00:02:24.140Well, I'm so delighted because I really feel like we share a sense of kinship, the similar kinship with the trees in the forest.
00:02:34.140I myself am nestled in a beautiful coastal redwood forest where I'm creating a native species nursery to restore the redwood forest community, but also the forest of Cascadia or the temperate rainforest bioregion.
00:02:51.020And I just am so grateful for all you do in service to these magnificent trees and forests and the biodiversity that spirals from them.
00:03:01.480It's just amazing to think about all of the biodiversity that is in the crowns that most people are unaware of.
00:03:08.580The redwoods, considered one of the most structurally complex trees on Earth, harbor entire unique ecosystems in their canopies.
00:03:16.140thick mats of moss and ferns, insects, the endangered marble murrelit, the threatened
00:03:22.760cloud salamander, fungi, you know, just the thought of these canopy beings, my heart really
00:03:28.780fills with excitement. So, you know, you have climbed many of these trees on four different
00:03:34.260continents and ventured many times into the tops of the Monteverde cloud forest of Costa Rica
00:03:39.680and the temperate rainforests of Washington state. So I would just love if we could start off by
00:03:45.860you treating us to a journey into the canopies, and perhaps the canopies of both of these forest
00:03:52.080systems. Well, first of all, I thank you for that introduction. And I would really love to take
00:03:57.920every one of your listeners up into a real journey up into a real tree. But since I can't do that at
00:04:03.440this moment, I would love to sort of invite you along to what happens, what you see, who you see,
00:04:09.480how you feel most of all when you move from the dark, damp, still forest floor, whether you're in
00:04:16.420the temperate rainforest of Washington or the tropical rainforest of Costa Rica. And then you
00:04:21.400move up as you climb into really quite a different world, a space where there's lots of sunlight,
00:04:27.320where there's more wind than what you find on the forest floor, a greater view of vista rather than
00:04:32.300being enclosed. And so let's start at the bottom. Let's put on our climbing gear. I'm a forest
00:04:37.960canopy researcher who uses mountain climbing techniques to get up into tall trees. Other
00:04:43.320canopy ecologists use construction cranes, hot air balloons, canopy walkways, and most recently
00:04:49.680drones as well to try to explore the forest canopy. But when I started out as a graduate student in
00:04:55.360the College of Forestry at the University of Washington, really very few people had gone into
00:04:59.980the canopy before. I mean, I think most of us have all climbed trees when we were kids, but, you know,
00:05:05.240in terms of climbing very tall trees for the purposes of trying to document the biota and
00:05:10.280the interactions up there, really the 1980s, the canopy was actually called the last biotic frontier.
00:05:17.680And so there's this sort of feeling of expectation, of curiosity, of exploration. As you put on your
00:05:24.480climbing gear, regular harness, you have ascenders like Jumar ascenders. Of course, you always have
00:05:29.680a safety line and you get ready to really to ascend into the upper canopy. I'll just sort of
00:05:35.360preface that with a question that comes up, which is like, how do you get the rope up there to begin
00:05:39.360with? And people use crossbows to shoot a, like a fishing line up high into the trees that goes
00:05:44.960up and over a branch and then comes down to the forest floor. You tie a line onto that,
00:05:50.200a parachute cord onto that and pull that up. Then you tie a climbing rope onto that parachute cord
00:05:54.780and pull that up and over the branch, tie one end off onto the trunk, and then you have a nice safe
00:06:00.380secure anchor so you can climb the other side of the rope to get up into the canopy. I invented
00:06:05.540something called a master caster, which is just a metal rod that has a slingshot attached to one
00:06:10.980side and a fishing reel beneath that. It's of course much easier to get across international
00:06:15.620borders than a giant crossbow, so that has served me well. But once the line is up and over and once
00:06:21.620our climbing gear is on, what we can do is basically slowly sort of inchworm up the rope
00:06:27.500itself. And as you move up from the forest floor, which is usually very dark because of all of the
00:06:32.860intervening vegetation, the leaves, the stems, the branches, and so forth that absorb most of
00:06:37.960the sunlight. In fact, only about 2% of the sunlight that strikes the forest canopy actually
00:06:43.560makes its way down to the forest floor. But as you start climbing, you sort of get intimate with
00:06:48.840the trunk. You start seeing the trunk as this really solid entity, and as you climb up, of
00:06:54.280course, it narrows. The branches sort of take off, and you start seeing the architecture of the tree
00:06:59.280itself. Sometimes you can kind of read the body language of the tree. You see a twisted branch or
00:07:05.420a missing branch, and you can understand that these trees are not just fixed entities in terms of their
00:07:10.520size and shape, but rather respond to the environment as they grow and record those
00:07:15.860pressures with their own wood and leaves as you move up. As you get up to about 30 or 40 feet and
00:07:21.760start looking down on the ground, you realize you're really gaining a different perspective
00:07:25.080than what you had on the forest floor. I notice this especially when I'm climbing into the
00:07:29.860temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula. And you know those sword ferns that are just sort
00:07:34.420of growing all over the ground. When you look down on them from 30 feet above them, you see
00:07:40.780they're really like green starfish. They're these radially symmetrical organisms that you don't
00:07:46.520quite appreciate their structure when you're actually looking at them from the ground.
