N. Nadkarni
Used with permission from the author.
May 10, 2008
A TAPESTRY OF BROWNS AND GREENS
–The tapestry of life’s story is woven with the threads of life’s ties, ever joining and breaking.
Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies
When I look closely at a hanging tapestry, I observe that the pathways of individual threads wend
through warp and woof, each one unconnected to the other. Yet if I stand back and look at the whole
tapestry, its intricate and beautiful patterns emerge. In a roomful of such carpets, I observe that those with
the most compelling patterns are composed of individual threads that have the highest intensity and most
contrasting of colors. When I reflect on the tapestry of my own half-century of life, I see that the threads
that have provided the greatest amount of influence on how I understand nature and my place in it are
those that came from the vividly mixed ethnic background of my Indian/Hindu and Brooklyn/Jewish
parents, threads that set me somewhat apart from the mainstream culture of white middle class America in
which I was raised. Being myself composed of different colored threads has allowed me to see the
complexity of nature, and to communicate them to a wide range of audiences.
It was near midnight at 10105 Dickens Avenue in October of 1966. The sleeping bags of my sixthgrade girlfriends lay like spokes around the central coffee table. Martha Bunn, my best friend since we
were seven years old, asked me: Nalini, what does it feel like to look so different from everyone else? I
remember opening my eyes wide in the dark room at her question. I had no answer. Until then, I had not
realized that I looked different from my white friends in the sleeping bags next to mine. But at that
moment, I realized that my mixed heritage apparently did set me apart from others in my suburban
neighborhood — at least from their perspective. My father was a Hindu who emigrated from
India in 1946 for his doctorate in pharmacology. My mother was raised as an Orthodox Jew by parents
who had fled the pogroms of Russia in 1916, and who spoke Yiddish in their home in Brooklyn, New
York. My parents met in graduate school, married, and moved to Bethesda, where my father
spent his career doing cancer research at the National Institute of Health.
The five Nadkarni kids were varying shades of brown. I was the third child, and was the darkest of
the five, the most Indian in my facial features and body look. In contrast to other immigrant Indian
families in the area, who seemed to assimilate into western culture as quickly as possible, my parents
made our home a “Little India”. They gave us all Indian names, which had meanings in Sanskrit: Saroj,
lotus flower; Susheela, well-behaved; Nalini, water lily; Vinay, gentleness; Mohan, charmer. Even our
dog and cats had Indian names: Tipu, Manya, Nisha. At dinnertime, we sat on the kitchen floor and ate
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Indian food with our fingers, my mom circling the six of us, doling out curry and vegetable bhaji. We
slept on mattresses on the floor, just as my father had done in Thane, the small village of his birth.
Christmas morning brought neither a crèche nor presents from Santa, as it did for all of our school
friends. Rather, the family gathered around our fireplace, bereft of Christmas regalia, while my parents
read excerpts from writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. Each month, we received a letter
from my father’s bhataji, or family priest, with a dozen Indian stamps pasted in the corner of the oddsized envelopes. Even unopened, these were redolent of sandalwood paste and prasad, the sweet powder
he would distribute to each of us at the small alter of Ganesha, the god of good fortune and remover of
obstacles. The little ivory carving of our family deity resided on a bookshelf in the kitchen pantry, where
we gathered if a family member were sick, or traveling, to giver prayers for their health or safe journeys.
Our family found it very natural that that Ganesha sat right next to our Menorah, Haggadah, and
Hebrew dictionary, objects that embodied my mother’s religion. The image of our elephant-headed god
was somehow not at all a strange bedfellow to these three representations of Judaism, a faith that forbids
any representation of God. Our two religions lived side-by-side, just as my sisters and I slept comfortably
together on our floor-level mattresses. Although my mother’s heritage was not as apparent as the Indian
elements, Jewish holidays and traditions had a presence in our home. At Passover, we welcomed
packages of honey cake and Matzoh from my maternal grandmother, our Bubby, who practiced her
Orthodox customs all her life. These represented her acceptance of the marriage of her daughter, who had
committed the unthinkable action of marrying outside the faith. Out of deference to her own parents, my
mother did not tell her mother that she was married until after I – the third child – was born, because of
the shame it would bring to her family. Civil law at that time also worked against them. My parents were
not able to legally marry in Washington D.C. – our nation’s capital – because of the miscegenation laws
that still ruled 17 states. These forbade my dark-skinned Indian father – who was classified as a Negro –
from marrying my white mother. They had to take a bus to New York and marry there to have their union
be legal.
