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Sidedoor (S10E16) – Dude, Where’s My Carbon?

Lizzie Peabody: Hey there, Sidedoorables. Today's episode is the second of three stories we 

reported from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. And for this one, well, I hope 

you're not afraid of heights. Let's go!

Lizzie: This is Sidedoor, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX. I'm Lizzie Peabody.

Sergio dos Santos: Ready?

Lizzie: Ready.

Sergio dos Santos: You ready?

Lizzie: I'm ready.

Sergio dos Santos: All right!

Lizzie: I'm actually not sure if I'm ready, because the trees in this tropical forest are very, very tall.

Lizzie: Hopefully these helmets will not be useful.

Sergio dos Santos: If you fall off the tower, no they're not very useful. Obviously. [laughs]

Lizzie: Sergio dos Santos is a project manager for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's 

hydro-meteorological and oceanographic monitoring program here in Panama. And he's about to lead 

me up one of the research towers he works on..

Sergio dos Santos: It's over 120 feet going up.

Lizzie: Uh-huh.

Sergio dos Santos: So it's—yeah, kind of a ways up.

Lizzie: I'm really glad my mom doesn't know I'm doing this. [laughs]
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Lizzie: The tower's about 10 stories high, and it's basically a four-sided ladder. It's about as wide as 

my shoulders. The rungs are as thin as pencils. We start the climb, and with every rung I step onto, I 

have to unclip one of the two giant hooks attaching me to the tower and move it up a rung. Right. Left. 

Right. Left.

Lizzie: It's slow going, but little by little I start to get into the groove. And then we come across 

something that looks like a cobweb full of little sesame seed-sized specks.

Lizzie: Oh, look! We have a little nest up here!

Lizzie: As soon as I touch it, the seeds burst into motion.

Lizzie: Oh my gosh! They came out, I think there's spiders!

Sergio dos Santos: So you just try to overcome them, okay?

Lizzie: Okay. Oh my God! [laughs]

Sergio dos Santos: It's fine! It's fine! They're fine!

Lizzie: Sergio, this is challenging me in more than one way.

Sergio dos Santos: Yeah?

Lizzie: Oh, yeah.

Sergio dos Santos: But you're good, right?

Lizzie: I'm good. I'm good.

Sergio dos Santos: If you're not good, let me know.

Lizzie: Okay.

Lizzie: If you're wondering why we're climbing through clouds of baby spiders as the ground recedes 

below us, I was asking myself the same question.

Lizzie: The spiders are a nice distraction from how high we are.
3

Lizzie: But from the top of the tower, we'll have a bird's eye view of the longest-studied forest in the 

entire world. For decades, researchers here on Barro Colorado Island have systematically monitored 

this forest as its trees have flourished and grown, died, and regrown.

Lizzie: You know the old saying: if a tree falls in the woods and there's nobody to hear it fall, does it 

actually make a sound?

Joshua Tewksbury: It's a really good question. Like, why do we care what happens to a forest?

Lizzie: This is Josh Tewksbury, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, also known as 

STRI.

Joshua Tewksbury: It turns out, even if you didn't hear the tree fall, that changed the amount of 

carbon in the forest. So we do care about where carbon is in the world, for example, because it is the 

driving force behind our climate.

Lizzie: Sergio and I aren't the only things getting higher around here. As we know, global 

temperatures are rising because humans are releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the 

atmosphere. And well, forests are working really hard to save our behinds, because they help suck 

that carbon back up.

Joshua Tewksbury: They are by far the largest storehouse of carbon on the land surface. And 

tropical forests in particular are far more effective at storing carbon than temperate forests in general.

Lizzie: Tropical forests are like a sponge, soaking up carbon and protecting us from the worst effects 

of climate change. But how much carbon can these forests keep absorbing? It turns out nobody 

actually knows. And the only way to find out is to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty—and 

also, apparently covered in spiders.

Lizzie: So this time on Sidedoor, we follow researchers up, down and sideways to figure out just how 

much carbon dioxide is stored in our tropical forests, the lungs of our planet, and how a better 

understanding of how that carbon is absorbed and released moment to moment could impact all of our 

lives in the years to come.

