The Current - What we can learn from the resilience of trees

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

For the past four decades, world renowned biologist Nalini Nadkarni has risked her life studying trees. In 2015, she fell from a 50-foot bigleaf maple tree in the Olympic Peninsula. She tells The Current host Matt Galloway what her recovery from that catastrophic fall taught her about resilience and trees.

At University of Montreal, researchers are improving lives all over the world, turning previously incurable blood cancers into treatable ones, searching for signs of life on planets light years away, training AI to detect diseases earlier and more accurately. It's breakthroughs like these that make us one of the top two universities in Canada for research, because it's more than what we do. It's our raison d'être. University of Montreal and of the world. This is a CBC podcast.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Laboratories can often be sterile, controlled environments, but that is not the case for the workplace of canopy biologist and National Geographic Explorer Nalini Ned Carney. She spends her days exploring what scientists sometimes call the last biotic frontier. Armed with a slingshot and rock climbing gear, she scales some of the world's tallest trees

to uncover the mysteries of forest canopies from Costa Rica to Washington State. This is all part of a lifelong mission to protect the world's diminishing rainforests and share her passion for trees with others. Nelidi Ned Carney is with me in our Toronto studio. Good morning. Good morning. The last biotic frontier?

Yes. Isn't that the most attractive, compelling thing you've ever heard? It sounds like a movie, Indiana Jones. That's right. What is that? Well, it means it's a frontier in that just 40 years ago, when I was starting out as a graduate student, the world of the forest canopy was virtually unknown

because there was no way to get up there safely and non-destructively. And so people thought of the forest canopy is like, well, it's kind of an extension of the forest floor, we can get up there. It's sort of like how the benthose of the ocean was before scuba gear was invented. Like you could collect the organisms and dredge them up and look at them. But it's another world.

It's another world. And you didn't know how organisms were interacting, how they were behaving until you could get down into the ocean. And the same thing up in the forest canopy. We could look up there and see there were birds and plants up in the treetops, but it wasn't until we started thinking about using mountain climbing techniques to get up there or construction cranes or hot air balloons or build walkways. And so all of those techniques have been developed over the last 40 years

to in effect equip scientists like me to get into the forest canopy and study it. Were you a kid who climbed trees? I was totally a kid who climbed trees. You said that being up in the tree was your place. It was my place. Yes. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, which is just outside Washington, D.C. It was, you know, a suburban neighborhood.

But my parents had a house that had eight maple trees that lined the driveway. And as a kid, you know, I'd come back after school. And I had four brothers and sisters and chores and homework. And so being able to climb up one of those trees every afternoon was a place. it was entering a place that was mine. My brothers and sisters didn't climb. Certainly my parents didn't climb trees. And so it became my place, my refuge, my arena of curiosity and imagination.

And I decided that that's where I wanted to be. I wanted to help protect trees and understand them. What was this oath that you swore to protect trees? I mean, it's not just going and hiding out in the tree. This is a real thing. This was as real as it can be. And when you're eight years old and you swear an oath, that's pretty darn real. And so I swore an oath to myself that one day, you know, when I'm a grown up, I'm going to do something to protect trees.

And at that time, as an eight-year-old and a little girl, there were no models for how you could do that. I thought, well, maybe I'll be a firefighter or a forest ranger. And it wasn't until I got to graduate school, actually, that I realized I could learn about trees. I could come to understand them and communicate their complexity, their beauty, how they work to other scientists and to other people. But what was eight-year-old you thinking? Eight-year-old was just thinking, this is my place. This is a place where the limbs of these trees are holding me.

They're protecting me. They're not asking anything of me. And since they have no voices themselves, I need to do something to help them sound those voices to help protect them. You know, it's really funny, Matt, because I remember as a little, as that little eight-year-old girl thinking, I might invent a microphone that I could insert into the bark of the tree

and wear headphones and ask it questions. And I figured it would answer in a very slow voice, you know, like whales. And I'd have to speed, you know, turn the dial up to understand it. And I realized I would never really invent

that microphone and headphones. But really, the practice of science has given me that capacity. If I'm curious about something in the canopy, something in a forest, I can use observations and experiments and modeling to ask and answer questions about that tree or that forest. This is your life's work, and as I said, a lot of that life's work is spent up in that canopy. Yes.

