Nalini Nadkarni is an ecologist who helped revolutionize the study of forest canopies. In 1980, Nalini started using mountain climbing techniques to ascend to the treetops in the Costa Rican rainforest. When Nalini isn't traversing tree canopies, she's advocating for environmental conservation and education. Her goal is to reach a broad audience with the message that nature can be incredibly profound, even life-changing.
Nalini Nadkarni is an ecologist who helped revolutionize the study of forest canopies. In 1980, Nalini started using mountain climbing techniques to ascend to the treetops in the Costa Rican rainforest. When Nalini isn't traversing tree canopies, she's advocating for environmental conservation and education. Her goal is to reach a broad audience with the message that nature can be incredibly profound, even life-changing.
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Shelby Stanger:
When you walk through a forest, a colorful ecosystem of plants and animals is alive all around you. As you duck under moss, hanging from towering trees, you might hear the hum of insects and the crunch of vegetation underfoot. But all of this is just a small slice of what the forest has to offer. High above the forest floor, the dense foliage of the tree canopy is a completely different world ripe for discovery.
Nalini Nadkarni:
I might walk around New York City or Salt Lake City and say, "Oh, I'm connected to all these people that are walking around here. I have a lot in common with them." There is something for me at least, that when I'm in a forest, especially when I'm in the canopy, that I feel connected to every living thing in that forest, and I cannot describe it. I cannot explain it scientifically. Maybe it is just in the realm of the spiritual, which is, I think spirituality is all about being connected. Being connected to other people, being connected to nature, being connected to place, being connected to myself.
Shelby Stanger:
That's Nalini Nadkarni, an ecologist who helped revolutionize the study of forest canopies. In 1980, Nalini started using mountain climbing techniques to ascend to the treetops in the Costa Rican rainforest. In doing so, she became one of the first scientists to study the canopy. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production. When Nalini Nadkarni isn't traversing tree canopies, she's advocating for environmental conservation and education. Her goal is to reach a broad audience with the message that nature can be incredibly profound, even life-changing. It's a personal mission with roots in her vibrant, chaotic childhood. Nalini Nadkarni, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living.
Nalini Nadkarni:
Thank you.
Shelby Stanger:
You've had so many wild ideas, especially making your life's work all about my favorite topic, which is...
Nalini Nadkarni:
Trees.
Shelby Stanger:
Trees, yes.
Nalini Nadkarni:
All right. You're in the club. That's fantastic.
Shelby Stanger:
Trees are awesome. So how did you come to studying trees and making your life's work about talking about trees, teaching people about trees, bringing trees to groups that don't normally get access to trees.
Nalini Nadkarni:
Well, I think as with so many scientists, and I think so many people, it's very often in their childhood. As a little kid, you find something that grabs your heart and grabs your passion, and you find a way to sort of follow up with that throughout your professional life. And the same was true with me, I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. It's a suburb of Washington DC, no big forest or wild lands there, but there were these eight maple trees on the driveway of my parents' home in Bethesda. And I used to love coming home from school, and I would be in third, fourth grade and just love climbing trees. And my family also was very instrumental in this. Not that they were necessarily tree lovers, but I have a very mixed background. My dad was from India. He was a scientist, very quiet. He was raised as a Hindu. My mother, on the other hand, was of Russian parentage. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and she was raised as an Orthodox Jew.
So from the very beginning, my siblings and I witnessed and experienced this sort of mixing of different cultures, different languages, different cuisines, different foods, different ways of understanding the world. And I, my brothers and sisters came to understand, there's nothing to it. It's a good thing to be a mix. But it was kind of chaotic in my home. And so I found as a little kid, my kind of refuge was to go out and to climb these eight trees in my parents' front yard every day. And I got to know them intimately, and I loved getting up there, and I felt protected up there. And so it was a place of inquiry and adventure and imagination and also it was my place. And as one of five kids with this busy, crazy household, it was really important to me to have that as a place.
And I think every child kind of needs that. So trees, for me, were that. And so I remember when I was in third or fourth grade, I took this oath to myself that one day when I'm a grownup, I'm going to take care of trees just like they take care of me.
