Between Earth and Sky. Our Intimate Connections to Trees

by Nalini M. Nadkarni
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2008
336 pages, illus. 29 b/w. Trade, $24.95, £16.95; paper, $17.95, £12.50
ISBN: 9780520248564; ISBN: 9780520261655.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens

Between Earth and Sky is a wonderful study on trees by a world renowned canopy biologist, weaving personal stories, scientific knowledge, poetry and – although to a much lesser extent – photography into a very readable companion to all that one may want to know about trees (this is the point of the view of the reader) as well as to all that one should know about them (this would be the point of view of the author who does much more than just love the object of her research). In the very first place, however, this is a feel good book with a clear message: trees are not just a fascinating part of nature, but they are also immensely profitable for humans.

Having received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the public dissemination of her work, Nadkarni knows how to raise interest in her passion for trees among a wide range of audiences, including those never going to science museums or reading books. The author’s strong commitment as well as her ability to entertain –in the good sense of the word– are well illustrated in Between Earth and Sky, which does tackle the issue from a very singular perspective, namely the way trees help us to be(come) more human. It explains what trees are, how they are built, how they function in their environment, how they form forests, but not why cultures have selected this or that “idea” of a tree (why do we want trees resemble to human bodies, or vice versa, for instance), nor why certain ideas of trees are being challenged or chased by other ones (what does Deleuze’s plea for the rhizome, that brings him explicitly to make a case against trees, mean for the cultural paradigm we are living in?). In short, Nadkarni’s science is real science (and one really learns a lot), but it remains light science (and after reading this book one understands why Nadkarni receives so many invitations to speak to all kind of audiences, from political lobby groups to church-goers). Corollarily, the environmentalist issues are of course present throughout the book –and one can only admire the author’s acute sense of an ethics of care–, but the level on which Nadkarni discusses them is always the strictly personal one: people first have to understand what trees can mean for them, then they will behave differently and life will become nicer and brighter. Her proposal to reduce the recidivism rate in state prison through gardening can be a good example of this attitude. A dendrophile myself, I will not contest these benefits, but the author’s innate optimism and good temper are sometimes a little one-dimensional. Therefore the reader will have to complete this study with darker ones, such as the book by Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests. The Shadow of Civilization (1992; a cultural and literary history of the “deforestation” of the Western imagination and usefully included by the author herself in the final list of recommended readings).

The basic structure of the book obeys two different logics. First of all, Nadkarni follows Abraham Maslow’s well-know schema of human needs (cf. his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” and expands it in a personal version that resembles –yes– a kind of Christmas tree with eight layers: physical needs, security, health, play and imagination, time and history, symbols and language, spirituality, and mindfulness. Each of the chapters (after an introductory chapter offering some very interesting basic information on the definition of trees and forests, with amazing insights on the study of canopy life) gives a global overview of what trees have to offer in all these respects – always with a very strong emphasis on the positive aspects of trees. In Nadkarni’s worldview, trees only give shelter; they never kill people when they fall upon them, so to speak. But in spite of these restrictions, one can only say that the story told is very convincing. The second major aspect of the book’s structure is it transcultural dimension: Nadkarni reconciles the viewpoints of many different people – peasants and city-dwellers, canopy scholars and Inuits who have never seen a tree in their life, artists and prison inmates – as well as she manages to seamlessly gather Western and non-Western or contemporary and less modern voices. This is a great achievement and the resulting homogenization cleverly underlines the very holistic approach of man and tree in the book.

Targeting a very broad audience, the author has nevertheless managed in presenting here an amazing wealth of scientific data on trees. Yet the presentation of these data is always extremely user-friendly and constantly highlighted by the use of a kind of material that is usually missing in scientific prose, even if it belongs to the subfield of scientific vulgarization: poetry. Nadkarni’s book is also a personal anthology of poetry on trees, and this is a refreshing decision.