How high up are you? Well, it depends on the forest, of course, and the trees, but in the two forests where I work, in the forest, the cloud forest of Monteverde, Costa Rica, we get up usually 100, 150 feet routinely are the size of the trees in that forest. And then I work also in the temperate rainforests of Western Washington, very much like your forest, your coastal western forests of British Columbia. And there I climb Big Leaf Maples, which are fairly short statured, so I'm usually up 60 or 70 feet above the forest floor. How do you get there? I said this slingshot and rock climbing in the introduction. What is the process of launching yourself up into the tree?

It's a really fun process. I wish everybody could join me to do this. When I first learned, I learned how to climbed trees in the tropics with a pioneer of canopy research named Don Perry. And his approach was to shoot a line up into the forest canopy up and over a branch with a crossbow. Well, a crossbow works. It's really accurate, really powerful. But when I was traveling from the United States to Costa Rica during the Sundanista Revolution, I was questioned by the airport authorities of, why are you carrying this crossbow with you? So I realized I needed something simpler.

And I invented something I called a Mastercaster, which is an illusion. aluminum rod with a powerful slingshot mounted underneath it and a fishing reel mounted on it also. So that way I can just tie a fishing weight, a two ounce fishing weight to the end of the fishing line. I aim for the branch. I pull the slingshot back. That line goes up and over the branch. And then when it comes down to the far as floor, I tie a nylon cord to the end of it. Reel that up and over the branch.

And then I can tie a climbing rope and pull that up and over the branch, tie off one end. of that rope and then I can just ascend the rope with a regular harness and ascenders like you would climb a rock. You invented this? Yes. The mastercaster. The mastercaster. Once one has launched the mastercaster over the canopy and the rope is there and then you

climb up. Then you climb up the rope. But you're not climbing it like pulling yourself hand over hand. It's actually really pretty much everybody except the most acrophobic people that I know can climb up this rope. So you put on your harness and then you have these ascenders. They go up the rope and not down, so they hold your weight. So you have one ascender attached to your leg loops, another to your waist harness.

And so basically you stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down. And that allows you to, in effect, inchworm your way up the rope to the top of the canopy. When you get to the top, what is it like? Describe the scene. Oh, my gosh. You just closed your eyes when I asked you. I did because I was imagining this one tree, we named my tree, I named my trees. This one is called Figurola.

It's a big strangler fig, and its branches are horizontal. They go out just forever. But when you start on the forest floor, your rope is up, you're in your harness. Your ascenders are attached to the rope. You start insurming your way up the rope. You move from the dark, damp forest floor. Because of the overhanging branches and leaves, it's very dark damp, and there's hardly any wind. As you ascend, the atmosphere, the microclimate gets lighter and lighter.

There's more and more light, the greater extremes of russes. relative humidity and temperature, and there's much more wind up in the canopy. So when you sit astride, a branch up there, and you look out, it's like you're in the atmosphere of an open field. And as you look around, you realize you're surrounded by a thousand, thousand leaves, and they're up above you, they're around you, and they're below you. And birds are flying underneath you, which is just amazing. But I think what's so amazing is that each tree is sort of moving independently, and

And so suddenly you're realizing that the forest is not just this set of vertical trunks. It's this set of three-dimensional, individual, active dynamic trees that are all around you. And although I'm not a religious person, I feel a sense of spirituality. I think of spirituality as being a sense of connection. And I feel no more connected with life anywhere else than as I do when I'm up in the top of a rainforest tree. Why do you name the trees? I mean, I don't think that trees are aware of me. I don't think they know I'm up there as an individual or even as anything, but I am aware of them.