Shelby Stanger:
You're so curious, which is so exciting. You really became interested specifically in tree canopies. Maybe you just break down and explain what a tree canopy even is.
Nalini Nadkarni:
Sure, right. Well, a tree canopy is really any part of a forest that's high above the forest floor. And when I was starting out my studies, my PhD work in forest ecology at the University of Washington, this was back in 1979. At that time, there were really no tools to get up, no procedures or processes or equipment to get up into the forest canopy safely and non-destructively. I mean, people knew about forest canopies and forest canopy organisms that live high up in the canopy because when trees fall down, you could say, "Oh my gosh, look at all these plants, these orchids and bromeliads that are living in the tops of these trees." But it was sort of like marine biology before scuba gear was invented. People knew there were these amazing organisms that lived in the benthos of the ocean, and they would dredge them up and look at them and put them in museums and in their collections. And so they were aware of them, but they never were able to study them in the habitat in which they live and reproduce and behave until the invention of scuba gear.
So it was sort of the same thing with forest canopies 40 years ago when I was just starting out. It was actually called by Terry Erwin, a Smithsonian entomologist, the last biotic frontier. The last biotic frontier?! Oh my gosh, I mean, that's so exciting for a young scientist because that's our job, to make discoveries and make explorations into areas that are unknown to people. And so that combined with my love of tree climbing, which I already love to do anyway, I thought, "Well, then I should be studying the forest canopy." And so my first summer of graduate school, I spent on a field course in Costa Rica, and I looked up into the canopy of these amazing tropical rainforests, and up there were orchids and bromeliads and ferns and birds and monkeys and sloths, and all the stuff was going on so high above the forest floor. You couldn't even really watch it because of all the blocking, intervening foliage and branches and stuff.
And so I asked my professors, "What's going on in the canopy? What are all these plants and animals doing in the forest?" And they just sort of shrug their shoulders and said, "Well, we don't know. We can't get up there safely. We have no idea." And so that time, 1979, that's when I sort of realized this is what I want to study.
Shelby Stanger:
So what was it like the very first time you were able to get high up in a tree, and how did you do it?
Nalini Nadkarni:
The very first time, I will never, ever forget that Shelby. I learned mountain climbing techniques from a guy named Don Perry who had pioneered some of these canopy access techniques to get into the canopy. And he was a graduate student who was studying pollination biology of emergent trees up high in the canopy. He built a platform 125 feet above the forest floor, and he began applying these mountain climbing techniques. He used a crossbow to first shoot up just a fishing line up and over a branch, then would tie on a nylon cord and pull that up and over the same branch, and then tie a climbing rope on that nylon cord and pull that up and over, tie off one end of the rope and then just climb the rope like... Well, many of your listeners, I'm sure, climb mountains and do rock climbing.
So the technology of actually, and the mechanics and engineering of getting up a rope is not that big a deal. You just sit in a regular harness. You have these ascending devices, one for your seat harness, one for your leg loops, and you kind of alternate weight in your seat harness and your leg loops so that you can move yourself up the rope with fairly small amounts of strength and just a little bit of coordination. So it's really within the capacity of just about everybody who isn't scared to death of heights. So that's the way I first went up there. And I remember Don Perry took me to his platform, to the tree that had this amazing platform up there. And he said, "Okay, here's your harness. Here's how you put these ascenders on the rope and up you go." And I just began slowly inchworming my way up the rope and sort of testing it out and getting my confidence.
And I remembered as I'd left the forest floor, and as I began progressing upward and just even 20 feet above the forest floor, you sense this change in the microenvironment. It's no longer the dark, damp, windless forest floor that you experience on the trail. You start moving into the canopy. And as I moved up there and began seeing these canopy plants and seeing bromeliads and vines right next to me, I just started screaming because I couldn't believe I was able to climb this tree that had no lower limbs. It was a hundred feet to the very first branch. So there's no way I could have climbed this tree just using my childhood climbing techniques. So the technology and the gear of the mountain climbing techniques I realized was my ticket to happiness, my ticket to exploration, my ticket to the world above. And I knew that that was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life.
