Laurie Palmer: Lessons from lichen worlds (ep412)
“You can’t cultivate [lichen] through artificial means... That is a mystery at the heart of this symbiotic relationship that is a fundamental resistance to capitalism and commodification. It hasn’t been figured out, and it can’t be reproduced.”
In this episode, we are joined by A. Laurie Palmer: a writer, artist, and author of the book The Lichen Museum. In paying attention to lichen, Laurie looks to these symbiotic organisms as a template for enriching human and multi-species relationality.
How might lichen, and their refusal to be scientifically categorized, offer a model of living that nurtures slowness, adaptability, and diversity? In what ways do they remind us how to practice mutual aid, and reconfigure narratives of dominance?
Join us in conversation with Laurie as she invites us to dream and play with lichen through artistic explorations of multiplicity and prosperity. And join us in alchemize to be invited into eight weeks of experimental imagination practices — including two led by Laurie as inspired by lichen worlds and ways of being.
About our guest:
A. Laurie Palmer’s work is concerned with material explorations of matter’s active nature as it asserts itself on different scales and in different speeds, and with collaborating on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. She sees art in its surprising, sensory, relational, and critically constructive capacities as a liberatory force that can contribute to collective and systemic transformation. Her work sometimes takes form as sculpture, installation, or writing, but also as collaborative public projects.
Artistic credits:
Episode-inspired artwork by isadora machado.
Dive deeper:
The Lichen Museum, a book by A. Laurie Palmer
Inflamed, a book by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
Learn more about philosopher and writer, Édouard Glissant
Learn more about poet and scholar, Fred Moten
Expand your lenses:
If you are enjoying Green Dreamer, join us on Patreon to listen to our extended conversations and other bonuses!
transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: Your book, The Lichen Museum, focuses specifically on lichens and how their radical traits provide inspirations for reimagining human relations. And I would like to preface the rest of our conversation with a more foundational question first, which is, what exactly are lichens? How are they usually defined or perceived in this dominant picture of the hierarchy of beings?
And also, how might people think past these conventional forms of defining to acknowledge the reality of how lichens really blur binaries and categories, and as you say, making queer horizontal alliances across these divisions where their symbiotic habit of being is thought to have evolved several times, end quote.
Laurie Palmer: Lichens are now stereotypically understood as the kind of prototype of symbiosis, which is a way of growing in relation with other beings together. And so lichens are certainly composed and their organism is not a single organism, but it's a collectivity of algae and fungus. And now it's understood that many other bacteria and yeast and maybe other members of that community that makes what we have called a quote “single lichen”. But it's always a collectivity. And this was a discovery in the 1860s that what people had been understanding and putting into taxonomies as a single being because it seemed like Western science could only think of things in terms of single, solo organisms. And so when this one scientist realized that like in, actually maybe where this combination of this collectivity of beings was very hard to get that to be accepted for many, many decades.
And I think that the resistance to that, it speaks to some of the really oppressive assumptions of individualism and competition, and that I was talking about it in the initial response. I think that what lichens opened up is this idea of of actually doing it together and a relational being kind of at the core of all of us, both literally as more and more has come out in terms of our selves being composed of many different organisms and our guts, but also in a more spiritual and expansive sense in terms of our senses of self being. Relational as well.
And one of the contested questions in lichenology, which is a somewhat obscure science, is who's in charge among this collectivity of selves? And that speaks to your mentioning of the hierarchy of beings that has typically put white, male, heterosexual, western humans you know, ladder of value with others just gradually, you know, lower and lower down and increasingly devalued with. Lichens are such really insignificant beings that they are almost invisible because they're so small and slight.
But actually what [lichens] suggest is in the relations among these beings that form their collectivity is a kind of horizontal mutual aid.
That's my insistence, and I think that even the lichenological sciences are really coming around to this as well. In fact, there is nobody in charge that then the other members of this collectivity fall into line below. There's an exchange of energies, of skills, if you call them that, of capacities within this collectivity that I think has a lot to teach us as humans for recognizing difference and equally valuing on a more horizontal level.
Kamea Chayne: And through your approach, you have written about these five radical traits of lichen that you've been learning from. So I'm really curious about these five things and we can go through each of them together one by one. But let’s just start with the trait of “two-ness” where our I is also a we. And I know as you shared in the beginning, this is something that you personally resonate with as well and your sense of multiplicity in who you are. But what can you share in regards to the plurality of lichen identity in terms of how they show up in the world and what lessons could this offer our human senses of selfhood?