And I see trees as individuals. And although I could say, well, there's tree number 343, there's also just a joy in saying, I'm kind of acquainted with you. And therefore, your name is Figuerola or, you know, or branch shot, or some name that just, sometimes I name them after my field assistants or friends I know. And so it becomes this sense of affiliation. Is it quiet up there? You mentioned that there are birds that are flying below you, but are there other things that are around you? There's sound. Yes, there's sound. There's the sound of these leaves moving, you know, moving. There have branches rubbing together. In Costa Rica, there's

often the sounds of howler monkeys sort of going through the trees. But sometimes, especially when it's just about to rain or when the mist and fog are coming through the can of be there's this amazing sense of silence, of quiet, of calm, of tranquillidad, as we say in Costa Rica. And I think for me, as someone who's a person who rushes around doing this and that, that's one of the most valuable, compelling reasons to climb my trees because I don't have that sense of calm and spirituality in many other parts of my life, but I can always find it when I climb a tree again. It's like part of this is about this idea of it being another world, right?

You mentioned we, if you take a look at, you know, the deepest parts of the ocean, there's a lot that we just don't understand. That's correct. That's correct. Here. What don't we understand about what's going on in the canopy from down on the ground? Well, that's a great question, Matt. Because it's been only recently penetrated, so to speak, with these canopy access techniques,

we had to sort of do basic, what I would call 19th century science, just describing what's up there. What is the biomass of the canopy plants, for example, that live up there? And now we're moving into a phase, which I think is much more exciting, which is not only understanding who is up there, who are these canopy plants, who are the canopy animals, who are the canopy microorganisms, these organisms that have adapted and evolved to live in the canopy environment, where, as I said, there are greater extremes of relative humidity and temperature. There's more wind.

Just the architecture of these trees, these cylinders suspended three-dimensional, cylinders is very different from the architecture of what you find on the forest floor. So who are these 27,000 species of plants, these what we call epiphytes? Who are they that they've evolved in the forest canopy? And what the heck are they doing up there? How are they functioning? How are they affecting the rest of the forest as a whole? So it's not just a taxonomist who says, oh, here's a new species of orchid.

Interesting and important as that is. It's like, how is that orchid? how are these canopy dwelling plants affecting the trees on which they perch? How are they affecting the ecosystem as a whole? At University of Montreal, researchers are improving lives all over the world, turning previously incurable blood cancers into treatable ones, searching for signs of life on planets light years away, training AI to detect diseases earlier and more accurately.

It's breakthroughs like these that make us one of the top two universe, in Canada for research because it's more than what we do. It's our raison d'être. University of Montreal and of the world. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson and I host the Daily News podcast, Front Burner, and lately I'll see a story about, I don't know, political corruption or something and think during a normal time, we'd be talking about this for weeks, but then it's almost immediately overwhelmed by something else. On Front Burner, we are trying to pull lots of story threads together so that you don't lose the plot. So you can learn how all these threads fit together. Follow Front Burner wherever

you get your podcasts. We've talked to Suzanne Samard, forest floor researchers. She means she looks at what's beneath the surface in some ways and the connections between that and what you're studying up above. Exactly. That if you start taking things out, there's an impact on all of that. That's right. Exactly. And actually, right now, Matt, I am working with three other researchers of the United States on a project in Costa Rica or long-term study site in Monteverde on the effects of climate change on canopy plants and the trees that support them. So because of climate change, we're getting much longer dry seasons. We're getting less mist and fog that nourishes these canopy dwelling plants. And so what we're trying to understand is what's going to happen if predictions

of climate change are actually happening or going to happen. And there's a prediction that because these canopy dwelling plants rely on mist and fog for their water and nutrients, that if that dissipates, if that lessens, if that becomes less prominent, then these canopy dwelling plants are going to suffer. They're going to die off. And so I think what canopy researchers like myself and my colleagues are trying desperately to do as time is clicking by with climate change going on at the rate it is, is being able to make predictions based on scientifically sound knowledge of how this intact system works in the canopy when everything's still okay versus what will happen when something perturbs it. What did you say the tool was that you used to get up the rope? The ascender, is that right?

Yes. You need to trust that the ascender is going to hold you when you're up in the tree. That's correct. And if it doesn't, you fall from the tree. And if it doesn't, you fall. And you fell. And I did have a fall. When was that? That was in 2015, so that was a little over 10 years ago. How high up in the tree were you? I was about 60 feet up. Let's see, I can't translate that into meters very quickly. It's pretty high. Yeah. It's a five-story building. Somebody said that when you were falling, it was like a silent sack of sand as you fell to the ground? I exploded five of my thoracic vertebrae. I broke my pelvis in three parts.

