2022/06/07 Member Speaker Series: An Evening with the Arbornaut

Hello, my name is Valerie Rudy Valle and I'm the Director of Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Thank you for joining us for tonight's member speaker series, An Evening with the Arbornaut. It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Margaret Meg Lohmann, known affectionately throughout the world as Canopy Meg. Meg is a global pioneer in forest canopy ecology and one of the world's foremost arbornauts, or someone who explores and studies the vast forest canopies that make up what she has termed the Earth's eighth continent. Meg has been named the Real Life Lorax by National Geographic and focuses her work on exploring, researching, and conserving global forests, mentoring the next generation in sustainability and forest stewardship and educating diverse audiences through storytelling. Meg received a bachelor's degree in biology from Williams College, a master's of education from Aberdeen University, and a PhD in botany from Sydney University. Her academic training additionally includes work at the Tuck School of Business and Stanford University. She was a Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar to both India and Ethiopia. Meg currently serves as a visiting professor for the National University of Singapore, research professor for the University of Saints Malaysia, and adjunct professor at Arizona State University. She is a three-time National Geographic Explorer grantee. This evening, Meg joins us to discuss her new memoir, The Arbornaut, A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us. The book is available at local retailers, The Novel Neighbor, Left Bank Books, and Subterranean Books. The Novel Neighbor is kindly providing guests of tonight's program a 15% discount on your purchase of The Arbornaut. Please keep an eye out for a follow-up email after tonight's program that will include a link to The Arbornaut with a 15% discount, thanks to our friends at The Novel Neighbor. If you have any questions during the presentation, please submit them using the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. And now, Meg Lohman. Thank you, Valerie. Oh my gosh, it's so nice to be here. And if for any reason you can't see or hear something, I will rely on your wonderful tech staff to give me a shout out. Well, I'm so happy to talk about the treetops, and my life as a botanist, and the whole issue of trying to overcome the challenge of gravity and get up there into the tops of trees. So with that, I do want to make a certain dedication to a mentor of mine for many years that has such a link to Missouri, but Peter Raven has been a long time my friend and mentor, and I'm so grateful. And I have to laugh because I ended up as the Chief of Science at the Cal Academy in 2016, and Peter, of course, spent some of his childhood there. So we had many, many dinners and little botanical excursions around San Francisco while he was writing his memoir. And I was delving into the archives to get him photos and comparing stories about everything wonderful in San Francisco. So I'm grateful for Peter being such a big part of Missouri, and grateful to be sharing his stories with you, starting with his little tiny life in California, which is always so interesting. And all of us can relate to how our childhood may have led to our career choices, or may have at least led to something we did in nature. Like Peter, I had the same kind of startup, but here I am as a total nerd and a totally shy girl growing up in very rural upstate New York, which is the first chapter of the book explaining how I really loved wildflowers. I loved it if my parents would stop the car and let me pick a flower on the side of the road, and I pressed them in a telephone book. If you can remember in the good old days, telephone books were actually made out of paper. They weren't little iPhones that you pressed and made a record, but they were these amazing books full of pages of paper that were the perfect herbarium for a five-year-old child. And I ultimately took this collection to the New York State Science Fair, and I was in fifth grade, and I was surrounded by about 500 boys with volcano experiments. Remember them when you put the baking soda in, the whole thing, the vinegar exploded, and it was really cool. But all these guys were mainly very noisy and loud, and I was so scared to death with my wildflowers. But lo and behold, I got a second prize, and somehow I felt akin to Rachel Carson or somebody amazing. I'd never met a woman scientist. I actually never had a woman science teacher. So this was extraordinary, and I guess it propelled me along the way to thinking that plants were really, really cool, and I would like to pursue a career with them. So here's where I grew up, rural upstate New York. In the good old days, of course, no movie theaters for our small town, but no iPhones, no computers, nothing else. But my whole bias in terms of trees was that they lost their leaves every fall, that they changed color, and then in the spring, they leafed out again. So I got the shock of my life when I went to college and found out that there are all these trees in the tropics that are evergreen, which was totally overwhelming and awesome. So my family history was a little crazy. No scientists in the family. Laum in New York still exists. We have a post office where I can take my Christmas cards and post them, but there was no history of science anywhere, except I give a lot of credit to my great-grandfather who took the corn in the fields during the prohibition and turned it into something pretty wonderful and managed to keep the farm afloat with his profits from selling the laum and whiskey. So that was about the closest my family ever came to having a scientist until this crazy girl came along and decided she wanted to study trees, which was me. So along the way, my next door neighbor was this crazy guy that loved fashion, and I talk about this a lot to kids. I give a lot of school talks every week because there's a children's book written about me. There's actually two, and one of them is in the curriculum for about 30 states middle school science