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“Movements. Ecopolitics of dance” by Emma Bigé – Ensad Limoges

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“Movements” by Emma Bigé, Movements. Ecopolitics of dance, Editions La Découverte, Emma Bigé

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Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown

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This book introduces readers to the known psychological aspects of climate change as a pressing global concern and explores how they are relevant to current and future clinical practice.
Arguing that it is vital for ecological concerns to enter the therapy room, this book calls for change from regulatory bodies, training institutes and individual practitioners. The book includes original thinking and research by practitioners from a range of perspectives, including psychodynamic, eco-systemic an

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Finding the Mother Tree - Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest by Suzanne Simard (9780141990286) | Akademika Bokhandel

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THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER’A scientific memoir as gripping as any HBO drama series’ Kate Kellaway, ObserverA dazzling scientific detective story from the ecologist who first discovered the hidden language of trees No one has done more to transform our understanding of trees than the world-renowned scientist Suzanne Simard

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What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming | Pe

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Kjøp «What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming | Per Espen Stoknes» av Per Espen Stoknes til en god pris på ark.no. Bestill hjemleverin

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The Hidden Life of Trees | Peter Wohlleben | ARK.no

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Kjøp «The Hidden Life of Trees | Peter Wohlleben» av Peter Wohlleben til en god pris på ark.no. Bestill hjemlevering eller klikk&hent i din ARK-butikk.

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Now recognized as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring exposed the destruction of wildlife through the...

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Discover nature-based devotional practices for rekindling humanity’s ancient covenant with the living world—one rooted in reverence and love—and restoring our sacred bond with Earth.Drawing from decades of Sufi teaching, a deep relationship with nature, and the transformative power of story, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee guides us beyond today’s ecological and cultural crises to the heart of the matter: our collective forgetfulness and the severing of our primordial bond with Earth. Following the entwined threads of grief and love, he explains how this moment of crisis holds within it the seeds of transformation and regrowth.Remembering Earth blends reflection with practical guidance, exploring how remembrance, prayer, praise, and intimacy with Earth can restore our sacred relationship with the living world. Through a variety of practices in six key areas—Breath, Heart, Step, Listening, Time, and Prayer—the book guides you to an experience of radical belonging. Each practice is a doorway, inviting you from concept to communion, from observer to participant in the sacred web of life, offering an embodied spiritual ecology that moves beyond ideas into lived experience.In a time of great unraveling, Remembering Earth offers an embodied, spiritual path of remembrance and kinship, guiding us back to the sacredness of creation and our place within the more-than-human world.

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Kjøp «I Contain Multitudes | Ed Yong» av Ed Yong til en god pris på ark.no. Bestill hjemlevering eller klikk&hent i din ARK-butikk.

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Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages

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Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages is the first edited collection in the field of ecosomatics.
With a combination of essays and practice pages that provide a variety of scholarly, creative, and experience-based approaches for readers, the book brings together both established and emergent scholars and artists from many diverse backgrounds and covers work rooted in a dozen countries. The essays engage an array of crucial methodologies and critical/theoretical perspectives, in

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Kjøp «An Immense World | Ed Yong» av Ed Yong til en god pris på ark.no. Bestill hjemlevering eller klikk&hent i din ARK-butikk.

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Ecosomatics by Cheryl Pallant | Embodied Healing & Transformation

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Discover Cheryl Pallant’s Ecosomatics, a book of embodiment practices to heal personal and planetary wounds and awaken somatic and spiritual intelligence.

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Becoming a Compassionate Diatom Companion | 5 | Feminist Reconfiguring

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This chapter contemplates the unfolding of co-author Nina Lykke's queer, posthuman love relationship with and eco-advocacies for the micro-algae, diatoms.

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The Overstory is a novel by Richard Powers published in 2018 by W.W. Norton. It is Powers's twelfth novel. The novel is about five trees whose unique life experiences with nine Americans bring them together to address the destruction of forests. Powers was inspired to write the work while teaching at Stanford University after he encountered giant redwood trees for the first time.

The Overstory was a contender for multiple awards. The Overstory was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize on September 20, 2018. It was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on April 15, 2019. and the William Dean Howells Medal in 2020. However, critical reviews of the novel were mixed, with critiques of the character plots and melodrama, alongside praise of the structure, writing and compelling reading experience.

Nicholas Hoel, Mimi Ma, Adam Appich, Ray Brinkman, Dorothy Cazaly, Douglas Pavlicek, Neelay Mehta, Patricia Westerford, and Olivia Vandergriff are people who had unique relationships with trees which occasionally led to tragedy or salvation.

Patricia Westerford recognizes that trees are social organisms rather than isolated ones and presents research to prove this; however, she is ridiculed for being "unscientific." Later, scientists will realize that she was right and give her international recognition, but she has been disillusioned from this world and prefers to study old forest growth on her own instead. To share her research, she publishes a widely successful book about trees.

Neelay Mehta loves coding and embraces how insignificant he is. However, while working on a surprise coding project for his father during class, his teacher takes his project notes away from him. He desperately wants his notes back and accidentally curses the teacher, which prompts his teacher to threaten him. Scared of the consequences of insulting a white woman as an Indian child, he climbs a tree to escape reality briefly, but falls out and paralyzes himself. After paralysis, he is able to spend all day programming and initially develops open source games in a world of for-profit video games, like Robin Hood. Eventually, he becomes so successful he starts a video game company too.