I broke nine ribs. I lacerated my left lung. I broke my fibula. I cracked my C2 vertebrae and I got traumatic brain injury. You said you were very close to death. I was. I was medevacked out after lying on the forest floor for six hours because we were pretty remote. This was a pretty remote site in the Olympic National Day.

forest. What happens? Is it something just gave way? The rope actually broke. The rope failed, as they say in roped land, which is extremely unusual, but it must have been a fault of it. It was only eight months old. To my knowledge, nobody had ever fallen on it or had an accident. And so we surmised there was just a fault in the rope. And again, very unusual, but it happened. Why do you think you survived? From the point of view of, you know, the mechanics of things, I was very, I'm very healthy, you know, I'm well fit, and I had a great support system of my family, my friends, my colleagues. Why do you think you survive? Do you think about that, though?

Do you think about part of it? I don't. I really actually, until you answered that, asked me that question, I really hadn't thought about it as why. I mean, in part because you didn't stop doing this. No, I didn't. It took me a while. I mean, I was out for a year. I couldn't climb. I couldn't do much of anything.

I was on medical leave. So I was just getting better. But, I mean, I'm a poster child for recovery for physical and mental recovery. Like I give talks now at medical schools and grand rounds telling doctors and nurses and therapists what my experience was. And because it's so weird that like a 65-year-old woman sustained all of these injuries and has sort of lived to tell the tale, so to speak. Why did you go back up a tree, though? Most people, I think if they fell out of a tree, it was a five-story fall and they broke, almost every bone in their body should have died, would say, thank you. I have been up the tree.

I'm staying here on the ground now. And you didn't. Well, there's still a lot of, there's still a lot of things I want to know about the canopy and about those canopy plants. And I think when I, you know, when I travel to Costa Rica and I see the conversion of primary forest to pastures, when I travel in the Northwest and I see these giant clear cuts. It's like, and when I know that climate change is moving faster than we even predicted that it would, I feel an urgency. That same, maybe the same urgency or the same pull that that little eight-year-old Nalini felt when she would climb into the trees and say, this is a good place. This tree is acting, is asking nothing of me because it has no voice to ask. I think that was the voice that called me again to the canopy to do this project

on climate change and canopy plant health. It's not just you going up into the tree and not you and your fellow scientist. You've taken a whole range of people up into the trees with you. Yeah. Traffic engineers? Yes. Dancers. Dancers. Inuits. How do you convince people that this is a thing to do? What is it that you say but why this matters that they, the dancer, should go up into the tree. I want to invite people who had other perspectives, who had other ways of seeing, other ways of knowing, other ways of perceiving this complex system, and inviting them and requesting to them to share their perceptions of the forest canopy through whatever means they used to express themselves. So when I invited a modern dancer to come to the forest canopy,

I wanted to know how she and her troop would see, perceive, and interpret and communicate that beauty, that complexity, that spirituality, or whatever it was that she found out, and perform it for dance audiences, not scientific, not people who go to a natural history museum, but people who would choose to see a dance performance about a rainforest. And I wanted to also bring in novices, people who literally had never seen trees before. And so I invited two blind people, to one of these confluences who literally hadn't seen trees, and also to Inuits, people who live in the far, far north of Nunavut and invited them down and they hadn't really seen trees before and we taught them how to climb. And it was so profound, Matt, because they were, first of all,

just to be up high and a tree was amazing. But also they, you know, they really hadn't had experience with trees. They taught me the word for tree in their language of inuctitude, which was Nabakhtut. That means tree. Which means pole in their language. And we said, well, what's the word for forest? and they said, Naboktujut, which means many poles. So we brought them and they camped out with us for a week where we were climbing trees. And at the end of the week, we had this campfire every week, every day, every evening, and people would share what they saw, what they learned that day. And Brian was one of the two Inuits, and he was an artist.