curricula. So I end up giving a lot of school talks and I try to tell the kids, you know, follow your passion. Don't do something you don't enjoy for a career, but do something you love. And of course my love was botany, but my next door neighbor was a guy named Tommy Hilfiger, and he loved fashion, which was pretty kooky for a guy that was growing up in a very rural town in upstate New York, but he stuck with it. And that's his sister in the center, still my best friend since age three. And the lo and behold message here is that, you know, Tommy followed his fashion. I mean, his passion, which was fashion, that's kind of a little crazy phrase there. And I say to kids, you know, if you love something, you should do it. And if it's fashion, definitely do it, because you could probably afford to save and pay for a lot of rainforest conservation around the world. So that's my little neighborhood message to all the young people in the audience. So my world ended up again with trees, and I became, I guess, the world's first global arbornaut, which is kind of crazy, meaning that I figured out some ways to study the whole tree. And this is amazing to think about, but foresters for over 100 years before my birth, actually studied trees from the ground, and they looked up, or maybe they knocked on the tree trunk with their fists, and they said, Oh, this tree is healthy, or this tree needs cutting down, but nobody really ever studied the whole tree, including the top until I came along in 1979 with a full scholarship to Sydney University in Australia. And actually, at the same time, a guy in Costa Rica named Don Perry decided he would figure out the same thing. And between the two of us, we ended up, you know, creating our own slingshots. Mine was out of a piece of metal at the Sydney University machine shop. And I sewed my own harness because I didn't have access to any of the recreational equipment stores that North America offered. And I borrowed a rope from the caving club and up I went. So that was the beginning of my career as an arbornaut. And one other guy in Costa Rica was doing it at the same time. And here's the amazing result that we both found, and so did some other students that we taught to climb. But it turns out that 50% of the species living on the terrestrial part of planet Earth live in the tops of trees right above our heads. Only 10% of those or less have been discovered. So that means there's a heck of a lot of biodiversity we don't know much about. And this is kind of cool to think about. You know, we had scuba gear invented in the 1950s. And the word aquanaut was coined for marine biologists of undersea exploration. We actually went to the moon in the 1960s and the word astronaut became a household word. But it really wasn't until the 1980s when I and one or two others said, oh my gosh, we should go climb the whole tree, not just the bottom of the tree. And that led to this extraordinary discovery of all these amazing species living in the tops of trees. Things like sloths in Central and South America, which are fantastic, all the way down to microscopic things like this very cool water bear or a member of the phylum tardigrada, which is probably about maybe 20 could fit on your little fingernail. They're very, very small. With a tiny microscope, you could probably barely see a dot under your lens. But the cool thing is that these guys live in the water column, they just float around in moist places like leaves in the top of the tree, mosses on the trunk, all sorts of places that the rainforest is famous for. And they absolutely are the most extremophile organism on the planet. They go into a little ball called a tonne. If there's a drought or it's cold, and they can actually even survive in outer space. NASA took some of them up on one of the recent payloads. And lo and behold, they even reproduced in outer space. So they're these extraordinary animals that are found in the treetops. And we're only just beginning to learn about all these crazy and amazing things that are part of this world of the Arbornaut, which is not the aquanaut undersea, not the astronaut in space, but the Arbornaut, which is a person who explores the whole tree, including the treetops, which is what I define myself as now I am an Arbornaut. And I wrote a book called the Arbornaut because that really was my profession. So just a little timeline to get a sense of how recent the science of canopy biology really is. It was in 1979, when I first made that slingshot out of a piece of metal and welded it and sewed a harness and borrowed some ropes from the caving club at Sydney University so that I could use my slingshot to put a string over a branch of a tree, and then use that string to haul a rope over the tree in the same pathway, so that I could climb it using some of the borrowed hardware that I had obtained from the caving club. And this is really recent. This means that truly canopy biology is only about 40 years old, which is pretty young, considering many scientists sciences are thousands of years old, like chemistry and physics and many other things. So here we have this whole new science in the treetops, right over our heads, not far away like Jupiter or Mars, but really, really close by, except we never thought about looking there. After I designed this rope and slingshot and harness technique in Australia in the late 1970s, I used that over and over to climb trees and write my thesis and find all this biodiversity, but it wasn't a good method for taking groups of students into the canopy. So when I started teaching classes and using citizen science groups to go to the rainforest to make discoveries, it just was important that we figure out a way where 20 people could be in the canopy all at once. And so that led to the first canopy walkway in the world, which is this public walkway in Queensland, Australia that I helped design with the owner of an ecotourist lodge in Lamington National Park. And this fabulous design has led to all sorts of tree walks or skywalks or canopy walkways around the world and something that I'm going to come back to later in the last chapter of the book to explain to you how I think these canopy walkways