Lizzie: Whoa! Oh my gosh, this is incredible! [laughs] This is an amazing view, and it's tons of greens 

and blues and it feels like we're just below the clouds.

Lizzie: That's coming up after the break.

***
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Lizzie: Back on the ground, David Mitre and his team of tree guys are trudging through the forest with 

a ladder, spray paint, string and measuring tape. Their job is simple.

David Mitre: Take the measure of every tree.

Lizzie: Wait. Every single tree?

Lizzie: David is a research manager here at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, 

but it's a job he finds kind of hard to describe, even to friends and family. When they ask ...

David Mitre: "Hey, what are you doing to live?"

Lizzie: Uh-huh.

David Mitre: "Okay, we census trees."

Lizzie: People just blink at him.

David Mitre: "Seriously, what are you doing to live? Seriously, we do census trees!"

Lizzie: [laughs]

David Mitre: Sometimes the people don't understand the importance of things like this.

Lizzie: So what is the importance of this tree census? Why would anyone get paid to count trees? 

Well, these aren't just any trees. In 1980, scientists here on Barro Colorado Island mapped out a 50-

hectare plot—that's about a hundred football fields of forest. And they counted and measured every 

single tree on it, from the bendiest saplings the width of your pinky finger, to the most towering trees in 

the forest. Today, that adds up to ...

David Mitre: 200,085 stems or trees measured.

Lizzie: ... nearly a quarter million trees. David is part of a research team that continues that work, 

conducting a tree census every five years. I watch as David's assistant wraps a measuring tape 

around the trunk of a large tree. He calls out the measurement to a guy logging the data, checks the 

identification tag and sprays the trunk with spray paint to mark where he measured it.

Lizzie: This may seem simple, but it's hard work because trees don't all grow with straight trunks and 

bushy tops like cartoon broccolis—especially in the tropics!
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Sidedoor (S10E16) – Dude, Where’s My Carbon?

Lizzie: There are more than 300 different species of tree in this forest alone. Some have huge 

buttresses fanning out at the base like the flaring end of a rocket ship, meaning David's team has to 

use ladders or sometimes even a tree climber to get high enough up to measure the trunk's width.

David Mitre: Sometimes we have tree that have multiple stem.

Lizzie: Researcher-speak for tree trunk.

Lizzie: Oh!

David Mitre: Or palms tree, or trees that make colonies that have multiple stems.

Lizzie: Oh, yeah!

David Mitre: Yes. So you need to record each stem.

Lizzie: Oh my gosh!

David Mitre: And link it to the main stem.

Lizzie: All this information gets recorded. It's like a tree equivalent of marking your height in pencil on 

the door frame. You can look back and see how much you and your siblings grew in a given span of 

time—if you had over 200,000 siblings. And because that's a lot of door frames, David carries an iPad 

where he can log the data, and with the tap of a finger, pull up the 40-year health history of any given 

tree.

Lizzie: So you're not only measuring how large the trees are, but you're also making notes about 

whether they're leaning or they're upright, and how healthy the foliage is.

David Mitre: Yes.

Lizzie: And you've got all these different codes, so you can track the health of each individual tree in 

this 50 hectare plot?

David Mitre: Yes.
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Lizzie: Wow!

Lizzie: David can also see how many of these trees were around for the original census.

David Mitre: We saw who die. In what condition die?

Lizzie: And new growth.

David Mitre: We're taking new recruits.

Lizzie: I love how you call them 'new recruits.' It's like they're doing a job. It's almost like military.

David Mitre: Yeah, it's like new recruits!

Lizzie: Sentinels.

David Mitre: Yeah! Because they come to working for us!

Lizzie: Everything David is doing in Panama will probably come to impact decisions you make every 

day. How, you might ask? Well, picture this: you're booking a flight to Panama—hypothetically 

speaking. And when you're paying for your ticket, you get an option.