00:07:50.740So you begin to see shapes and forms, colors and relationships within the three-dimensional
00:07:55.920volume of the forest that's really impossible to appreciate when you're sitting on the forest floor.
00:08:01.380Anyway, as you ascend, you begin, especially if you're in a wet forest like the temperate
00:08:05.660rainforest of Washington State or the tropical cloud forest of Monteverde, Costa Rica,
00:08:10.780you start seeing these epiphytes, these plants that grow upon the branches of the tree.
00:08:16.040In the temperate rainforest, you see mosses and lichens and liverworts.
00:08:19.700The living plants in Costa Rica are much more diverse.
00:08:22.780You get bromeliads and ferns and orchids and blueberry bushes
00:08:26.760and all kinds of things that are living in the forest canopy there.
00:08:29.860And one of the things I have found most interesting is beneath these living plants
00:08:34.880on the branches of the trees, there's an accumulation of canopy soil.
00:08:38.700As they die and decompose, they actually create a soil that they root themselves in.
00:08:43.280Their roots don't go into the tree itself.
00:08:45.560But you realize as you're sort of hanging on your rope, looking at this mini ecosystem
00:08:50.180of the canopy, that all of the elements of a big ecosystem, the living plants, the mosses,
00:08:56.080and even the soils and microorganisms are present in these little canopy ecosystems.
00:09:01.980And so for me, that's been an intriguing piece of ascending into the canopy is seeing that
00:09:06.640these are not just one or two little isolated plants that live up there that are visited by
00:09:11.280isolated animals or birds, but rather they constitute their own living system. And my
00:09:16.820questions have really been about how does this mini living system of the forest treetops interact
00:09:22.740with the forest as a whole? And so when we get up into the forest canopy itself, when we sit on the
00:09:27.740highest branches and look out at the view of the forest from the top rather than the bottom,
00:09:32.720When we see birds moving from one treetop to another or howler monkeys calling from the tree next door or just sort of a nest of little bromeliads that are living their little lives up in these canopy soils high above the forest floor, we realize then that this is really an opportunity to think about how holistic a forest is, how connected it is.
00:09:54.380And yet it's still made out of these subcomponents, these little micro ecosystems that can get as small as a single microorganism or a single molecule of nitrogen and carbon.
00:10:06.460And yet somehow it all works together as a whole.
00:10:08.860And I guess I sometimes when I arrive to the top of the tree and if you were sitting next to me, I might have a conversation more about spirituality than about biology.
00:10:18.240Because I think that biologically and from the standpoint of the human spirit, getting and living and thinking about the tree canopy is really all about connections, which is something I think that all of us feel when we walk beneath the crowns of redwood forest or a lowland tropical forest or any sort of forest, that we sense that really what it's about is connections.
