on and traveled to New Zealand and to Papua New Guinea and found out that there are roots in canopy and trees there as well, wherever there are lots of these canopy plants and canopy soils. So it really is this generalized response to the presence of nutrients in their own canopies. And it became kind of this sense of, well, then there's a mutualistic interaction then between these canopy dwelling plants that people just sort of discounted as not being important and the very trees that support them. And so I feel that my interpretation was that there's sort of a shortcut then in nutrient cycling. The tree doesn't even have to wait till these canopy plants fall to the forest floor. They can get a connection, a direct shortcut connection, to them directly even before they fall to the forest floor.
And so it exemplified for me then that trees have evolved to be connectors with organisms that aren't even themself, like these canopy dwelling plants that they're not really related to. In fact, they have to invest something in supporting them because they have to hold them up. And so to me, it was just a super interesting phenomenon, both from the standpoint of science and botany and forest ecology. But it was also, I think, another example of how when we look at nature carefully, when we really observe, when we really ourselves connect to slow down and look at nature, we can see these examples of how — I wouldn't say nature helps each other out. I think nature is still driven by competition. But that what has evolved is a system where there are benefits to the canopy dwelling plants and to the host trees that support them. We can look at that in our society about how different elements of society are connected to each other, either intentionally or not. But the result is that there's some kind of synergism that's going on.
Brandon: Yeah, wow. It sounds like in both the cases of getting started with studying tree canopies and then studying this root system or canopy soil, you had to face some obstacles. What advice do you have? Because a lot of grad students or even postdocs these days would probably hesitate to go against their major professors and say, "Look. I really want to invest in this area" where you're being discouraged by people who are in the know, right?
Nalini: Yeah.
Brandon: Do you have any recommendations? What does it take? What for you sustained your ability to continue?
Nalini: That's a great question, Brandon. What sort of surprises me, especially now when I go back and read my journals and stuff back when I was 25 years old and was sort of trying to make these decisions and hold my own in a, well, I'll just say, a pretty much male-dominated scientific community — especially at that time in forestry, there just weren't that many women graduate students. It sort of surprises me. Because I grew up with a dad from India who was very authoritarian, where we were taught not to question authority. We were taught to do whatever. Dance and we were supposed to do it. But there must have been something there that was also — maybe this is because both my parents were immigrants that said when you need to do something, when you know that you have to go somewhere, when you are certain of something, then you stick to it even if it seems impossible.
I think that's what happened with me. There was some certainty that happened to me when I was in the canopy of that tropical tree. Seeing this diversity, seeing the possibilities of illuminating the black box of the canopy, that really, really gave me a certainty to overcome my hesitancy to question authority. And if you don't mind, I'd love to read a little poem, one of my favorite poems in the world that states that same idea. It's a poem called Wanting to Move. It's by Vijaya Mukhopadhyay. He's a Bengali poet. The reason I love this poem is because it's spoken from the standpoint of a tree.
Brandon: Okay. Great.
Nalini reads "Wanting to Move"
Nalini: It's called Wanting to Move. “Continually, a bell rings in my heart. I was supposed to go somewhere, to some other place. Tense from the long wait, 'Where do you go, will you take me with you on your horses down the river, with the flames of your torches?' They burst out laughing. 'A tree wanting to move from place to place?' Startled, I look at myself. A tree wanting to move from place to place? A tree wanting to move? Am I then born here to die here? Even die here? Who rings the bell then inside my heart? Who tells me to go inside my heart? Who agitates me continually inside my heart?"
And so I think that poem is really about — it could be about you, Brandon, trying to look at beauty and bring in all these amazing people. Like, who would think of bringing in scientists and beauty? But there was something in you that said, "I need to do this. I'm going to do this even though it sounds ridiculous." And for me, sitting in that committee meeting when I was 25 years old and trying to convince Dr. Scott and Dr. Greer that studying the canopy is some good idea, it was like that tree saying what is it in my heart. What is it that agitates me to keep doing this? And there's no answer to that tree. There's no answer. Some trees don't do that. Most trees don't do that. Most scientists don't ask those questions about beauty. Most scientists don't need to climb trees. And so I think we just take that as in some of us, in many of us, I think, that there is something that burns, that nails. That bell is nailing inside us, and we have to listen to it.