Lizzie: "Do I want to pay a fee to offset my travel emissions?"

Lizzie: I sometimes choose this option because it makes me feel better, but when I click that button, 

what does it actually mean? Well, it means I'm buying into something called the 'carbon offset market.'

Joshua Tewksbury: There are two types of carbon markets. There's a compliance market and a 

voluntary market. And it's important to understand the difference because a compliance market is what 

a government does.

Lizzie: STRI Director Josh Tewksbury again. He says the first kind of market, the compliance market, 

is about a government setting a cap on emissions, and then gradually lowering that cap. It's called a 

compliance market because companies have to comply with the government's requirements.

Lizzie: The other kind of market is the one you're more likely to interact with.
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Joshua Tewksbury: The other market is voluntary carbon markets. And this is when the private 

sector, notably companies all over the world, have set zero carbon emission goals.

Lizzie: A zero-carbon emission goal is exactly what it sounds like: when a company says, "We are not 

going to add anymore carbon to the atmosphere." But it's hard to imagine any company functioning 

without polluting even a little bit, unless, I don't know, maybe it's a bicycle messenger service? Or 

basket weaving? But even then, you have to ship the baskets in trucks or planes. Unless you're using 

the bicycle messenger service to deliver the baskets and you only sell locally. But then who made the 

bikes? And what are the messengers eating?

Lizzie: My point is, until fossil fuels are a thing of the past, almost any company is going to leave 

some carbon footprint. There's no way around it. So how do you become carbon neutral?

Joshua Tewksbury: Well, in most industries, being carbon neutral means reducing the carbon that 

you're responsible for putting into the air. And then, doing good works elsewhere to take carbon out of 

the atmosphere and put it in the ground.

Lizzie: For example, let's say your inspirational basket-weaving company, True BeWEAVErs, 

contributes 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year from shipping. So you pay to 

plant enough trees to suck up 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. Bam! You're offsetting your 

carbon emissions. Now you're carbon neutral, aka net zero.

Joshua Tewksbury: And it's net zero. Exactly. That's the principle, that I'm responsible for removing 

as much carbon from the atmosphere as I'm putting into the atmosphere, and therefore I'm good as a 

company. And the hard part about this is you have to be able to attribute an action—let's say, 

reforesting a forest in a land you've never visited, which is quite common—to an actual change in 

carbon being removed from the atmosphere and put in the ground.

Lizzie: The markets only work if you actually know how much carbon is absorbed or released by a 

given action, right? How many trees would need to be planted to offset the carbon burned by shipping 

my basket to Guam? Well, that depends on what kinds of trees we're talking about. Where are they 

planted? How long will they live before they're chopped down? These are things you can measure, but 

...

Joshua Tewksbury: The measurements we use today, they're just fundamentally not reliable. And 

you can't pay for that which you cannot measure.

Lizzie: And this is a big problem when the carbon market, like any market, depends on standardized 

measurements. Let's say you go to a supermarket to buy five pounds of potatoes.

Joshua Tewksbury: You just put your produce on the scale, you get a weight and you pay for it, 

right? You might go to a different supermarket because the price is lower, but not because the scales 

are better.
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Lizzie: You know that five pounds of potatoes will weigh the same at any store you go to because a 

pound is a pound is a pound wherever you go. Because we as a society agree on what a pound is, 

and we calibrate all our scales to reflect that.

Lizzie: But that's not how it currently works in carbon markets. It would be like going to a supermarket 

and holding up a bag of potatoes and the grocer saying "A potato is about a pound each. You've got 

five. Let's call it five pounds." But they're not differentiating between baby potatoes, or Russets or 

Yukon Gold. That's basically how carbon markets look at trees.

Joshua Tewksbury: There's a whole science behind calibrating those scales. It's called metrology. 

We need metrology for the planet.

Lizzie: Josh says without a common standard for measuring and then verifying if planting this tree 

equaled that much carbon absorption, the market will not work.

Joshua Tewksbury: Could you have a banking system if no one kept track of where the money was? 