Laurie Palmer: Okay, that's great. Yeah, they're “two-ness”. The main relation in a lichen between the algae and the fungus has sometimes been described, again, in sort of hierarchical ways, like master-slave or imprisoned algae and jailer fungus or something like that. But really increasingly we're understanding that there is this mutual aid between the fungus and the lichen. So it is more of a horizontal exchange of qualities. And I also think that this sense of two-ness opens up what we have been taught is our isolation as individuals.
If we can understand these other beings as already being not just split, but multiple, and being able to have greater capacities for adaptation, for instance, to climate change, for drought or flood, then because of this “two-ness”, this partnering, [lichens] able to respond to different kinds of climates with much more facility than if they were just a fungus or just a lichen.
So that, I think, also reminds us of our own multiplicity and perhaps our own…. if we're already multiple ourselves, then I think that it makes it more possible to be in relation to others as well, because again, we're not thinking of ourselves as this monad, this single person, but actually already multiple. So adding more multiples makes it maybe easier. I don't know if that's making sense to you, but it somehow makes sense to me.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, that definitely resonates. And then the second trait of lichen that you note is their resistance to cultivation, that lichen cannot be reduced to their use-value. You have shared about how various cultures have utilized lichen in different ways, so what are some examples of those? And even with that in mind, what does it mean that they can't be cultivated or privatized for capital?
Laurie Palmer: Right, so definitely lichens are very remarkable beings. They have some special substances that are called lichen substances that they only produce through this collaborative two-ness. And these substances have been recognized in ancient times for creating. Beautiful dyes and also perfume, perfumes and also for, you know, some, sometimes people have and have found ways to eat them, but mostly these two kinds of industries have really going back to ancient times, both in China and in the Mediterranean in particular, lichens have been used for these things, but they've been, but even then they were over cultivated. So the particular lichens that created these purples or these particular smells were not entirely made extinct, but they were harvested to the point of you know, they're running out. And part of that is that lichens grow really slowly.
And so they don't… like you can't plant a field of lichen and harvest it the next year. Some lichens take, you know, thousands of years to grow. They're really, really slow. And so they don't replace themselves the same way that wheat or, you know, something else would.
There is another way in which they resist commodification, which is almost more significant, perhaps, and that is that nobody yet knows, and I believe that this is still true to this date, how this symbiotic collaboration happens.
So some scientists have tried to grow lichens in the laboratory, and they have been semi-successful to get the algae and the fungus to grow together, but they do not thrive, and they don't reproduce. So you can't, in other words, cultivate them through artificial means, through the ways in which science has come to think that it can control life forces. And so that to me is a mystery at the heart of this symbiotic relationship that is a fundamental resistance to capitalism and commodification. So it can't be, it hasn't been figured out and it can't be reproduced.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah. And I also wonder if part of the reason that it hasn't quote unquote been figured out is because their quote unquote use value or that the quote unquote use value that people have come to know don't justify the amount of funding that it would require to conduct research in those areas. Because there's definitely like an institutional bias in research in terms of whatever industries deem as being the most exploitable or profitable, like those areas might get the most funding and then a lot of other areas that we can learn a lot more about don't get nearly the same amounts of funding just because industries haven't found use values in them to be able to justify pumping the same amount of money into it. Not that I want lichen to ever be cultivatable, but I wonder if that is part of the limitation or the limiting factor.
Laurie Palmer: I think that makes a lot of sense, yeah. I mean, what you're saying, I think, is really true. And again, they're small. They've been understood as insignificant beings. But it's so ironic because they certainly way outlived the time that humans have been on the Earth and will certainly live past us, probably. And so there's a kind of, I sometimes think of them, sitting there on the rock and looking at us with sort of a scant, you know, and just like waiting it out. But yeah, I think they're not seen as exploitable because they're so small, you know.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and in some ways that's a positive thing that they're not seen as exploitable. So we hope that remains the same, but also we should learn more about the vital role that lichen plays in our whole world.
And the third trait of lichen that you talk about is site specificity, which really reminds me of some of our past conversations thinking with mycelium and fungi. But what would you like to highlight about lichen’s being place-based and especially at a time when a lot of peoples have been forcibly displaced or otherwise are migratory communities or have been moving around by their own free will. What lessons for our relationships with community and with place can we learn from the site specificity of lichen?