Adam Appich is a curious psychology student with an unfortunate childhood. On the last day of his psychology seminar, his professor begins having a seizure. Thinking he is demonstrating the bystander effect, no one rises to help him, and the professor dies.

In 1989, when Olivia Vandergriff is one semester away from finishing college, she gets high and is accidentally electrocuted, briefly dying. Upon being revived, she comes to believe that higher powers are trying to give her a message. After seeing a news story about a group of activists trying to protect the remaining 3% of giant redwood trees, she decides that her purpose is to join them. On her way there, she meets Nicholas Hoel, now 35 years old, and at a loss of what to do with his life as the life insurance money he lived on is gone. He has sold the Hoel farm, the Hoel tree is dying, and his art is a commercial failure. After talking to Olivia, he decides to join her in her mission.

At the same time, in Portland, Oregon, Mimi Ma, the daughter of a Chinese engineer who dies by suicide, is rising up the corporate ladder when she sees that a small group of trees by her building are scheduled to be destroyed by the city. She contemplates attending a town hall meeting to protest their removal but before she can, the city cuts down the trees in the night. Douglas Pavlicek, a veteran who has spent 5 years of his life replanting trees for major companies only to become disillusioned when he discovers that his work actually enables additional logging of old-growth stands, walks by the trees and sees them being cut down. He tries to prevent their destruction and is arrested. When he returns to the trees he is confronted by Mimi Ma, who quickly realizes he is not a city employee but an environmentalist. The two band together to start joining in protests against environmental destruction.

Nick and Olivia join a group of nonviolent radicals and give themselves "tree" names, Nick becoming Watchman and Olivia being Maidenhair. When they are asked to tree sit in a giant redwood called Mimas for two weeks, Olivia leaps at the chance. Their stay ends up lasting for more than a year, during which they watch as the forest around them is clear-cut. They are eventually joined by Adam Appich, who is doing a thesis on environmentalists. The night he is there Nick and Olivia are finally forced out of the tree and arrested so Mimas can be cut down. Nick and Olivia decide to do more work in Oregon.

Mimi Ma and Douglas continue going to protests where they are brutalized by the police and arrested. Mimi is eventually fired from her job and, like Douglas, becomes a full-time activist.

Changed by his time with Olivia and Nick, Adam goes to Oregon to rejoin them, and meets Mimi Ma, now going by the name Mulberry, and Douglas, going by Doug-fir, who are part of the same activist camp. He stays with them a month and they believe that they are finally achieving something until their camp is destroyed by the forest authorities and law enforcement. In the altercation Mimi and Douglas are both badly injured. In retaliation the group sets fire to logging equipment. Pleased by the results, they set two more fires intending the third to be their final act. During the final arson Olivia is injured and dies, and the four remaining activists burn her body and scatter. The fire is deemed the work of a crazed killer and the logging continues.

Mimi Ma sells a priceless heirloom her father passed down, which ensures that she can reinvent herself. Nick becomes a vagrant, Douglas a BLM ranger, and Adam returns to academia.

Patricia Westerford is developing a seed bank to preserve tree species before they become extinct. However, she becomes hopeless as she realizes that no one will take conservation seriously enough. Even though many are turning to technology to protect the environment, she believes the most effective conservation technology has already been invented: trees.

Neelay Mehta becomes the head of a successful video game company, but he would rather explore the world in his own video games and create new worlds than run it. Soon, he comes up with the idea to make his video game emulate the real natural world, a simulation that contains every species in existence and limited resources. However, his board calls this idea crazy and he is voted off. He wishes to hear the dendrologist, Patricia Westerford, speak to recenter his life.

Dorothy and Ray are united by their love for adventure and get married. Ray is a successful lawyer, however, Dorothy begins getting bored in married life, especially since she cannot have children, which Ray wants. She has an extramarital affair and Ray becomes paralyzed from stroke. However, as she helps him recover, she ends her affair and rejuvenate her connection with Ray, even though he cannot speak. They realize that trees are treated as property, with no one to fight for them in court, but they are living too. To them, humans are simply pesky, short-lived bugs. In the end, they have children together, trees.

Douglas is still haunted by what happened and writes down everything in his journal using everyone's forest names. Nevertheless, his journal is discovered and the FBI arrests him. In order to protect Mimi Ma he decides to give up one name and goes to New York City where he locates Adam and reminisces with him about the fire. Fingered by Douglas, Adam is arrested and sentenced to 140 years in prison, which strikes him as a small price to pay as it is barely any time in tree life.

Mimi Ma, who is now living and working as an unconventional unlicensed therapist of sorts, hears about the arrests and realizes that Douglas turned in Adam to protect her.

Westerford, now an acclaimed scientist, is invited to a environmental technology conference to speak. She is about to commit suicide for the trees in front of an audience that doesn't do anything to stop her, until Neelay waves his hands to stop her. She finishes her speech by toasting, "To unsuicide!"

Living in the forest, Nick creates a giant message from branches and dead logs that can be read from space. He is helped in this project by a Native American man who happens to be passing by, and later by some of the man's family. The message, which reads "Still," will be legible from space for 200 years before it is absorbed into the forest.