could actually help us save rainforests, which is really, really important. Moving along in the timeline of canopy tools, we had the ropes and harnesses in the late 1970s, we had the walkway in 1985, but in the early 1990s, the Smithsonian purchased the first leftover construction crane from a building project and shipped it down to Panama. So suddenly we had this new tool called the canopy crane, which was limited in a way because you can only work out of this crane and only within the arm of the crane, but it did lead to very intense studies on things like photosynthesis or maybe the number of leaf miners in a tree canopy and all kinds of very close-up research, which was great. And then we ended up having my career change. I left Australia and came back to North America and actually built the first canopy walkway in North America at the Williams College Research Forest, where I was a professor. And this little tiny itty-bitty walkway that I got funded for $5,000 turned into this amazing giant because all my students made new discoveries of new insects in the temperate forests, of predators on gypsy moths, and lots of amazing things linked to, at the time, acid rain, and they all got great scholarships to graduate school. So the canopy walkway became a big part of North America at that time. And I also developed and helped design the fourth canopy tool, which were inflatables, really pioneered by the French scientists at the Institute of Botany, but then tweaked by those of us who used them over time. And I absolutely love this method more than anything else. Going up in that hot air balloon or riding on that canopy raft pictured here, which is just moving into a treetop, felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. It was so absolutely cool. And with these expeditions of what were usually 49 men and one female, which was me, we could make a lot of collaborative research, which was really fantastic. And the absolute inflatable gift to the canopy world was the fact that we all worked together as a team, and that was really great. So moving on, the first public canopy walkway in North America was built by me down in Florida when I was the director of Selby Gardens. And we had the opportunity to put up a walkway that the community funded, and every school child had a field trip there, and every family on vacation went there. So it turned into this wonderful ecotourism opportunity that today brings in about 30 million dollars in revenue to the county every year, hosts a half a million visitors, and just again reminded me, you know what, these canopy walkways are really great for educating people about the importance of forests, which I will talk about in a minute. Finally, to build that walkway, we created a foundation so that people's gifts could be tax-deductible, and that led to having the Tree Foundation. Tree, research, education, and exploration are what the initials stand for, and today the Tree Foundation funds walkways around the world, gives girls in science training, and books, and opportunities, and does all kinds of things relating to the preservation and conservation of big trees. Not planting new trees, but preserving those senior citizens on planet Earth that house all those millions of species. And finally, I wrote a book about it, because I guess at the end of the day, you think to yourself, oh my gosh, you know, 40 years of a new science, over 40 countries of research, I had to put pen to paper, and maybe, and hopefully talk a little bit about the challenges of being a woman in science, where there were mostly males at the time, and my dream is that girls will read this book, and some of you will buy this book for young women, so that they can learn about the hurdles of being a female field biologist, and they can do a much better job than I did, because I think I fell flat on my face many, many times, because I really wasn't strategic, and I didn't really understand those hurdles back in my day. So that's a little history of the timeline, all of which is outlined in the book, and many chapters about all these cool methods, a lot of great sites where we implemented amazing canopy research, and ending up of course with the most important part, which is how we can save these fabulous big trees. So this is the book, and I guess some of you have read it, or maybe others of you are waiting to learn about it from this talk. I'm really grateful to Sylvia Earle, who's been my mentor as an oceanographer, to write the preface. I'm grateful for Jane Goodall, who loved the book, and wrote about it in the New York Times, and did a cover review for me, and Peter Raven, who did the same, and Ed Wilson, who did the same, because I guess at the end of the day, all of us biologists realized that, holy cow, here's a part of the planet right over our heads that we've overlooked for the last 300 years, and we're really playing catch-up to try to understand what life exists in the forest treetops. So one of the things that's really important to me, and I hope I emphasize it in the book when you read it, is, you know what, trees are not free. They're an amazing investment for our children and grandchildren. They literally keep the planet healthy. Without trees, we can't live, and they're worth millions of dollars if we're going to value these senior citizens on our landscape. Everything from fresh water that gets filtered through the leaves when toxic rainwater comes down, to producing oxygen which we breathe, to providing us with sustainable products like timber and food and clothing. One of my favorites, of course, is chocolate, which comes from the canopies of South American chocolate trees, so that's fantastic. Their roots, of course, conserve the soil and keep all of that soil from wandering downstream out into the ocean. If there are no trees, we get amazing silt in our rivers, which is a real loss to everything on earth. And, of course, we know they're home to 50 percent of our species. With canopy research, we've discovered that these giant tall trunks 200 or 300 feet high store carbon, and a lot of that carbon has been pollution like carbon dioxide that we humans have put into the atmosphere, so trees