In France, if you get accepted into grad school, they automatically save your spot which led me to accidentally be enrolled in two programs at once. Besides the Natural History Museum's BEE SEB TTSE program, I also was a student at Paris 8 in TREES: Transitions écologiques, économiques et sociales. For a myriad of bureaucratic reasons, I was never able to formally enroll at Paris 8 but really enjoyed joining for the first few months of courses at this amazing school that was started after the May 68 protests both to cater to student's demands for greater freedom but also to get them out of the center of Paris (whose narrow streets are easily barricaded.)

Trees is usually what people thing of in the "western world" when you talk about ecology.

A lot of my classmates use Ecosia as their main search engine (works on phones too) that puts a big part of their profits from ad revenue towards planting trees. Planting trees alone won't fix everything, especially when they go up in flames in increasingly frequent and devastating fires. And trees are one of frequently used "units" of climate measures that range from the very concrete to the totally greenwashed. Cooking Sections project Offsetted and accompanying book goes deep into the limits of assigning dollar values to the "ecosystem services" a tree can provide:

"A London plane tree at 728 Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn reduces USD 13.55 of carbon dioxide annually. In Manhattan, a thornless honey locust at 320 East 42nd Street conserves USD 194.14 of energy. An ailanthus at 95 Astoria Boulevard in Queens intercepts USD 46.16 worth of storm water. In total, 678,183 street trees in New York City currently provide USD 109,625,536.06 in “environmental services” to the city every year. These services correlate to a tree’s biological functions, which are calculated in dollars—a mitigation scheme that positions trees as instruments to offset man-made ecological degradation. Rather than address the actual source of emissions, wastewater, or energy over-expenditure, the quantification of the performance of trees into tradable assets implicitly accepts the continuous production of waste and pollutants."

We've also used trees for all kinds of other things like timber, firewood, paper but also to make baskets, like in this beautiful short film from Wapikoni Mobile, a "travelling mediation, training and audiovisual creation studio dedicated to Indigenous youth" called My Father's Tools about basked maker Stephen Jerome from the Mi’gmaq First Nation community in Gesgapegiag.

Beyond the myriad uses for wood, we also tap sap for rubber, a mesmerizing process that fueled the cruelest conditions in European nation's colonized lands in Congo and the Amazon. In 1839, Charles Goodyear (of Goodyear Tires) figured out "vulcanization" — a process that allows rubber to withstand heat and cold when mixed with sulfur (people in Mesoamerican cultures had already figured this out of course, making rubber shoes and balls and elastic bands.) And a century later, General Motors and lots of other gas & automobile industry players including Firestone Tires allegedly conspired to dismantle streetcar & tram networks across major cities in the USA to um... sell more gas & tires?

Another sap you can tap from trees is maple syrup, which the most wonderful person Nick Woodin taught us how to do. Nick is coincidentally one of the people who got me on my path to ecology studies with his book A Natural History of the Present. To tap maple syrup, you need to wait till that time of the year when it's freezing at night and above freezing during the day, then drill a small hole in the tree and set up a filter and a bucket to catch the sap. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes beautifully about sugaring season in Braiding Sweetgrass, the sap comes out watery and then you can let it sit overnight - the sugars are heavier so you can lift off the watery-ice, then boil down the rest. It takes ages. It's delicious. And precious. Just ask anyone involved in the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist ! The maple line is moving further north as the climate warms, and you can read all about it the maple scientists's fantastically-named study by Rapp et al "Sugar maple responses to climate change: We’ll boil it down for you" and on the ACERnet "an international consortium dedicated to advancing understanding of maple (genus Acer) ecology and its management in the face of climate change. Our research team is monitoring sap flow at sites across sugar maples’ range, from Virginia to Quebec, to understand how climate effects sap flow, sugar content, and chemical composition, which together influence the quality and quantity of maple syrup produced."

Maybe the favorite thing I've learned about trees recently is about how little we've known about treetops and what happens way up there. Andrew Nadkarni made a magnificent short film, "Between Earth & Sky" about his awesome aunt Nalini, an ecologist who invented a way to climb to the very top of the rainforest by shooting a grappling hook from a bow and arrow.

We humans make so much trash, which is what we call the things we don't want and that we assume disappear once we put it in a can.

Our trash is treasure to crows, and probably, most famously, pigeons.

