Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

"Yes, it’s just about moss. Here’s the cover, it’s got moss on it and it’s got lots of pictures of moss inside. It’s a lovely book, and it inspired a rather good novel called The Measure of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. So, it’s a natural and cultural history of moss. Kimmerer writes, ‘we poor myopic humans with neither the raptor’s gift of long distance acuity nor the talents of a housefly for panoramic vision.’ We’ve got all this technology—she’s saying—and that’s great, but the power of our devices can lead us to distrust our unaided eyes. Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens. She writes vividly about what it’s like to walk across moss in bare feet and to notice it for the first time and to notice the incredible world within moss and the creatures that live within it. So there’s a favourite of mine, a creature I wrote about in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings called the tardigrade, or water bear, which is this extraordinary tiny para-arthropod. It’s not an insect, it’s a bit like an insect and it’s probably the most indestructible animal on the planet. You can put it in space and it can survive cosmic rays, but you can find them living happily deep on the ocean floor or in almost any moss. If we went outside and looked in the gutter, we could probably find them. They’re there in this extraordinary micro-forest and we just don’t think about them. She talks about that forest very well. It can be bad; it can be good. It’s a question of how we manage our attention. The analogy only goes so far, but perhaps the new technology is a bit like alcohol. There is this video where some monkeys get into a holiday resort and start stealing the tourist’s drinks and they’re throwing themselves around and behaving like you know, teenagers. Alcohol brings euphoria, and technological devices can be a bit like that. They bring connection, the little supposedly endorphin hit you get every time you get a like on your Facebook feed. Because it’s a very powerful technology and it can be a powerful technology for good, we just haven’t yet learned to control it and manage it—and, indeed, to take it out the hands of the corporations who want to addict us and manipulate us and sell our data. Like drink, we’ve just got to learn to control it. So I say look at the moss as well as use your iPhone to find out more. There could be incredible applications on your phone to help you learn. Probably, there already are some and I just don’t know about them. People talk about augmented reality, or AR, so as well as spending time to relax in completely manufactured virtual worlds, and I think augmented reality technologies could be tremendously powerful learning tools and attention-supporting tools. So in Britain you go out to the hills, say, and you look at some rocks and you call up on your augmented reality device and it will tell you about the geology, and what’s under the ground, and what’s growing here and how it changes over the year, and maybe it can superimpose some maps and changes and bring that all to you. So you see the landscape in more depth. But then, of course, hopefully you also then take off that device and just be in that place, because I think that’s absolutely vital. Because we are embodied creatures and we smell and feel the temperature and the breeze on the skin. We have this 4 billion year history as embodied beings and it’s still in us in every respect. So we need to be present for that as well as the devices. Yes. I recently tried out an augmented reality device developed by Microsoft. You put on a big pair of goggles and it superimposes dynamic images onto objects around you, which you can also still see. I was almost crying actually not so much because it was already quite impressive but really because you can see it will get a whole lot better. So for example, the object might have been a globe, an old globe from 200 years ago and it would impose patterns on that and bring things out and help you appreciate them. One can see a tremendous power for good there as well as something to divert, and mislead, and distort and control. There’s a bit of that too. Is this the new science writing? Here’s a real scientist writing about science and also writing about her personal experience and asserting that it’s okay to bring the two together. People talk about ‘the new nature writing,’ this genre that, in the British case, has come to the fore in the last twenty years or so—from Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999) through Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014) and so on. But, as Rob Macfarlane argues, maybe we shouldn’t call it good ‘nature writing’, just good ‘writing.’ It’s refreshing when there’s this idea that you can combine writing about science with writing about yourself. As that’s what Kimmerer has done here, and done very well. Something also to say about Robin Wall Kimmerer, is she’s an American citizen and a biologist, but she’s also a member of the Potowatomi nation, which is a Native American tribe. More recently, she published a book called Braiding Sweetgras s (2014). It’s partly about natural history, but she also talks about investigating her own cultural background. There are about 7 people left who speak the Potowatomi language, they’re all old ladies so the language is nearly extinct: the culture’s almost gone. But she went to investigate the nature of the language and the culture and she talks about how it opened a window to her for another way of seeing. You might think what’s this got to do with science? Well, she observes that English is a noun-based language, in which only about 30% of the words we use are verbs. But the Potowatomi language is about 70% verbs. Things happen, rather than are. “We are a bunch of atoms, but that’s not all we are.” Kimmerer takes the example of a body of water that we call a ‘bay’ in English. She says a bay is a noun only if water is dead. When a bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb in the Potowatomi language—which is wiikwegamaa , ‘to be a bay’—releases the water from that bondage and lets it live. To be a bay, she says, holds the wonder that for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers., because it could do otherwise, become a stream, or an ocean or a waterfall. And there are verbs for that too. I think this is lovely. It’s not mystical, but it’s a more generous and insightful realism that respects and pays attention to process, cycle and change. It’s a different way of thinking, a different way of framing and it’s actually very useful to think of scientifically: to think about process and not just object."