explorers have the joy of investigating
the animals and plants and people that
that occur in places that are far
removed from where we live for example
in the tops of trees and distance
rainforests but the problems that
rainforests are facing means also that
explorers have to cut through the noise
in order to communicate what they learn
in these far places to those members of
society who may not necessarily
understand the beauty and importance of
them who may not necessarily have active
subscriptions to the National Geographic
magazine
I believe that communication to the
environmentally unaware is one of our
big challenges to solve environmental
problems big problems such as forest
fragmentation global climate change
species extinctions how can we foster
change in people who may not wish to
change or not even be aware that there
is a need to change metaphorically I
think there’s one approach to do this
that we can move the focus from the
immovable trunks of our big problems so
those parts of this metaphorical tree
that do move that is in this case the
leaves and twigs of a tree and to
investigate this I turn trees into
artists what I did was attach little
paintbrushes on a breezy day to the tips
of trees held up a piece of drawing
paper and allowed the tree to make art
for two minutes
this was the resulting piece of art that
the tree made being a scientist I want
to know how far how much these trees
could move collectively and so I simply
measured the segments of the painted
tree for two minutes added up the
segments multiplied the number of
minutes by number of minutes per year
the number of twigs per branch the
number of branches per tree and came up
with an accurate figure of how far
collectively a single tree could move in
a year I’m sure you have a guess
since I only have 15 minutes I’ll tell
you the answer which is 186,000 540
miles per year which is equivalent to 7
times around planet Earth
so using this metaphor of a tree that
seems a movable and yet isn’t is moving
very fast and very far I would like to
share with you today what I think of in
terms of three ways that we explorers
might need to promote movement in terms
of moving these environmental problems
that I spoke about one of them is moving
from the unknown to the known the second
is moving information from the exclusive
to the inclusive and finally moving from
despair to hope first from moving from
the unknown to the known one of the
things that I’ve spent my scientific
life on is exploring a very unknown
place the rainforest canopy of
Monteverde Costa Rica this is the the
rainforest canopy just thirty years ago
was known as the last biotic frontier
but with a variety of mountain climbing
techniques we have been able to know the
unknown very well and I thought the best
way to show this to you would be to show
you a small clip of a piece of a
National Geographic film called heroes
of the high frontier which illustrates
to you how I get from the unknown to the
known
so when I’ve gotten to the canopy what
I’ve learned is that there are a number
of things that are revealed that the
caballo de are very diverse and that
they perform extremely important
ecological roles they enhance the water
and nutrient cycles of the forest as a
whole the canopy plants provide food and
water for the arboreal mammals and birds
that live up there for their whole lives
but there are other things that I see in
the forest canopy that I’ve learned one
is that we see not only ecological
wholeness but we also see human
disturbances and the effects of those of
mining of conversion from forests to
agricultural use of invasive species in
addition what I have observed is this
increasing distance of people from trees
this non knowledge that trees are
important to all of the things that we
do and so in response to this
understanding I started a little
nonprofit called the international
canopy network we canopy researchers got
together and began publishing papers in
the popular press consulting to the
media and so forth but very soon I
realized that I was really preaching to
the choir these products of my publicity
we’re really getting to people who were
already aware of the importance and the
beauty of canopy organisms so I began to
ask how I can get outside that choir how
can I bring my messages to people who
might not already be convinced of the
importance and I took then my movement
from exclusive knowledge to inclusive
knowledge and I took a clue from the
fact that trees have a peculiar
structure that each twig is connected to
another twig each branch to another
branch and I realized that perhaps what
I could explore is the connection of the
ecological values of trees which I just
told you about to other societal values
that already exist recreational values
aesthetic values spiritual values and
social justice values and I’ll go
through an example of each of the
projects that we’ve worked on in order
to connect these ecological values with
society I’ll start with recreational
values the toys and games that we play
with and of course there was an easy
shot to say well let’s just make treetop
Barbie after all
girls are entranced with her what was
really key here after we approached
Mattel and didn’t get much of a positive