Wouldn't work, right? That's the problem with forest carbons right now. We haven't kept track of where 

the carbon is. And so how can you start a market if no one knows where the carbon is? That requires 

science. We can't guess this.

Lizzie: So how do you measure just how much carbon is in a tree? Well, measuring them, like David 

is doing with the tree census, is a start. But not all potatoes—I mean trees—are created equal.

Helene Muller-Landau: If you look at a fresh wood of a tree, you can kind of break it down into three 

general categories.

Lizzie: This is Helene Muller-Landau.

Helene Muller-Landau: There's water in there, there's air in there, and then there's, like, the real 

wood, basically the hard wood stuff. And for the carbon, all we care about is that hard woody stuff.

Lizzie: Helene is a senior scientist at STRI, researching tropical forests and ecosystems. She says 

how much carbon a tree can hold depends on its wood density.*

Helene Muller-Landau: The density essentially of the tree varies a lot among tropical tree species. I 

mean, it varies among temperate tree species too—people talk about softwoods and hardwoods. But 

for tropical trees, it varies a lot more.

Lizzie: For example, on one end of the spectrum you could have balsa wood—the kind you use to 

make model airplanes. It's a super lightweight, low-density wood, and it's all over this forest.

Helene Muller-Landau: On the other extreme, there's these tropical, really, really hardwoods that
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Sidedoor (S10E16) – Dude, Where’s My Carbon?

literally the wood sinks in water, right?

Lizzie: Wow.

Helene Muller-Landau: You take a chunk of the wood or you have a tree, and you put it in water and 

it does not float.

Lizzie: It plunges.

Helene Muller-Landau: It sinks.

Lizzie: So when calculating how much carbon is in a tree ...

Helene Muller-Landau: You gotta know something about the density, because otherwise you still 

have a huge amount of uncertainty in how much woody—like, really woody mass is there, and how 

much carbon is there.

Lizzie: Helene has her ways of figuring out just how dense a particular tree is. As we're talking, we 

come across a tree that has recently fallen in the forest.

Helene Muller-Landau: Okay so the way we get the sample is we pull out a tool called an increment 

bore.

Lizzie: She drops her backpack on the ground and pulls out a thin metal instrument.

Helene Muller-Landau: So there's the handle, and then there's what's essentially a drill bit that's 

gonna go into the tree.

Lizzie: As I watch, Helene thunks it into the bark of this fallen tree and twists the little T-bar handle, 

drilling into the wood.

Helene Muller-Landau: And then we pull the extractor, and if everything has worked out as it has in 

this kind of case ...

Lizzie: Whoa!
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Helene Muller-Landau: ... we have a wood core here on the extractor.

Lizzie: She pulls out what looks like a twig, a little plug straight from the core of the tree, and sheathes 

it inside a 'highly sensitive' storage device.

Lizzie: [laughs]

Helene Muller-Landau: Which is plastic drinking straws.

Lizzie: Oh, great!

Helene Muller-Landau: Turned out to be ...

Lizzie: That is perfect!

Helene Muller-Landau: And that keeps it from, you know, falling apart or such as we transport it back 

to the lab.

Lizzie: Back at the lab, Helene will measure the volume of the sample, and then dry it in an oven to 

get rid of the water.

Helene Muller-Landau: And then we take the dry mass and divide it by the fresh volume to get a 

measure called 'wood-specific gravity.'

Lizzie: Basically, wood density. Pair that with David's measurements of the tree's size and you can 

get a pretty good estimate of the tree's carbon content. Now this is the traditional way of measuring 

forest carbon—and it's definitely tried and true. But there are a lot of trees, and only so many Davids 

and Helenes. So what do you do?

Lizzie: A little ways off in another part of the forest, Luisa Fernanda Gomez Correa unfolds a tripod, 

heaving a heavy cylindrical canister on top of it.

Luisa Fernanda Gomez Correa: So here when we connect the battery, the laser turns on.

Eline de Loore: It will make a sound maybe. [laughs]

Lizzie: Luisa and her research partner, Eline de Loore are using a remote-sensing laser scanner to 

create a 3D digital scan of the trees and vines in the forest.
11

Lizzie: Oh, it's spinning!