Brandon: One of the things that the scientists I talk to often say in terms of the rewards of the work they do, at least in terms of the beauty that they find, is that it's not just in the sensory experience. It's not even in the emotional experience, but it's in the understanding, the beauty of understanding, the grasping of the hidden order of things, the inner logic of things, the bringing to light of that which was hidden. And I wonder whether that was also part of the animating force for you. Because certainly, there is the pioneering work of like a Humboldt or someone who's sort of simply mapping out here's what things are. But then getting into mechanisms, getting into sort of the causes, how much is that pursuit of understanding been central to your own work? How much would you say that is an aspect of the beauty that you encounter in your work?
Nalini: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that's why I chose to be what is called an ecosystem ecologist. I'm not really too interested. I hate to say this. I'm not really interested in taxonomy or naming species. Even physiology is not that compelling to me. Like, how does this work, and how does this valve in a plant works so that it can signal to shut down the stomata? What really has always intrigued me from that very first ecology lecture, back at Brown University when I took my Biology 101 class, was the fact that ecology is all about understanding systems. It's understanding how one piece of the system interacts with the rest of it. And whether that's the root part, the roots, the below ground part or whether it's the leaves, or whether it's the canopy dwelling plants, it doesn't really matter. What you're really asking is, how does a system work? And if you can understand the pieces of a system, the patterns of how stuff is arranged in a system and what the dynamics are, what are the fluxes and the pulls, and what are the processes that govern the size of those pulls and the rate of those processes and fluxes, then you can actually start making predictions. You can say, if we remove the mosses from this carpet of plants, what are we going to find is going to happen in terms of interception and retention of nitrate ions? And if we remove the bromeliads, what happens then?
And so ecology becomes a symphony of studies whereby we identify and quantify pools and patterns, and then we move on to processes, and we put those together into this time where we might be able to make a prediction. That's actually where I feel so happy to have been sort of born and raised doing canopy studies. Because now I feel like I'm in a position where I can ask some questions that have to do with predictions. If we isolate a tree in a pasture because we've cleared around the primary forest and we've left a few trees for shade for cattle in that pasture, what's going to happen with those canopy plants? Are pollinators going to come out and still pollinate them? Are fruit dispersers going to be able to cross that ocean of pasture and get those fruits and disseminate them? If climate change is extending the length of the dry season and reducing the amount of mist and fog, how is that going to affect the canopy dwelling plants that depend on that? But also, how is it going to affect the trees that support those?
And so now my work is really about making predictions based on my work and other people's work, obviously, that have built up a foundation of understanding of pattern and process. And so I think when I'm trying to answer your question about is, yes, a resounding yes. Because ultimately, although we have to ask and answer these little, tiny questions about pattern and process along the way, what's always in our minds as ecosystem ecologists is, what does this mean in terms of the whole? What does it mean when you disturb a piece of it? Does it recover? Is it resilient? Does it compensate? What's going to happen? And if we know enough about that system, we can make useful predictions, not just as scientists but also for forest managers, or for farmers, or for people collecting medicinal plants or whatever. So that, to me, is the joy. I guess I could put it in the context of longing as well, longing to understand a system well enough to be able to predict what will happen to it either as a steady state system or, more interestingly, I think if you perturb it somehow.
Brandon: When I first heard about your work and thought about rainforest, for a lot of people, I suppose the first association is Amazon rainforest and dangerous creatures and pythons and so forth. Were there any difficulties you encountered in terms of either dangerous encounters or even falling from a big height, like injury? What other challenges did you face?
Nalini: Well, I've been working in the tropical cloud forest of Costa Rica and also the temperate rainforest of Washington State, which are pretty innocuous in terms of the dripping poisonous snakes and bees that attack your hair and so forth. That was primarily my choice. I hate to say this also, but I'm not a snake person. So low in rainforests clearly have some dangers in terms of the organisms that you encounter. But cloud forest and temperate rainfalls are pretty benign. But of course, when you're 150 feet above the forest floor, dangling on a rope no bigger than the width of your pinky finger, there's always danger. You're always subject to gravity unfortunately or to a broken branch. Actually, in 2015, I had a really bad fall. It was the only fall I've taken from a tree in my life, but it was an extremely traumatic fall. I had to be medevacked out of the forest. I was in the hospital for three months. I had exploded vertebrae and a broken pelvis and broken ribs and traumatic brain injury and a broken fibula, exploded lung. I lost my spleen.
Brandon: Oh, my gosh.