That initial awakening at Martha Bunn’s slumber party, reinforced by my family history and the way
we lived made me aware that I was somehow different from others. But those deep cultural differences
my family embodied did not create a conflict. Rather, it fostered something enriching, just as differentcolored threads created the richness of Tagore’s tapestry. I believe that it set the stage for the way I have
come to view nature – not as consisting of monochromes, but rather as comprising many colors and
textures, all necessary to creating a complex and resilient whole.
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NATURE AS PROTECTED AND PROTECTOR
My early experiences provided me with two seemingly contradictory roles of nature. The natural
world both needed protection and provided protection. As children, we participated in caring for the
nature in our own back yard. Although my father was stern and authoritarian, and I often feared his iron
rule, he had a benevolent attitude toward nature. On weekends, he tended our two-acre lot of garden and
trees. I remember the care he showed when we transplanted young saplings from one part of our yard to
another, a near-reverent tenderness that I seldom saw in him. He made sure that the sphere of soil
surrounding each tree’s young roots was big enough to absorb the shock of being uprooted. He would
unfailingly water it afterward, to welcome it to its new environment. I liked to pat the soil in the
handprints that he had lain down. His big handprint surrounded my little one in the dark soil beside the
slender brown trunk that upheld the pliant limbs, so like mine, ready to grow. I have wondered if he saw
himself in those transplanted trees, a fellow migrant, from his small village in India to the culture of
suburban America. Those actions gave me a strong ethic of protecting nature.
I learned also that the converse was true — nature protected me. The elm tree that stood outside my
childhood home and tapped companionably on my bedroom window kept me company on scary, windy
nights, assuring me that my favorite playmates – the trees that lined our driveway – awaited me outside to
join them when daytime returned. Tree climbing was a near-daily pleasure for me. When I got home from
school, I exchanged a hello with my mom, and grabbed a snack and a book to read. I chose one of the
eight maple trees that lined the driveway to climb for the afternoon. Those perches were refuges from the
world of homework, chores, fights with siblings, and strict parental directives. I could look out across my
home territory, check on the progress of squirrel nest constructions, and feel the strong limbs of the trees
holding me up for as long as I wished. In my imagination, those treetop roosts became in turn a place to
sequester Anne Frank, a sanctuary for injured birds, a refuge for wounded soldiers, and a rescue vessel in
case of drastic emergency neighborhood flooding. It was my Ark. Those afternoons of arboreal repose
germinated my sense that nature is a place of safety, a place that protected me and those I cared for.
NATURE AS AN OBJECT OF STUDY
As with many children of immigrants, the strongest directive from both of our parents to the children
was to behave properly: to be obedient, respectful, and studious. Scholastic achievement was of
paramount importance. Education had been the key element for the success of both of my parents, and
they believed deeply it would help us find our place in life. I felt I had to meet the highest standards of all
of my siblings. In the tradition of India, girls marry and go off to the family of their husbands, which
requires large dowries, rendering them more of a burden than a gift. It is the sons who bring home wives
and care for them in their old age. As the third daughter in a family of two cultures that value sons over
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daughters, I worked hard to gather straight A’s, played on three varsity sports teams, joined the Latin
Scrabble Club, and implemented my own private After School Shakespeare Reading Project. This
emphasis on academics created another thread that I wove into my relationship with nature, the realm of
the intellect and use of the scientific process to understand trees and forests.