Lizzie: We have to move out of its way as the scanner swivels around, pulsing invisible beams of light 

that bounce off the trees like sonar uses sound or radar uses radio waves, to create a map.

Lizzie: Oh look, I can see the tree in there.

Lizzie: As the scanner gets information back, a grainy black-and-white image appears on its screen.

Lizzie: Wow, so it's creating a picture of the forest.

Luisa Fernanda Gomez Correa: But then when you see the data on the computer, we will see, like, 

tons of points.

Lizzie: Picture a pointillist painting, an image created from thousands of tiny dots. And then imagine 

that every dot is a data point. That is the level of detail we're talking about.

Luisa Fernanda Gomez Correa: So you have a 3D point cloud. So you can zoom in and you are, 

like, indeed in the forest. So you will see everything in a volumetric form.

Lizzie: Whoa! It's like virtual reality.

Eline de Loore: Yeah.

Luisa Fernanda Gomez Correa: Yeah, like virtual reality is made of 3D models.

Lizzie: Once you have a 3D model of the forest, you can do all kinds of stuff. With these data, 

scientists can identify the types of trees, their volume and associated density, and with that 

information, estimate the carbon content of the forest. So between hand-measuring trees, coring for 

wood density and ground-based laser scanning, we've got it all figured out! We can confidently say 

how much carbon is in this forest, right?

Lizzie: Well, sort of. Because—okay, don't be mad, but trees are constantly exchanging carbon with 

the atmosphere. Moment to moment, just like you are right now.

Joshua Tewksbury: When you breathe a bit of carbon into your lungs, it has probably been a part of 

a tree, you know, a part of an ant or a termite. It's been flowing as a part of a stream. That carbon 

molecule has been around for eons, and you're just the latest recipient of a little bit of carbon.

Lizzie: When we come back, we'll zoom out—and up—to find out how carbon moves in and out of the 
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forest. Don't go away!

***

Sergio dos Santos: It's clear skies! So we're no problem.

Lizzie: This tower is shaking a little bit.

Sergio dos Santos: I mean, we're on top of it. So it moves a bit. I mean ...

Lizzie: Remember where we started this episode, with me in my helmet and harness, clambering with 

Sergio dos Santos up a tower above the forest? Well, that was 17 minutes ago, and in real time, that's 

about how long I've been climbing. And since then, I've encountered a few more critters.

Sergio dos Santos: What is it?

Lizzie: An ant bit me. [laughs]

Sergio dos Santos: An ant?

Lizzie: Yeah, yeah!

Sergio dos Santos: Are you sure?

Lizzie: And right about now, I'm wishing I'd done some Pilates in preparation for this trip.

Lizzie: This is definitely a core workout and a hand workout. And an exercise in maintaining a singular 

focus on not looking down. Okay.

Lizzie: But at long last, we make it to the top of the tower, the entire forest splayed out below us. And 

in the distance, the Caribbean Sea.

Lizzie: Okay, so we are—we are up at the top of the tower.

Lizzie: But that's not the only thing we can see.

Lizzie: We are next to a bunch of boxes. They look like fishing tackle boxes that are strapped to this—

this narrow tower. And there's tons of cords coming down. And they're all different kinds of sensors.
13

Sidedoor (S10E16) – Dude, Where’s My Carbon?

Sergio dos Santos: You see the—you see the white instrument there?

Lizzie: Yeah.

Sergio dos Santos: Looks like a little dome?

Lizzie: Yeah.

Lizzie: Sergio points out a bunch of sensors mounted to the top of the tower.

Sergio dos Santos: So there's an emitter on top. And then there is—there is this 3D anemometer, 

which has three fingers on the bottom, three fingers on the top.

Lizzie: Uh-huh.

Sergio dos Santos: Right?

Lizzie: These sensors measure wind speed, direction, and concentration of gasses in the air—most 

notably carbon dioxide. See, to grow, trees take in carbon dioxide through little holes in their leaves 

called stomata.