are helping us solve this problem. Trees control our climate in so many ways, from shade to atmospheric moisture to atmospheric temperature coming down to the earth, so they're enormously important. And finally, about two billion people on earth rely on trees for their religion and their spiritual heritage, so that's a huge value that many of us in North America don't appreciate, but we need to because it's a really critical way that might lead us to better conservation. So other things in my book that I'm passionate about and probably will leap across the page to you is that I really think kids need nature. My mantra is no child left indoors, and all my life I have done programs for kids, and canopy walkways are for kids, tree climbing is for kids. I was a kid that climbed trees as a youth, and maybe that helped my very nerdy, geeky upbringing that I could go to the trees and find solace and sanctuary instead of being on the playground where probably the kids would have made fun of me. So I really think it's great to take kids out into the forest, and it's very healthy. The National Academy of Sciences just produced a report showing us how important nature and forests are to keep kids healthy and help them do better in school. These kids on the right, which is kind of cute, are actually third graders, and they were in my local school here in Sarasota, Florida using the canopy walkway that I built in Florida, and they actually on their field trip discovered a new species of weevil, which we published. So here are these kids at age 10 being bona fide scientists with a technical publication. So it illustrates how the canopy can be this amazing sense of discovery for kids, and maybe in Missouri you will have the same result that there are new species to be found in your forest canopies. I'm a real proponent for diversity in science probably because I was the only girl on so many expeditions, so I've worked really hard over my years as a museum director and a professor to try to identify different minority groups and help them engage. One of my favorites was a National Science Foundation grad that I forced them to give me almost because I wanted to take kids with mobility limitations into the canopy. These are the kids that always get told in the college laboratories, oh you have to stay inside, you have to take the notes, you can't come on the trail, you can't come up the tree of course, and they always lost out to even thinking they could have a career in science. So I did have a grant for five years where we took mobility limited kids, we developed some special methods, and up they went. And this is Rebecca, she's from Maine, and guess what, she discovered three or four new species in the oak trees of Kansas nonetheless, not in some exotic forest far away, but it just shows you how available and easy it is to find new species if you can get kids up into the treetops. Here they all go, we had some wonderful, wonderful field trips over the years with that grant, but there are many numbers of kids that might think they can't access the treetops, and I hope they do because I think nature and I think exploration and discovery is really great for getting kids inspired to go into science as a career. So another important thing for me in the book was this use of canopy walkways, which is turning out to be an amazing solution to many problems of deforestation. And this is a beautiful walkway, I was so honored to be part of constructing, designing, and implementing over in Malaysia. This is a part of the world where all the rainforests are being cut down for palm oil because unfortunately Americans buy so many products that contain palm oil ranging from plastics to shampoo to nail polish to soaps, and we need to avoid buying those products, but most importantly we need to also share in how to save the remaining pieces of primary forest in these parts of the world. So this walkway has been an amazing investment to give people a chance to see the forest, so valuable that I and a couple others were able to do a bio blitz there and find over 1,500 species in the period of a 10-day expedition, and then use that data to turn this forest into a UNESCO World Heritage Forest preserved for perpetuity, and now all the visitors to Malaysia can see the canopy and enjoy and appreciate a forest that will never be cut down for palm oil. So these walkways in general, here's one in the Amazon that I've been working on for 25 years, provide education opportunities, research opportunities, amazing chances for big kids and little kids, scientists and citizen scientists to make discoveries and contribute to our world of rainforest conservation, which is really fantastic indeed. Another chapter in my book that I'm really excited about sharing with you is how can we invest in trust and building up local relationships, and this was something for me that I never learned in graduate school. Nobody ever told me you have to train in creating trust with local people. We always were trained about statistics or identifying species or pressing plants or something like that, but I kind of learned from the School of Field Biology that the most important thing that I could ever give to students is helping them understand that you really need to build up collaboration and local trust, and for me that issue came home with my work in Ethiopia, which is one chapter of the book which talks about this extraordinary country where unfortunately less than three percent of the forest remains, and part of the reason for that is that most of the land is subsistence agriculture. They don't yet have tractors or metal tools or irrigation, so they farm a whole lot more to grow enough crop to feed their families and their villages, and the only trees and forest remaining are what we call church forests because here's the church, the Coptic church in the middle, and all the priests believe that they are the stewards of all of God's creatures, so they try to keep a forest surrounding their church. Guess what? I'm a conservation botanist or biologist, and I believe in saving biodiversity, so our missions are the same. The priests and I, once we met while I was doing a National Geographic