Nalini: It was really bad. It was that bad. Happily and fortunately, I was able to pretty much recover physically from that, thanks to my very supportive family and friends and a great medical team. But it was one of the few falls really that canopy researchers have taken. It's been remarkable how in the course of the last 40 years of canopy research, there have been remarkably few accidents or falls, either because of the tree or the equipment. Mine was due to the equipment. My rope actually failed. So there's that danger all the time. But I think as like race car drivers who put themselves in these situations where it's super dangerous, you're always really paying attention. I think there's always this sense of when you're in the canopy — although you're enjoying the beauty and the diversity and everything, all the sense of longing, being fulfilled — you're also really aware always that I am 150 feet above the forest floor. So we take enormous care with our equipment, with always working with another person, with radios, with first aid kits and rescue techniques. One on the team is always expert and licensed in climbing and climbing rescue and paying attention. I think very often, it's when I drive to a field site when I'm on the freeway listening to a phone call or putting my lipstick on or whatever, that's actually a lot more dangerous than climbing the tree. Because we're not paying attention to the potential dangers that we're encountering as we speed down this giant 60-mile-an-hour highway. So yeah, there are dangers. But again, as with any profession, or any hobby, or any sport, there are ways to take care of ourselves.
Brandon: Great. Well, I want to ask you about the tremendous public engagement work you've been doing the last few years. There are a lot of strands here, but I'd love to hear about TreeTop Barbie first. Because that was the most fun thing that I came across.
Nalini: Yeah, well, I guess it was sort of 20 years into my scientific career — climbing trees, publishing papers, going to conferences, talking to other scientists, getting grants for canopy research — that I became, as so many tropical biologists have done, became aware of the human activities that are negatively affecting rainforest ecology. So deforestation, forest fragmentation, invasive species, climate change, all of these things are having negative effects on the forest. In some ways, I could justify that I was doing something by publishing my papers and talking at conferences. But I also realized that I need to do something more than only that important as that is to contribute to the scientific record. And so I thought, well, what can I do? Actually, I tried a little bit of talking to policymakers, going on the hill and talking to senators. I was terrible at it. They always want to know. Is this a yes or a no? How many species are going to go extinct at one year and blah, blah, blah? I just couldn't stand it.
But I thought like, well, I'm an extrovert. I'm a brown woman climbing trees and tropical rainforests. I mean, how fun is that? So I thought maybe my contribution could be to do public engagement and to engage with the public, inspire them, inform them, excite them, motivate them to take some sort of action to protect forests. That could be my role. So I started embarking on that. I started giving talks at museums and writing articles for natural history museums, being in films, National Geographic films and stuff. Then I realized this is great. This is fun. This is easy. But the people who watch National Geographic, the people who read Natural History magazines, the people who go to a museum to hear a lecture, they already know how important trees are. So I'm not really doing anything more than that. That's when I began thinking about, how can I get to other kinds of people who might not have access to a museum, who might not pick up a National Geographic?
I began thinking about my own childhood, how I got connected and stuck on trees when I was a little girl. When you look at urban cities today, there are no trees to climb. And so what else could I use to connect little girls with trees? Of course, the answer was Barbie. Because pretty much every little girl around the world, urban, rural, loves little Barbie and uses it as something that they want to identify as. I want to be like Barbie when I grow up. But our Barbie model is proms and accessories and getting a boyfriend named Ken. And so I thought, well, what if I tweak Barbie and then dress her in my field clothes with a little helmet and a little booklet about canopy plants and a crossbow?
How Nalini won over Mattel with Treetop Barbie
And so I knocked on the door of Mattel and they said, "No, we're not interested at all." You can have this idea. This is where you'll get a whole another group of customers. So that was back in 2004. Once again, there was something in me that said, I think there's something here with that tree. I want to move. I want to inspire little girls to climb trees. And so my students and I began buying Barbies, used Barbies, from Goodwill stores. We engaged these volunteer seamstresses to sew her little clothes. We got helmets on eBay. We made a little pamphlet about canopy plants. I began just selling them on my little, stupid academic website, which nobody sees. But anyway, we began selling them with a little booklet about canopy plants. Anyway, it was written up in the New York Times, and then Mattel heard about it. They called me up and they said, "You can't do this. You're encroaching on our brand." I said, I'd be happy to give you this idea. I'm not making any money off it. Go ahead and use it. They said, no, no, no, no, you can't do it. We're going to shut you down. I said, oh, I have some journalist friends who are really interested in learning that Mattel is trying to shut down small brown woman from inspiring little girls to go into science.