Laurie Palmer: Yeah, I think that the stories from lichenologists about what happens if they try to move a lichen in their backyard 20 feet across the yard and not thriving in another place is really fascinating to me. So it's speaking to these organisms’ acute sensitivity to the angle of the sun, the way that the wind blows, whatever might be shading them or open, exposing them, slight microclimate factors.
And so, in many ways, I think this site specificity speaks to their deep integration or thorough integration with environmental factors, the light, the air, the temperature, the wind, the substrate that they're attached to, and that all of those aspects are so deeply embodied in who they are that once those elements in terms of their access, their relations with them are shifted, that it changes the ability of the organism to continue being. And I think that there's something very instructive about that in terms of our own as humans and all of our beings sort of vulnerability and permeability these shared qualities that make it possible to be alive that we often not only dismiss or ignore, but also degrade and pollute and destroy, not recognizing that they make us up, that we are as much about the sun and the air and the moisture that we have access to and the kinds of food that we have access to. So I think of lichen’s site specificity in that way.
It's interesting because they're also so ubiquitous so that lichens grow anywhere in the world, basically everywhere in the world, in the most extreme environments. You could even call some of them extremophiles in the sense that word relates to adapting to environmental situations that most other organisms can't live in. And so they're adaptable, but they take a while to come up in relation to those conditions. So it's not like you can move them there, and then they'll adapt. But they grow into that adaptation. So, yeah.
It feels like there's a lot to learn from [lichens] as humans, but also as thinking about the more-than-human world in general and how integrated we are and need to be with understanding relationships with place.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, thank you for these learnings. And I think what comes to mind for me right now is thinking about universalized understandings and measurements of human well-being. And to what degree, I'm not sure, but it definitely feels intuitive to me that different people's bodies interact with and react to different environments in really different ways. So some places might feel invigorating and affirming for some of us and some other places might not feel as welcoming for our bodies and how we feel in that place in general. So it would make me question those sorts of universalized understandings of human health.
And it also then makes sense that this trait of lichens being site-specific then also renders them incapable of being mass-reproduced or simply copy and pasted. Because, yeah, they really seem like an embodiment and a reflection of very specific places. But moving on to the fourth trait, which is slowness, although you note that lichen exists in a very different temporal frames than human senses can register and can be seen as both very fast and very slow. So in what ways do they embody excitement and busyness while also living in slower time? And how might this inspire human cultures, especially as we become increasingly fast-paced in all aspects of life and society, to reconfigure our relationships with time?
Laurie Palmer: I think their relationship to time is very compelling to me. Again, as I understand it, there's a wide range of... well, there's so many different lichens, and that in itself is really astounding in terms of their general lifespans and there are certainly the huge range of forms that come out of that. Some of them grow, for instance, in Antarctica, lichens grow at like less than a millimeter a year. But then some of them in that same area have been thought to be 10,000 years old. And so that slow metabolism leads potentially to a particularly long-lived relation.
Some people think that lichens, like many fungi, don't have a natural death but only die by accident, which is a very interesting quality in relation to time as well.
So there isn't this sense of a steady, you know, shape to the lifespan that eventually senses or grows old and then dies but just continues until it doesn't. You know, in terms of the “fast pace” of lichens, I'm not sure how to think about their speediness other than perhaps this sort of energetic relation to the sun, because their source of food is the sun and water and carbon dioxide that they bring in through their pores. And in this case, I think it's okay to acknowledge that the algae do the photosynthesis, the work of creating food for this collective organism. And this means that they're autotrophic, so that they don't need to reach outside their own bodies to extract or kill or hunt anything else to provide nutrition. But it also means that with this relation to the sun, they are still not self-sufficient because again they're embedded in these relations with all of these other aspects of the environment. So I guess that's what I think of as kind of the this the speed would be the amazing energy involved in what I still think of as perhaps our solution to living on this planet is still to photosynthesize, to learn how to photosynthesize, and not have to extract.
Kamea Chayne: Can you share a little more about that? What would it mean for humans to learn how to photosynthesize?
Laurie Palmer: Yeah, I mean, there are some humans that are trying to sort of artificially speed it up, you know, and make plants, like, create more food faster or create themselves to be food faster and they're, you know, doing genetic experiments to speed up photosynthesis in other beings. But it would be great if, you know, we could understand if we could simplify, as humans, our lives, to get the fact that we can get energy from the sun and turn that into food, perhaps not through the cells of our actual bodies, but through recognizing and valuing differently how organisms that are doing it and not trying to control them, but instead trying to learn from them.