In college, I pursued the study of biology. During my junior year, I discovered the world of forest
ecology through the lectures of a behavioral ecologist, Dr. Jon Waage. When he wasn’t teaching Brown
University undergraduates, he carried out research on damselfly behavior. I was amazed to learn that he
could make a living by sitting at stream edges to record the movements of these aquatic insects. He posed
seemingly narrow questions that later turned out to relate to much broader issues about life and death,
competition and mutualism, and the evolution of life on Earth. How does a female’s wing size affect mate
choice? How does mate choice affect population diversity? How does diversity affect resilience to
community disturbance from human activities? Wrestling through the labyrinth of the scientific literature,
I learned to trace citations to their sources and recognize the key players in a scientific discussion.
Attending scientific meetings gave me a tribal sense of community as I listened to its elders and became
initiated into its rituals.
Most of all, I enjoyed the challenge of untangling the endless puzzles I encountered in nature. Like
veterinarians with their dogs and obstetricians with the unborn, ecologists must work with their subjects
without the benefit of speech. I had to rely on my own observations and those of other scientists, to figure
out how ecological systems worked. I entered graduate school in forest ecology at the University of
Washington. During my first summer as a doctoral student, I took a graduate level field course in tropical
biology in Costa Rica. Whenever we struck out on a rainforest trail, my eyes went upward to the plants
and animals that I saw in the treetops, located far from the reach of those who were stuck walking on the
dark, damp forest floor. At that time, in 1979, almost no one had studied – or even climbed into – the
forest canopy. Many of these tropical trees have unnervingly long straight trunks with no branches for 100
feet, rendering my childhood tree-climbing skills useless. But my interest was piqued to explore and
understand the treetops. I learned mountain-climbing techniques to climb trees from Don Perry, an early
pioneer of forest canopy access, and was on my way to making a niche for myself in the barely existing –
but emerging — field of forest canopy studies.
It took some struggles with my graduate committee help them understand that climbing trees could
be serious science, rather than “Tarzan and Jane stuff”, as they called it. Eventually, they helped me carve
out a dissertation project, a comparative study of the biomass held within the epiphytes – the plants that
grow perched on tree branches and trunks. My fieldwork took place in the spectacular temperate
rainforest of the Olympic National Park and the tropical cloud forests of Costa Rica. Both forest types
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support massive loads of epiphytes, though the types and species of plants are very different. For four
years, I identified, marked, and tagged all the trees in study plots at both sites, and collected epiphyte
samples to calculate their mass relative to the whole ecosystem.
In the more than 25 years that followed, I continued this academic approach to nature, collaborating
with students and colleagues to produce over ninety scientific papers and three scholarly books about
canopy ecology. We have learned that treetop versions of traditionally terrestrial invertebrates – beetles,
ants, springtails and even earthworms – are found in this canopy-level soil, living out their entire life
cycle high above the forest floor. We have measured the amounts of nitrogen that the epiphytes intercept
and retain from rain, mist, and dust, which can be considerable. A study that involved perching on
platforms in trees for six hours each day revealed that birds of the cloud forest use epiphytic flowers and
fruits for over one-third of all of their foraging visits, which documented the importance of these plants to
arboreal animals. In summary, these little-known and structurally small plants that live their lives high
above the forest floor have tremendous ecological importance for the forest as a whole; they are critical
threads in the integrity of the complex tapestry that of rainforest ecosystems.
LEARNING FROM MANY SOURCES
During my academic appointments at the University of California Santa Barbara and The Evergreen
State College in Olympia, Washington, I immersed myself in the academic approach to understanding
nature. I received scientific grants, carried out fieldwork, gave talks at meetings, and published scientific
papers, just as my peers did. However, I sensed that this world of the ivory towers was somehow
incomplete, and was missing certain elements and dimensions. I also recognized that the growing distance
between scientists and non-scientists, and the widening gaps between humans and nature were two grave
societal problems that most scientists did not seem to address. As my career progressed, I found myself
compelled to reach out to other sources of information outside of academia that seemed equally valid to
those inside it – sources that went beyond the scientific aspects of nature, and involved recognizing and
understanding the medical, political, recreational, aesthetic, and religious values of nature. During that
stage of my work, I became open to the idea that other ways of knowing might help me better understand
the complexities of nature.
