Tuesday, 30 Apr 2002

OLYMPIA, Wash.

My boiled egg this morning was a bit on the soft side. I caught a look of concern from my nine-year old daughter, Erika, but I reassured her that it was okay.

After breakfast, I spent much of the morning plugging away on a quest for funding for a project that started five years ago, to build a forest canopy walkway on our college campus. We have 1,000 acres of secondary forest of Douglas fir, bigleaf maple, and red alder right here outside our lab and library buildings. Ever since I came to this campus 10 years ago, I’ve been excited about getting students up to the canopy to make observations, do ecological projects, and make art. I have had some students do ecological research in the canopy; we published a paper last year on the rates of recolonization of mosses after experimentally stripping them from branches in order to understand the processes of succession. I was proud that my students were senior authors on a paper in the Canadian Journal of Botany.

The proposed canopy walkway.

But not every student (or non-student, for that matter) can climb trees using ascenders and mountain-climbing gear. A walkway, by contrast, would allow anyone to experience the wonders of the forest canopy. The idea is to make the connection between humans and trees apparent by building a circular walkway that links the forest directly to our library. In addition to books, the library building houses our computer center, art galleries, and administrative offices. In other words, the building stores many forms of information used by humans. The forest also contains information, but it is stored as species diversity, ecological relationships, and interactions. By creating the physical link between the two, my hope is that users of the walkway will come to see the forest in a different way, in three dimensions and from the perspective of birds and raindrops and pollen grains. You can see more about the walkway on our website.

Today, I’ve been working with the development director at Evergreen to strategize about which foundations and major donors we should pursue next to fund the canopy walkway. It is a project that falls in between the cracks of “regular” foundation giving areas; most foundations don’t want to fund capital projects. The idea has been very well received, but it will still take work to raise the $1 million to make it happen. One thing I’ve learned in coordinating this project is that a project of this scale must be done with an open mind; I have had to be truly receptive to other peoples’ ideas and input. By including the whole campus in the process, the concept has enlarged and improved tremendously. I’ve also learned that I have to to be patient, to accept slowness, to know that a missed deadline just means we have to wait until the next one. These have been extremely hard lessons for me, with my natural tendency to be the boss, to push forward, to go fast, fast, fast. I guess I am learning from the trees, with their long lifespans and their solid, silent way of being.

I found a wonderful passage on this topic in an essay by Herman Hesse:

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts. Trees have longer thoughts, longer-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are. When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Later in the day, I got a call from Arun Chandra, a music professor at Evergreen. He and I are working on an amazing project that will turn my data on global climate change into music. The idea came to me a long time ago, at a scientific meeting when I was feeling bored by yet another set of standard data slides. Staring at the flat, two-dimensional graph on an overhead projector, I wondered what the data would sound like if we assigned each data point a note or an instrument. What would a tropical forest sound like as compared to a temperate forest? Might we be able to hear patterns that we couldn’t see or derive from statistics?

That question is now being answered through my work with Arun. Ours is a marvelous collaboration! I gave him some data (from a cloud forest nutrient cycling project of mine) in the form of line graphs, explaining that I wanted to hear it. Arun is a brilliant mathematician and musician who immediately understood what I wanted. He worked with the data file for a few weeks, and then invited me to his home office. He then displayed the graph of the data on his computer screen and patiently explained to me how he converted each line of data to a different range of sound frequencies. The result was stunning. I shut my eyes and listened to what Arun had produced. I was thrilled to my socks. He grinned, bright eyes shining with joy, and we both laughed out loud, from our bellies, filled with the delight of a creative project realized.