Brandon: Fantastic. Perfect. Amazing.
Nalini: So they said okay. Never mind. Never mind. You can go ahead. They wouldn't put it in writing, but they let me go ahead and sell them. Anyway, 15 years later, I got a call from National Geographic. They had partnered with Mattel. They said, "We are starting a new line called Explorer Barbies, and we'd like you to be on the advisory committee. We're going to have an entomologist Barbie, a polar scientist Barbie, a wildlife photographer Barbie." So I was an advisor. And as a thank you, they gave me a one-of-a-kind Nalini-look-alike treetop Barbie, which is now in my lab which I'm very proud of.
But I think the story behind that is really not so much this idea or anything. It means that over the course of 15 years, there are more and more little girls who want role models that are like an explorer and not just the prom Barbie. And so to me, that's a really hopeful, wonderful thing. That girls who are looking for something too long for what am I going to be, who am I now and who will I be in the future, I long to be someone who's important, who's beautiful, who's an explorer. And so now they have something that fits that. And so I feel hopeful and optimistic that my sense of longing for little girls to grow up thinking about doing something for trees has been helped by this big corporation that I thought so badly about, and yet they were actually doing something powerful and something positive to fulfill that sense of longing of myself and of these little girls.
Brandon: Wow. That's amazing. Talk about the work you've been doing with religious communities in terms of connecting your research to the sacredness of trees.
Nalini: Yeah, well, that also came from this sense of wanting to motivate, inspire and inform people who might not believe in evolution, for example, or go to a natural history museum because it doesn't promote their beliefs. But they still might have a belief that trees are important. And so although, as I mentioned earlier, my religious background is this weird mix of Hinduism and Orthodox Judaism, so I didn't really know that much about the dominant religion of Christianity in our society. But I was aware. Even I was aware. You open the Bible and their first page of Genesis are two very important trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And so I decided to use religious authorities as my data set rather than drawing on science and trying to cram it down with the throats of religious people who might reject it because they just reject science.
So I downloaded the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Talmud, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita from the web. I did a search for all the word tree and forest. And I found like in the Old Testament, there are 328 references to trees and forests, and they're all positive. So I categorized them into practical use, adornment of temples, location descriptors, analogies to God. I did this with all of the religious texts that I could find. I also started looking at the rituals and celebrations. Like the Jews have this wonderful holiday called Tu BiShvat, a celebration of the new year for trees. It was originally started for taxing purposes of the fruit, but it's turned into this holiday that celebrates trees and promotes tree planting for Jews in Israel and in our communities.
So I pulled together these thoughts, these ideas, these data really about the importance and values of trees from the standpoint of religion and spirituality. I put it together in a sermon, and then I started knocking on doors of churches and saying, "Hey, I'm a scientist. But I've read your text, your religious text, and I'd like to deliver a sermon about trees on spirituality." Of course, the Unitarians were the ones who mocked me in first. But after that, I got sort of passed on to Presbyterians and Episcopalian and Catholics and Muslims. And so I've given this sermon in over 40 places of worship. That led to some trusting relationships between the congregants and the clergy and myself, which then led us to map trees in churchyards. Because I figured if churches are sacred, maybe the church yards are sacred. Maybe the soils in the church yards are sacred, and the trees that grow in the sacred soil are also sacred. So we mapped the trees. We made these little pamphlets that had information about the biology of those species in the church yards but also scriptural references to those trees. And we gave them out to congregations. That led to giving lectures in seminaries. It led to a conversation that I was able to have with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who's the spiritual leader of 83 million Anglicans and Episcopalians. He wanted to learn more about ecological justice. So here I am, this little, tiny ecologist talking to this very powerful religious leader about the precepts of ecological justice and why trees are important to all of us. And so he took that information. He's incorporated it into his teachings. He's written a book in which he's included that. And so it's this thread then of starting very small, with just respecting the religious texts of given religions, which I myself do not believe in. I'm not a religious person myself. And so when I read the Bible, I can read it and I can understand it. I may not promote it.