00:10:40.720it's interesting to think about the connections of the canopy to the forest floor and just how
00:10:50.780unique both of these ecosystems are yet they're within the same community and it's just incredible
00:10:59.580to hear the experience that you've had time and time again of starting at the floor and working
00:11:05.820your way up climbing into these trees and the wonder and the spirituality that you're talking
00:11:11.680about just this overwhelming connection to this place and you had mentioned that back in the 80s
00:11:20.960the canopies were the next frontier or maybe even the last frontier how much is still unknown about
00:11:28.340the ecological dynamics and biodiversity of forest canopies and what are some of the pieces that you
00:11:34.340have been learning that have really shifted knowledge? Well, those are great questions.
00:11:40.380Maybe I'll start with the second question first, which is what have I discovered that was unknown
00:11:44.920before I and my colleagues went up there? And I can tell you that, you know, really, I mean,
00:11:49.300this is hard to believe now if you're a canopy scientist or like my young graduate students who
00:11:53.320are just doing canopy research as if it's sort of the most normal thing to do. But 35 years ago,
00:11:58.240when I was starting out, there really literally were very few people who were doing this. And
00:12:02.220I remember the first time I went to a tropical rainforest on a tropical field course in Costa
00:12:06.920Rica and I looked up in the canopy and I'm like oh my god look at all those plants up there and
00:12:11.980you know my professors just couldn't answer questions about what was going on up there so
00:12:15.740I came back to Seattle to the College of Forestry and I got my committee together and I said you know
00:12:20.600I really want to study the forest canopy and they looked at me sort of like I was cuckoo or not a
00:12:25.820scientist because they said well you know Nalini the canopy is just really part of the forest and
00:12:30.580And with so many questions on the forest floor, you don't really need to get up into the forest
00:12:34.600canopy. And I really reacted against that. And for some reason, I felt confident about
00:12:39.720this almost, I guess, an instinct or something or intuition that, in fact, I did want to go up
00:12:45.740to the canopy, that I did need to go up into the canopy to understand the forest as a whole,
00:12:51.960that we were missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle if we didn't go up there to study it. And I think,
00:12:57.200You know, I could sort of have taken a lead from marine biologists that when the scuba gear was invented, when biologists could spend hours and hours down in the lower parts of the ocean, they began making discoveries that were never possible if they stayed up in their boats on the surface of the ocean.
00:13:13.020And so I began with some of the most basic questions that can be asked about an ecosystem, which is, you know, how much material is up there? Who's up there? What are the species? How much does it weigh? What's the nutrient content of this stuff? How much does it circulate when the stuff falls down? Does it decompose and get taken up by trees? What's its role in the ecosystem cycles of the forest as a whole?
00:13:36.560But if you want to start answering those kinds of questions, you still have to answer very basic pieces of it.
00:13:41.900And again, nobody had really studied anything basic about this.
00:13:45.280So I just started out by saying, well, how much stuff is up there?
00:13:48.200How many mosses? How much does this stuff weigh relative to the rest of the ecosystem?
00:13:52.700And as I went out to the Olympic rainforest and climbed these big leaf maple trees that are very dominant in the river bottoms of the four major river systems of the Olympic Peninsula on the west side,
00:14:02.480I would peel away these mats of moss and the underlying canopy soils. And I kept seeing these roots, large roots, small roots, woody roots, clearly not the roots of mosses because mosses don't have roots.
00:14:16.780You know, they have these little tiny rhizoid things that that aren't like woody plant roots at all.
00:14:21.580And so I took samples and I brought them back to my major professor. And I said, you know, hey, Chuck, what's with these roots in the canopy?
00:14:27.300And he said, what are you talking about? You know? And I said, well, there are roots up in the canopy that I've been climbing. And he said, I don't think you know what you're talking about. So I rented a chainsaw and I actually, you know, went up to the canopy and sought out these, the source of the roots, which were at the crotches of these large branches in the trunk, brought them back to my major professor.
00:14:45.540And I said, these are the roots I'm talking about.
00:14:48.200And he had never heard of it, but these are canopy roots.
00:14:51.260They are produced by the trees themselves that snake underneath the mats of live and
00:14:57.040dead organic matter, those canopy soils I talked about.
00:15:00.340And the tree itself is capable of taking nutrients and water up from the very mosses and canopy
00:24:26.440And just to shorten the story, for all the four species that we did the experiment with,
00:24:31.440we found that the mats that were exposed to less mist and fog had significantly higher
00:24:36.680rates of mortality, produced fewer new leaves and died earlier.