survey in Ethiopia, discovered we had the same mission in life, which is to create and protect all of God's creatures, or in my case, all of biodiversity, so this for me was a huge take-home message because to gain the trust of the priests, I had to pray a lot. I had to do different things from what I was taught in graduate school, and here, by the way, is a Google Earth image showing you how these church forests look from satellite views, and it reminds us all that there is definitely an urgent, urgent need to save the forests of Ethiopia. What little is left, and so I went to Ethiopia. I've been there for the last 15 years working really hard side by side with the priests in this extraordinary landscape that's very dry and hot, but all the animals, the birds, the mammals, the insects, of course they crowd to the remaining trees, and so this was really important to link me with the religious sector because we had that shared mission. This is the chief priest of the Gondor region in northern Ethiopia, and he and I are best friends, and we now have this amazing shared mission. Maybe one of my first field efforts where being a female was an advantage because he enjoyed the pictures of my children. He trusted me because I was female, and they have a lot of issues with missionaries and aggressive scientists wanting to push into these forests for data collection or for conversion of their religion, and so they are very scared of Westerners, and somehow I created an element of trust with this religious sector, and we have a great opportunity, I hope, to save these forests. How? Well, once we had that local trust, I started giving workshops with my Ethiopian colleague who translated, and we would talk to 100 or 200 priests at a time, tell them about the importance of their forests, which they never realized because they didn't have computers to look at Google Earth images to see all the deforestation, and even better, they devised a solution. They said we will get our churchgoers to haul the rocks out of the farmer fields and build walls to keep the cattle out of our church forests and to protect the boundaries and to create the sanctuary for all the wildlife. So, lo and behold, we have a fabulous solution in Ethiopia, which is going on now. One of several countries where there's not enough money for conservation or saving forests the way Americans have plenty of funds or Europeans or Australians, but there are many countries where the equality of conservation and funding conservation is very unequal and very, very unfortunate because they don't have nearly the resources of Costa Rica or United States or even a place like Germany or France, so we have to help them because their biodiversity is just as important as ours is. So today, if you go to Ethiopia, you will see that we are putting walls around the 40 highest biodiversity forests. We're halfway to our goal, which is a million dollars budget. We've raised $500,000 mostly through school kids giving little bake sales and lunch money allowances because they are so excited to help the kids of Ethiopia save their wildlife and their pollinators and their biodiversity, but I'm just hoping, hoping that we can cover that remaining $500,000 soon so that we can ensure Ethiopia of having a genetic library for the future of their generations of important human beings. And even for us, one of the important trees I work on over there actually has a chemical in the leaves that cures prostate cancer. So, there are so many reasons why we need to save forests in every single country of the world. And we also need to educate the kids because they love their bugs, they love their birds, and yet they don't have field guides or iNaturalist or computers to look things up, but they're the most fabulous field assistants in the world and I'm really excited that we can work in more of these underserved countries that don't have the funds and don't have the intellectual capital and help them catch up. One of my solutions for Ethiopia is that I wrote a book in their language, which is called Amarik, and it's all about why saving their trees is important. And if you go on Amazon, you can buy the book in English and every time somebody buys an English copy of this book, it funds a copy to be printed in Amarik and we send it over to the kids in Ethiopia, which for me has been about the most joyful part of my whole career. Giving a 16-year-old a book when they have never owned one book in their life, or one pencil by the way, is probably the most cheerful and joyful moment of my whole scientific career because kids need books and kids need tools in order to become good scientists. So, we're just beginning in Ethiopia, but it's really heartwarming and important. And there's a big section in my book talking about Ethiopia and how we can help other countries become a little more savvy with their conservation. And that leads me to the last chapter in the book, which is the big challenge we all know about and we all face. And during my lifetime alone, 50% of the world's primary forests have disappeared. That is not a good track record and it doesn't really reflect all of the effort of scientists, all of the funding of research, and the Amazon doesn't in any way show a result about helping save these forests. And that's kind of led me to think in the last 10 or 20 years of my career, maybe I need to stop focusing on naming new bugs and publishing papers and journals and going to conferences, but trying to actually save forests on the ground, literally getting acreage set aside and figuring out economic ways that the local people can afford to keep those forests. So, here's been my solution using my 40 years of research and my 40 plus countries of research. I figure how can canopy science, this whole tree research, contribute in some way our knowledge to help save forests a little bit better than most research has done in the past. And so I just founded a new project in the last two years called Mission Green, where we have a 10 times 10 times 10 project. And that is to take the 10 most important and degraded forests of the world in 10 million dollars of allocation and build 10 canopy walkways and hire 10 