The Arbornaut, page 1
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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
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Copyright Page
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This book is dedicated to those lifelong planetary heroes—trees. I hope my passion for these leafy giants will inspire readers to share a sense of wonder for
our eighth continent, and maybe we can
help save it, together.
Big thanks to Eddie and James for joyfully climbing in many forests with their mom.
FOREWORD
I WILL NEVER LOOK AT A TREE in the same way again, nor will the rest of the world, thanks to the author of this book. It now seems obvious that most of what makes a tree—as well as what constitutes a forest—is above eye level, but until Meg Lowman’s irrepressible curiosity inspired her to look at trees from the top down, most humans tended to view them from the bottom up. What they missed is most of what makes treetops not only individual miracles, but collectively the source of shelter and sustenance for most forest dwellers, with dividends for the rest of life on Earth. I was thrilled when I heard about a fellow botanist who had devised ways to not only use her natural primate abilities to climb trees, but also to take tree-climbing to new heights with ingenious lifting techniques and, pushing further, to develop sky-walking pathways among the trees’ leafy crowns. In this engaging volume, she shares her view with stories that you know are true because “You just can’t make this stuff up!”
For a scientist and explorer, it is satisfying to make new discoveries, to go where no woman (or man) has gone before, to see what others have not, and to find meaningful pieces of the great living puzzle of life that is unique to Earth. But Meg Lowman does more, excelling in communicating her findings not only to scientists in the arcane language of numbers and graphs, but also to non-scientists with contagious enthusiasm and meaningful rationale, in language and humor befitting the audience, conveying why trees matter and how their existence and ours is inextricably connected. She also instills a sense of urgency about embracing the planet’s remaining natural forests with enhanced protection, speaking in classrooms and boardrooms, in villages far from tall buildings, in the offices of government officials, electronically and in print, with the world at large.
Throughout history, people have taken from nature whatever was needed or wanted from the world’s lands and waters. When our numbers were small and the natural world was largely intact, our impact was slight, but after one hundred thousand years of a more or less peaceful relationship with nature, the past five hundred, and especially the past fifty, have marked a turning point that does not bode well for the future of life on Earth. Human capacity to consume and alter the nature of nature has reached perilous tipping points for climate, biodiversity, and land and water use, compounded by pollution, all driving changes in planetary processes and the underpinnings of what makes Earth hospitable for life as we know it. The good news is the other tipping point—knowledge. Children in the twenty-first century (adults, too) are armed with the superpower of knowing what Earth looks like from space, of seeing and hearing about events across the globe in real time while understanding the new perspectives of geological time, of seeing Earth’s place in the universe, of vicariously traveling into the inner workings of cells, to the depths of the deepest seas, and to the tops of the highest trees. Half a century ago, it was widely believed that Earth was too big to fail. Now we know. If Earth is to remain habitable for the likes of us, we must take care of what remains of the natural systems that took 4.5 billion years to make and a bit more than 4.5 decades to break and do our best to restore damaged areas to better health. There is still time to hold on to the last safe havens where trees are intact, hosting miraculous creatures that are as vital to our existence as we are to theirs.
Bravo, Meg Lowman, aka “Your Highness,” for sharing your journey in this book, and for launching Mission Green, thereby inspiring others to understand and know why we must take care of the natural world as if our lives depend on it. Because they do.
—SYLVIA A. EARLE, aka “Her Deepness,” founder, Mission Blue
Oceanographer, botanist, National Geographic Explorer in Residence
TEN TIPS OF FIELD BIOLOGY FOR EVERY ASPIRING ARBORNAUT
Always carry a headlamp, not just in the forest but anywhere … even on a plane or traveling by car.
Keep a few tissues in your pocket for those emergency ablutions behind a tree!
Wear a vest with lots of pockets.
Never drink more than half of your water supply every time you hydrate so you always have some left, and it always helps to tell someone your itinerary in case a rescue is required.
Keep your camera handy for amazing discoveries, even if it is just on your phone.
Carry a poncho. It can serve as a ground cloth as well as rain gear.
Oreo cookies are a wonderful energy snack!
If you are a parent, carry a few photos of your kids—they work well to break the ice with other cultures, especially where language barriers exist.
Use all five senses, relentlessly.
Keep a journal so that you can recall amazing stories, biodiversity, and observations.
PROLOGUE
How to See the Whole Tree (and What That Means for the Forest)
IMAGINE GOING TO THE DOCTOR for a complete checkup and, in the course of an entire visit, the only body part examined was your big toe. The visit ends with a pronouncement that you are perfectly healthy, but there was no test of your vital signs, heartbeat, vision, or any other part of you—just the big toe. You may have gone in with a broken arm or a headache from high blood pressure, but the assessment of your lowest bipedal extremity alone couldn’t clue the doctor in to the real trouble. How would you feel? At the very least, you’d probably switch doctors.