In 2000, I set out to understand the multiple values of trees and to link these with public audiences
outside of academia. I began with the value of health, our most basic need. My younger brother, a
physician of internal medicine, invited me to speak to his medical students about the relationships
between trees and health. In my lecture, I presented examples of how health practitioners use trees for
medicinal products. For example, the bark of the Pacific Yew tree ( Taxus brevifolia), which grows in the
Pacific Northwest, contains taxol, a compound that has proven to be an enormously effective anti-cancer
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compound. This recent discovery was preceded in history by numerous other tree-related medicines. As
early as the 17 th century, quinine was extracted from the South American cinchona tree ( Cinchona
officinalis) to effectively treat malaria in South America. In addition to the chemical compounds trees
provide to keep humans healthy, they also function to reduce stress in psychological ways. In the early
1990s, Roger Ulrich published scientific studies showing that patients who had a view of a tree outside
their window recovered more quickly and with fewer complications as patients sustaining the same
operation who had views of concrete walls. These studies have, in recent years, been applied to hospital
and designs, and several companies now provide artificial tree scenery consisting of backlit panels that
can be hung on walls and ceilings of examining rooms and waiting areas. Thus, the many health values of
trees can be woven into the tapestry that describes the total significance of trees.
Recreation values can connect nature and science to people. Several years ago, my students and I
created a “TreeTop Barbie Doll”, which provides an alternative to the traditonal “girly” dolls – one that
embodies exploration, strength, and an image of a young woman interested in forest science. An
illustrated booklet about canopy biota of the Pacific Northwest accompanies TreeTop Barbie to engage
young girls in science as well as outfits. I also realized that skateboards – as well as many others sports
such as hockey, pole-vaulting, golf, and riflery – depend on trees because the equipment they require is
composed of wood. We designed tree art stickers that are affixed to skateboards to remind the youthful
users that trees are connected to what provides their swoop-flying action in the bowls and curves of their
local skateboard park.
Political values are another important thread for the tree value tapestry. To explore how decisionmakers and scientists communicate about policy issues that concern forests, I created the “Legislature
Aloft” project, in which Iinvited twelve state legislators and their aides to join my students and me in the
canopy for an afternoon. We installed some temporary platforms in the treetops of a local park, and then
taught the congresspeople to ascend to platforms with harnesses and climbing ropes. In the hours we
spent aloft, we discussed forest management issues, government funding of science, the reasons for high
biodiversity in the canopy, and the importance of non-vascular plants in forest nutrient cycles. The postsession evaluation documented that nearly all of the participants felt positive about the experience, and
most stated that they would be willing to contact a forest ecologist in the future. I still communicate with
a subset of these legislators, and these relationships have enhanced my ability to exchange information
about forest ecosystems to the people who make decisions about them.
Urban youth are a segment of the population that are hard to reach when it comes to interesting them
in nature. To connect young people from the inner city with science and fieldwork, I stretched far outside
of academia and engaged a young rapper named C.A.U.T.I.O.N. to come out to the field with field
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scientists – a marine biologist, a forest ecologist, and an entomologist — along with 30 middle school
children from Tacoma, Washington. Each day included field time – with the rapper singing about the
trees, clams, and bugs we encountered – and sound studio time – when the students made up their own
rap songs about their field experiences. At the end of the week, the kids had cut a CD, which they
presented to their families and peers. Their insights also served to open my eyes to the many colors of
nature that they saw with fresh eyes in the familiar (to me) forest of my own college campus.