response I really don’t understand why
so we began making treetops Barbies
ourselves going to Goodwill’s buying
used Barbies and dressing her in these
little clothes
we also made this little booklet that
has information about the canopy plants
of the temperate and tropical
rainforests we’re now working on ground
support Ken but it’s not as good as
Stella so in terms of aesthetic values
the power of science combined with the
power of art is something that I think
is very effective in terms of cutting
through the noise to communicate with
the environmentally unaware and with the
support of a conservation trust grant
and the guidance of John Francis who
awarded that I started putting together
what I call canopy confluences where I
invite and then become inclusive with
scientists artists singers opera singers
dancers rap singers and forest
ecologists we spend a week in the forest
together climbing trees making
observations and communicating what we
collectively learned about the forest
canopy this has resulted in moss
collections and modern dances and
artwork and in sculpture but to me
perhaps the most important result was
learning that I could engage rap singers
to engage urban youth at risk urban
youth in terms of understanding the
importance of trees
I hired a rap singer named caution we
brought together 40 at-risk kids from
Tacoma Washington we spent five days at
the college campus where I taught and in
the afternoons we adjourn to the music
the music studios were the kids
themselves then translated what they had
experienced in the forest with the rap
singer – making their own rap songs
their own hip-hop songs and their own
spoken word poetry another application
of aesthetics of course is fashion very
powerful business in terms of people’s
self image and in terms of the amount of
money that people spend on clothes I’m
working now with a fashion designer in
New York City to create a line of
clothes called field guide in which we
take an image from the forest canopy
this is a piper plant piper
Arita m– it grows in the canopy it’s in
the same plant family as black pepper
that you put on your scrambled eggs this
morning we make little hang tags that go
along with this so that the person who
buys it will have that information and
so when I first
might go to Starbucks and I’m in line
and Brooke sees me just Nalini nice
jacket then I can tell her well this is
Piper Eitam it grows on the Monteverdi
forest clan lady it’s related to the
black pepper and it’s an endangered
ecosystem thereby getting the message to
people again who might cherish clothes
the applied aesthetics of clothes and
fashion where they might never step foot
in a tropical rainforest spiritual
values are very pervasive about 80% of
the people on this planet consider
themselves religious or spiritual in
nature and my technique for doing this
for exploring the connection between the
ecological values of trees with those of
spiritual and religious people was to
start reading and taking notes on the
religious texts of all of the world
religions to find out how trees and
forests are described in the holy
scriptures for example in the Old
Testament I ended up downloading that
from the from the web doing a search for
the word tree in forest and finding that
there were 328 references to the words
tree and forests all of which relate to
important cultural and religious values
ornamentation for temples practical use
location descriptions and so forth I did
the same thing with a Koran with a
Talmud with Buddhist writings in the
Bhagavad Gita and it was able then to
put together a number of sermons that
I’ve taken to churches and temples and
synagogues to provide evidence of the
importance of trees growing not on my
ecological values but rather the words
of the Holy Scriptures of the people in
the congregation themselves another
thing that we’re doing is mapping trees
and churchyards where we go to a
churchyard we offer to map and document
all of the trees on the sacred ground of
the churchyard to remind people that
they are protecting not only the nave
and the Holy Scriptures and the pews and
the pulpit but also the fact that the
trees and the biota in their own
churchyards are deserving of mindfulness
and of stewardship and of understanding
the last value all talked about is the
value of social justice values basically
when you think of the prisons in our
country there are 2.3 million people who
are incarcerated these people are kept
away from nature as one of the
consequences of their actions
and that is something that I myself can
hardly imagine but I thought that they
might be great candidates for needing to
learn about
the importance of trees and forests my
approach to this was to involve them
with a ecological problem in the Pacific
Northwest there’s a great deal of
harvesting of mosses and lichens for the
horticultural trade which is expanding
my research has shown that these mosses
take two to three decades to regrow and
therefore it is not a sustainable
practice and so I needed to engage some
people who could help me learn how to
farm mosses to reduce the collection of
mosses from the wild it seems to me also
that perhaps prisoners would be the best
candidates for this they have a lot of
time they have a lot of space they don’t
