Wednesday, 1 May 2002

OLYMPIA, Wash.

Today is Canopy Lab Lunch. Every Wednesday at noon, I meet with the small cadre of students who are working or volunteering in my lab on projects related to forest canopy work. Because the Evergreen State College is a small, undergraduate-centered institution, I don’t have many graduate students. So I try to cultivate the spirit of a graduate school lab by having students support each other. Everyone brown bags it and I bring some sort of dessert. We go around the table, and the students recount the progress or problems with their work for that week.

David Franklin reports that he has finished getting the newsletter out, an activity that occurs every four months. The newsletter, which goes out to International Canopy Network members all over the world, includes articles about canopy research, educational and job opportunities, websites and publications of interest, upcoming meetings, and a compilation of scientific citations concerning forest canopies. Each week, I go through Current Contents on Diskette, which compiles large numbers of ecological journals. I look for articles relating to forest canopies and write a reprint request to the authors. We get the reprints, and the list of references — 60 or 70 per issue — goes into the newsletter. Because there is no single journal that publishes canopy work, this is the closest we get to keeping up with the canopy research literature.

A botanically correct camouflage suit.

Another of my “Guggenheim projects” is starting to move forward. I want to make canopy camouflage clothing. When I was out at the ranch in Florida (where my husband grew up), some hunters were standing around in the their camouflage clothing. My first reaction was “yuck — hunters or military people,” but as I looked closer, I was struck by how marvelous it is to wear clothes that depict trees. Unfortunately, the clothes they were wearing didn’t depict any real trees; they were a combination of oak and maple foliage. When I went to Cabela’s catalogue, the clothes for women were very limited in style, stiff, and didn’t fit right. So I’ve been designing my own with the help of a fabric designer. My students are helping out by calling the major outdoor recreation companies — LL Bean, Eddie Bauer, Patagonia, REI — to see if they are interested in my version of camouflage clothing. I think the time is ripe for clothing that depicts botanically correct trees (and helps educate the public). I plan to include a small piece of writing about the trees with every article of clothing, so that when someone stops you at the water fountain, you can speak knowledgeably about your clothes.

Another project I’m excited about involves giving talks about trees and spirituality in churches and other places of worship. I downloaded the Bible and the Koran from the web, searched for the terms “tree” and “forest,” and then categorized each of the references. Interesting patterns came out of that analysis, all of them signaling the importance of trees in the lives of readers of the Bible. So far, I’ve spoken to a Unitarian Universalist church, a Jewish synagogue, and a Zen Buddhist temple, and I’ll be speaking at another church next week. What I really want is a contact that will put me in the pulpit of some sort of fundamentalist church.

Speaking at a Unitarian church.

Tonight is also our Thoughtcatchers meeting. Thoughtcatchers is a group of like-minded people who enjoy talking about ideas. The idea for the meetings came to me after I had joined a women’s investment club. Neither Jack (my biologist husband) nor I know much about money, so we figured it would be a good idea for me to go to the club. I did enjoy the interactions with the women in the group and appreciated that everyone made a commitment to attend the meetings once a month. The problem was that every time people actually started talking about investments, I got horrendously bored. I would often come away thinking, “Why can’t we talk about something interesting, like new ideas or inventions?” Suddenly, it hit me that there was nothing stopping me from starting my own group.

And so I did, after retrieving my invested money from the women’s group. That was about three years ago, and our group has expanded and continued. We meet in the Urban Onion restaurant; we don’t order dinner (too distracting) but we do get drinks and dessert. Each month, one person chooses a topic and begins the discussion, and then the group takes off. Topics have ranged from sustainability to “What is beauty?” to transformative experiences. Even though it is sometimes hard to make the time for it, I’m always glad when we have the meetings. I would love to see them start up in other towns and cities. Maybe then people would watch less television and talk more about plain old ideas. Or new ones.