00:24:41.380And so although this is an experimental setup that sort of allows us to fast forward to
00:24:46.660the future, what it tells us in a sort of horrible way is that, yes, climate change that drives
00:24:53.080lower amounts of mist, smaller amounts of rainfall is going to have a decidedly negative effect
00:24:59.200on these canopy dwelling plants. You know, as I think about climate change and how much it's
00:25:06.680affecting this amazing biodiversity in all of these forests, my mind goes to carbon sequestration.
00:25:13.760And that's part of the One Million Redwoods project is wanting to sequester carbon with redwood trees and all of the understory plants in the soil to help try to mitigate climate change.
00:25:24.140And I would love if you could take us through how trees such as redwoods or the temperate rainforest in general are unparalleled at their ability to store carbon.
00:25:35.560And then if you could describe the different pools of carbon in forest ecosystems and perhaps how they interact from the soil to the terrestrial to the canopy.
00:25:45.100Well, I think, you know, describing the carbon cycle of a forest could probably take me the next three years on your podcast.
00:25:52.340and even then we wouldn't get to the end of it but we can also describe it very simply i mean that
00:25:57.380basically all of the energy or nearly all of the energy of our earth is derived from sunlight and
00:26:04.140the energy that comes from the sun you know there's a tiny amount that that comes out of these
00:26:08.100vents in the bottoms of the ocean but for all intents and purposes all of our energy comes
00:26:13.060in the form of sunlight but we humans animals and any heterotrophic organisms that require
00:26:19.080sort of a digestion of that sunlight, we can't use sunlight directly. Even when we get a suntan,
00:26:24.460you know, and we get browner, it doesn't mean that we're actually taking up energy from the sun.
00:26:28.260It means that we have to rely on plants like trees, redwoods, bromeliads, mosses, and so forth
00:26:35.320to convert that sunlight energy through the process of photosynthesis, of taking carbon
00:26:40.980dioxide, water, and creating oxygen and stored energy sort of for all of us to make it in terms
00:26:47.760of meeting our energy needs. And so over the long time span of the evolution of green plants,
00:26:55.980what has evolved is that plants have become incredibly efficient converters and storers
00:27:02.120of that sunlight energy through photosynthesis into their leaves and other living parts and
00:27:07.300dead parts of their structures. And that that carbon that's, say, manufactured in a leaf of
00:27:12.080a redwood will endure for some period of time, maybe from three to 10 years as a single needle
00:27:18.580or leaf. But at some point it will age just like we do. It will abscise. That means there'll be
00:27:24.120sort of a line that occurs in response to sunlight and in terms of hormones. And that packet of
00:27:30.280carbon that's been stored in that leaf will fall to the forest floor. Thanks to the presence of
00:27:35.260microbes that are able to decompose and move that carbon from the leaf into other forms,
00:27:40.820trees are then able to use those nutrients to create more structures, to create more leaves,
00:27:47.060to harvest more energy. And so I think that when we think about the carbon cycle, we have to think
00:27:52.760about how long is carbon stored in these different parts of a tree's structure? And how long is it
00:28:00.620stored in, say, calcium carbonate deposits in a desert ecosystem? And how long has it been stored
00:28:06.860in oil reserves down far underneath the forest floor that was created during the Cretaceous.
00:28:12.660So when we think about carbon cycling, we have to think about not only how much is stored,
00:28:17.380how apparent it is, but how long will it be immobilized? How long will that carbon dioxide
00:28:22.260that's been taken out of the air, thanks to photosynthesis, how long will it be stored in
00:28:27.380a tree and kept out of going back out into the atmosphere to capture more sunlight, more heat,
00:28:33.080and create global warming. And so when you think about a fast-growing tree in New England, for
00:28:38.040example, a maple tree that grows very quickly, it dies within 80 years and is recycled, that carbon
00:28:44.100is not staying immobilized very long. But when you look at a long-life tree like the redwoods that
00:28:49.820you're so protective of and trying to help along, I think that carbon is being stored for a much
00:28:55.940longer time period. So as we start thinking about strategies of storing carbon, getting it out of
00:29:03.220the atmosphere, holding onto it for as long as possible, those are the kinds of strategies that
00:29:08.680we have to think about as we design systems or modify systems and making the checks and balances
00:29:14.820of is it better to avoid putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere altogether rather than thinking,
00:29:22.140oh, it's already in the air, and now we have to think about ways to take it out.