For centuries, the health of trees, even those ancient giants stretching hundreds of feet high into the clouds, was assessed in just the same way. Examining woody trunks at eye level, scientists essentially inspected the “big toes” of their patients and then made sweeping deductions about forest health without ever gazing at the bulk of the tree, known as the canopy, growing overhead. The only time foresters had the chance to evaluate a whole tree was when it was cut down—which is kind of like assessing a person’s entire medical history from a few ashes after cremation. In tropical forests especially, the lower levels are as different from the upper reaches as night and day. The ground receives as little as 1 percent of the light shining on the crowns. So the understory is dark, windless, and often humid whereas the canopy is blasted with sun, whipped by high winds, and often crispy in its dryness between rainstorms. The gloomy forest floor is inhabited by a few shade-loving creatures, while the canopy hosts a riotous variety of life—millions of species of every imaginable color, shape, and size that pollinate flowers, eat leaves, and also eat each other.
Before the 1980s, foresters unimaginatively overlooked 95 percent of their subject; almost no one paid attention to the treetops. Then, in 1978, a young botanist with a lifelong passion for green giants and infatuated by leaves arrived in Australia on a fellowship to study tropical forests. Coming from the temperate zones, this neophyte knew almost nothing about the tropics. During her first visit to a rain forest in Australia, she stared up into the most dizzyingly tall trees she’d ever met and thought, “Holy cow, I can’t see the top!” That gobsmacked botanist was me.
I carried with me an enormous tree-love and planned to devote my future to demystifying their secrets. After a few misadventures, I realized that to understand the whole forest, I needed to get up into its highest levels. Initially I hoped that the simple use of binoculars would be enough to bring the treetops down to me. But after a lot of thought and some trial and error, I figured out a way to hoist myself into that magical, unexplored wonderland, full of the six-legged mayhem of the insect world and more shades of green than I imagined possible. I nicknamed this amazing new world the “eighth continent.” Cavers go down a rope, but I went up. Recreational mountaineers pound hardware into rock cliffs, but I gently rigged tall trees to avoid breaking any leaves or scaring off any creatures. And to affix my ropes in the upper branches, I welded my own slingshot from a metal rod. My approach turned out to be a simple, inexpensive technique, and it launched my exploration of that “eighth continent,” a complex hot spot of biodiversity located not hundreds or thousands of miles away like the ocean floor or outer space, but almost within reach just above our heads. I called myself an “arbornaut.”
During that first ascent into the canopy, I ecstatically came eyeball to eyeball with creatures I had never imagined and that were, at that very moment, still unknown to the rest of the world. I marveled at a handsome black-snouted weevil sucking leaf juices, elegant colorful pollinators flitting between vine flowers, giant bird-nest ferns that gave sanctuary to ants, and t
When they encounter unexplored frontiers, scientists design new techniques and technology for safe exploration. The invention of the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, or SCUBA, in the 1950s opened the extraordinary world of coral reef biodiversity to scientific research. During the 1960s, astronauts landed on the moon thanks to NASA’s development of rocket combustion for space travel. Solid rocket fuel was to astronauts what my humble homemade slingshot was to arbornauts—not a new invention, but an innovative new way to use one. Just as space travel launched a generation of astronauts, canopy access created a new career pathway for arbornauts. If you love to climb trees, take note—there is a profession for you! I was one of those first arboreal explorers, and arguably the only crazy climber to have conducted research on every continent (even Antarctica, where the tops of moss and lichen foliage are only two inches high, and require kneeling, not climbing, to access their Lilliputian canopies). Over the past forty years, I have marked thousands of leaves and tracked their life history, some lasting more than twenty years despite the constant threats of creatures (mostly insects) trying to eat, tear, tunnel through, or disfigure them. And this aerial shift in our approach to forest science has also led to advancements in knowledge of global cycles ranging from freshwater circulation to carbon storage to climate change.
It shouldn’t be a surprise (but it still is for some) that planetary health links directly to forests. Their canopies produce oxygen, filter fresh water, transfer sunlight into sugars, clean our air by absorbing carbon dioxide, and provide a home to the extraordinary genetic library of all earthbound creatures, among many other crucial functions. And unlike an electric grid or water treatment plant, no expensive taxes or fees are required to maintain this complex forest machinery that keeps our Earth healthy. Still, for it to function well, we need to insulate it from human destruction. Within my lifetime of approximately six decades, Amazon rain forest degradation has zoomed past a tipping point; restoration is unlikely. Countries like Madagascar, Ethiopia, and the Philippines have almost no primary forests left to seed future stands. And remaining forest fragments around the world ranging from California to Indonesia to Brazil are at great risk from fires, drought, roads, and clearing. We must race ever faster to understand the mysteries of the treetops before they disappear, or better yet, we must find a way to conserve those remaining green Noah’s arks. “Climate change” was not in my vocabulary when I studied backyard trees some fifty years ago, but now this term drives an even greater urgency to understand and conserve natural systems, especially forests.