need sharp tools to work with mosses and
that’s exactly what happened I went to a
minimum-security prison just south of
Olympia Washington where I lived and I
was able after going through two or
three prisons found that in fact one of
the superintendent’s was very
sympathetic to this I was allowed to
bring my mosses together we developed
together with the inmates the study
design and the the research itself we
ended up publishing a number of
scientific papers with the inmates as
co-authors this was so successful in
terms of the prisoners myself as a
scientist and the prison administrators
that I was asked to start a science
lecture series and I did and I began
bringing in other scientists
sustainability experts these lectures
then began inspiring the superintendent
and the inmates themselves to start
putting in organic Gardens vermiculture
beekeeping water catchment and that led
them to working with conservation groups
to start having the inmates raise
endangered plants for restoration the
endangered Oregon spotted frog and the
Taylor Checkerspot butterfly this
program the sustainability and prisons
project has now spread to ten state
prisons in Washington State and we are
now moving towards a nationwide effort
to bring this program to other states
and other universities we have a
multitude of partners agencies NGOs and
universities as well as corrections
groups and we recently had a National
Science foundation-funded conference to
bring together people from ten different
states to think about launching their
own sustainability in prisons projects
the last piece I’d like to talk about is
the movement from despair to hope and it
was in the prisons I began to feel that
I was really in the pits of despair
looking at what some of the prisoners
have to deal with in their own lives we
didn’t have access to all of the prisons
and all of the prisoners in these
projects because some of these prisoners
are kept in what is called Supermax or
segregated units where because of the
violence of their crimes or the nature
of their crimes they’re kept away in
solitary confinement and small-scaled
cells for 23 hours a day one hour a day
they’re allowed to go out to what is
called recreation yards they’re very
bare and very sterile my idea was to
bring nature imagery to these inmates we
couldn’t bring frogs to them we couldn’t
bring plants and soil to them but we
could bring the images of trees the
images of nature to them in these cells
and that’s exactly what we’ve been able
to do starting with one prison in Oregon
state where we now have projectors that
are now beaming images of trees and
forests and other images of nature
within these very sterile cells to at
least show them and expose them to the
beauty of trees which in other
situations bring down stress brings down
anxiety and brings down violence what we
found on just the first two months is
that in fact violent interactions and
infractions have gone down in the units
of where these nature imagery
projections are being being offered and
so we hope to get really strong evidence
for that so that we can spread that to
other prisons across the country all of
us as explorers I think can think about
ways that we can link the values of the
plants and the animals and the people
that we are investigating in these
far-flung places to the public not just
to the public and people like us but to
the public that may not be so aware of
the importance of ecological values and
so I invite each of you to think about
and I think all of you are explorers to
think about the plant or animal or
people that you might relate to other
kinds of values within society in order
to cut through the noise and communicate
with them I’ve started what I call the
research ambassador program funded by
the National Science Foundation to take
other scientists to do this kind of work
to take their research their knowledge
their deep knowledge moving from the
unknown to the known and share that in
an an inclusive way with other people in
society
I’ll end by just repeating that
explorers do have the joy of
investigating biota in place that lie
outside the ordinary and that we must
share what we learn with those who do
not share our values although there’s
really very little training at least in
academia for this I believe that we all
can do this I believe that if a single
tree can move around our planet seven
times in a year if Barbie can climb
trees with her high-heeled feet
if rap singers can inspire urban
children if puppets can become places to
preach about conservation and if
prisoners can nurture species and bring
them away from extinction while even
these prisoners are still caged then I
think that explorers like us can counter
the deep-rooted and heavily trunk
problems of plants and animals and
people on our planet I’ve learned many
lessons with the support of the National
Geographic Society I’ve learned that by
making creative leaps that turn out to
be just small stepping stones by
engaging it by engaging partners in all
walks of life and most of all by opening
ourselves to the values of others we can
harness the beautiful movement of
seemingly intractable intractable
obstacles that will prove that will
propel us upward and onward thank you
Oh
