As a shy kid who loved to play outdoors, Dr. Margaret (Meg) Lowman always considered herself to be a “capital NERD." “I just started loving trees; trees don’t bully you and don’t talk back,” Lowman says. “I was also told that girls could never become scientists in my generation, but I kept on pushing.” One day during her time at Williams College in Massachusetts, Lowman realized she wanted to study trees in the college forest. She later received a scholarship to study and research in Australia, where she earned her Ph.D. in Botany at Sydney University. Her time abroad led her to create the world’s first canopy walkway in 1985 in Queensland so people could safely explore life in the treetops, which is considered the eighth continent.
“Research over the last 40 years reveals that 50% of the land-based plants, insects and animals live in the treetops,” Lowman says. She created the TREE Foundation in 1999 as a non-profit dedicated to the acronym’s principles of tree research, education and exploration. Lowman says she wants to inspire the next generation of researchers and environmentalists—and for kids to feel excited when studying different species from the canopies. The first of these treetop walkways she created in North America was at the Myakka River State Park in Sarasota in 2000.
Recently celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Myakka walkway has collected about $30 million in revenue from general visitorship and attracted up to half a million people before the COVID-19 Pandemic. “We just fundraised and gave a renovation to the Myakka walkway,” Lowman says. All of the hardware was redone—if needed—and boards were stained. She says updates on signage around the walkway are currently underway. “Then it dawned on me: what about some of the poorer countries—Ethiopia, Madagascar—who can’t afford tree conservation?” Meg asked. “So we created a nonprofit to help fundraise to save the forests in places that don’t have enough income to give to tree conservation.”
Mission Green was launched from this dream in 2020 to help fund and build canopy walkways in the 10 most endangered forests in the world. Lowman’s mission is to conserve endangered forests that are home to rich biodiversity, and she also wants to provide indigenous communities with sustainable economic opportunities. Currently, Mission Green has funded five canopy walkways around the world: Amazonian Peru (1994), Florida’s Myakka River State Park (2000), The Habitat Pinang Hill in Malaysia (2017), Vermont Institute of Natural Science (2019) and Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka, California (2021).
“It’s a global issue—children’s health and welfare—and Mission Green was born out of the Myakka walkway with how ecotourism can give kids health and opportunities,” Lowman says. Plans for other canopy walkway locations include Madagascar, Brazil, India, Bhutan, New York’s Tanglewood Nature Preserve, North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains and Mozambique.
“We’re amazed that we’ve made a lot of progress, and now we’re going to do the next five,” Lowman says. “India is underway, and also the Great Smoky Mountains—one with the Cherokee Nation and one with the national parks.” Mission Green also helps provide books and backpacks to children who live in the Amazon, and the non-profit trains young girls in villages to be ecotourist guides. “My ultimate goal is to bring kids into nature using the walkway as an inspiration for other programs to get kids outdoors,” Lowman says. SRQ