Nicholas Hoel - an artist of Norwegian and Irish descent who comes from a long line of farmers and whose great-great-great grandfather planted a chestnut tree that survived blight for decades and enthralled the Hoel family for generations.

Mimi Ma - the eldest daughter of Winston Ma, born Ma Sih Hsuin, who fled China and became an engineer in America. Mimi falls in love with the Mulberry bush he plants in their backyard and is deeply affected when her father eventually commits suicide.

Adam Appich - an inquisitive boy who is fascinated with insects and later becomes interested in human psychology and how humans can only understand things that are put into narratives. His father planted a tree before the birth of Adam and each of his four siblings; as a child, Adam conflated the characteristics of each tree with his siblings.

Ray Brinkman - a conventional intellectual property lawyer and Dorothy's husband who later in life falls in love with nature.

Dorothy Cazaly - an unconventional stenographer who falls in love with nature late in life.

Douglas Pavlicek - an orphan who enlists in the Stanford prison experiment before enlisting in the Air Force. He falls from his plane and is saved by a banyan tree. After being discharged he wanders across America, realizing as he does so that deforestation is ruining the country. He signs up to plant seedlings, only learning after the planting of his fifty thousandth seedling that this effort does nothing to help the trees and only contributes to their destruction at the hands of logging companies.

Neelay Mehta - the child of Indian immigrants, Neelay spends his life building computers and creating computer programs in Northern California. Despite being paralyzed when he falls out of a tree as a child, he goes on to become a computer programming marvel, eventually creating a series of video games called Mastery inspired by trees, deforestation, and colonization.

Patricia Westerford - a dendrologist with a hearing disability, Patricia spends most of her childhood and adulthood enthralled with trees. When she accidentally discovers that trees are capable of communicating with each other, her research is widely mocked leading her to contemplate suicide. She eventually finds work as a park ranger where, years later, she discovers that her work has been redeemed and expanded upon.

Olivia Vandergriff - a young woman in her early 20s who lives an impulsive and reckless life until dedicating her life to protesting deforestation.

The Atlantic called the novel "darkly optimistic" for taking the long view that humanity was doomed while trees are not. The Guardian was mixed on the novel, with one review claiming that Powers mostly succeeded in conjuring "narrative momentum out of thin air, again and again"; another reviewer excoriated the novel as being an "increasingly absurd melodrama." Library Journal called the book "a deep meditation on the irreparable psychic damage that manifests in our unmitigated separation from nature". Ron Charles of The Washington Post offered up effusive praise, writing that this "ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction."

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The Overstory is a novel by Richard Powers published in 2018 by W.W. Norton. It is Powers's twelfth novel. The novel is about five trees whose unique life experiences with nine Americans bring them together to address the destruction of forests.

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'We borrow our bodies from the Earth.' Peter Kindfield

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'We borrow our bodies from the Earth.' Peter Kindfield

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"All of the activities described in this book) support embodied learning. Broadly defined, embodied learning is learning that involves the body and senses, as well as the mind. Is there really any other kind? It is nonsensical that we’ve somehow accepted that an ideal context for learning is sitting in a chair, in a classroom, facing the front of the room, and listening to a teacher talk. This method of separating learning from sensing and moving arose from our cultural habit of separating everything from everything else."

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/827846/explorations-in-ecology-by-peter-kindfield-phd/

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How to Survive the End of the World - Podcast - Apple Podcasts

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Future Ecologies - Podcast - Apple Podcasts

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The Emerald: Currents and Trends Through a Mythic Lens 

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The Emerald: Currents and Trends Through a Mythic Lens 

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Emergence Magazine Podcast - Podcast - Apple Podcasts

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In a world-first a New Zealand river has been granted the same legal rights as a human being.

The local Māori tribe of Whanganui in the North Island has fought for the recognition of their river - the third-largest in New Zealand - as an ancestor for 140 years.

On Wednesday, hundreds of tribal representatives wept with joy when their bid to have their kin awarded legal status as a living entity was passed into law.

"The reason we have taken this approach is because we consider the river an ancestor and always have," said Gerrard Albert, the lead negotiator for the Whanganui iwi [tribe].

"We have fought to find an approximation in law so that all others can understand that from our perspective treating the river as a living entity is the correct way to approach it, as in indivisible whole, instead of the traditional model for the last 100 years of treating it from a perspective of ownership and management."

The new status of the river means if someone abused or harmed it the law now sees no differentiation between harming the tribe or harming the river because they are one and the same.

Chris Finlayson, the minister for the treaty of Waitangi negotiations, said the decision brought the longest-running litigation in New Zealand's history to an end. "Te Awa Tupua will have its own legal identity with all the corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person," said Finlayson in a statement.

"The approach of granting legal personality to a river is unique ... it responds to the view of the iwi of the Whanganui river which has long recognised Te Awa Tupua through its traditions, customs and practice."

Two guardians will be appointed to act on behalf of the Whanganui river, one from the crown and one from the Whanganui iwi.

Albert said all Māori tribes regarded themselves as part of the universe, at one with and equal to the mountains, the rivers and the seas.

The new law now honoured and reflected their worldview, he said, and could set a precedent for other Māori tribes in New Zealand to follow in Whanganui's footsteps.