Joshua Tewksbury: And when they open those holes in their leaves to pull the carbon in, it releases 

water. So it's a constant exchange between water and carbon in the atmosphere that trees are always 

balancing throughout the day and night.

Lizzie: At night, trees release carbon dioxide back into the air in a process called respiration, when 

they convert sugars to energy. And the instruments Sergio shows me measure how much carbon 

dioxide is going into the forest or coming out.

Joshua Tewksbury: That's right. They're measuring the balancing act in real time, and so we can see 

how carbon is moving at a micro level from low down to high up and above the canopy.

Lizzie: That's so cool!

Lizzie: And this is important to measure because while trees pull carbon out of the air to build their 
14

trunks and limbs and roots, they're only holding that carbon temporarily. When a tree dies—whether 

it's chopped down or struck by lightning or strangled by a vine—it re-releases its carbon back into the 

atmosphere as it decomposes.

Joshua Tewksbury: So a forest that's releasing carbon is a forest that's essentially dying in a very 

slow way. It'll be dropping limbs, it'll be having trees fall down. A forest that's gaining carbon is a forest 

that's growing. It is a place that absorbs carbon. It's like what you can pour water into and it'll hold that 

carbon. And so that's why we think of forests as large carbon sinks.

Lizzie: So measuring just how much carbon is in a tree or a forest becomes a game of trying to 

predict the future. Because as the Earth warms with climate change, forests are already changing too. 

And that's where all these measurements from STRI come in handy, because they're helping climate 

scientists come up with more accurate models to predict how forests could respond to climate change.

Helene Muller-Landau: There's still a lot of uncertainty in the predictions across models. They all 

agree that climate's gonna get warmer and natural disasters are gonna increase. There's some really 

common themes.

Lizzie: But Helene says when you look at the difference between the most conservative models that 

say it won't be so bad, and the most aggressive that say oh, it is way worse than we think ...

Helene Muller-Landau: It turns out that one of the very biggest pieces is what's going to happen with 

tropical forests.

Lizzie: It's a critical piece of the equation. On one hand, a warmer climate could cause forests to grow 

faster and suck up more carbon dioxide, slowing climate change. Or things could swing in the exact 

opposite direction: extreme storms could mean more trees are blown down or struck by lightning. 

More carbon will be released, compounding climate change. It could go either way.

Helene Muller-Landau: Growth rates are shifting, and tree mortality rates are shifting. And so to 

project into the future, we need to know how, you know, those sorts of pieces of the puzzle essentially 

are changing under climate change.

Lizzie: Now you might be thinking this is just one tropical forest on one island in the middle of the 

Panama Canal. But Smithsonian researchers are teaming up with scientists all over the globe to 

collect and compare data on the world's forests through the Smithsonian plot network, Forest GEO 

and the other networks taking part in the global network called GEO-TREES. Using the same 

methodology ...

Joshua Tewksbury: We're now measuring in the same way 78 different forests in 28 different 

countries all over the world. That represents something like seven million stems we're measuring now. 

It's by far the largest effort to understand forests in the world. And it's done in a standardized way 

which allows scientists from Malaysia and Madagascar to work with scientists from Suriname and 

Panama and the United States, and understand in general how forests change through time and what 
15

are the factors affecting their health.

Lizzie: Even with all this teamwork, it's not practical to measure every forest in the world. These 

research sites are just pinpricks dotting the globe. But with the data from these specific locations, we 

can zoom out—way out—and connect the dots from space.

Helene Muller-Landau: For the large-scale picture of forest biomass and carbon, an increasingly 

important set of tools is space-based laser and radar sensors.

Lizzie: Remote-sensing satellites can give us really detailed pictures of the world's forests from above.

Helene Muller-Landau: But we need good ground data in order to figure out what that signal tells us.

Lizzie: In other words, without measurements on the ground, satellite pictures are just that: pictures.