Shelby Stanger:
Getting up into the canopy allowed Nalini's mind to run wild with curiosity. What kind of organisms, plants, birds, insects, lichens, would she find up there? How do all of these organisms interact with each other? And how do those interactions affect the rest of the forest? There were so many questions that she was eager to research, not to mention, just being up in the treetops was an unbelievable experience in itself. So was your first tree that you climbed that high up in Costa Rica?
Nalini Nadkarni:
Yeah. It was in a place called the La Selva Biological Station. This fabulous research station in the lowland tropical rainforest of Costa Rica.
Shelby Stanger:
And so what did you see? Because the first time I went to Costa Rica, I was just like, there are leaves growing on top of leaves and trees growing on top of trees, and cockroaches the size of an 8 by 11 piece of paper. There's monkeys, there's sloths, there's just these crazy intricate vines growing on top. It's just so interconnected. It blew me away.
Nalini Nadkarni:
Well, you've just described my first climb up into the rainforest canopy of La Selva Biological Station. This enormous complexity of organisms, this enormous diversity of interactions that you simply cannot be aware of even when you're standing on the forest floor. And I think it's not only the organisms, it's not only the interactions, it's also the incredibly complex structure of the forest that you become aware of as you climb into it. When we walk on the forest floor, we're in a two-dimensional world. Well, it's called a floor for a reason, it's basically this flat floor. But when you move up into the canopy and start looking at the forest, your perceptions go from two dimensions to three dimensions, and you realize the intricacies of these multiple layers and the connections like with vines, as you mentioned, from one tree to another.
And suddenly instead of this flat jigsaw puzzle of a picture of a tropical rainforest, you're in the middle of virtual reality of a tropical rainforest. And everywhere you look, everywhere you turn your ear to listen, there's something that you become aware of that you would not have been able to be aware of, much less understand, much less do experiments on, much less communicate about when you're stuck on the forest floor.
Shelby Stanger:
So you've studied trees for 40 years of your life. You've studied these canopies. What are some of the most profound things that you've learned?
Nalini Nadkarni:
I'll just give you one example of a discovery I made early on in my canopy studies that exemplified the need for exploration of the canopy, but also how connected elements of the forest are in ways that we hadn't learned before. So when I was climbing up into the canopy of the temperate rainforest of Washington state where I did part of my dissertation work. I learned that there are living epiphytes there. There are living mosses and lichens and ferns and so forth. But when those living plants die, they decompose and they stay up in the canopy. They create this sort of canopy soil on the branches and trunks of these living trees. And I was thinking, "Wow, that's pretty cool. All this soil a hundred feet above the forest floor." And so I was taking samples of these mats of living mosses and that canopy soil underneath them. But as I was peeling back these rugs, these literally upholstery of these mats, of these canopy plants and soil, I noticed these roots that were running along the branches underneath these mats of soil.
I thought, "Well, that's weird. These are vascular plant roots. They're not fern roots. They're definitely not moss roots. What are they?" And it turned out they originated in the branches and trunks of the host trees themselves. And I thought, "Wow, that is weird. These trees are getting nutrients from the very plants that they're supporting. That's cool." So I went back to my major professor and I said, "Hey, Chuck, like what's with these roots in the canopy?" He said, "Nalini, what are you talking about?" And so I said, "No, there are these roots." And he said, "No, that doesn't happen. Roots grow on the soil." So the next time I went to my field site, I rented a chainsaw and I went up into the canopy with this chainsaw. It was a 12-inch chainsaw. And I just chainsawed out this chunk of trunk and branches that had these roots connected to them. I brought them back to my major professor and I said, "These are the roots I'm talking about." And he was just astounded and said, "We've never seen these."