"We can trace our genealogy to the origins of the universe," said Albert. "And therefore rather than us being masters of the natural world, we are part of it. We want to live like that as our starting point. And that is not an anti-development, or anti-economic use of the river but to begin with the view that it is a living being, and then consider its future from that central belief."

Financial redress of NZ$80m is included in the settlement, as well as an additional NZ$1m contribution towards establishing the legal framework for the river.

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New Zealand river granted same legal rights as human being

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In a world-first a New Zealand river has been granted the same legal rights as a human being. The local Māori tribe of Whanganui in the North Island has fought for the recognition of their river - the third-largest in New Zealand - as an ancestor for 140 years.

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If you know where you are going, if you are clear on the destination and how to get there, it may be that your clarity has fooled you into thinking you have traversed worlds when you have merely substituted familiarity and intelligibility for the uncomfortable yet transformative potential of bewilderment. Bayo Akomolafe

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Once, we supposed that by burrowing into the world, and taking things apart, we would eventually arrive at pure essences, at unbequeathed virgins hidden behind thick layered harems of dust, grime and exactitude. At the heart of the matter. When we 'arrived' there, it wasn't a holy calmness we found:

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It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Mark Watson (1962-2024), who was at the heart of the Dark Mountain Project for 12 years. Mark was our subscriptions and distribution manager, the main proofreader for our books, and an inspiring teacher.

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Tsing, Anna L., Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou

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Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene

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Feral Atlas invites you to explore the ecological worlds created when nonhuman entities become tangled up with human infrastructure projects. Seventy-nine field reports from scientists, humanists, and artists show you how to recognize “feral” ecologies, that is, ecologies that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but which have developed and spread beyond human control.

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How you can help save nature where you live

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How you can help save nature where you live

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- Naturen er ikke bare på Hardangervidda, Galdhøpiggen eller Lofoten. Den er egentlig rundt oss hele tiden. Også i byen, sier Lene Liebe Delsett ved Senter for biogeokjemi i antropocen.

Hun har nettopp gitt ut boka Brennmaneteffekten. Hvordan går det med den norske naturen? Der har hun gått gjennom forskning, rapporter og kartlegginger av arter og naturtyper i Norge.

Det er nemlig ikke bare branner i Amazonas, ørkenspredning i Sahara og plastøyer i havet som truer plante- og dyrelivet. Også i Norge står mange arter i fare for å forsvinne.

- Sjøfugltallene er kanskje det som skremmer meg mest, for der er nedgangen så enorm. Ikke for alle arter og ikke for alle områder, men det store bildet for sjøfugl synes jeg er skummelt, sier Delsett til Titan.uio.no.

Også i skogene våre er det mange som står i fare.

- Det er i skogen det bor flest truede arter. Mange arter er truet av skogbruksdrift, og vi kommer til å utrydde arter i skogen i Norge, slår Delsett fast.

Uten at konfliktlinjene nødvendigvis går mellom naturvernere og skogbønder.

- Nå krever miljøvernorganisasjoner og skogbruksnæringen sammen økte penger til vern av skogen. Der er det politikerne som er trege, sier Delsett.

Og der kan du komme inn i bildet hvis du har lyst til å bidra - i den lokale arealpolitikken.

Der de viktige slagene står

- Det kan høres ufattelig kjedelig ut, innrømmer Delsett.

- Men vi må også ta vare på hverdagsnaturen, og det er naturen i Norge vi kan gjøre noe med.

En arealplan er en plan politikerne vedtar for hvordan arealet i et område skal brukes. De finnes både i statlige, regionale og kommunale varianter.

- Dette er prosesser som tar lang tid, det er mye dokumenter og mange kart, og det er tidvis ganske ugjennomtrengelig. Men det handler om hva vi bygger hvor, sier Delsett.

Skal vi bygge ny vei eller ikke? Skal man bygge kjøpesenter på de flate jordene utenfor byen? Skal vi lage boligfelt i et skogholt? Eller hva med hytter i strandsonen? Det er der de viktige slagene står.

- Det trenger ikke være så komplisert hvis alle bryr seg om skogholtet eller jordet der de bor. Det beste er om vi kan ha en engasjert lokalbefolkning som tar den kampen og passer litt på, sier Delsett.

Som eksempel nevner hun aksjonsgruppa Bevar Bredtvet-skogen. Der kjemper lokalbefolkningen mot Justisdepartementet og Statsbyggs planer om et nytt fengsel i Groruddalen i Oslo. Planene vil fjerne et sjeldent skogholt i en ellers tettbygd bydel.

- Det er utbygginger som truer naturen i Norge - som splitter opp og bygger ned, sier Delsett.

- Alle som vil engasjere seg i naturvern, trenger ikke gjøre det samme. Men skal jeg gi ett råd, så er det å begynne å engasjere seg i arealpolitikken.

Flått, mygg og brennmaneter

Selv har Delsett vært miljøaktivist siden hun var 15 år gammel - ved siden av studier i biologi og forskning i paleontologi. Da hun oppdaget en til da ukjent fiskeøgle på Svalbard, ga hun den navnet Keilhauia nui som en hyllest til organisasjonen Natur og Ungdom (NU).