00:29:26.020So this idea of carbon cycling is sort of easy to explain when you have this theoretical kind
00:29:32.000of conceptual idea of how carbon is made, stored, and moved around. But when you want to tweak the
00:29:37.240system to remove carbon dioxide, then there are a lot of other factors, both biological and social
00:29:42.660and cultural, that we have to think about in order to maximize the amount of carbon dioxide
00:30:52.140You know, one part of me really is focused on mitigating climate change.
00:31:15.180The other part is very focused on biodiversity protection and enhancement.
00:31:19.880And one of your articles details seed banks in the canopy of Monteverde, where canopies are described as time capsules in which seeds can be removed in both space and time.
00:31:34.800And it got me thinking about the possibility of unique genetics in hidden seeds stored in moss mats of the canopy here in the Redwoods or elsewhere.
00:31:44.180Perhaps holding genetic diversity that was lost when temperate rainforests were pillaged by logging and degradation, maybe even with genes advantageous to our changing climate, that could bring resilient diversity to the reduced gene pools in the wake of such pervasive destruction.
00:32:04.040And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
00:32:07.280So the concept of seed banks in the canopy is one of the few places where tropical rainforest research is ahead of or further developed than temperate rainforest research.
00:32:18.960You know, we've done more research in temperate regions than we have in the tropics.
00:32:21.880But in this case, the study that I did was trying to understand the presence of seed banks really anywhere in the ecosystem.
00:32:29.160But in many aspects of regeneration of forests, in the tropics at least, rely on banks of seeds in the forest floor.
00:32:37.720That is, a tree makes hundreds, perhaps thousands of seeds that fall to the forest floor.
00:32:42.960Some of them decompose. Some of them are eaten by terrestrial mammals and moved away and destroyed.
00:32:48.520But some of them just stay there on the forest floor and get buried by subsequent layers of leaves.
00:32:53.380And many of them can remain dormant in the soil for decades and sometimes centuries.
00:33:00.380And when a gap opens up, that is when a tree falls over and there's sunlight that comes to the forest floor, these seeds say, hey, it's time to wake up.
00:33:09.040They can germinate. They start growing into the gap. And that's one way that a forest can regenerate.
00:33:14.100Well, you know, as you clear forests, for instance, in the tropical rainforest where I work in Costa Rica, a lot of that cloud forest has been converted to agricultural lands.
00:33:24.380That is, farmers have cut down forests, but very often they leave one or two or three trees in their pastures for shade for their cattle or because they think they're beautiful or the wood is no good anyway.
00:33:35.340So there's these communities that I described before of these living epiphytic canopy dwelling
00:33:40.540plants and that soil that is present underneath them.
00:33:44.300And I thought, well, maybe that soil has seeds in them, just like the terrestrial soil does.
00:33:50.940And so my students and I cut off patches of these chunks of canopy soil.
00:34:00.340And lo and behold, there was a bank of viable seeds in these pasture trees.
00:34:04.740And so we figured that if those exist as part of a viable seed bank, if a branch falls down and that soil and those seeds ride down that branch, there's a greater probability that then a primary rainforest plant is going to grow in the shade of that isolated pasture tree.
00:34:22.000Or if the tree falls over altogether, again, that is a seed bank that wasn't there before that might help or enhance the probability of the regeneration of the next generation of forests underneath these pasture trees.
00:34:36.780So we explored that. We published a paper on that.
