The Ecologist and the Prisoners

Wonking Class Hero The Ecologist and the Prisoners Professor Nalini Nadkarni enlists a Washington state prison in sustainability research that has turned the prison green — and may help convicts turn their lives around. BY VALERIE BROWN HE CEDAR Creek Cor- innovative forest ecologist from nearby ing lines with a crossbow. He taught rections Center is Evergreen State College, they’re also her to climb. in the woods — the involved in environmental research and “It was the last biotic frontier,” Capitol Forest, to be development projects that could chart Nadkarni says. “People hadn’t climbed exact, about half an the way for sustainable operations at up there. It just seemed like what was Thour southwest of Olympia, Wash. The other large institutions. going on in the forest was going on up minimum-security facility is near the there.” But when she returned to school ghost town of Bordeaux, where a uto- SLIGHT , ENERGETIC woman, and proposed to study the forest can- pian settlement was founded in 1880. Nalini Nadkarni was a tomboy opy, her graduate committee balked. Most of its enthusiasts departed after A as a kid. “I was a tree climb- At the time, canopy exploration was the first winter. It’s no wonder; here on er,” she says. She spent a lot of time considered “just Tarzan and Jane stuff, the fringe of the Olympic Peninsula, in the eight maple trees that lined her getting up there and swinging around,” rainfall totals 30 to 40 inches a year, family’s driveway in Bethesda, Md. “It she recalls. But she was persistent, and and the peninsula itself soaks up as was my own world,” she says. “I really eventually the committee acquiesced. much as 180 inches annually. If you loved it.” Her father, a pharmacology don’t like rain, you’ll go nuts here. researcher with the National Institute T THE University of Washing- On a foggy November day, the of Environmental Health Sciences, ton, Nadkarni did her first re- Bordeaux woods ooze primeval mys- was a native of Mumbai, India; her A search in the nearby Olympic tery. At each turning, trees seem to mother, of Jewish heritage, grew up in rain forest, awestruck at the incred- crowd closer, until the road leading Brooklyn, N.Y., and taught English as ible jumble of plant life in the forest to the prison becomes a narrow strip a second language. canopy. That jumble consists mostly identifiable as two-way only by the Nadkarni has always seen life from of epiphytes — plants that live on, but dotted line down its center. The facil- several angles simultaneously. As an un- don’t derive their nutrients from, other ity appears as a collection of two-story dergraduate at Brown University, she plants. It’s a group that includes or- white wooden buildings inside a high discovered ecology but was also power- chids and bromeliads. chain-link fence topped with coiled ra- fully drawn to modern dance. After she Most of the epiphytes she encoun- zor wire. Also inside the fence are two worked as a field assistant in Papua, New tered were mosses. “Moss has been greenhouses, several garden plots and a Guinea, for a year and then danced with one of the most overlooked compo- big pile of compost. A totem pole spikes a studio in Paris for six months, practi- nents of ecosystems,” Nadkarni says. into the gray sky, flanked by two gno- cality won out; a profession in science “People laugh about moss. I know meish guardian figures. Deer graze near would last longer than a dance career. that, because I give talks about moss, the fence. A clump of men is gathered As a graduate student in forest ecol- and I get laughed at.” Truly, moss on the patio of one building around an ogy at the University of Washington, she doesn’t get much respect; it’s often array of weight-lifting equipment. The spent eight weeks in the Monteverde considered a nuisance to be eradicat- place feels remote, quiet, calm. It could cloud forest in Costa Rica. There she ed from lawns or a decorative element be a Zen retreat, a place of contempla- met Don Perry (known as the “Jacques for flower arrangements. tion, and in a sense, it is. Cousteau of the rain forest”), who trav- The participants here may have tat- eled high in the trees using mountain- Nalini Nadkarni in the Bordeaux woods toos and rap sheets, but thanks to an climbing techniques, setting his climb- of Washington. 