Naturen er ikke et annet sted, skriver Lene Liebe Delsett i Brennmaneteffekten. (Spartacus forlag)

Med Brennmaneteffekten har Delsett skrevet seg inn i selskap med professorene Dag O. Hessen fra UiO og Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson fra NMBU som i fjor ga ut bøker om naturen og vårt forhold til den. Hessen omtaler blant annet naturen som en gratis, verdifull og bivirkningsfri lykkepille.

- Jeg merker at mange rundt meg har begynt å bli bekymret, også folk som aldri har brydd seg om miljø, klima og biologisk mangfold tidligere. Jeg har skrevet boka for dem som spør og lurer og som kanskje ikke har vært så opptatt av det før, sier Delsett.

Tittelen er en hyllest til brennmaneten, og til andre arter som det noen ganger kan være vanskelig å forstå nytten av. Hva skal vi liksom med flått og mygg - og brennmaneter?

- Jeg ville fortelle om den naturen som ikke er så "nyttig". Som til og med er litt ekkel. Vi trenger de artene og vi trenger de prosessene de er en del av, sier Delsett.

Småfuglen i hekken

Vi har vist at vi får det til hvis vi vil, mener hun.

- Vi skjønner at vi må forvalte det vi har nytte av, for eksempel elgbestanden. Nå er det mye elg i Norge, og det er en villet politikk. Fordi vi vil ha masse elg.

- Det har også vært en villet politikk i Norge de siste 100 årene at vi skal ha flere trær. Og da får vi til det. Det burde egentlig gi masse håp, sier Delsett.

Hun oppfordrer også alle til å bruke naturen som er der man bor. Lytt til småfugler i hekken. Se på meitemarken som kryper frem når det regner.

- Bak blokka vår er det et lite kratt. Noen er litt sure på det fordi det ser litt rufsete ut. Men det er kanskje min favorittnaturområde i hele verden.

- Men det tør jeg nesten ikke si fra om i tilfelle noen skulle finne på å fjerne buskene. Det er så mye fugler og insekter der, og det er så grønt og fint. Det handler litt om å se, sier Delsett.
I artikkelen under finner du et godt eksempel på litt hverdagsnatur:

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Slik kan du bidra til å redde naturen der du bor

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Naturen er ikke bare på Hardangervidda, Galdhøpiggen eller Lofoten. Den er egentlig rundt oss hele tiden. Også i byen, sier Lene Liebe Delsett ved Senter for biogeokjemi i antropocen. Hun har nettopp gitt ut boka Brennmaneteffekten. Hvordan går det med den norske naturen?

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How Ants Sniff Out the Right Path (Published 2019)

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They may seem like automatons, but ants are surprisingly sophisticated in their navigational strategies.

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How a Bit of Awe Can Improve Your Health

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Experts say wonder is an essential human emotion — and a salve for a turbulent mind.

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THE ECOFEMINIST SCHOLAR Donna Haraway has a remarkable talent for diving into new debates in the intellectual zeitgeist. She's been doing it for decades. Her landmark 1985 "A Cyborg Manifesto" drew on feminist theory to critique prevailing ideas about science and gender, and helped launch the field of science and technology studies. Her 2003 The Companion Species Manifesto examined our deep connections to dogs and other nonhuman "critters" (a favorite Haraway word), and she became a notable figure in the emerging discipline of animal studies. Her training as both a scientist and cultural scholar has also extended her influence beyond academia, inspiring a generation of conceptual artists grappling with the ever-growing impact of technology.

More recently, Haraway has waded into the lively debates surrounding the Anthropocene, which she considers "both too big and too small" a concept to explain the perilous state of our planet. She has coined not one, but two words to describe this historical epoch: the "Chthulucene" breaks down the hierarchy between the human and nonhuman worlds, while the "Plantationocene" connects the climate crisis to specific economic and political practices of exploitation.

This is all quite an accomplishment for a theorist with a reputation for difficult and sometimes obscurant writing. From her perch in two University of California, Santa Cruz departments - History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies - Haraway has gained a celebrity status that's rare for academics. She was even the subject of a 2017 documentary film, Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, which sold out at its New York premiere.

Haraway's blend of high theory with a poetic, almost digressive style of writing made me wonder how accessible she would be in an interview for my radio program. I didn't need to worry. Haraway was charming and eager to connect. She's also a fast talker who often speaks in run-on sentences that jump from one big idea to the next. I had the sense that her words can barely keep up with her fertile mind.

Our conversation flowed over a wide range of subjects, from her early career struggles to the interdisciplinary work she's known for; how her love for a dog led her into a series of challenging research questions; and why she believes "making kin" with the more-than-human world is an urgent ethical responsibility. We talked during her visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she and her UC Santa Cruz colleague Anna Tsing spoke at a seminar on the Plantationocene.

¤

STEVE PAULSON: Some scholars are very difficult to categorize because their work spans so many different disciplines, and you are one of those people. You have a PhD in biology, but I've heard you described as a philosopher, an ecological-feminist, a multi-species theorist, a science and technology scholar. How would you describe yourself?

DONNA HARAWAY: I think my work has been question-driven. It's been driven by finding myself in a conjuncture of events, ideas, things, people, and other critters - plants and animals and microbes - that provoke needing to know something and finding myself in an institutional environment that encouraged that.