The element of formal religion is a powerful force in our society, but one which generally has a low
profile in academia. However, it seemed to me that places of worship might be excellent places to both
teach and learn about about aspects of nature. Members of congregations set aside time, dress carefully,
and open their hearts and minds to consider matters such as living in an upright way, caring for fellow
humans, and marking important moments of life with meaningful ceremonies. I hypothesized that
communicating how people of different faiths describe trees in their own holy texts, and in their own
places of worship – churches, synagogues, and temples – might inspire its followers to be better stewards
of forest ecosystems. I also believed that I would learn from the congregation about their views of nature
and trees. By generating discussion on their turf instead of mine, the people in the pews might be more
receptive to ideas that trees are critical to human survival and well-being.
There were two critical part of this approach. First, I had to be open about learning from nonscientific sources. Second, I had to consider multiple religions without judgment, just as Ganesha and the
Menorah sat side by side on my families home alter. Before taking the pulpit, I acquainted myself with the
tone and practice of each group by attending their services as a guest. After several months of simply
listening and observing services of different faiths, I offered clergy a sermon on trees and spirituality, not
as a scholar of religious studies nor as a particularly religious person myself, but rather as a scientist
interested in understanding trees with my intellect, and as a human being who cares about forests. The 22
congregations I addressed ranged from fundamentalist to progressive, and included Episcopalians,
Baptists, Unitarians, Zen Buddhists, Jews (Conservative and Reform), Catholics, Methodists, and
interfaith organizations. My source materials came from downloading and searching the Bible, the
Talmud, the Qu’ran, as well as Hindu and Buddhist scriptures.
Because it is the dominant religion, I began with the Christian tradition and spoke in churches. I
downloaded the Old Testament from the web and did a search for quotations that contained the words
“tree” and forest”, which I categorized into ways trees are used or viewed (e.g., practical use, adornment
for temples, analogies to God, location markers). I integrated these into three topics for my talks: a) trees
as providers of the needs of followers; b) how trees connect humans to the divine; and 3) the ways
humans incorporate trees into spiritual practices. Congregants listened attentively, participated in
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discussions after the sermon, suggested texts and hymns that I had overlooked, and passed me on to other
churches. Some continued conversations with me by telephone and email.
On one occasion, I spoke from the bima (meaning “high place”, the raised platform from which the
holy scriptures, the Torah, is read) of the Jewish synagogue in Olympia, Washington. One of the things
that struck me was how rarely I had been in a synagogue, and yet how comfortable I felt there. Something
of my mother’s teachings about the holidays, coupled with the memory of those packages from my Bubby
made me feel a connection to the sounds and smells of the synagogue. When I spoke to the congregants
about links between trees, spirituality, and Judaism, I described my childhood tree-climbing activities,
which led me to opine that Tu B’Shvat, the celebration for the New Year of the Trees , was the best
holiday the Jews invented. Its beginnings were strictly secular. The Torah required farmers every year to
give a tenth of all crops grown to the priests of the Holy Temple, and Tu B’Shvat marked the date when
those taxes were tallied. Gradually, the holiday became a day of celebration of trees, and of Jews’
connections to nature. In Israel and other countries, the day is celebrated with tree-planting ceremonies or
by giving money to plant trees. Through these actions, modern Jews affirm a future filled with fruit,
shade, and beauty for their children. Sukkot, another Jewish holiday, involves the building of a little house
in the backyard, made from tree branches and sticks, in which to eat, host guests, and reflect on the time
when their ancestors used such shelters during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after the Exodus
from Egypt. The action of building the structure connects them to their important past and their shared
beliefs.
Just as easily, I was able to talk about the role of trees in Hindu religion in the places of
worship I visited, drawing from the teachings of my father. He described the early inhabitants of
India as perceiving a godly element at work in places of natural beauty, especially in trees.
Centuries ago, many villages set apart sacred land for the “tree spirits,” or vanadevatas. Wouldbe parents propitiated the spirits by tying toy cradles to the branches of trees in sacred groves.
Damage to the sacred grove, especially the felling of a tree, might invite the wrath of the local
deity, causing disease, disaster, or the failure of crops. Through ebbs and flows of many political
and religious sy…