So the point is, I guess, I don't have to become an Episcopalian. I don't have to become a Baptist to find common ground of longing to understand the world, the spiritual world, the religious world, the biological world. We don't have to be in the same faith, but we can still agree that trees are pretty cool and pretty important for lots of reasons. So let's start protecting them together. So we've also started doing bioblitzes and tree planting on church grounds. And again, I bring my biology students. They bring their church goers. We don't have to argue about does God exist, or what do I believe in or you believe in, or did you vote for Trump, or did you vote for Biden? We can just say, "I'm really happy that I planted 10 trees today with you, and I'm going to come back and visit them and make sure that they're healthy. I hope I might see you when I do that." So there's a personal sense of connection which has been created by the agreement that trees are important to all of us for whatever reasons they might be.
Brandon: That's amazing. Is there anything you've learned in this interaction with faith leaders, faith communities, scriptural texts and so on that's informed anything about the way you look at trees or your own sort of spiritual—?
Nalini: Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, great. You know, I always say, oh, every time I give a talk to loggers or artists or these other groups that aren't scientists, I wonder what question they're going to ask that's going to spark some sort of scientific my next grant. And so far, I haven't really found anything. But what it has revealed to me, I think, Brandon, is especially the religious groups, it's revealed to me my own prejudices. I remember at this Baptist Church I went to, and I was giving this sermon about treason spirituality. One of the members of the church came up to me and said, "Oh, Dr. Nadkarni, could I get your email?" And I said, oh, God, here it comes. He's going to proselytize me to become a Baptist. And so I said, you know, I'm not going to become a Baptist. My dad was Hindu. My mother was Jewish. I am not a religious person. He said, "Oh, no. I wasn't going to proselytize you. I want you to know if you and your students might want to join us on a tree planting that we've already organized." And I realized, holy moly. He is so far ahead of me in terms of actually doing something for trees, and I made the assumption that he was just going to try to push his stuff on me. And so that has stuck with me because it means to me that I have to be intellectually humble. I have to practice what people call 'intellectual humility,' that we can't make the assumption that people are going to shove stuff on us that we don't want. We need to go into every situation that involves some kind of interaction with as open a mind as possible. I think that's a really important precept for a successful public engagement but also just in life, that we shouldn't make assumptions about each other that might mar the possibility of finding common ground.
Brandon: Yeah, wow. That's amazing. You've also been working with prisoners. Could you say a little bit about that?
Nalini: Yeah, so when I began thinking about public engagement and attracting little girls and religious people and artists and so forth, I began thinking, well, tactically, which population should I really focus on? And I realized I should probably focus on people who don't have access to nature at all. Well, who are those people? Well, obviously, it's the 2.3 million adults and the 55,000 incarcerated youth that exist in our country. They live and work in places that are basically devoid of nature: inside prisons, county jails, tribal jails and juvenile detention centers. Part of the punishment, intentional or not, is that not only are they kept away from earning a living or learning new skills, they're also kept away from interacting day to day with nature.
And so I started a science lecture series in a local minimum security prison, and the reaction was so fabulous. The guys were so curious, so interested and so informed. They already knew so much about different topics. They may not have the same scientific vocabulary, but they were really, really engaged. So I brought in more scientists to give talks. And that led to our developing conservation projects inside prisons, where we collaborated with groups like the Washington division of Fish and Wildlife who had an ongoing program to rear the endangered Oregon spotted frog in captivity, from egg, to tadpole, to adults. Then they released the adults in protected wetlands to build up the communities and the population sizes of these endangered species. So the guys started raising these frogs. They did a great job, just a fantastic job. They got the award for the best captive rearing facility in Washington state two years in a row.
We started then interacting with other conservation groups, with The Nature Conservancy, to rehab and then grow 300,000 clubs of endangered prairie plants for out planting. We worked with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to rear the endangered Taylor's checkerspot butterfly and various other, building bird-nesting boxes for the American Kestrel whose populations are declining across North America, and basically engaging the populations of people who are incarcerated — men, women and youth — in participating hands on to develop these groups of endangered species that could then raise the populations of groups that are outside and not protected. And so it was a lesson for me and a lesson for all of us, I think, that instead of throwing away this population of people that are regarded by society as just trash and garbage and they cost us money and they're bad people, here was a group of people who when given the opportunity, when given a tiny bit of training and some encouragement and treated like my grad student or anybody who's participating in a conservation project, that they too can be contributors.