Is there a disciplinary category that fits what you do?

If I had to choose a single category, it would be as a scholar with skills in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences who tends to work in areas of science studies, particularly on questions of environmentalism, the well-being of plants and animals, and the interactions of diverse human cultures with what many call "nature."

I've also heard you call yourself a "fabulator." I'm not sure that means, but I love the idea.

I've been a reader of science fiction since the flowering of feminist science fiction in the '70s, which is how I got started with books like Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, and the Tales of Nevèrÿon stories. From that reading of science fiction I have what I call my little skein of fibers for "SF": string figures, science fiction, speculative fabulation, science fact, speculative feminism, and so far.

So you're not really drawing a clear line between fiction and nonfiction. Does it all merge together?

It doesn't so much merge together as foreground and background differently. I think the care and feeding of facts is a really important craft skill. Facts are made in human historical circumstances, but not made up. Fiction is more like a gerund, a making. Fiction's imaginative boundaries are quite different. Its narrative rules are differently configured than the narrative rules in, say, evolutionary and ecological science, but there are so many contact zones. So I'm interested in the play, in the Cat's Cradle game, between science fact and speculative fiction.

Clearly, you're very driven by curiosity. Are you also driven by wonder?

I am very attuned to wonder. For example, when I was a biology graduate student at Woods Hole and we were studying marine developmental biology with embryos, we'd all get slightly stoned after dinner and then go skinny dipping off Woods Hole in the phosphorescent ocean.

Weren't those the days!

Then we would go back to the lab for several hours slightly stoned, but really mesmerized by the critters, and watch the early cell divisions of an octopus egg, for example, through a 10 times magnification microscope. You move inside those cells. It's not like you become one with the octopus egg, but just being brought into the otherness of it, you are struck by the fact that this is not yourself, the kind of wonder and beauty and technical virtuosity of a cell. Knowing something about how cells pull this off on in terms of their molecular mechanisms has just fed me as a person in the world.

You've written about the notion of "making kin." What does kinship mean to you?

Making kin seems to me the thing that we most need to be doing in a world that rips us apart from each other, in a world that has already more than seven and a half billion human beings with very unequal and unjust patterns of suffering and well-being. By kin I mean those who have an enduring mutual, obligatory, non-optional, you-can't-just-cast-that-away-when-it-gets-inconvenient, enduring relatedness that carries consequences. I have a cousin, the cousin has me; I have a dog, a dog has me.

I first started using the word "kin" when I was in college in a Shakespeare class because I realized that Shakespeare punned with "kin" and "kind." Etymologically they're very closely related. To be kind is to be kin, but kin is not kind. Kin is often quite the opposite of kind. It's not necessarily to be biologically related but in some consequential way to belong in the same category with each other in such a way that has consequences. If I am kin with the human and more-than-human beings of the Monterey Bay area, then I have accountabilities and obligations and pleasures that are different than if I cared about another place. Nobody can be kin to everything, but our kin networks can be full of attachment sites. I feel like the need for the care across generations is urgent, and it cannot be just a humanist affair.

How does this play out in your own life and your own thinking?

Lots of ways. One of them is in terms of personal family. All of my eggs are fried and before that were maintained carefully haploid, but I have a strong interest in being engaged with the care of young humans. Teaching is of course part of that, but I am also part of an extended family of a seriously close friend who adopted a child from Guatemala 20-odd years ago. My husband now, and my first husband and his partner, became a family - a kin group. We share in-laws, we have built a family without any of us ever having had a biological child, which doesn't mean I'm against biological children but I am really for building households and families and kin otherwise.

I think LGBTQI people from all sections of society, as well as many Indigenous Peoples and African-American communities, have been the most innovative in the United States in terms of building and sustaining really interesting kinds of kin networks, often against great odds. There are lots of very practical issues, including housing and financial issues, and I'm interested in questions of inheritance and adoption law - various ways that people can build financial obligation into each other's friendship networks.

You're talking about redefining family.

It's very materialist stuff. I'm talking about redefining family and I feel like my own family has been a tiny little piece of living that, including my biogenetically related kin. And my family has never been just human beings. To be any kind of animal at all is to be within obligate mutualisms with a whole range of other plants, animals, and microbes and living as a holobiont, not as a single organism or individual. It's good science. And besides, I live with companion animals of the household kind.

You've written about one of those animals. Tell me about your dog, Cayenne.

Ah, Cayenne, dog of my heart! She died at about age 17. She was a purpose-bred Australian shepherd who came into my life when I wanted to play the sport of agility with another serious athlete. I became a much better athlete in order to be worthy of Cayenne. Picture a field 100 feet on the side, fill it up with weave poles, jumps, A-frames, teeter-totters, and tunnels, and put them in some diabolic pattern designed by an agility judge. The dog has to navigate the patterns at speed, in sequence, at the direction of the human being who has walked the course a couple of times but didn't know it before. So the trust between the dog and the human being has to be really strong. You train for thousands of hours. You drive to state fairs and campgrounds and run all day Saturday and Sunday. If you're a working academic and you're doing that two weekends a month, it's got to be your research project.

Obviously, you have to love it, but how do you have time to do this?