So we start... We sent out samples to root experts all over the world, and it turns out nobody had ever documented that there were these canopy roots. So we published it on the cover actually, of the journal Science, which is one of the most prestigious science journals. And that really kind of cemented this idea that there's some really important scientific interactions that are going on in the canopy that we have to get into the canopy if we are to understand how a forest works at its most basic. But the underlying piece of understanding that I got from that experience was, number one, if you think there's something cool and important going on, you can pursue it and you should pursue it no matter what your major professor tells you. And secondly, that there are unknown pieces of the earth that are yet to be discovered. And if we pursue them, if we explore them, we will find out more about them in order to better understand how these systems work, how they can be sustained, and ultimately what are the consequences of disturbing them.
Shelby Stanger:
No one has ever made me so excited about trees. I can see why your students absolutely love you. What's the big question you're asking now?
Nalini Nadkarni:
Well, there are many questions I'm asking now, but in terms of my forest canopy research, I think the big question that we are all kind of... I think ecologists as well as non-ecologists are wondering about is how are forests going to respond to the environmental challenges that humans have presented to them? And so specifically, one of the questions that I'm asking with three of my colleagues, we just got a grant from the National Science Foundation, is what are the projected effects of climate change on these canopy plant communities and tropical rainforests? And this is especially important to ask in montane forests, forests that occur on mountaintops. Because those forests are called cloud forests and they are bathed for much of the year in wind-driven mist and fog and it creates this amazing canopy community of just incredibly abundant and diverse canopy dwelling plants.
We've learned that they get their nutrients and their water from incoming mist and fog and rainfall. Every raindrop, every little droplet of mist has a very dilute amount of all these nutrients that are fundamental and needed by plants. But climate change, which is already happening and manifesting in these tropical montane forests, the dry seasons are getting longer. There's more days without mist and fog than there ever have been in that forest. And we want to know, since these plants are dependent on mist and fog and rain, what is going to be the consequence of climate change on these plants?
Shelby Stanger:
Nalini is always striving to learn more about the planet and apply her discoveries in constructive ways. For example, her research on montane forests will help us protect delicate ecosystems from climate change disturbance and her discovery of root systems in the canopy was groundbreaking. It changed the way ecologists think about how nutrients circulate in forest ecosystems. Nalini is also keen to share her findings with people who aren't scientists and show them the power of nature. When we come back, Nalini walks us through her initiative to get incarcerated people involved with ecology and breaks down her idea of tapestry thinking.
In 2022, Nalini Nadkarni launched a show on her local NPR station called TreeNote. The episodes are short, just two minutes each. They're a quick peek into some cool ecological facts and stories about trees, like the physiology of leaf fall or what kind of wood is used to make baseball bats. Nalini was inspired to make TreeNote because she's always looking for creative ways to get people excited about the environment. Some of the most important educational work she's done has taken place in prisons with incarcerated people that don't have much access to nature or to science education.
Nalini Nadkarni:
I was so enthralled and grateful to trees that I was always trying to think of ways that I could let other people in on that and encourage them and excite them and stimulate them just as I was stimulated by trees. When I sort of got on that shtick, I would do things like work with National Geographic and consult with them on films and write articles for Natural History Magazines and go to museums and give talks. But the people who come to museums, the people who watch National Geographic documentaries, they already love trees anyway, what am I really doing? I'm not saying those aren't important, they're really important. But I felt like there was so much urgency as I was watching tropical rainforests being cut down and climate change manifestations happening in the very forest that I was working in. I needed to do something more.
And so I began thinking about what group of people should I be focusing on who live and work in completely nature deficit environments? Who have no access to trees or forests? And of course the answer is people who are incarcerated. 2.3 million adults in our country are incarcerated. 50 million youth are incarcerated. So that's a pretty big group. And so I began knocking on doors of state prisons and county jails and just saying, "Hey, could I give a talk about trees to your inmates?" And I was met with a lot of, this is not a university. This is a prison. But there was one small state prison in Washington state where I used to live, the Cedar Creek Correctional Center, and the superintendent, Dan Pacholke, said, "Well, it can't hurt. Maybe the guys will be interested and maybe it'll be okay." So I began giving lectures in that little prison.
