Renowned forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni’s favorite tree is a strangler fig named Figuerola in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Nestled within the lush rainforest ecosystem, Figuerola is over 200 feet tall and has wide branches that stretch horizontally as far as the eye can see.

“Each time I go up, it’s this sense of newness, of seeing the world in a different way,” Nadkarni remarks. Nicknamed “the Queen of the Forest Canopy,” Nadkarni pioneered an innovative climbing technique using a “master caster”—her own invention, essentially a metal rod with a slingshot attached to one side and a fishing reel on the other. With this tool, Nadkarni has climbed hundreds of trees across the United States, Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea and has published research in more than 120 articles. She inspired the Treetop Barbie, presented at several TED talks, and was even featured in a Playboy magazine series highlighting the work of professors.

Now, she’s the focus of an Academy Award–shortlisted documentary film, Between Earth & Sky. Directed and produced by her nephew, Andrew Nadkarni, the film profiles the elder Nadkarni returning to her roots, literally and figuratively. Gently holding a picture of a younger self, she says in the film, “I wish she knew that people loved her. Because I think she didn’t know that.”

As a daughter of Indian and Russian parents, growing up in a Hindu-Jewish household, Nadkarni was taught to be quiet, listen to her elders, and keep secrets. She navigated a difficult childhood and always felt like she had to accomplish more in order to be recognized or loved. “There are these deep disturbances that happen to people throughout their lives, starting maybe when they’re eight years old. The trees were there as my witness.”

She turned to climbing maple trees as a child after school to escape. Sometimes she’d bring a book. Other times she’d create imaginary worlds, pretending the treetop was a refuge for wounded birds. “They were dependable. You could trust them. They didn’t have any harsh words to say, and they didn’t have any expectations.” 

As she grew older, this early refuge became a deep source of wonder and knowledge. In the 1980s, when she was a young ecologist, she was told to focus on the forest floor, but she felt called to the canopy. In the rainforest of Olympic National Park in Washington, she peeled away mats of moss and underlying canopy soils to find a network of canopy root systems. Sitting high above the ground, Nadkarni discovered that in the forest canopy, epiphytes such as orchids and ferns were trapping organic-rich material and developing aerial roots, allowing trees to access nourishment outside of the nutrient-poor soil. These root systems help trees retain nourishment and water from the very mosses and soil that they themselves support. In a For the Wild podcast episode with host Ayana Young, Nadkarni says, “Sometimes when I arrive to the top of the tree and if you were sitting next to me, I might have a conversation more about spirituality than about biology … getting and living and thinking about the tree canopy is really all about connections, which is something I think that all of us feel when we walk beneath the crowns of redwood forest or a lowland tropical forest, or any sort of forest.”

Especially in an era of overlapping social and climate crises, Between Earth & Sky offers a timely reminder of the healing, reciprocal relationship we humans have with nature and the resilience of our ecosystems and humanity. In a PBS interview, director Andrew reiterates this sentiment from his experience on set: “Nalini’s energetic love for trees is infectious.… Spending time with her has made me more attuned, for example, to how a tree’s body language shows the scars of injuries weathered in its life.”

Nadkarni herself carries one such injury. In a visceral montage of abundant forest intercut with X-rays and archival footage, she falls 50 feet to the forest floor while on a routine climb with her graduate students in Olympia, Washington. She cracked five vertebrae, broke nine ribs, lacerated her lung, injured her pelvis in several areas, and broke her fibula. 

Nalini Nadkarni sits in a tree canopy overlooking her research area. | Photo by Andrew Nadkarni

“I hadn’t really stopped the way this fall made me stop,” she recounts in a voiceover. “To be forced to confront, maybe for the first time in my life, ‘Well Nalini, who are you?’”

She spent two months in the hospital recovering. “I found it interesting to consider how her relationship to trees changes over time,” director Nadkarni told PBS. “Trees were safety and refuge to her as a child, a place of exploration and achievement as she climbed high in her career, and a source of danger when she fell. That fall, however, allowed for a new sort of relationship, integrating all that came before into something new.”

How do you heal while holding histories and experiences of loss and trauma? For Nadkarni, she looked to the trees. “As soon as I fell, I was barraged with expressions of horror, pity, and sympathy for being in my critically injured state,” she stated in an article for the University of Utah. Disturbances—personal injury, forest fires, traffic jams, catastrophic flooding, uprooting of refugees—are often viewed as negative and destructive. Yet, even using the example of fire as something that is needed in nature, Nadkarni wrote, “Fire-adapted tree species require fire to open their ‘serotinous’ cones, which allow them to grow rapidly, using the high-light levels and the flush of nutrients that become available immediately after a fire.”

These disturbances, personal and ecological, present us with an opportunity to sit with difficult reflections while finding new versions of ourselves and our world through this exploration. “It is actually very rare for any system, after a disturbance, to revert to its former state,” Nadkarni says in the film. “It doesn't happen in nature. It doesn’t happen in human lives.”

Toward the end of the film, we see Nadkarni return to her favorite strangler fig, Figuerola, in Costa Rica for a research trip. Looking down at the camera through layers of leaves and epiphytes, she shares, “I feel like I'm back home again. I thought I’d be a lot more scared, but I’m not. Maybe because it’s Figuerola.”

Between Earth & Sky screened globally at Big Sky Doc Fest, DC Environmental Film Fest, DOC NYC, Sheffield DocFest, Hot Docs, and other festivals. It premiered in season 6 of the critically acclaimed PBS series POV Shorts and is available to watch online here.