I recently finished Nalini Nadkarni’s book, Between Earth and Sky (2008), which is a long thoughtful meditation on
trees: the role they play in ecosystems, and in the lives of humans directly and indirectly.
She illustrates how trees permeate every aspect of our lives. Forest canopies are her cup of tea and she
tells you about them with the flare of a sugar maple in fall.
I met her when she was Miami U’s Hefner Lecturer a decade or so ago,
and her visit has always stuck with me because of the amazing science outreach
efforts she’s initiated while continuing to be an active researcher—from
treetop Barbie, which her lab designed and sold, to prisoners growing moss, to
interactions with artists and musicians and dancers. She has taken dancers to her field site in
Costa Rica where they learned about the forests and, naturally, turned that
information into dance. From data to
dance! She says of the performance with
members of the Monteverde Community in attendance: “The Costa Ricans were
excited to see “their” cloud forest animals and plants portrayed in an abstract
but still discernible way…I also recognized the power of artists to communicate
how they feel about their subjects to an audience. Although ecologists and environmental
scientists possess a tremendous amount of information about particular animals,
plants, and interactions, our training dictates that we leave our emotions out
of the telling…In the small auditorium in Monteverde, people seemed far more
inspired than I had ever seen them at a scientist’s lecture or conservationist
workshop. Nevertheless, I knew that my “science-y”
input into the dance had added something.”
Nature has everything you could hope for, plus mosquitoes. Yet we are increasingly removed from nature
even while the magnitude of our impact increases exponentially. And we scientists will turn it all into a lecture, when really a dance seems more appropriate. Although she goes to the masses in TED talks
and seminars, it also seems that she brings the masses with her… maybe that is
too slow with 7 billion plus of us, but it has a huge appeal: One person who
can get fired up about epiphytes, how many more people will s/he impact in the
rest of her/his life? Nadkarni seems at
the cutting edge of what any research scientist is doing, so we must keep an
eye on her. She can see the forest for
the trees, and each tree she can call out by name.