Here's a short and a long documentary about kinds of creatures who eats up our scraps:

Nuissance Bear
Rat Film

sTo Len was a Public Artist In Residence in the department of sanitation in NYC for two years, as was Rania Ho at Recology in SF and Anne Ishii at RAIR in Philly. I love these portals into waste management systems (which you can also visit on your own sometime, many give tours! Paris even has a Musée des Egouts, a sewers museum ;)

And then there's near-eternal nuclear waste... and three projects (two feature documentaries and a website) about the lasting impact on the people, landscapes, and geopolitics of burying this waste.

• Demon Mineral
• This Much We know
• Resource Entanglements

We're not great at thinking from the point of view of other humans, let alone non-humans, like animals or plants. I've gone deep down this rabbithole for my final school paper, and along the way, I've been saving artworks that attempt this shift in points of views.

Oftentimes, the use of a non-human point of view is to criticize humans, and what we've done to the environment as well as the terrible ways we behave amongst humans (ie genocide, colonialism).

In the video piece called Quinquina Diaspora by Samir Laghouati-Rashwan, two plants start by their conversation by asking:
"tu sais pourquoi tout le monde s'interesse à nous en ce moment?"
"je sais pas trop"

These plants are shrubs originally from the Andes mountains whose bark fulled empire - it can be ground into a powder that treats malaria since it's high in quinine, which kept European colonists alive when invading West Africa. The plants in the artwork complain about their scientific names not suiting them (Jesuit missionaries in Peru were taught to use the bark for healing by the people already there, the Quechua people, but instead of naming it for the person who shared the wisdom, or the name of the place, or what the plant looked like, Carl Linnaeus named the plant after the wife of the count the Jesuits cured who supposedly brought the bark back to Europe... but that's not true and even though a medical historian named A.G. Haggis debunked the whole story in 1941, the tale lives on). The plants speak of the artists's friend's grandfather, a Bamiléké farmer and parlementarian who grew the plants in the volcanic lands of Western Cameroon, and the way French army "took advantage of local conflicts to serve their own interests", causing the deaths of 300 000 to 400 000 Bamiléké in the 1960 during the many struggles for independence.

The rush to grow these plants to monopolize malaria treatment fueled colonial destruction on multiple continents: Peru eventually tried to block the export of the plants, but the Dutch managed to set up monocultures in colonized Indonesia. The USA tried to set up plantations in Costa Rica during the WWII. Securing quinine supply was essential when it was the only source of anti-malarial medicine, but now that there's artemisinins, the chemical compound first noted by Tu Youyou who turned to Chinese traditional medicine to find that something in sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) also cured malaria. She figured it out in 1970s and got a prize for it decades later.

The quinine pills that are now not as needed have been widely used off label as abortifacients in China, and mostly now you'll find quinine in tonic water (of gin and tonic fame). Fun fact: quinine glows under ultraviolet light.

One of the biggest impact that can be done on an individual household level is switching energy sources and opting in to renewable energy. Installing solar panels is getting cheaper by the year and quickly pays for itself, on top of being subsidized through government plans in a lot of places. In Philadelphia, thanks to Solarize Philly, you can fill out a form and have a full system installed in less than three months.

It's possible thanks to Inflation Reduction Act, and according to WHYY last summer, "Just under 3% of taxpayers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania claimed the credits." WHYY News Climate Desk "The Philly region is claiming millions in home energy tax credits. Here’s how taxpayers saved"

That means there's 97% of taxpayers who could be benefiting from this but aren't, and there's a chance these incentives won't survive without political support. So if you or anyone you know has a house or building to repair or update, now would be a good time.

It's also something that can be proposed on a city-scale combined with plants for pollinators, like Richmond, VA's plans for a solar meadow. Minnesota was the "first state to incentivize pollinator-friendly ground cover on its solar energy sites" working with the Monarch Joint Venture project to monitor sites.

And more on this later, but pollinators aren't just bees! Bats, moths, flies, and lots of other creatures plus the wind all help plants reproduce, and one of my favorite participatory science programs housed at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris is VigiNature's Spipoll - Suivi photographique des insectes pollinisateurs, where your task is to look at a single flower for 20 minutes and take a picture of every pollinator that swings by. It's fun and they publish collections of the day on their instagram. The coolest bee I've seen now that I'm looking out for them is the Xyclopa violacea (the violet carpenter bee)

Welp, so much for typing up my notes from school as I went along... Maybe it's better to think of sharing notes an ongoing process, not as a "project"? so here are my thoughts from what stuck with me from both school and life outside of & beyond, egg on branch style.