Joshua Tewksbury: We can provide that authoritative answer to how carbon is changing in all the 

world's forests by connecting the space-based community with the network of ground-based 

observations in a standardized format all over the world.

Lizzie: So that whether you're in space, Malaysia or Panama, you know how much carbon is in each 

kind of tree and how that adds up, whether it's acres of tropical jungle or the three dogwoods on your 

local traffic median.

Joshua Tewksbury: GEO-TREES is the effort to do that, to create one standardized reference for 

carbon in all the world's forests by combining technologies from simple tape measures around trees to 

satellites going over the planet.

Lizzie: Josh says this is metrology for the planet.

Joshua Tewksbury: And then that allows the market to function where it needs to function, which is 

on the actions that change carbon.

Lizzie: Pricing the apples and oranges.

Joshua Tewksbury: We want to price the apples and oranges, not price the reliability of the scales, 

right? And, like, we're just trying to get the market pushed in that direction.

Lizzie: All this hard work helps us better understand climate change, to quantify and track and reflect 

the changes already happening. But measurement is just a tool. To alter the trajectory of that change 

is about our behavior, as we humans fight for our own survival by thinking about our own carbon 

emissions. So I asked Josh ...
16

Lizzie: What can we as individuals do to kind of help move our climate in the right direction?

Joshua Tewksbury: There are some very easy ways to reduce your own carbon footprint, and 

oftentimes those are the less easy things to do, like not flying instead of flying, or like taking a train 

instead of driving. Solar is a better place to get your electricity than a coal-fired plant. And consumers 

increasingly have choices on what cars they buy and how much they drive and what their commutes 

look like. And our actions drive economies. So consumers have a lot of power to change carbon. It's 

not out of our control.

Lizzie: Oh my gosh! I cannot believe I get to be up here. This is the best job ever—except for the 

spiders.

Sergio dos Santos: I'm glad you enjoyed it.

Lizzie: Yes, I'm loving this! Thank you so much for bringing me.

Sergio dos Santos: You're welcome.

Lizzie: You've been listening to Sidedoor, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX. 

This is the second episode from our Sidedoor road trip around Panama. Stay tuned for number three 

in just two weeks—it's sure to leave you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Lizzie: The Smithsonian is grateful to the Bezos Earth Fund for their support of GEO-TREES. To learn 

more about the Smithsonian ForestGEO plot networks and the work of GEO-TREES, check out our 

newsletter. You can subscribe at SI.edu/Sidedoor.

Lizzie: You can also find some behind-the-scenes photos of me with Sergio on the tower—and me 

getting stuck inside my own shirt when I tried to take it off over my helmet.

Sergio dos Santos: [laughs] I'm sorry. I shouldn't laugh. No, wait wait wait wait wait. Take it easy. 

Take it easy.

Lizzie: Like this?

Sergio dos Santos: Take it easy. Wait wait wait!

Lizzie: Look for it on our Instagram @sidedoorpod.

Lizzie: For help with this episode, we want to thank Joshua Tewksbury, Stuard Davies, Helene Muller-
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Sidedoor (S10E16) – Dude, Where’s My Carbon?

Landau, Sergio dos Santos, David Mitre and his team of tree technicians, Eline de Loore, Louisa 

Fernanda Gomez Correa, and Vincente Vasquez. Thanks to everyone at the Smithsonian's Tropical 

Research Institute, including Beth King, Linette Dutari and Olivia Milloway.

Lizzie: Our podcast is produced by James Morrison and me, Lizzie Peabody. Our associate producer 

is Nathalie Boyd. Executive producer is Ann Conanan. Our editorial team is Jess Sadeq and Sharon 

Bryant. Tami O'Neill writes our newsletter. Episode artwork is by Dave Leonard. Extra support comes 

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Cylinder.

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Lizzie: I'm your host, Lizzie Peabody. Thanks for listening.

Eline: I had like twenty ticks only on my hands but also on the clothes we wear in the field we never 

wear the clothes the next day because otherwise we will be extra full of ticks and chiggers, so. 

Lizzie: Oh! I’ve been wearing these pants for three days straight. 

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