How do you get people to appreciate, value, and protect creatures and ecosystems they have never seen? Two authors approach this challenge from different but complementary perspectives at a panel called Seeing Trees, Saving the Great Forests.
Dr. Meg Lowman’s mission is to have people take another look at trees—specifically, the complex and fascinating ecosystem in their crowns. A career biologist and forest ecologist, Lowman has earned the nickname “Canopy Meg” for her pioneering work using hot air balloons, drones, and rope walkways to study this previously inaccessible world. Much like Dr. Suzanne Simard, whose research in the forests of British Columbia helped uncover the fungal-based ecosystems beneath the trees, Lowman’s work reveals the rich biodiversity in the treetops.
“We only see the part of a tree that’s near us,” she says. “We don’t see what’s in the top of the tree—about half of the species in the world live only in the forest canopy—until we cut it down.” Lowman has written several popular science books about the forest canopy (because “trees don’t have a voice,” she notes). But she hopes her latest book, the autobiographical The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us, will also reach and inspire girls to follow careers in science and ecology. For that reason, Lowman says, she deliberately ended the book on a note of hope. We can learn to value and preserve our forests, she believes, “and find ways to translate our knowledge into positive action.”
In Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet, John W. Reid takes a more global approach, bringing in his own background in environmental economics and policy. Reid and his co-author, noted biologist Thomas E. Lovejoy, had been discussing for years how the Earth’s great mega forests—in Siberia, North America, the Amazon, the Congo, and New Guinea—needed to be managed as individual ecosystems. Reid “was frustrated at economics not knowing how to value these big forests—it can only value things as products in a market, by taking them apart.” In 2019, Reid and Lovejoy co-authored a New York Times op-ed that developed into this book.
Reid is careful to say that the mega forests “are not more important than the forests out your back door.” But these large, continuous expanses have an outsize influence on water cycles, carbon cycles, weather and climate, biodiversity, and wildlife migratory patterns. And, as one of the last places for surviving indigenous peoples, they are “a template for us to learn how to live with our environment.”
Moderator Michelle Nijhuis, an environmental and science journalist (as her website says, “writing about humans and other species”), will help these two authors explore their common themes, as well as the threats—biological and human—to our forests. In Reid’s words, “it’s a truism that you love what you know. But it’s a truism because it’s true. There’s different ways of knowing; being there is the most powerful,” but he cites the examples of Jacques Cousteau and popular nature programs in exposing the wider public to the world’s wonders. Lowman mentions Jane Goodall in the same way, as someone who has drawn the natural and human worlds closer.
Perhaps the well-known saying should be re-written: You can’t save the forest unless you see the trees.