the animals and plants and people that
that occur in places that are far
removed from where we live for example
in the tops of trees and distance
rainforests but the problems that
rainforests are facing means also that
explorers have to cut through the noise
in order to communicate what they learn
in these far places to those members of
society who may not necessarily
understand the beauty and importance of
them who may not necessarily have active
subscriptions to the National Geographic
magazine
I believe that communication to the
environmentally unaware is one of our
big challenges to solve environmental
problems big problems such as forest
fragmentation global climate change
species extinctions how can we foster
change in people who may not wish to
change or not even be aware that there
is a need to change metaphorically I
think there’s one approach to do this
that we can move the focus from the
immovable trunks of our big problems so
those parts of this metaphorical tree
that do move that is in this case the
leaves and twigs of a tree and to
investigate this I turn trees into
artists what I did was attach little
paintbrushes on a breezy day to the tips
of trees held up a piece of drawing
paper and allowed the tree to make art
for two minutes
this was the resulting piece of art that
the tree made being a scientist I want
to know how far how much these trees
could move collectively and so I simply
measured the segments of the painted
tree for two minutes added up the
segments multiplied the number of
minutes by number of minutes per year
the number of twigs per branch the
number of branches per tree and came up
with an accurate figure of how far
collectively a single tree could move in
a year I’m sure you have a guess
since I only have 15 minutes I’ll tell
you the answer which is 186,000 540
miles per year which is equivalent to 7
times around planet Earth
so using this metaphor of a tree that
seems a movable and yet isn’t is moving
very fast and very far I would like to
share with you today what I think of in
terms of three ways that we explorers
might need to promote movement in terms
of moving these environmental problems
that I spoke about one of them is moving
from the unknown to the known the second
is moving information from the exclusive
to the inclusive and finally moving from
despair to hope first from moving from
the unknown to the known one of the
things that I’ve spent my scientific
life on is exploring a very unknown
place the rainforest canopy of
Monteverde Costa Rica this is the the
rainforest canopy just thirty years ago
was known as the last biotic frontier
but with a variety of mountain climbing
techniques we have been able to know the
unknown very well and I thought the best
way to show this to you would be to show
you a small clip of a piece of a
National Geographic film called heroes
of the high frontier which illustrates
to you how I get from the unknown to the
known
so when I’ve gotten to the canopy what
I’ve learned is that there are a number
of things that are revealed that the
caballo de are very diverse and that
they perform extremely important
ecological roles they enhance the water
and nutrient cycles of the forest as a
whole the canopy plants provide food and
water for the arboreal mammals and birds
that live up there for their whole lives
but there are other things that I see in
the forest canopy that I’ve learned one
is that we see not only ecological
wholeness but we also see human
disturbances and the effects of those of
mining of conversion from forests to
agricultural use of invasive species in
addition what I have observed is this
increasing distance of people from trees
this non knowledge that trees are
important to all of the things that we
do and so in response to this
understanding I started a little
nonprofit called the international
canopy network we canopy researchers got
together and began publishing papers in
the popular press consulting to the
media and so forth but very soon I
realized that I was really preaching to
the choir these products of my publicity
we’re really getting to people who were
already aware of the importance and the
beauty of canopy organisms so I began to
ask how I can get outside that choir how
can I bring my messages to people who
might not already be convinced of the
importance and I took then my movement
from exclusive knowledge to inclusive
knowledge and I took a clue from the
fact that trees have a peculiar
structure that each twig is connected to
another twig each branch to another
branch and I realized that perhaps what
I could explore is the connection of the
ecological values of trees which I just
told you about to other societal values
that already exist recreational values
aesthetic values spiritual values and
social justice values and I’ll go
through an example of each of the
projects that we’ve worked on in order
to connect these ecological values with
society I’ll start with recreational
values the toys and games that we play
with and of course there was an easy
shot to say well let’s just make treetop
Barbie after all
girls are entranced with her what was
really key here after we approached
Mattel and didn’t get much of a positive
response I really don’t understand why
