Imagine quitting your job, your apartment, and your Wi-Fi router, then moving into a tree for over a year. That is pretty much what Miranda Gibson did. In her own words, written soon after she climbed down, letting go of her climbing rope felt like one of the hardest steps of the whole ordeal, according to Miranda Gibson's first-person account for CNN. She was not doing this for fun. She was trying to save a forest, and she helped make that happen.
A treehouse with a Wi-Fi signal
On December 14, 2011, Gibson, then a schoolteacher, climbed a 60-metre-tall (about 200-foot) old-growth eucalyptus tree in southern Tasmania, an island state of Australia. She named it the Observer Tree. Her plan was simple but extreme: stay up there until the surrounding forest was protected. She lived on a small suspended platform, used a composting toilet, and ran a solar-powered computer that kept her connected to the outside world. She blogged and joined school groups and conferences by video link, all without leaving the canopy.
Gibson stayed through freezing winter storms and blistering summer heat. Within about seven months, she broke Australia's previous tree-sitting record of 208 days, set by Manfred Stephens near Cairns in 1995. American readers may recognize the bigger picture: the world record still belongs to Julia Butterfly Hill, the Californian who lived in a redwood named Luna for 738 days between December 1997 and December 1999 to save it from logging. That same SBS report notes Hill reached out to Gibson personally to offer support.