I mean, it is true that the very cells that perform photosynthesis, you know, they are a kind of symbiotic. This probably came up in other discussions you've had on this great program as well, but that cyanobacteria crawled inside the cells of other cells to create the chloroplasts that perform photosynthesis. So that's already a symbiotic relation that then became reproduced through evolution. So it's already a collaboration, so I don't know, maybe we could grow chloroplasts. That would be amazing.
Kamea Chayne: I want to move to the fifth radical trait of lichen, which is their close association with the mineral world. And again, you know, being that bridge and broker between the geology of earth and the biology of earth, the quote unquote “non-living” and “living” that we just talked about. So how exactly does this relationship and process play out and how do lichens therefore contribute their vital role of devouring rock and bringing minerals into the rest of the so-called living world?
Laurie Palmer: So lichens grow on stone and rock a lot. They also grow on wood and concrete and other, almost any surface that's going to stay still long enough. But in particular, in relation to rock, their hyphae, which are not really roots, but fungal threads that if they're crustacean lichen, actually any lichen because it wants to stick to the substrate it's on, sends some sort of hyphae to attach to its substrate and this can collect particles of dust and sand and other things and gradually through erosion that happens with materials that get concentrated there. And to some degree, it's thought that some lichens also send some of their special substances through their hyphae into the substrate that can also contribute to breaking up the rock, for instance, in this case.
And so going back to the early times that there were lots of ideas that lichens preceded vascular plants by helping to create soil by breaking up the rock and turning it into some of it helping turn it into some of its components of elemental components that then could be taken up by vascular plants now there's a lot of controversy I think within lichenology about when actual lichens were when they evolved in relation to vascular plants. But I think that there's just so much we don't know. Because lichens are so slight in the fossil record, it's hard to know really what a lichen was back in early evolutionary times anyway, and what other collaborative entity might have done similar work then.
So at any rate, they, through whatever means, the do attach to rock are able to contribute to breaking it down to help create soil for other organisms. At the same time, I'm fascinated because lichens grow so slowly and are so closely connected to some of the mineral surfaces that they attach to. And I'm thinking mostly about crustos-like, and some of them sink so deeply into the surfaces of the rock that you can't tell that there's anything on top, so that their beings become so integrated with the rock that it becomes another kind of symbiosis between mineral and biological, like you said, geological and biological.
I find that bridging to be so fascinating and instructive because we have, in our human taxonomies, drawn such clear lines between what is living matter and what is non-living matter.
And that obscures the fact that, you know, we as humans just are taking in, you know, quote unquote non-living minerals all the time through our food and making them part of us. So these are divisions that, again, obscure some of the vital relationships that are functional and working that contribute to life and even to just the functioning of ecosystems that include life and what we've called non-life. I could stop there, but I just want to mention these early 20th century Russian geophysicists, I think, in particular, who theorized that biology was there at the start of the early ear from the beginning and how the Earth came to be. So that those scientists were thinking of bio and geo together from the very beginning of the planet as well.
Kamea Chayne: This is all super fascinating and stimulating too for me to think about because I just, I really appreciate thinking with beings that challenge our conventional modes of categorizing or imposing certain value judgments or yeah, just more conventional modes of trying to make sense of the world. These beings that really challenge and disrupt those ways of thinking and knowledge thinking and invites us to really look at everything around us in fresh ways. But our main conversation is coming to a wrap here. What else do you feel called to leave with us here in terms of what you personally have taken away or what you hope people might take away from thinking and learning with lichen?
Laurie Palmer: Well, thank you for this conversation. I am inspired by your questions and very excited by your interest in challenging non-conventional modes of knowledge. It's very inspiring to me to hear you say this. In terms of what to leave with people around lichens.
I do feel like this idea of not being alone and being multiplicities ourselves is just something I want to reiterate as a way to understand maybe a comfort even in what are really, really complicated and difficult times and to extend that into, for instance, Ruth Wilson Gilmore's quote that everything worth doing is better when done with others.
You're already others in yourself. And then to, you know, extend that into conversations and connections and relations with many others, human or not, I think, is so helpful when we're struggling with how to think futures now and be in this very beautiful and very complex world.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but to learn more and stay updated on Laurie's work, you can head to alauriepalmer.net. And Laurie, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been a huge honor to have you and yeah, we're excited to continue thinking about everything that you shared with us here. For now though, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Laurie Palmer: Pay attention, slow down. Get together, forgive oneself and others for making mistakes. And thank you, Kamea, for a wonderful conversation and for your work in general.