so we began making treetops Barbies
ourselves going to Goodwill’s buying
used Barbies and dressing her in these
little clothes
we also made this little booklet that
has information about the canopy plants
of the temperate and tropical
rainforests we’re now working on ground
support Ken but it’s not as good as
Stella so in terms of aesthetic values
the power of science combined with the
power of art is something that I think
is very effective in terms of cutting
through the noise to communicate with
the environmentally unaware and with the
support of a conservation trust grant
and the guidance of John Francis who
awarded that I started putting together
what I call canopy confluences where I
invite and then become inclusive with
scientists artists singers opera singers
dancers rap singers and forest
ecologists we spend a week in the forest
together climbing trees making
observations and communicating what we
collectively learned about the forest
canopy this has resulted in moss
collections and modern dances and
artwork and in sculpture but to me
perhaps the most important result was
learning that I could engage rap singers
to engage urban youth at risk urban
youth in terms of understanding the
importance of trees
I hired a rap singer named caution we
brought together 40 at-risk kids from
Tacoma Washington we spent five days at
the college campus where I taught and in
the afternoons we adjourn to the music
the music studios were the kids
themselves then translated what they had
experienced in the forest with the rap
singer – making their own rap songs
their own hip-hop songs and their own
spoken word poetry another application
of aesthetics of course is fashion very
powerful business in terms of people’s
self image and in terms of the amount of
money that people spend on clothes I’m
working now with a fashion designer in
New York City to create a line of
clothes called field guide in which we
take an image from the forest canopy
this is a piper plant piper
Arita m– it grows in the canopy it’s in
the same plant family as black pepper
that you put on your scrambled eggs this
morning we make little hang tags that go
along with this so that the person who
buys it will have that information and
so when I first
might go to Starbucks and I’m in line
and Brooke sees me just Nalini nice
jacket then I can tell her well this is
Piper Eitam it grows on the Monteverdi
forest clan lady it’s related to the
black pepper and it’s an endangered
ecosystem thereby getting the message to
people again who might cherish clothes
the applied aesthetics of clothes and
fashion where they might never step foot
in a tropical rainforest spiritual
values are very pervasive about 80% of
the people on this planet consider
themselves religious or spiritual in
nature and my technique for doing this
for exploring the connection between the
ecological values of trees with those of
spiritual and religious people was to
start reading and taking notes on the
religious texts of all of the world
religions to find out how trees and
forests are described in the holy
scriptures for example in the Old
Testament I ended up downloading that
from the from the web doing a search for
the word tree in forest and finding that
there were 328 references to the words
tree and forests all of which relate to
important cultural and religious values
ornamentation for temples practical use
location descriptions and so forth I did
the same thing with a Koran with a
Talmud with Buddhist writings in the
Bhagavad Gita and it was able then to
put together a number of sermons that
I’ve taken to churches and temples and
synagogues to provide evidence of the
importance of trees growing not on my
ecological values but rather the words
of the Holy Scriptures of the people in
the congregation themselves another
thing that we’re doing is mapping trees
and churchyards where we go to a
churchyard we offer to map and document
all of the trees on the sacred ground of
the churchyard to remind people that
they are protecting not only the nave
and the Holy Scriptures and the pews and
the pulpit but also the fact that the
trees and the biota in their own
churchyards are deserving of mindfulness
and of stewardship and of understanding
the last value all talked about is the
value of social justice values basically
when you think of the prisons in our
country there are 2.3 million people who
are incarcerated these people are kept
away from nature as one of the
consequences of their actions
and that is something that I myself can
hardly imagine but I thought that they
might be great candidates for needing to
learn about
the importance of trees and forests my
approach to this was to involve them
with a ecological problem in the Pacific
Northwest there’s a great deal of
harvesting of mosses and lichens for the
horticultural trade which is expanding
my research has shown that these mosses
take two to three decades to regrow and
therefore it is not a sustainable
practice and so I needed to engage some
people who could help me learn how to
farm mosses to reduce the collection of
mosses from the wild it seems to me also
that perhaps prisoners would be the best
candidates for this they have a lot of
time they have a lot of space they don’t
need sharp tools to work with mosses and
