Staying with the Trouble (with Lichens)

Book Review of The Lichen Museum by A Laurie Palmer ((University of Minnesota Press 2023).

There are many books on lichens – field guides, lichen biology texts – but if there was one book that I’d recommend to Dark Mountain readers about lichens, it would be artist A. Laurie Palmer’s The Lichen Museum. In a compact, easy-to-read, 132 page text, Palmer goes beyond the usual excitement about lichens, and integrates lichen ecology, biology, with social theory to elevate lichens to the level of a mascot for these times of collapse.

When I started digging deeper into my life-long, but until that point, unexamined interest in lichens, I recognised how their startling habits of living and becoming resonated with my own hopes and desires for another world and a different future… [lichens] seemed to present a set of qualities and modes of relating from which to model alternative pathways and practices, as a counter to racial capitalisms’ ruinous course.

However, defining lichens as a mascot for our times belies their potent power – they are more than symbols. Perhaps it would be better to describe lichens as templates for inquiry, akin to how myths can reframe our perception and thus our orientation to life’s challenges. Although myths can often be problematic, so rewoven by dominator culture that it can be hard to separate the seeds from the microplastics, the same goes for scientific narratives.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Sophie Strand and Charlotte Du Cann, are all writers reclaiming myths from their patriarchal revisions, and something similar is happening within the sciences. Narratives that once reinforced the foundations for anthropocentric exploitation are currently being questioned and upended by other narratives that point a way forward to more collectivist, dynamic, and equitable futures.

Perhaps it would be better to describe lichens as templates for inquiry, akin to how myths can reframe our perception and thus our orientation to life’s challenges.

If you open any text on lichens, the first sentence will usually explain that lichens are symbiotic organisms – a symbiosis between a fungus (called mycobiont) and an algae or cyanobacteria (called photobiont). In the lichen symbiosis, the photobiont does the photosynthesising, alchemising light and air into carbon molecules, while the mycobioint weaves those carbon molecules into intricate structures that elevate, protect, and exclaim the photobiont. Together they thrive in extreme environments where other forms of life are typically diminished (the desert, the Antarctic, the tops of boulders along stormy shorelines). Together they readily enter a state of dormancy which lend them resilience, hardiness and indestructibility in the face of intense conditions (including the intense radiation, subfreezing temperatures, and vacuum pressures of outer space).

Together they do what neither biont can do alone. Together, Palmer explains, lichens co-create radical lifeways: ‘collective identity, mutual aid, decentralization, interdependence, humility and resistance to being used, as well as slowness, porosity, adaptability, wild diversity of form, and intimate relations with their environment.’

But despite Palmers loving gaze at lichens, she’s not afraid to tackle one of the elephants in the lichenological room: the story about Simon Schwendener, the person who first proposed the dual hypothesis that lichens were made up of two different organisms during an eclipse season in 1869.

In most lichen texts, the story is presented as the typical hero narrative: Schwendener was laughed out of the room, ridiculed by the mainstream scientific community — A composite organism? There are only individual organisms, this is blasphemy! But gradually subsequent generations confirmed his findings: an individual can be a multiplicity of individuals, together creating something that is more than the sum of their parts. From these debates, the term symbiosis was created to describe lichens and subsequently other realms of life as well, opening up our frameworks of understanding the natural world as place where cooperation is more important than competition.

The term symbiosis was created to describe lichens … opening up our frameworks of understanding the natural world as place where cooperation is more important than competition.

But the genesis of the lichen symbiosis concept is more dimensional than this utopian hero narrative, and Palmer doesn’t hesitate to share her dismay that Schwendener, and most of the researchers that followed him, saw lichens as parasitic symbioses (by definition, symbioses fall within a spectrum between mutualism and parasitism). In Schwendener’s version of the lichen symbioses, colonialism and all its parasitism was propped up as a natural good “…these growths are not simple plants… they are more like colonies composed of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Of them however, only one is in control… this master is a fungus… a parasite… its slaves are green Algae…but whilst [other predators kill their prey] the Fungus stimulates the Algae… to more lively activity, in fact causes them to grow larger and causes thereby a luxuriant growth and the thrifty appearance of the whole colony.”

During the post-war anti-colonialist liberation movements, the lichen symbiosis framework evolved to see the fungus as oppressor, and algae as oppressed. As Vernon Ahmadjian wrote in his 1993 book The Lichen Symbiosis, “The mutualistic myth of lichens hinders our better understanding of these symbioses. To call a lichen association mutualistic is similar to believing that domestic cattle and humans have a comparable relationship because we provide them with food and shelter and increase their populations before we slaughter them.”

The popular shift in understanding lichens as systems didn’t happen until the mid 2000s, as essays by lichenologist Trevor Goward (which Palmer oddly does not reference) framed the lichen symbiosis as a mutualistic emergent property. The current scientific trend towards systems thinking is largely due to researchers challenging axiomatic beliefs within their research design – akin to how as a culture, we are challenging axiomatic beliefs whose firmaments are thousands of years old: are hierarchical modes of power the best way of steering a ship, as Plato’s Republic argues? If we look at lichens, we see a blueprint for collective co-creation that Plato either didn’t know about, or was deeply threatened by. That’s the power of the more than human world — it holds templates for other ways of being on earth, other ways of being human.

Weaving together lichen biology, eco-Marxism, and a subversive wealth of work by philosophers, physicists and critical social theorists, Palmer explores lichens as blueprints for thriving collective futures. The Lichen Museum, as Palmer defines it, ‘is a frame within which to witness and conjure how collectivity, interdependence, and reciprocity might work as fundamental values and practices, in place of competitive individualism and exploitation.’

We need more blueprints for how to be alive, collectively and individually, in the world, on this planet, with each other. Lichens offer that blueprint,

Personally, as a lichenologist, I found Palmer’s book refreshing and compelling. Non-academic texts on lichens are typically a rehashing of mainstream research narratives that are in the process of being deconstructed (e.g. the narrative that lichens are creators of soil is currently being dismantled). One of the few non-naturalist oriented books of lichens, Vincent Zonca’s book Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance (Polity Press 2022), is similarly disappointing, though for other reasons: although Zonca treads similar domains as Palmer and explores lichens through the lens of philosophy and art, Zonca’s book is wandering and difficult to read, a text that deserved more incubation time to fully accomplish a coherent message. But Palmer’s message is cohesive – the Lichen Museum is not a dilettante exploration of the beauty and wonder of lichens (though awe, beauty and wonder are its backbone), The Lichen Museum is a revolutionary envisioning. It’s an inspiring example of how artists can step out of the interpretive role that science usually places upon them, and engage directly in steering broader conversations about the trajectories of science, philosophy, and social change.

Lichens are not products of our imagination… but it takes imagination to learn from them, as well as the desire for a different world. Straddling that space – between the world and our expectations for it – is the process and territory of art making. It is a space composed with a concatenation of voices and consisting of a vibrant materiality – creative, dynamic, and unfixed.

We need more blueprints for how to be alive, collectively and individually, in the world, on this planet, with each other. Lichens offer that blueprint, but it takes artists who can lean into transdisciplinarity and link the social and philosophical dimensions with lichenological findings in ways that most scientific researchers are academically excluded from exploring. Laurie Palmer is one of those voices, and the Lichen Museum is one of those vehicles for stimulating biomorphic social change. If there’s one book on lichens that I’d recommend Dark Mountaineers to read alongside a field guide to your local lichen flora, it’s The Lichen Museum.