ROBIN KIMMERER'S LICHENS

My friend Paul from Florida and Mérida visited Valladolid so we could sit in the park awhile talking. Paul kindly gave me a book he'd read and liked, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. I'd never heard of Kimmerer or her book, but the next day when a Danish visitor to the hut saw the book on my table he said his wife was reading it, so maybe it's a popular read nowadays. Kimmerer is a noted environmental scientist and a Potawatomi indigenous American.

To see if the book might qualify for accompanying me on my upcoming visa-renewing trip, I chose a randomly selected page and read a random paragraph. It described how the free-ranging cells of certain species of algae often combine with free-ranging cells of certain species of fungi to form distinct species of lichen. Kimmerer described how scientists wanting to study the lichen-forming phenomenon placed appropriate cells of algae and fungi together in the lab, but at first no lichens formed under a variety of environmental conditions. Finally it was discovered that communities of cells of algae and fungi would indeed form lichens if they were stressed. When conditions were good for both kinds of cells, they preferred to keep living independently, but during a severe environmental crises they cooperated to save themselves.

At that point I slammed the book shut, not wanting to read more, because that single paragraph had set a train of thought going that I wanted to nurture.

For, that one paragraph suggested a message I desperately wanted to believe in: That at some point maybe we humans will reach a point where we start cooperating to save ourselves by stopping our destruction of the Earthly biosphere. And maybe we can even go beyond that and -- like simple algal and fungal cells forming more complex lichens -- create something entirely new and transcendentally worthy of the potentials of human mentality.

But then it occurred to me that, by denying myself further reading and taking the paragraph out of its larger context, possibly I was misunderstanding a higher-level message that Kimmerer had wanted to relate. I was behaving precisely like so many people nowadays who consciously and willfully deny themselves information that might conflict with what they want to believe.

This was a distinct possibility, too, because already I knew facts that seemed to be at odds which what Kimmerer seemed to be saying. My understanding from both ecology and history is that when populations of living things, including humans, come under stress because of limited resources, more likely than the cooperation shown by algae and fungi forming lichens, is wars, and Nature's old standbys, plagues and famine.

After several days of exploring the condition of having found a good-feeling ray of hope for what otherwise seems in nearly every respect a profoundly bleak future for Life on Earth, while at the same time admitting that the hope was rooted in my having chosen ignorance over an open mind, here's what I decided:

  1. Ignorance-based peace of mind is a seductive pleasure hard to abandon.
  2. It's a form of self gratification bought with mental and/or spiritual laziness and willful self deception.
  3. It's an ugly, dangerous condition I don't want anything to do with.

So, I'm looking forward to reading the rest of Braiding Sweetgrass during my upcoming visa trip. I'm eager to flush from my system this brief exposure to a viral, potentially lethal way of managing one's mentality.