And that, in fact, the primary motivation of the inmates in the surveys that we gave them — we were trying to evaluate the effects on the inmates — it wasn't the training for getting a STEM job when they get back into society. It wasn't for the miserable amount of money that they earn when they are working inside prisons. It was the opportunity to contribute, the idea that even though they are incarcerated, even though they have been told that they're worthless and they're not worth any trouble, that they were actually contributing something that's bigger than the prison they were in, bigger than their own self, bigger than their family, as big as the Earth. Maybe that's about longing too which is about the longing to contribute, which I think is at the core of kindness. It's at the core of reciprocity. It's at the core of doing good. It's this very human sense. Even for people like those who are incarcerated and have been convicted of a crime that wasn't contributing to society, that there's something that happened when they got contact with nature, with those frogs, with the butterflies, with the prairie plants, with the nesting boxes that said, "I am, and I want to contribute more."
Brandon: Yeah, that's extraordinary. Wow. You had also mentioned doing work with artists. I think you've also had, if I remember hearing, about maybe bringing people to the forest who had never encountered trees before. Was it Inuit communities? What was that experience like?
Nalini: Yeah, so that stemmed from this idea that, oh, my gosh, artists can create beauty and make us think about beauty. They are so powerful. I mean, they don't earn much money. Let's face it. But they're still very powerful, important persons in the society. Also, they don't use the same tools and approaches that scientists do, and yet they can really communicate well. Not just the emotion, they can also contribute content. I think artists can. And so I decided to bring artists to the canopy for a week at a time. I call them 'canopy confluences.' So I engaged a group of forest ecologists like me, some visual artists, some poets, musicians to come to the canopy for a week at a time. We had these little platforms that we put into the canopy. I taught them all how to climb trees. They made art, and they made music. They made rap songs, and they made amazing visual art of how they perceive and come to understand this universe that we've talked about, this different universe that they saw when they were spending days up on these little platforms.
But I also wanted to get insights from what I was calling 'canopy novices,' people who have never seen trees or the canopy before. And so I invited two Inuits from Nunavut up high in the Arctic who literally have not seen trees before, and also two blind people who haven't seen trees before. We brought them into one of these canopy confluences. It was fantastic to to see how quickly the Inuits who had no word for the word tree — trees are called napaaqtuq which means pole. A forest is napaaqtuqarniq which means many poles. So they didn't have a vocabulary for words, just like we don't have a vocabulary for the many kinds of snow that they probably do up in the Arctic. And within a week, they came to understand, I think, the importance of trees and the canopy in human lives.
At the last little campfire — every evening, we'd have a campfire and sort of talk about what we had come to understand, or the art we made, or the moss collection we made. And Enil, one of the Inuits, he said, "Well, in this week, I've learned the importance of trees from you." He showed us this picture he had made with this stone cairn. And behind it was a tree that looked sort of like a pole, actually. We said, well, what's that stone thing? And he said, "Well, this marks our way. These are the wayfinders that we set up in the tundra because we don't have anything else. We stack up these stones. I've learned that trees for you guys are wayfinders. They help you find your way, just like the stone cairns find our way. And that's why I put them together, my stone cairn and your tree." He said, "We think that you should treat your trees the way we treat our elders, with more respect than what you do." I think coming from someone who, until that week, had never been in a forest, who had never climbed a tree, who'd never encountered a tall, majestic cedar tree that the rest of us had, it was a really powerful statement of how quickly he came to understand the importance of trees in our lives, maybe even in a way that we hadn't realized ourselves. And so I think that that experience of bringing someone from the outside who doesn't have even vocabulary, who hasn't had long experience, can be a maybe uniquely valuable spokesperson or have insights that those of us who are familiar with what we see around us all the time might be.
Brandon: Yeah, wow. It's amazing. Nalini, what are you longing for these days? What are you yearning for? What's in the horizon as you move forward?
Nalini: Yeah, great. That's a good question. A couple things. You know, I retired a couple years ago from my active faculty position. So I'm not teaching anymore and doing faculty meetings. And it's so wonderful.
Brandon: Great. Congratulations.
Nalini: But I've been appointed as a National Geographic Explorer at large, so I get access to the amazing world of media and information and photographs and explorers that National Geographic support. So I've been spending time. I'm going to be doing a tour, an international tour, about trees, giving presentation about trees in Canada and the USA for the next three years, which I'm really excited about. But I've also been thinking about long-term support for ecological people and programs and projects. In my experience of gaining support from my work, it either comes from National Science Foundation, a science agency that lets you ask a very narrow scientific question and test it. Then when you have the answer, you publish it. And then that's it for that grant. Or, it comes from philanthropy. And very often, those grants are short term. Then they move on to something other than that.