00:34:39.520it's been followed up by other people who have been doing greenhouse experiments to make sure
00:34:43.480that these trees are viable, that they can actually grow, that they are protected by fences from being
00:34:50.320eaten by cows, that they can actually grow. And they actually call these isolated pasture trees
00:34:55.520regeneration nuclei. That is, that individual tree can serve as sort of an island of safety,
00:35:02.740an island of shade. And now we know an island of a repository of canopy seeds that wouldn't
00:35:08.080otherwise be there. I think a really promising area of research in the Pacific Northwest
00:35:12.700would be to do the same kinds of studies that we've been doing in Costa Rica, but with these
00:35:17.460legacy trees that are left in clear cuts to serve as a seed source for the next generation of trees,
00:35:24.720but to actually try to quantify that bank of seeds that are in the canopy soils that might be used
00:35:32.160as the tree branches fall, or the trees as a whole fall, or animals visiting the canopy of that
00:35:38.260isolated tree might take chunks of that soil or seeds themselves and disperse them to other areas.
00:35:43.520So that's another example, I think, of an area of forest canopy ecology that we've just barely
00:35:50.640scratched the surface and would really benefit from more scrutiny, more investigation.
00:35:56.040Oh, that's incredible. I'm so excited by that topic. And it reminds me fungi in these canopies
00:36:06.760as well. And there's so many that are not understood. And I'm wondering, along with
00:36:14.660these seeds that are left in the canopies, what are some of the lessons from the fungi in these
00:36:21.860canopies that are also extremely biodiverse and perhaps have a similar way of helping to restore
00:36:29.260certain ecosystems and also have more research directed towards them.
00:36:34.960You've hit on probably the part of canopy ecology that is the most poorly known,
00:36:40.260and that is canopy fungi. And when I was putting together a textbook with a colleague of mine
00:36:45.220called Forest Canopies about 10 years ago, we had somebody who could write a chapter about
00:36:50.340the canopy plants, the canopy birds, the canopy soils, the canopy microorganisms,
00:36:56.240canopy conservation. We couldn't find any scientist that could actually write a chapter
00:37:02.380about canopy fungi because there simply wasn't enough, there isn't enough sort of basic research
00:37:07.740that's been done to even try to integrate or synthesize what is known and what needs to be
00:37:12.560done. So all I can say is it's very rare to encounter fruiting bodies, you know, the
00:37:17.660the mushrooms, you don't see those in the canopy. But we know that there are fungi there. For
00:37:23.580instance, some of the work that I've done with a graduate student of mine, Kai Rains, we looked at
00:37:28.720the roots of several of the genera of these canopy dwelling plants, plants in the piper family,
00:37:35.080the pepper family, and also the plants in the blueberry family, the ericaceae. And they
00:37:40.560collected roots, they did the preparation to see whether or not there was a fungal component,
00:37:44.600And also looked at the physical structures of the roots there, and they ascertained that those plants are indeed mycorrhizal, that they have this fungal root interaction that allows them to take greater advantage of the water and the nutrients in the soil, in this case, the canopy soil, but that by whatever means, the spores and propagules of the fungi that are specific to that mycorrhizal interaction are indeed up in the canopy.
00:38:10.980but who they are and what they look like and what conditions they grow in best and how specific they
00:38:17.320are to particular species of vascular plants, those questions are wide open. And to me,
00:38:24.480that means that it's both super exciting and super frustrating, super exciting because there's lots
00:38:30.320of questions to ask and answer, but super frustrating because there still are so many
00:38:35.320missing pieces of this jigsaw puzzle of rainforests that have not been answered, so that we can't even
00:38:41.280yet describe patterns, much less make predictions about what might happen in the face of global
00:38:46.840climate change or more land conversion to agricultural land, because we're missing these
00:38:51.620basic pieces of biology that are so necessary to really soundly understand what's going on in an
00:39:36.380Oh, here's a mushroom that I must not eat.
00:39:41.540Here's a mushroom that I must not eat.
00:39:47.200Well, now that you've taken us through the seed banks and the canopies and the fungi,
00:39:54.040I would now love to delve a little deeper into the epiphytes of the canopy, more specifically the mosses, which really steal my heart.
00:40:03.260And these beings are so often overlooked and understudied, but as one of the most ancient plant lineages on Earth, we have a thing or two to learn from them.
00:40:13.940And I've heard that the gathering of wild moss is for commercial uses in some temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest and Appalachia to be called the, quote, botanical equivalent of strip mining.
00:40:25.380And in one of your publications, you reference that the U.S. floral industry alone consumes up to 37 million dry kilograms of moss each year.