to the 3, in other words, a thousand women and families to operate ecotourism in these 10 countries in order to keep the forests and give sustainable income to women and provide these amazing tools for research and educators and tourists to come and appreciate these forests. So, I'm pretty excited about this. 10 by 10 by 10 times 10, one more 10 is really the women that we'll hire, which is more like a thousand. And in this case, we're not saving the whole forest of the country. We've all learned from Brazil that you cannot save the whole forest of a country. You can ship money to governments and it becomes very corrupt and nothing really happens. But maybe we can save the highest diversity portions of the forest in these deserving countries and thereby create genetic libraries to seed the forest of the future. And to do that, we have to offer some income to the local people. We can't expect them to starve to save this genetic library. So, the canopy walkway offers this extraordinary economic opportunity for local people. And I'm relying on my colleague and friend and fabulous woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, who 10 years ago started a program for marine conservation. She called it Mission Blue and she creates Hope Spot. She brings attention to high biodiversity spots in the ocean and she's not funding them, but she's marketing them, which is fantastic. And so she and I got together and said, Hey, we need to do this on the land. So last birthday, Sylvia and I wrote an op-ed in the Miami Herald called Mission Blue and Mission Green. And we launched Mission Green and we had a lot of help from a really wonderful friend of mine named EO Wilson, who sad to say has passed away. But in his latest book called Half Earth, he actually listed the most endangered forests of the world. And I was part of the effort that he recruited to make that list. But using his list, we said to ourselves, why don't we use these fabulous canopy walkways and create places in these countries that have no opportunity to save their forests economically or intellectually, and we could do our share of creating these genetic libraries. So today I'm really happy to say we have Mission Green, thanks to Ed and Sylvia. We have a proven conservation model from Mission Blue. We have world-class science experts on my board of advisors. We have local leadership in every one of these countries where we plan to build walkways and we have sustainable income forthcoming for the local indigenous people that might operate the ecotourism. Here's our scientific experts, you'll recognize a couple names. Thank you, Peter, if you're out there listening, because he's been an incredible mentor. Thank you, Pat, who also is a fabulous woman in botany that has been a role model for me for decades. And we have a couple other people along the way. Pat Wright is helping us in Madagascar, and Dr. Alamaihu in Ethiopia, and Wade Davis has been a big force in the Amazon. So we're really excited about this one way of creating a solution to deforestation that hopefully is foolproof and will really work. And we have the models to prove it. We have built a walkway in the subtropical forests of Florida. We have the revenue of 30 million dollars a year, probably more than we can generate in a developing country, but at least proof about the economic opportunity that these walkways provide to local hotels and restaurants when people come to walk on these treetop opportunities. And we have a half a million visitors a year there, which is absolutely fantastic. So we have one of these 10 walkways completely finished. We just got a grant to actually provide more ADA opportunity to this walkway. So we'll be piloting some great opportunities for access for the disabled, including seniors and walkers, which is kind of commonplace in my home state of Florida. So we're excited to improve this walkway to expand for diversity. We have a fabulous finished walkway in Malaysia, thanks to one amazing corporate donor. And this walkway has access to 2.5 million residents in Penang, annual visitorship of at least a million people who come to Penang. And so we're really excited that this walkway will lead to a great model for other countries. And as I mentioned earlier, the walkway itself featured a BioBlitz that I hosted about four years ago and provided the data that led to this whole forest becoming a UNESCO World Biological Heritage. And we're really excited about that conservation opportunity. We have a new walkway completely finished in the Redwoods out in Eureka, California. And this is an amazing jewel in the crown of our Mission Green opportunity because Redwoods are the most iconic species in all of North America. Did you know that more people climb Mount Everest than have ever climbed a Redwood tree? Not surprising perhaps, but crazy when you think about the access and the cost and the opportunities that Redwoods provide for all of us. And we also have a walkway finished in the Amazon in Peru, but it doesn't have the educational opportunities provided yet. It hasn't been marketed appropriately, but we're really excited because this walkway has over time employed 100 families from some of the indigenous villages nearby. The reserve has been expanded many, many fold because the people see the importance of saving trees instead of logging them. And finally, our fifth walkway that we're just in the process of designing and fundraising for is Madagascar. Less than 3% of their forests remain. Here's the field station operated by Pat Wright in SUNY Stony Brook. And here's the place where the walkway will be built. And here are the Darlene lemurs that will finally get to be studied in situ, not from binoculars on the ground, but actually from a canopy walkway where these critters live. So we're really excited about Mission Green. As I said, it's the last chapter in the book because I want to provide readers with hope and not total dejection and disappointment. But I do think for the very small cost of $10 million, we can turn some of these countries around in terms of saving their canopies and their opportunities. So I'm so excited for you to read the book, comment about it, think