The inmates and the officers were really interested in it. And then I began thinking, "Well, these guys, they have a lot of time and maybe they could actually help us with hands-on conservation projects." And so I started a moss growing project to try to think about how can we grow moss so that people won't strip moss out of the old growth forest of the Washington state for the horticulture trade that goes on. So I taught the men how to grow mosses, and they began doing... They did a great job. They loved it. And I began collaborations with other conservation groups like the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, had an ongoing program to rear the Oregon spotted frog from egg to tadpole to adult, and then take those frogs and release them in protected wetlands. So we have the conservationists teach the inmates how to rear these frogs, and they did a great job.
They got the best captive rearing facility award in Washington state for two years in a row. So it was all going great. And then I thought after maybe four or five years, I thought, "Wow, the only inmates I'm really getting to are people, the ones who are in minimum and medium security. But there are inmates who are much deeper in the prison system, and those are the ones in solitary confinement." I approached the solitary confinement people and they said, No, you can't bring plants. You can't bring lecturers to these guys because the security is so high, but we could bring films to them. And there's been a lot of literature that actually started in the medical world, people who were looking at the effects of patients looking out the window at a tree instead of a concrete wall. And they found that the patients who looked out at a tree or nature recovered more quickly.
So I was able to get permission from the Snake River Correctional Institution in eastern Oregon, and we were given access to a cell block that had two parts. And the inmates were of equal risk, security, and age and so forth. But one of them had an exercise room in which we projected films, nature videos, and the other side, we didn't project anything. They just went to their exercise room one hour a day. After a year, we came back and the men who had seen the nature videos on a daily basis, we looked at the record, there are records of violent infractions. And we found that those who had seen these nature videos committed 26% fewer violent infractions than the men who did not see them.
Shelby Stanger:
Nalini, that is so great. Has that program been implemented on a wider scale?
Nalini Nadkarni:
There are a number of prisons now that are taking that on. We've gotten queries from prison systems pretty much around the country. So although it isn't sort of an established practice at this point, I think that people in corrections are... They're looking around for practices that are low cost and effective in terms of reducing violence inside prisons. So it's not the answer to the system of mass incarceration. It's not an answer to the injustices that are so deeply embedded in our system of mass incarceration, but it will provide some relief perhaps, some sense of connection and some sense of contribution to the men and women and youth who are now incarcerated in our system of corrections.
Shelby Stanger:
I think the Nalini's work in prisons is incredible. By projecting natural landscapes onto walls and involving inmates and growing mosses and raising frogs, Nalini was able to engage incarcerated people in nature and conservation work. You wouldn't think that a prison is the likeliest environment for science education, but Nalini weaves scientific threads into all kinds of places. She calls this interdisciplinary approach, tapestry thinking.
Nalini Nadkarni:
It was being in the canopy that kind of taught me about the different kinds of interconnections that operate in a forest. And so that I think along with going back to my parents who interwove Judaism and Hinduism, who interwove Brooklyn, New York with Mumbai, India in the creation of the family without rancor, without conflict. But I always felt like, well, really all... This is what my parents taught me, that Hinduism and Judaism are pretty much the same. They have different trappings, but it doesn't matter because what's important to both religions is about respecting your parents, about loving fellow humans, about contributing in some way to make the world better and to have celebrations and to feel part of a group. But it left me with this understanding that it's possible to weave together threads of different colors and textures, and in doing that to create a new image that would not have existed without those components of these different threads of colors and textures.
When you set up a loom, whether that's academia or whether it's an institute of some kind or a podcast of some kind, and you're trying to answer a difficult question that requires more than one approach, more than one discipline, more than one way of knowing, then you can create this tapestry of these different threads. If you're careful about respecting the color and the texture of each thread, giving it its place and being able to create this tapestry, which is something that's connected and complex, something that's strong, something that's useful, and very often something that's very beautiful. And so that's how I've kind of been approaching my attempt to weave trees into the fabric of care and understanding of our planet with as many different sectors of society as I can.
Shelby Stanger:
Any advice to others on how they can maybe think about connecting groups and tangents that normally we don't think of belonging together?