12 MILLER-McCUNE / MARCH-APRIL 2009 PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL HANSON Wonking Class Hero Mosses have long been known for their ability to hold massive amounts of water. They also serve as a sort of natural battery, storing nutrients acquired directly from precipitation. When they die and decompose, the nutrients are released to other life forms, both in the canopy and on the forest floor. But moss has hidden virtues. Among Since then, the world of tree-can- needed assistants, preferably with “new the first photosynthesizers to colonize opy research has expanded, propelled fresh minds (and who) aren’t bota- the land, mosses have been around for in part by Nadkarni’s perseverance. nists or biologists,” she says. “So then about 450 million years. They are in- She joined the faculty at Evergreen I thought, prisons! They’ve got time, termediate organisms between simple State College in Olympia in 1991 and they’ve got space — and you don’t need algae and vascular plants, which have co-founded the International Canopy sharp tools to work with moss, because an internal circulatory system. Mosses Network in 1994. She’s also served you can just pull it apart.” lack vascular structure and roots, de- as president of the Association for Nadkarni pitched her idea to two riving their nutrients almost entirely Tropical Biology. Canopy research, she prisons that, she recalls, were “not from minerals dissolved in fog and explains, is not a separate discipline ready for it.” But when she approached raindrops. Some of them can become from forest ecology. But now, she says, Cedar Creek in 2004, she says, “The desiccated but, with a good watering, there’s a recognition that “if you’re a superintendent was very open-minded. spring back to life a century later. forest ecologist, you’d better pay atten- I said, ‘I want to work on this project, Mosses have long been known for tion to the canopy, because there’s so which is really about ecological sus- their ability to hold massive amounts much going on there.” tainability, and I want to use your men of water. They also serve as a sort of to be partners with me in this.’ natural battery, Nadkarni says, stor- S SHE pursued her treetop ob- “And he said, ‘You know, that ing nutrients acquired directly from session, Nadkarni came to re- sounds kind of interesting. What do precipitation. When they die and de- A alize that something was amiss you need?’” compose, the nutrients are released in the world of moss. She encountered to other life forms, both in the canopy trees whose trunks and lower branches HE CEDAR Creek Correctional and on the forest floor. had been scraped clean; she learned Center was already going Studying bigleaf maples as a gradu- that most of the lost moss went to Tgreen, partly out of necessity. ate student, Nadkarni noticed layers of the horticulture industry, which uses The state of Washington had seen an soil and decomposing vegetable mat- it to pack flower bulbs for shipment, explosion in its inmate population, and ter running along tree branches under among other things. It’s a $265 mil- Cedar Creek needed to expand its ca- the mosses growing there. Below that, lion business, and 95 percent of the pacity by 100 beds. But there was an she found something you’d never ex- moss used in horticulture comes from environmental impediment. “I was pect to find in a tree canopy — roots. the Pacific Northwest. told we couldn’t (expand) because we When she followed the roots back to In fact, moss has been classified as didn’t have enough water rights,” says their origins, she discovered that they a “non-timber forest product” suitable Dan Pacholke, the superintendent of were maple roots. The trees were send- for sustainable harvesting in public Cedar Creek approached by Nadkarni. ing them out to take nutrients from the forests. But much of it is taken without Pacholke, a corrections lifer who epiphytes and the soil mats piled on the required permits. Nadkarni was worked his way up from high-security their own branches. uneasy: Sustainability means the re- prison guard to his current position as In November 1981, her study com- source can’t be depleted faster than it’s a deputy director of the Washington paring canopy root systems in temper- replaced, and moss grows very slowly. Department of Corrections, says the ate and tropical tree species made the It would take 20 to 40 years for the amount of organic waste generated cover of Science magazine. “Suddenly mosses to grow back to their former by Cedar Creek was adversely affect- people began saying maybe there are glory, Nadkarni says. ing groundwater, and the state would some questions up there that it’s worth But could moss be farmed? She knew not permit an increase in waste with- taking a look at,” she says. “It was like she was too busy to do all the work it out a $1.4 million expansion of the this ‘click’ moment.” would take to answer that question.

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