So what I've decided to work on and explore is longer term funding from impact investors. There's an institute on our campus called the Sorenson Impact Institute which basically herds together global leaders in impact investing. Impact investing are people who want to invest their money in projects that do both social or environmental good and have some financial return so that there's the possibility for long-term sustainable funding for programs that have demonstrated that they're successful in some sort of social or ecological good. So my work is with the Institute now. I've become a senior fellow there. It's to try to connect projects that are doing really great ecological programs, people who are doing great things for the environment, but connect them with the impact investors who are trying to find projects like that. This institute is in the College of Business, which is like, what? What on earth, all these weird business people? But they've been so kind and open. And I really believe that they're not just about greenwashing. They really, sincerely want to contribute, just like those inmates who wanted to raise frogs and get a sense of contribution. So if I can be with my long career, I've got lots of contacts in the ecological world, if I can be a connector in that way, I think that's kind of what my sense of contribution is right now.
Brandon: Is there any advice you might have for helping people who might sort of romantically look at trees and say, well, those are lovely things out there, to be better connected to this important vital source of life?
Nalini: Yeah, you know, I think really, very often when we think about environmental problems or social problems on our planet, they're just so gigantic, we fall into despair instead of hope. I think, for me, what's important is to know that we can contribute in little, short, small ways if we do it collectively. So I would say to people like, well, I'll tell you some math I did. There are 350 million people in our country. There are 6.2 scientists and conservationists. So if you do the division, it turns out that if every scientist spoke to just 52 people a year — that's one person a week — we will have had a discussion about nature or about trees, about how great trees are with every single person in our country. So when you talk to your barista when you're getting your latte on Monday morning, you say, "Hey, you know about shade grown coffee, how important trees are to maintaining birds in coffee plantation?" You talk to your Uber driver." Hey, what about an electric vehicle and all the carbon dioxide story and so forth?" Sometimes what I do is I get my fingernails painted. I'm not a fingernail person. But a lot of people pay attention to fingernails, so I get them painted with little trees on them. So not only do I get a great conversation with a manicurist about trees in Vietnam. She's from Vietnam. Every time a young woman looks at my nails and was like, oh, wow, then we get to have this great conversation about what's your favorite tree and how important trees are. And so check. That's my one person a week.
So I would say to people, whatever religion, whatever you do for a living, whatever kind of art you make, whatever kinds of investments you're making, one of the things that we all can do is engage each other with conversation about the positive aspect of trees. Once people understand, once they take in that something is valuable to them, they will figure out how to protect it. I don't have to tell them to join this group or that group. They'll figure it out. But what we need to do is to be aware of the value of trees or some aspect of nature or society. Then we will start moving towards protecting it, each in his or her own way, with his or her own organization, or hobby group, or money that they have in the bank. And so it's not up to me to decide how to do that for them, but it can be something that I can urge people to do, which is just to keep the groundswell of understanding and appreciation for these silent, sedentary organisms that seem on the outskirts of our life to bring them to the inskirts.
Brandon: Wow. That's fantastic. It sounds like very early in your life, you were invited into a relationship with trees. They sent you on a mission, and here you are bringing this to so much fruition.
Nalini: Yeah, that's right. Isn't that amazing?
Brandon: It's fantastic, yeah. Anything else you want to add? I don't have any more questions for you, but anything else on this theme of beauty and yearning in relation to your work?
Nalini: I think you've covered pretty much everything. If I could end with this wonderful poem—
Brandon: Yeah.
Nalini: —that brings me home when I read it. It's by Michael Glaser. It's called the Presence of Trees. “I have always felt the living presence of trees, the forest that calls to me as deeply as I breathe, as though the woods were marrow of my bone, as though I myself were tree, a breathing, reaching arc of the larger canopy beside a brook bubbling to foam like the one deep in these woods, that calls, that whispers home.” And all of us have a longing for home, don't we? Whether it's the home we grew up in, or the home we've created, or the home we hope to create. And I think trees can be home.
Brandon: Yeah, amazing. Nalini, thank you so much. Where can we direct our viewers and listeners to learn more about your work?
Nalini: You can come to my website which is www.nalininadkarni.com. No dots.
Brandon: All right. We'll put that in there.
Nalini: Yeah, that would be great.
Brandon: We'll put that on the links there. Wonderful. Thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure.
Nalini: You're welcome. Thank you, Brandon, for your work and for this interview. I appreciate it.
Brandon: My pleasure.
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