that’s exactly what happened I went to a
minimum-security prison just south of
Olympia Washington where I lived and I
was able after going through two or
three prisons found that in fact one of
the superintendent’s was very
sympathetic to this I was allowed to
bring my mosses together we developed
together with the inmates the study
design and the the research itself we
ended up publishing a number of
scientific papers with the inmates as
co-authors this was so successful in
terms of the prisoners myself as a
scientist and the prison administrators
that I was asked to start a science
lecture series and I did and I began
bringing in other scientists
sustainability experts these lectures
then began inspiring the superintendent
and the inmates themselves to start
putting in organic Gardens vermiculture
beekeeping water catchment and that led
them to working with conservation groups
to start having the inmates raise
endangered plants for restoration the
endangered Oregon spotted frog and the
Taylor Checkerspot butterfly this
program the sustainability and prisons
project has now spread to ten state
prisons in Washington State and we are
now moving towards a nationwide effort
to bring this program to other states
and other universities we have a
multitude of partners agencies NGOs and
universities as well as corrections
groups and we recently had a National
Science foundation-funded conference to
bring together people from ten different
states to think about launching their
own sustainability in prisons projects
the last piece I’d like to talk about is
the movement from despair to hope and it
was in the prisons I began to feel that
I was really in the pits of despair
looking at what some of the prisoners
have to deal with in their own lives we
didn’t have access to all of the prisons
and all of the prisoners in these
projects because some of these prisoners
are kept in what is called Supermax or
segregated units where because of the
violence of their crimes or the nature
of their crimes they’re kept away in
solitary confinement and small-scaled
cells for 23 hours a day one hour a day
they’re allowed to go out to what is
called recreation yards they’re very
bare and very sterile my idea was to
bring nature imagery to these inmates we
couldn’t bring frogs to them we couldn’t
bring plants and soil to them but we
could bring the images of trees the
images of nature to them in these cells
and that’s exactly what we’ve been able
to do starting with one prison in Oregon
state where we now have projectors that
are now beaming images of trees and
forests and other images of nature
within these very sterile cells to at
least show them and expose them to the
beauty of trees which in other
situations bring down stress brings down
anxiety and brings down violence what we
found on just the first two months is
that in fact violent interactions and
infractions have gone down in the units
of where these nature imagery
projections are being being offered and
so we hope to get really strong evidence
for that so that we can spread that to
other prisons across the country all of
us as explorers I think can think about
ways that we can link the values of the
plants and the animals and the people
that we are investigating in these
far-flung places to the public not just
to the public and people like us but to
the public that may not be so aware of
the importance of ecological values and
so I invite each of you to think about
and I think all of you are explorers to
think about the plant or animal or
people that you might relate to other
kinds of values within society in order
to cut through the noise and communicate
with them I’ve started what I call the
research ambassador program funded by
the National Science Foundation to take
other scientists to do this kind of work
to take their research their knowledge
their deep knowledge moving from the
unknown to the known and share that in
an an inclusive way with other people in
society
I’ll end by just repeating that
explorers do have the joy of
investigating biota in place that lie
outside the ordinary and that we must
share what we learn with those who do
not share our values although there’s
really very little training at least in
academia for this I believe that we all
can do this I believe that if a single
tree can move around our planet seven
times in a year if Barbie can climb
trees with her high-heeled feet
if rap singers can inspire urban
children if puppets can become places to
preach about conservation and if
prisoners can nurture species and bring
them away from extinction while even
these prisoners are still caged then I
think that explorers like us can counter
the deep-rooted and heavily trunk
problems of plants and animals and
people on our planet I’ve learned many
lessons with the support of the National
Geographic Society I’ve learned that by
making creative leaps that turn out to
be just small stepping stones by
engaging it by engaging partners in all
walks of life and most of all by opening
ourselves to the values of others we can
harness the beautiful movement of
seemingly intractable intractable
obstacles that will prove that will
propel us upward and onward thank you
Oh
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