I actually got interested in it as a research question. I found coming to understand what motivated the two of us as a team was intellectually compelling. I got really interested in the way dogs think, in the way they perceive the world, in the way these two rather different social mammals nonetheless have long evolutionary and social histories with each other. I'm extremely interested in the history of dogs. I'm interested in street dogs, sports dogs, thrown-away rescue dogs, and the purebred dog scene. I took a fabulous online dog genetics course from Cornell University Vet School while I was working with Cayenne.

What did you learn about how dogs think?

It's very hard to answer that question. Human beings think they know what motivates a dog, but it's pure denial. It is a lie we tell ourselves. We are just learning how to pay attention to what a dog's ears are really doing and what their eyes are really attending to, what range of color their eyes see, and what their range of olfactory perception really is. Or the ways they use their bodies in response to really small cues, or the way they exchange messages. If you're going to play a sport well with a member of another species, you have to learn what actually motivates them. A lot of human beings shut their dogs down by not learning to hold themselves still long enough to figure out what their dog actually likes to do.

It sounds like you had a deep and profound relationship with Cayenne.

It was a very profound, life-changing relationship. It was deep at levels of touch and smell and daily life. She and I were seriously embedded in each other. Cayenne was a dog who did not like inappropriate displays of affection. She was not a snuggle dog. So I had to learn to respect her boundaries as you would with another human being. Cayenne, a herding dog from the American West, also carried her own stories. I'm from Colorado, so I am acutely aware that I grew up as a young white girl on conquest territory on land seized from Comanche, Arapaho, and other Native American tribes, as well as land seized from the Spanish who themselves had multiple layers of conquest.

I'm aware that Cayenne, the dog I fell in love with, is one of the dogs enlisted in the work of herding sheep who are imported from Australia after the Gold Rush to feed the disappointed miners. I was working with a dog who, like me, inherits being white in a certain way in the ranching West and its practices of xenobiology and the claiming of the landscape - and the claiming of the fairgrounds. We played our sport in the fairgrounds with the railroads and the stockyards and quinceañera celebrations on Saturday and the NASCAR racing and the social history built into who we were. So I felt like when you touch someone and someone touches you, one question that emerges is, Okay, who are we? Who do we make each other? And that starts leading you into layers and layers and threads and threads of histories.

So through your relationship with Cayenne, you also learned something about yourself?

I learned a huge amount about myself, and I started caring in a different way about the history of ranching and the Rocky Mountain West, and the history of sport and the relationships of herding dogs to other dogs. My love affair with Cayenne was what brought me to the Colorado Plateau and my study of the Navajo Nation, the Black Mesa Water Coalition, Just Transition, Black Mesa coal mining, the Navajo Generating Station, and the sheep and wool market on the Navajo Nation and the relationship with the wool weavers in Massachusetts. What I'm saying is that Cayenne ended up leading me into worlds I knew nothing about and that my love affair with her led me to know how to care more. Sometimes people say loving a dog is petty and small because it makes you small. But my experience about loving anything - most certainly a dog - is that it makes you bigger and more worldly because all of a sudden you're tracking threads that you weren't curious about before.

And yet some animal advocates say we shouldn't even have pets.

I have a tiny bit of respect for that opinion. This is not a relationship of equality. It's a relationship based on control and necessarily so. Otherwise, you kill your dog with a fantasy of freedom not rooted in what it takes to live together. But if you are seriously against the bringing of any other organisms into relationships of obligatory exchange with human beings, you also could not really seriously domesticate plants. I actually regard pets as a kind of working animal. I think affection is a hard job and pets work really hard. These are complex relations of labor and play, love and violence, and to glorify them is illegitimate. But I also think that to be alive, to live and die with each other, is to be accountable for our forms of love and violence. The relationship with a pet is honorable but not simple.

Did you ever feel like you really got to know what Cayenne was thinking - her subjective experience?

No, I certainly don't think I ever reached any seriously deep understanding, although I knew more than I did before. Some of it is research-based and some of it is interaction- and play-based. But I didn't lose any sleep over that question. At the end of the day, it's who you live with and care about. It's about mutually felt and lived connection, and we had that, even in all of our ignorance.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Jane Goodall, who said she would give anything to be inside the mind of a chimpanzee for a few minutes.

But we're not inside anybody's mind. We're never inside another human being's mind. We're not even inside our own mind. The notion that if I can only kidnap for a minute my own self so that I can actually know who I am - that fantasy of full knowledge is a violent fantasy.

Why violent?

I think it's a kidnapping fantasy. It's a possession of self and other. I think it's a lust for oneness. I understand Jane Goodall's comment and I honor it. Of course, we wish we could know, if only for a minute, what makes the one we love really tick. But very quickly, particularly in the cultures I come from, it becomes a fantasy of perfect communication. And I think that's a violent fantasy that leads us to murder and war. It leads us to violence against the other because the other remains other.

So there's an ethics to honoring unknowability?

And otherness. If you take anybody seriously, one of the things you learn is not knowing. That's one thing I learned from Cayenne and my other dogs. Not knowing is a quasi-Buddhist value. And the appreciation of not knowing and letting that be is something you learn in a serious relationship. It's a kind of letting go. Not knowing and being with each other not knowing.

That's so hard!

