Product Description

World-renowned canopy biologist Nalini Nadkarni has climbed trees on four continents with scientists, students, artists, clergymen, musicians, activists, loggers, legislators, and Inuits, gathering diverse perspectives. In Between Earth and Sky, a rich tapestry of personal stories, information, art, and photography, she becomes our captivating guide to the leafy wilderness above our heads. Through her luminous narrative, we embark on a multifaceted exploration of trees that illuminates the profound connections we have with them, the dazzling array of goods and services they provide, and the powerful lessons they hold for us. Nadkarni describes trees' intricate root systems, their highly evolved and still not completely understood canopies, their role in commerce and medicine, their existence in city centers and in extreme habitats of mountaintops and deserts, and their important place in folklore and the arts. She explains tree fundamentals and considers the symbolic role they have assumed in culture and religion. In a book that reawakens our sense of wonder at the fascinating world of trees, we ultimately find entry to the entire natural world and rediscover our own place in it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #508841 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780520248564
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"A wide-ranging and eye-opening book about trees and our connections to them."--New Scientist

"A wealth of entertaining arboreal facts and figures, but her personal anecdotes are the book's most compelling and inimitable feature."--Publishers Weekly

"Nadkarni's writing is like a love letter to trees that effortlessly mixes poetry and prose with environmentalism, culture, history and science."--Foreword

"Nadkarni is a wonder. . . . Every page enthralls."--Terrain Magazine

From the Inside Flap
"A lovely work of writing and a rich scientific exploration of trees, suffused with poetry and humanity. Between Earth and Sky takes us on a journey through the wonders of the forest canopy and the web of spiritual and literal connections we have with trees. Nalini Nadkarni is a unique figure in forest ecology--as a pioneering tree climber and explorer, and a topnotch scientist, she's a hero in a world where heroes don't come around often."--Richard Preston, author of The Wild Trees and The Hot Zone

"Besides cutting them, climbing them, and planting them, the urge to anthropomorphize trees, make them into metaphors, and worship them, is practically universal. Many people feel an intimate connection to trees. Nadkarni's scientific, personal, and literary book shows why, on so many levels, this should be so. Although the ancient Chinese thought of humans as the connection between earth and sky, my vote would go to trees."--Liza Dalby, author of East Wind Melts the Ice

"From mosses to giant figs, from nail polish to turpentine, from poetry to rap music, world-acclaimed arbornaut Nadkarni weaves science and story together as she shares her passion for trees, reminding us that forests and humans are inextricably linked." -Margaret D. Lowman, author of Life in the Treetops and It's a Jungle Up There

"I came in from an afternoon of splitting firewood to find this book waiting for me in the mail. It's as wonderful a compendium as one could imagine of all things that make trees such special companions, rooted and steady and patient and full of glory."--Bill McKibben, author of The Bill McKibben Reader

"An epic and lyrical look at trees--an exploration that ranges from molecules and metabolism to ecology, poetry and dance--so breathtaking and eye-opening that it will be impossible to ever look at a tree or think about the world in the same way again."--Thomas E. Lovejoy, President, The Heinz Center

About the Author
Nalini Nadkarni is the author of Rainforests, with J. Johnson, Monteverde: The Ecology and Conservation of a Tropical Cloud Forest, with N.T. Wheelwright, and Forest Canopies, with M.L. Lowman. She teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at The Evergreen State College and is President of the International Canopy Network. Her work has been featured in magazines such as Natural History, Glamour, and National Geographic and she has appeared in numerous television documentaries. In 2002, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to better extend her work to the public.

Customer Reviews

deep love, deep knowledge
Knowing of my lifelong love of trees, my wife picked this up for me at our local library after seeing it displayed on the "New Arrivals" table. I hardly know where to begin to describe how profoundly informative and enjoyable this book was to read. I am nearly 60 and this is one of the most significant and helpful and memorable books of my life. What struck me over and over was just how connected Nalini Nadkarni is with people of all cultures and walks of life. She can relate to anyone, and does, on the basis of her vast experience and knowledge of trees. Some are laughable, such as using the time she was subjected to an airport baggage search to inform the inspector how each and every one of her personal items was connected to trees or tree products. She instituted a program at a correctional facility to enlist the aid of inmate volunteers to monitor and record observations on moss samples, wisely sensing that a re-connection to nature could be an approach to rehabilitation. This is not light reading; there is a vast amount of basic and complex information presented, but written with an undisguised passion and child-like wonder. This lady has lived--she is a wife and mother as well as a forest ecologist and researcher. She openly discusses a personal tension she experiences between the role of a dispassionate, analytical, and objective scientist and that of a fully alive human being who still is aware of her awe and spiritual connectedness to trees. To that end she has included numerous and related poems. They are not long nor are they frequent, but they are appropriate. I am forever grateful to my wife for bringing this book home for me.

All the ways we love trees
Nalini Nadkarni was hooked on trees by the maples growing outside her childhood home, which she climbed every day after school as a refuge from the hazards of family life. How fitting that she ended up climbing trees for a living, working as a forest canopy researcher in both temperate and tropical rainforests. "Between Earth and Sky" is actually not her first book on trees. The first was "Be Among the Birds: My Guide to Climbing Trees," which she produced at the tender age of nine years old! Her enthusiasm for trees seems only to have grown since then, and her current book is an attempt to share that enthusiasm with others in the broadest possible way.

Like a tree the book is vertically structured. It's roots explore the many ways trees provide for our basic needs: foods and materials; shelter for people, livestock, and crops; medicines and healing; and play for children of all ages. In these chapters Nadkarni includes quite a bit of scientific background to explain the properties that make trees so valuable to us. The trunk of the book looks at how trees live in our consciousness, as markers of time and change, and as powerful symbols in art, culture, spirituality, and religion. Since the science of trees is familiar to me, I found this second part of the book was the most interesting, and I wish it had been longer. No doubt whole books could be (and perhaps have been) written on the subject.

The crown of this book is "mindfulness," which Nadkarni defines as "the need to be aware of and compassionate towards one's surroundings." I think the author hopes that by presenting such a wide variety of ways of looking at and valuing trees, readers will be moved to participate in efforts to preserve the trees and forests around them, some of which she describes in the final chapter. She mentions a project in which Nadkarni was the scientific advisor to a modern dance troupe (Capacitor) that wanted to create a piece about the tropical rainforest ("Biome"). After the first performance, she noted that "people seemed far more inspired than I had ever seen them at a scientist's lecture or conservationist workshop." Such is the power of art. As much as us scientists would like people to just understand all the rational reasons why we should stop cutting down forests so fast, I suspect that there really are very few people who can be reached that way (and they probably already are or soon will be scientists!). Nadkarni is a model for a more holistic approach. Not only has she featured poetry about trees throughout this book, she has initiated projects to bring artists to the rainforest canopy, and has given lectures on trees in houses of worship. This book brings together all the diverse ways we can appreciate trees.