00:52:05.660and let alone your passion about so many things
00:52:10.700and building bridges beyond the scientific community.
00:52:14.420And it's wonderful because that scientific community
00:52:17.440and the knowledge tends to be inaccessible
00:52:20.540and elitist and insular to most people
00:52:23.540And especially people who don't identify with academia or don't have the opportunity to go to college or whatever reasons.
00:52:30.780And I guess as we're coming to the end of our interview, I would just like to ask you to share with the audience how you're endeavoring to make the teachings of the forest accessible to all.
00:52:42.960And maybe just being able to round out this interview with what you're working on now, what is most important to you, and how can people support your work, or are there areas that you feel that are really important for people to get involved in?
00:53:01.860Oh, wow. I guess now at this stage of my life, I mean, I'm 63 years old. I've been a scientist and a professor for more than 30 years.
00:53:10.460I've lived in different parts of the country. I've done field work in different parts of the
00:53:14.480world. I feel I'm now at a stage where I'm allowed to and I'm capable maybe of pulling together these
00:53:21.500threads, the threads of science, threads of the arts, the threads of the humanities, the threads
00:53:27.280of human needs, especially humans who have been in bad places for my 15 years of work in prisons.
00:53:34.580And I think now I'm allowed and able to try to weave them together to think about life and its interpretation as a tapestry where each thread is pure, you know, a green thread, a red thread.
00:53:48.060I love the purity of science. I love the purity of faith based people and how directed and singular they can be about their faith. I love the purity of the arts of an artist who just is so great at singing opera. And then you can bring her into the canopy of a tree and she can sing an opera about the forest canopy.
00:54:10.040And so what I'm seeing is the possibility and the need for interweaving these threads.
00:54:16.680And unfortunately, our society is often about separating threads.
00:54:20.900You know, you take your English class, your math class, your geography class, you know,
00:54:24.920your history class, and then somehow you're supposed to put those all together maybe to
00:54:30.800And it's clear from our world right now that we need all those different threads.
00:54:35.840I mean, it's very, very rare to find a societal problem that's just one color or could be solved by a thread of one color.
00:54:43.340So I think where I'm going now is taking what I've done before in science and continue to do.
00:54:48.740I'm very fortunate and I'm leaving the day after tomorrow for three months in Costa Rica to do fieldwork.
00:54:53.880So I'm carrying on the science thread.
00:54:55.860But I've also been able to add these other threads of the incarcerated, of the arts, of thinking about conservation in this sense of connectedness.
00:55:06.380And then, you know, to create this tapestry of how science and society, how nature and humans work together.
00:55:13.560And I'm still not certain what the loom is.
00:55:16.360You know, I'm still like looking around.
00:55:17.760I've been using academia as my loom, but maybe there's some other loom that will allow me to lay the woof and the weft of these different colored threads together to more efficiently and effectively make something that's like a tapestry that's beautiful and complex and connected and yet fragile too.
00:55:34.880And so I guess that's what I'm up to these days is searching for the loom that will allow me to weave these different, diverse, beautiful threads together to make something of use.
00:55:47.760Well, I just want to again, thank you, Nalini, for all that you have done and given back to the earth. It's mind blowing and inspiring and just gives me so much energy and honestly, I just want to get to know you more.
00:56:06.900I'm like who is this person you are just so incredible especially as a scientist because
00:56:15.360science holds so much power and so much influence in today's world and many scientists are not
00:56:22.840putting all of the pieces together I wish you could see my face right now it is smiling from
00:56:29.840ear to ear knowing that someone like you is out there doing the work that you are doing
00:56:34.660and influencing others along the way so thank you so much for this interview and this time that we
00:56:42.080spent together and I hope that we will find each other in a tree somewhere at some point
00:56:47.180hugging each other and hugging the tree at the same time and just
00:56:50.880uh singing opera to the mosses that is exactly what I want to do for 2018
00:56:57.160I'm sure you will thank you so much okay thank you Nalini
00:57:04.660Thank you for listening to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayanna Young.
00:57:17.040Today we heard the sonic artistry of Emma Tricka singing Take Me Away,