One way to save more trees is to introduce more people to their wonders. After perfecting safe rope techniques, I designed aerial trails in the canopy called treetop walkways or skywalks, allowing groups of people to study the crowns, not just one person dangling from a rope. These walkways not only offered an important research and education tool but also served a humanitarian effort; they provided income to indigenous people from ecotourism instead of logging, which in turn inspires sustainable conservation. After ropes and walkways, I went on to design, tinker with, and utilize an extensive toolkit for canopy exploration, including cherry pickers, hot-air balloons, construction cranes, and drones. Each tool allowed unique access to different aspects of the forest and provided the means to answer diverse research questions. Exploration of whole forests, not merely the forest floor, has inspired communities around the globe—from governments in Malaysia to priests in Ethiopia—to partner with arbornauts to save their precious green heritage, which is so critical to human survival. In my experience, positive conservation outcomes arose more from mutual trust between scientists and local stakeholders than from the latest technical publications. And it never hurts to invite a few community leaders into the canopy! People seem to love climbing trees—even those who think they’ve outgrown it.
No one would have guessed that a shy kid from rural upstate New York, a veritable geek who spent her childhood collecting wildflowers along roadsides, could change our view of the planet with a few homemade gadgets. Using a simple toolkit that fits into one duffel bag, I now travel the world exploring the eighth continent, uncovering its secrets, and sharing treetop wonders with anyone who will listen. My story is a testimony: any average kid can make discoveries by exploring the world around us. This book is meant to share that thrill of aerial exploration—filled with thousands of feet of ropes, many failed volleys with a welded slingshot, lots of remote jungles, hundreds of thousands of leaves examined at their birthplace (not clipped or dead on the forest floor), multitudes of stinging ants, and gazillions of other creatures in their green penthouses. After four decades as an arbornaut, forests remain my best teachers. Once you have ascended into the canopy with me through these pages, I’m betting you, too, will feel an urgency to champion their conservation.
1
FROM WILDFLOWER TO WALLFLOWER
A Girl Naturalist in Rural America
I HAD SET THE ALARM, but in my excitement, I awoke a half hour before it rang. At 4:00 a.m., there were still just slivers of light on the horizon, so I tiptoed out to the living room of our small cabin on Seneca Lake to avoid waking my two younger brothers.
Our town of Elmira, New York, was unbearably hot in the summer, so we escaped to a nearby cabin twenty-five miles away, where the forests worked their natural cooling magic. The cottage where we spent these summers was an abandoned gristmill. Many years before, probably almost a hundred, an elm tree had taken root on that mill site; my grandfather, a stonemason and carpenter, then lovingly constructed the cottage around its trunk, so it ran right up through the living room as a prominent feature. When it rained, water dripped through the roof, down the bark to a patch of soil nestled amid the stone floor. I often searched for tiny insects inhabiting all the woody fissures. The elm canopy stretched across the entire roof, shading our cottage during summer and standing sentinel with its bare branches in winter. I loved every inch of that tree right down to the diverse fungi that grew along the trunk when it fell victim to Dutch elm disease. Its special place inside our cabin was always such a comfort, and one of my saddest childhood moments was its death. On a dangerously tall ladder, my grandfather meticulously cut away all the dead branches, leaving the beloved trunk as a statue gracing the center of the cottage. My grandparents would occasionally allow me to harvest one of the flat, tough fungal brackets decorating the dead trunk adjacent to our dining room table. I did my creative best to etch designs and paint images of plants on these living canvases, sometimes called artist fungus. Summer at our rustic cabin was my refuge, where I could explore, observe, and collect, inhaling all the nature my small body could absorb.
I carefully shook Mom awake, then we crept outside before sunrise and quietly drove five miles along a dirt road to my favorite birdwatching pond. This nature trip was a huge deal for me. Mom did not even own binoculars, and all she knew about my feathered friends was that starlings sometimes tore up her spring lettuce sprouts. But she knew birdwatching brought immeasurable joy to me at the tender age of seven and so offered to drive to a special place for the dawn chorus—an exquisite concert sung by a winged choir at sunrise. Our old Rambler bounced along a dusty road, through cherry orchards where my brother and I earned money picking fruit, near an old haunted house that made my hair stand on end, past a one-room bar where farmers bragged about their corn. Willows encircled the pond’s edge, their roots adapted to soggy soil. A discarded, leaky old rowboat was tied to a branch. I had dreamed all summer of rowing out from the bank to observe egrets or herons. Those majestic birds would garner five big stars on my modest bird list if they appeared. When we arrived, my mom worried we were trespassing on some farmer’s property even though there was no house to be seen, so she very reluctantly climbed into that dilapidated dinghy, strewn with spiderwebs and dusty underpinnings. Away we paddled. This was as close as I ever came to feeling like a princess in a silver carriage, even though it was a rough-and-tumble contraption full of leaks! We rowed and bailed constantly, to keep afloat. Out in the middle of the pond, we stopped paddling and I focused my enormous Sears binoculars. They were ridiculously bulky, felt like they weighed almost as much as I did, and probably were not even capable of focusing, but they made me feel like a professional ornithologist. Much to my amazement, as if on cue, a great blue heron flew in and landed along the shoreline. Even my mom was overcome with awe.
