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Inkiling
Magazine
Tree climbing with a higher purpose/
One forest ecologist's got a great idea: mix practicing scientists with artists
and generate that much more data.
12/26/2006
Like any experiment, Nalini Nadkarni’s latest stint of fieldwork in
the old growth forests of Southeast Washington state began with a hypothesis:
“By putting scientists and artists together in the field doing experiential
work, will each group gain something that would not have happened if they
had been doing their work separately?”
To test her idea the tree canopy ecologist from Evergreen State College invited
an array of artists to join her scientific colleagues and herself in the field
for a couple weeks as part of the “Canopy Confluence”. Nadkarni
keeps eight different field sites in the Cascades Mountains as part of a long-term
study of old growth Douglas fir stands. This summer, she visited two of them
with an army of artists, dancers, scientists, tv people, and writers in tow,
including myself...
Nadkarni’s communicated science outside the box for a
while. Several years ago, Nadkarni converted her data on the translocation
of tree nutrients into music so that she could play her data at conferences.
The melody was a hit. She also hosted an artists’ retreat called “Branching
Out” set in the forest. In a different vein her “Tree Canopy Barbie,”
300 of which were sold around Olympia for donation, not only gets smiles from
young girls, but also generates their interest in forest ecology (“Ground
Support Ken” is on the way). Other projects include counting biblical
references to forests and trees (there are 328) and telling local churchgoers
about it. More recently she teamed up with the Cedar Creek Correctional Facility
where she got prisoners to study how to best grow mosses artificially.
Still the best results she’s seen have been with artists. “Artists
are allowed to articulate the emotional, the aesthetic, and spiritual in a
way that scientists, even though they might feel it, aren’t allowed
to,” she says. “[They] are much more able to communicate those
aspects which are more compelling to the public in terms of conservation that
almost all the scientific content in the world.”