Nalini Nadkarni:
I've thought about this a lot. So this whole idea of tapestry thinking, some of the things I think that are important for that, first of all, I think you need intellectual humility. And that can be really hard because experts, people say, "Oh, you're a forest ecologist, you're an expert." And I stand up in front of classes and I talk about this is the way trees work, and this is the way forests work. So I'm used to being the authority figure in my world, but to reach out to the incarcerated or to faith-based groups or to artists, what I've learned is that I have to be more humble. I have to say, "Gosh, maybe there's another way of understanding. Maybe there's another way of knowing that's equally valid to my own." So I think being intellectually humble is one of the first things.
I think a second thing to keep in mind is that the novice can have great power in understanding. When you bring somebody to the canopy who's never climbed a tree before, or you bring someone to a forest who's never seen a tree or a forest before. I did this thing called Canopy Confluences, where I brought together artists and forests ecologists, and I asked them to perceive and to create materials how they perceived the canopy. We also brought two Inuits, two men from Nunavut up in the Arctic, who had literally never seen trees because I wanted to get input from people who were completely novices because I thought maybe they'll see trees completely differently than me. And it was true. The Inuits saw trees differently. And at the end of that week, they stood up at the camp, we had a campfire every night. And they said, "You need to start treating trees like we treat our elders in our village because they are the pathfinders for your society."
And it was one of the most powerful conservation statements that I've ever heard. And it came from the mouths of people who had until that week, never ever encountered a tree at all. And I realized then that a novice, someone who doesn't have the vocabulary, who hasn't read the literature, who doesn't have the same understanding that sort of professional experts do, can make statements and have insights that are fresh and perhaps different and may be very useful to people who are the, quote "experts". So this idea of being a novice and having a role and potentially important role in that field, I think, is another thing to think about with tapestry thinking. I think also that it's important to know that starting small is okay. We think, "Oh, to have a big impact, you have to have a big program." But you don't have to, I did some math.
There are 325 million people in the United States. There's 6.2 million scientists. So if each scientist talks to just 52 people a year, that's one person a week outside of academia. That means every single person in the United States would have a conversation with a scientist or conservationist. So it could be your barista. When you buy a latte and you say, "Hey, you know about shade-grown coffee. It's really good to have trees in coffee plantations." Or you get an Uber driver and talk about electric cars, right? So there's your one person a week right there, barista, Uber driver. And if we all did that, we would have this larger impact. And so I think of some of my work with public engagement, like with prisons. I started that with one, little, tiny, minimum security prison, 400 guys in that prison but the work that we've done since then has grown. It went to one prison, to three prisons, to 12 prisons in Washington, then it came to Utah, then it went to Florida.
It takes time. But that little act, that one small prison, that one small conversation with one inmate, it can grow from that. So I think, especially for young people who don't have a lot of resources or a lot of letters of PhD and MD and MS behind their names, starting small, starting local, could grow into something big and that small action itself can be very significant. And then I guess the last one would be is to be as fearless as you can. And it is scary sometimes to knock on the door of a church that you don't belong to or a prison that you've never entered, or an artist studio where you don't really know anything about what's going on, or a radio station where you don't even know how to put the headphones on. Those things are scary, and you want to make people think you know what you're doing, but sometimes the work is too important to be afraid. It's more scary not to do the work.
Shelby Stanger:
Nalini has never been afraid to do things a little differently, whether in a high security prison, on NPR, or high above the Costa Rican rainforest, she always follows her curiosity wherever it leads. Nalini often finds more questions than answers, but her unique approach allows her to make connections that others might not see. Before we wrap up, I also need to share with you a fun fact. Mattel made Nalini into a Barbie. It was one of a kind doll, but in 2020, they made a badass scientist Barbie based on Nalini and her innovative work as an ecologist. They called her Treetop Barbie, and she even came with Barbie size binoculars for bird watching. So cool. Nalini, thank you so much for coming on the show. If Nalini's words and energy inspired you, be sure to check out her new NPR show, TreeNote at KUER.org/podcast/treenote. You can also head to her website to learn more about her work. You can find that at NaliniNadkarni.com. That's N-A-L-I-N-I-N-A-D-K-A-R-N-I.com.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber and our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow this show. Rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.