about, help me decide who can fund these canopy walkways in these important countries that don't have much support. And how can we do this together as fellow botany and conservation lovers and make sure that our kids and grandkids have this biodiversity and this forest conservation in their future. So I just want to thank all of you for reading the book. I want to thank Peter and Pat Raven for mentoring me to write this book. And I want to thank Missouri for over many years of visits to your collections and lectures to your members and your staff. Being a part of your family has meant a great deal. And so I'm really excited to share all this with you. And you can go on my websites and learn more. Or you can stop now and I will stop screen share and we can go back to Valerie for a couple questions. So thanks so much for staying awake if you're still awake. Thank you, Meg. That was fantastic. And the ideas and questions are swirling. And I see we have questions coming in from the audience as well. So if you're ready, I'm going to go ahead and begin sharing those with you. So I think one of the things that has been foremost on all of our minds in recent years has been the pandemic. And I can only imagine how that has affected your work. Can you tell us a little bit more about how things have shifted for you and changed and evolved? Sure. Yeah. And it has, of course, affected everyone in a funny way. Of course, the pandemic stopped me from doing my incredibly aggressive global touring. I was working in a dozen countries and visiting a lot of them every year. So it was very active schedule and I had to cancel all that. But the one thing it did that was positive was it gave me time to go to Harvard and visit with Ed Wilson and talk with Peter Raven and really map out this project because I had to pause. I had to stop the travel. And so we created the graphics. We researched the forests. We talked about who were the local trust leaders that we could rely on in these countries. So in some ways, I feel that Michigan Green is coming out of the stable, totally ready to run the race. Whereas with many nonprofits and programs, you're sort of developing them along the way. But we're 40% almost finished with our 10 forests because we had the opportunity to really look at the successes. And some things were moving ahead locally, and we could operate them from afar. Fundraising was very tough. We're behind on that, of course. And field visits were behind that. I just did my first visit to Madagascar a month ago. But oh, the local people were in tears. They were so excited. They just can't wait to have this ecotourism opportunity come to them. So I think that it's very heartwarming that now we can hit the ground running. So that's maybe what the pandemic did for me. And I did write the book during that time. That probably helped me finish it. I used all my journals from 40 years of work, but I did at least focus and sit at my desk and kind of have time to think, which is unusual. Sometimes you're just running so fast, you don't stop. Well, we're so glad you shared your stories with us. The story, you've had an extraordinary life, but what you also make clear in your book is these incredible collaborations that really make a vision a reality. So thank you. And the questions continue. And I've had several people that have asked, can you give us a sense of what some of those 10 forests that have been identified by Mission Green, where there's a hope of the canopy bridges being built? Yes. And, you know, if you do read Ed Wilson's book, Half Earth, or if you go on my new website, mission slash green.org, which just got released a couple weeks ago, you will see those 10 forests. But, you know, we have a success with the Redwoods, which is great. We have a success in the Amazon. We have a success in the subtropics of Florida. And now we're building in Madagascar. And we are excited about building in Bhutan, in India, in Mozambique, in New Guinea, and we have a 10th unknown. I just talked today, I'm here at National Geographic, actually at the Explorers Conference and met with some Filipino foresters who are desperate because they have less than 3% of their forests left. But the good news is, we don't really have to stop at 10. We want to do, our NGO says we will do 10 and finish them so funders don't feel like they have to give for the rest of their life, which so many nonprofits want you to give more every year. We want to finish these, give them to the locals, and 10 is our goal. But the good news is, we could have 10 more that could be funded in other ways. We now have a walkway at Holden Arboretum in Ohio, another one in Quechee, Vermont, all funded locally, but I help them with the design. So I sort of like the good housekeeping seal of approval, like we have this necklace of canopy walkways. I have the three walkways in Australia that I helped with that are up and running. And so the good news is, we want to help those underserved countries, but other places could get them as well. So it's exciting because the model is really what we would like to share. I can see the wheels turning in our chat. People are eager to explore what the opportunities are here closer to us. Talking about those walkways, I have a question. One of our participants asks, do walkways damage or inhibit the trees in any way? Oh, such a great question. And number one, a trail on the forest floor is one of the most damaging things that can be done. It tramples the roots. It prevents small animals from crossing that very kind of rugged, exposed, you know, dry soil trodden path. It's a really incredible problem in forests when you think about it from the point of view of small wildlife and even seed dispersal. So the canopy walkway is much less damaging in the treetops than on the forest floor. But admittedly, there are a few things that will be affected. The birds are not affected. The insects aren't. Small mammals might use it. They might say, this is fantastic. I'm going to use it to travel. And it might change their sort of field biology, how they move from tree to tree. Or maybe they'll use a couple trees more than they used to. So we need to know that mammalogists