And so we had asked him, please make art about what you're seeing here, because he had been making art of polar bears and the tundra and so forth. And he showed us this amazing picture that he, had drawn of a set of pole-like trees, skinny little trees, but in front of it was the stone cairn, these stacked rocks right in front of one of the trees. We said, what is that about? And he said, well, in my land of the tundra, we don't have trees to show us ways. We use these stacked up cairns as our guideposts. And he said, during this week, listening to others talk about trees, camping under these Western red cedars, I have come to see that you understand

that trees are your guideposts, and you need to respect them the way we respect elders in our village. That statement coming from someone who hadn't, until that week, seen a tree, experienced a tree, had no word really for what a tree is, was, I think, one of the most powerful conservation statements of anybody that I've ever known, especially of ecologists and biologists. And so I think there's this value of bringing people who have different experiences, different perspectives, and different ways of knowing to the arena of what you're interested in as a scientist so that a scientist can learn from people who may not have the vocabulary or the background, but who still have an understanding and the ability to express.

You have an evangelical zeal for the work that you do. I think I do. I do. Do you feel an urgency? It's not specifically but falling out of the tree and nearly dying. But now do you feel an urgency? for that work. We're in this world now where, and you hinted it. There's a lot of those forests are being chopped down. You're seeing people see dollar signs in those trees. They don't see that other world that's up in the canopy. And I just wonder whether you worry about that and you feel a greater urgency for this work because of the time that we live in where people look at, yeah, extractive value of things rather than that other value that might exist.

I think you hit it on the head. I don't have to say anything more than that. But I would say that the villain in this is, not the loggers who cut down the trees, nor is it even the log, you know, the forest extraction companies, I think we have to look at each of our, at ourselves to say, do I need to consume this? Do I need more of this? Do I need more of that? Are there other ways that I can meet my needs that don't involve consumption or don't involve driving my car or don't involve getting on an airplane and consuming fuel that's going to increase the carbon dioxide?

or spending time looking into the issues that will make tree cover more equitable in our city. I don't know about Toronto, but I know in Salt Lake City where I live, urban tree cover is much more concentrated on the east side of the city where more prosperous people live than on the west side of the city. And so that means the people who live in those lower income areas are not gaining the benefits of tree cover, of reduced temperatures, of less pollution, of more beauty in their immediate. surroundings than those that have more money. And so I think that the urgency I feel is at the global scale of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere that affects all of us that's making these, you know, these extreme weather events that we're now sort of shocked at, but actually getting less shocked at because we're understanding that it's, it's our actions that are contributing to that. But also on a smaller scale, things like the distribution of trees within our cities. And so all

of those issues that involve trees and by extension other aspects of nature, I think are urgent. And we were just talking before the show about the accessibility of people who live in Toronto to your beautiful Lake Ontario. And how important that is that when you have time to stroll in the city, that you can say, oh, I think I can walk on the waterfront and get a sense of water and get a sense of those beautiful ships that are moving through the water and get a sense of the trees that live around the lake and walk there instead of down these urban streets that are just concrete and tall buildings. And so all of those actions of making the lake accessible to Toronto citizens, I think, when I think of the riverwalk in Calgary and how beautiful that is and how

wonderful that is. The seawall in Vancouver around Stanley Park. Exactly. That urban people need access to trees, but all aspects of nature, even more, I think, than people who live in suburbia who do have those eight trees lining their driveways or rural people who have nature around them. So all of those demand urgent actions, urgent thinking, but most of all, urgent awareness of how important as nature is to all of us. It's kind of amazing to imagine back the eight-year-old you who made this pledge to preserve and protect the trees. And this is, I mean, this is your life's work. is what you have done.

And being able to be on this show and being able to give talks, every time I walk out on a stage and I have this opportunity, you know, to talk about trees to people and to hopefully move them and to raise awareness of how trees there and to not awaken, but reawaken their sense of, oh, that's right. Trees are really important. Is the fulfillment of that wish of that little, that little skinny eight-year-old kid? It would be really neat to spend some time up in the canopy. I'd love to take you up there, Matt. I'm kind of afraid of heights. I don't know that you could do it. I'll just go from your, your descriptions of what you have seen. It's a real pleasure to talk to about the work that you do. Thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. Thanks. Nalini Nudkarni is a world-renowned canopy biologist. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.