#giftsfromplants IV
“Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious”
Gifts from Plants IIII: Matter cycles and what lichen have to say about them.
Things can move and things can change but things don't go away.
This is a phrase we use in the Foodweb Education program to set our minds up for thinking about matter and how it behaves. Matter is the ‘stuff’ of our lives, from the food we eat, to the air we breathe, to the clothes we wear and the houses we live in. Anything that takes up space and has mass is called matter. Our Earth is considered materially closed with matter constantly moving and changing and being recycled through biogeochemical cycles like the water cycle, air cycles, life cycles and rock cycles.
Matter Cycles is one of the key patterns we use to frame our lessons and activities in the Foodweb Education program. We use matter cycles as one of the great connectors. When we think and teach about matter cycles we are wanting our students to embody a sense of the connectivity it can provide. This connection can mapped through and across time and space joining mountains to mushrooms and shopping malls to ancient seas. Matter cycles is a pattern that describes the alchemy of the Earth and this pattern is literally brought to life by Life. Life is the great conjurer and composer creating spectacles and masterpieces out of inanimate particles everywhere. Then in death we find the promise of even more creative biological expression as the atoms and molecules reenter the arena.
The garden is a space our students get to interact with these processes. We are trying to ensure that life is embedded into our students understanding of matter cycles and not just any life but their lives, your life. These cycles are the basis of life and being a living system you are a participant in these cycles. You are an integral part of the water cycle. You wash yourself with last years raindrops and your tears will return to the clouds. A sense of comfort and responsibility come with this understanding.
Every mouthful of food you take in is an act of repurposing atoms. These atoms that had somehow, somewhere been returned to the elemental smorgasbord of the soil and transformed into your dinner. Where was the calcium in your teeth before it got to you? Where does the nitrogen in your urine go after your morning pee?
We don't often get to connect with this idea and we're even less likely to get to see these transformations with our own eyes. Lichen, those intricate embroideries of life decorating a seemingly dead world, can offer a portal into this intangible universe of transformations. One that we can easily see, touch and even smell. If we recognise what we're looking at when we see these strange psychedelic stickers and corsages, the gateways that lichen provides will be open forever and our understanding of the world deepened dramatically. As they sit quietly, patiently glued to the rock in front of you they are not only pulling atoms of carbon and oxygen out of the air through photosynthetic processes but they are also slowly but surely devouring that rock, converting it from a solid into gases and living tissue - literally bringing it to life. This lichen is a portal between worlds, take a moment to take that on. Take a moment to peer through this woven window. Take a moment to:
See back in time, deep time.
Behind that wrinkly living weird paint job there's a story. A story from the substrate. A story that may stretch way back in time. A rock, is it a vesicular basalt? The remnants of a lava flow that annihilated large swathes of Gondwanan forests, cooling so quickly bubbles of gas expanded and we trapped inside puckering it like honeycomb. Or is it a tale of boiling lava intruded then cooled slowly deep underground millions of years ago allowing time for crystals of pink and white to form. With the movement of skies and oceans the granite is gradually exposed providing a landscape for glowing lichen to glue themselves to and begin their miniature kalpa. The colonising lichen put a spotlight on these mysterious pasts attempting to reveal this tale as it simultaneously erodes any trace of it happening.
See the transformation of intangible into tangible.
I think it's relatively safe to say that unless you're a geologist the physical and chemical weathering of rocks is probably not at the forefront of your mind. We are operating on a different time scale so typically the only time rock transformations pop up on our radar is when they hit the news headlines like a volcano erupting or a landslide. Lichen gives us window into this process through a gentle, beautiful and creative display of rock being destroyed and transformed, albeit gradually, into soil. Some lichens grow immersed inside rock between the crystals! This psychedelic living blanket is actually tearing apart atoms bound since time immemorial, releasing them back into the world to start a new story.
See the power of coming together.
https://shutterbugwalkabouts.com.au/hobart-tasmania-day-tours/hartz-mountains-national-park-tahune-forest-reserve/
Lichen is not an individual organism. It is a fungi and cyanobacteria (or algae) that weave themselves together in the most intimate and supportive relationship. The woven fungal mesh encloses the photosynthesising cyanobacteria cells in a partnership that is are typically unique to lichen associations.
The fungi and photosynthetic component (photobiont - cyanobacteria or algae) form a symbiotic relationship. The fungi benefit from the carbohydrates produced by the photobiont via photosynthesis. The algae or cyanobacteria benefit by the protection, moisture and nutrients provided by the fungal filaments. The relationship extends the ecological range of both partners. Lichens are among the first living things to grow on bare rock or areas left lifeless and sterile by disaster. They are a pioneering species. They can grow on bare rock, desert sands and even old tyres. This is the power of cooperation.
Without the cyanobacteria, “a lichen-forming fungus bears no likeness to a lichen. It’s an entirely different entity. The lichen is an organism created by symbiosis. It forms only when its two partners meet”. If one partner receives an overabundance of nutrient then the partnership is over and neither one exists. Their capacity to share and support each other is not only what sustains them but its what creates them.
See a reflection of yourself.
Visually lichens seem magical and powerful and instantly make a place or object feel enchanted. Their presence kick starts the engine of our imagination. The worlds they create are so wonderous and beautiful they turn a scientific paper into a fantasy novel. They are magical. In reality though, just by existing - breathing in and out, digesting and growing and all of the other mundane involuntary activities you do every second you too are doing the same type of magic. Welcome to the phenomenon of life, congratulations.
https://www.lukeobrien.com.au/rattler-range-tasmania
See lichen
Lichens need you to admire and protect them. They are resilient and committed but also very slow growing and sensitive to physical destruction and air pollution. Maybe you are having trouble finding lichens where you are. Listen to the silent scream from the absence of lichen in your life - it sends a deafening message.
Thank you lichen for your lessons in dedication, cooperation, patience and for reminding us of the magic of life. Thank you for softening the rocks…and reality.
Downloadable poster from etsy https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/548454060876736677/
“What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.”
Books:
There is No Such Place as Away
Images:
Podcast:
Song:
Further lichen information:
wikipedia article on lichen
Foodweb Education is gratefully living, learning and working on and with Country, Aboriginal land, land that has never been ceded. We acknowledge and pay respect to the Aboriginal communities as the enduring custodians of these lands, seas, air and waterways on this continent now called Australia. Our ecoliteracy program observes and is strengthened by the traditional ecological knowledge, worldviews and protocols of the First Nations culture where we are teaching as well as the wider Indigenous protocols of First Nations people and land based cultures across our planetary home, Earth.