keep that in mind. But the bottom line is for most humans in the canopy, the animals are not scared of you up there. It's not damaging and you're not really touching things or grabbing things because you can't. On the forest floor, you go off the trail and sometimes you do bad things. I hate to say it. So the canopy walkway is very, very passive and much more beneficial than the other alternative, which is, you know, clear cutting the forest for profit. Thank you. Thanks for it. Thank you for clarifying. A question, how far up is the walkway in the redwood canopy? Oh, that is a great question. It's 100 feet. It's in a little 100 year old redwood stand. So it's not huge. It's a baby, but you know, people love it. It's associated with the Sequoia Zoo, which is fantastic. And someday we would love to get a, maybe a tower or a little climb up into a platform in a big redwood. But for now, it's just still fabulous because I think it gives people so much respect and love for those fabulous trees. Oh, just wonderful. A few more questions for you, Meg. What advice would you give to aspiring arbornauts? Oh gosh. And I hope there are some, as I mentioned, 50% of the species on the planet living up there and less than 10% are known. So we need to recruit arbornauts. And I would just say any young person who likes nature, who can continue to get outside and smell nature and see it and maybe, you know, photograph it and take observations, you're well on the way to becoming an arbornaut. I was not some bold athlete in high school and, you know, the hardware now to climb a tree is very, very facilitated. You don't have to be a big strong athlete to do it. And you just have to be curious and use your five senses and, you know, maybe go off to college and get a biology degree or an environmental science degree. And I would encourage everybody because there's so much to discover. And I'm hopeful that we can recruit a few from the Missouri area. Well, like I said, you have a number of people asking about opportunities here in the Missouri and St. Louis area. Do you know, are there canopies? You mentioned one in Ohio. Are there other canopy locations that you're aware of in the Midwest? Not a lot. The Holden is one of the few. And then right now we have some interest in the Great Smokies. That is the highest biodiversity forest in North America, actually higher than the Redwoods. The Redwood is the iconic tree, but the Great Smokies is the bastion of biodiversity. And so I've been in conversation with some forestry groups in Asheville and in North Carolina. But we'd be so welcoming anything in the Midwest because, again, to educate all those kids to have all that biodiversity, I promise you, you have tons of new species up in your treetops. So we do need a walkway in your region. And it just wasn't our priority because Americans don't have the financial, you know, disadvantage of Madagascar or Ethiopia, but we certainly have the people that could build it and we have the designs that could be built. We just have to get some property and a good forest and a few funds and it would be a fabulous addition to all of the nature experiences in your region. Well, you have us feeling very, very, very inspired. Meg, you have traveled extensively, clearly from your photos and what we learned from the book, as a botanist and as an arbor knot. Where would you like to travel next? Oh my gosh, that is such a great question. Well, you know, it's funny, I was happy. The only other good thing about COVID is I got to stay in my home state of Florida for a few years and really discover local things, which is always good to do. And I was excited about that. But I'm very excited about working in the Philippines and also in Bhutan. Now Bhutan is unusual and I have met with the royal family, so we have some good inroads there. It is not an endangered forest, but it's right next to Nepal, which has been totally denuded. So the hope there is because the royals are interested in this project that we could do something in Bhutan that's exemplary for animals seeking refugia because we have India and we have Nepal needing Bhutan to keep all those forests. So, you know, I'm excited about doing some work there and I'm excited. I've worked in India a lot, but I can't wait to go back. I've missed it for four years and the Western Ghats is another area so deserving of a walkway because India has so many unique species and so many people that don't get to see trees very often. So I just feel like those are really important places. Meg, if we want to continue following your adventures and see what happens next, where may we follow you? Where may we tag along on your adventures? Thanks for asking. So if you go to www.treefoundation.org, my foundation, there is a free newsletter you can sign up for and we put out a little update on how we're saving the church forest in Ethiopia or the progress with the walkway in Madagascar right now. So please do that. Love to have you do that and of course you can go on my personal website canopymeg.com and see my blogs and my kind of urgent, you know, essays about what we need to do to save the world's forests before we all go with the earthworms into the grave. Well on that note, it has been a pleasure spending time with you this evening. Dr. Meg Laumann, thank you so much for joining us and for taking us along up into the trees with you. Your story is really inspiring and to those of you at home, if you haven't already, I cannot encourage you enough to pick up a copy of The Arbor Knot. It's a fantastic read. It's available locally again at Left Bank Books, Subterranean and The Novel Neighbor, which is offering a special discount to all of you of 15 percent. That code is available in the chat and we will also send it in a follow-up message. Please keep following Meg. We look forward to seeing all of you at the garden soon. This was really a treat to experience and share your love of the natural world. So thank you to all of you for joining us this evening and for your support as members of the Missouri Botanical Garden. We look forward to seeing you at the garden soon. Have a great night. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.