It's very hard. But that kind of relationship is also deeply joyful. It takes a lot of restraint, and it takes forgiving each other. It takes forgiving yourself for imposing yourself on the other, for thinking you knew when you didn't, for not paying enough attention to know when you could have.

I want to pull back from the animal-human connection to our larger relationship with the planet. With climate change, we're on the cusp of a potentially catastrophic historical moment. The "Anthropocene" has been used to describe this period in history, but you don't like that word, do you?

I resisted the term Anthropocene because it centered the Anthropos - Man - as if the multiple crises and destructions that merit the term Anthropocene were a species act, as if we did it by virtue of being human, as opposed to being in situated historical processes rooted in systems of a world-changing operation four or five hundred years ago, with the invention of the slave-based plantation and the emergence of capitalism. The creation of wealth through these systems has brought us into our current situation. I don't think it's a species act.

So you've coined a new word, the "Plantationocene."

I threw out that word in a conversation with Anna Tsing and others in Denmark precisely because we wanted to foreground the world-changing importance of our relations to plants. In formulating the Plantationocene, we needed also to pay more attention to the work of mainly Black scholars on plantation slavery and its ongoing consequences, such as Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, and Dianne Glave. The Anthropocene refuses to name the political and economic apparatus that drives the practices that are so destructive, and it treats the dilemma we're in as if it's our own natural evolutionary trajectory. That's simply not true. We act that way in historical conjunctures and systems that can be changed. It's not human nature that's the issue, but a situated historical metabolism with the planet in conditions that nurture extraction and extermination. Not all people have lived on the Earth that way, and it doesn't have to be that way. It can still change.

A lot of people would say the plantation was abolished with slavery more than a hundred years ago. So why use this alternative concept of the Plantationocene?

That is not true. The Plantationocene has if anything expanded. Probably the best contemporary example would be the oil palm plantations that take over mangrove forests and large tracts of land all over the world. Southeast Asia is a good place to think about this, with the destruction of multi-species forests and everybody who lives in them, including people, and the clearing of the land, dislocated and extracted labor, and the planting of a single industrial factory crop.

Do we still live in a plantation economy?

We live in a system of forced monocropping. With forced monocropping, you take a complex area of the world, and you not only radically simplify its ecology, but you also radically reduce the kinds of organisms that live there. Then, you displace the labor force that's already there and import another labor force, using various forms of force, contract, and indentured labor. You bring in new crops that will produce at high rates, preferably for global markets, and you bring in a labor force that literally can't run away. And you call that "agriculture."

That system, which is four or five hundred years old, breaks the tie to place. But people still manage to care about their farms, their cows, their trees. People are astonishingly gifted with the capacity to care, so that even in the worst circumstances that capacity to love is still there. But breaking those ties to place and - here is the real linchpin - breaking the capacity to care for generations, across generations, so that plants, microbes, animals, and people are in a state of disordered reproductive entanglement for wealth creation and extraction of value. I call that the Plantationocene. I don't want to get rid of the Anthropocene, but I think we need more than one word.

As you look at all these trends, particularly in this era of climate change, do you despair?

No! For one thing, I think that's cheap. Then you can just go enjoy yourself or suffer in despair. It's lazy. I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic. The book I wrote was called Staying with the Trouble on purpose, and I am against techno-optimism.

By techno-optimism, do you mean geoengineering?

You know, "They'll fix it." There will be a techno fix down the line. I think technology can solve some problems, but not others. Technology is part of the mix. But we need to reconsider what we're about. As Anna Tsing puts it, we need to figure out how to live well on damaged land. We also need to figure out again and again who "we" are. We're not going to get back to the status quo. But this does not mean we can't fix some things. To live well with each other in a thick present means environmental, multi-species, multiracial, multi-kinded reproductive and environmental justice. We can't control whether this all works in the end. I think futurism defeats us. Our job is to live in a thick time of caring for and with each other. That's neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but it involves cultivating the capacity to keep a kind of love and heart with each other. Pessimism blocks that out.

¤

Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated show To the Best of Our Knowledge. He's the author of Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science.

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Featured image: "Donna Haraway and Cayenne" by Rusten Hogness is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Making Kin: An Interview with Donna Haraway

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THE ECOFEMINIST SCHOLAR Donna Haraway has a remarkable talent for diving into new debates in the intellectual zeitgeist. She's been doing it for decades. Her landmark 1985 "A Cyborg Manifesto" drew on feminist theory to critique prevailing ideas about science and gender, and helped launch the field of science and technology studies.

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Beneath our feet is an ecosystem so astonishing that it tests the limits of our imagination. It's as diverse as a rainforest or a coral reef. We depend on it for 99% of our food, yet we scarcely know it. Soil.

Under one square metre of undisturbed ground in the Earth's mid-latitudes (which include the UK) there might live several hundred thousand small animals. Roughly 90% of the species to which they belong have yet to be named. One gram of this soil - less than a teaspoonful - contains around a kilometre of fungal filaments.

When I first examined a lump of soil with a powerful lens, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. As soon as I found the focal length, it burst into life. I immediately saw springtails - tiny animals similar to insects - in dozens of shapes and sizes. Round, crabby mites were everywhere: in some soils there are half a million in every square metre.

Then I began to see creatures I had never encountered before. What I took to be a tiny white centipede turned out, when I looked it up, to be a different life form altogether, called a symphylid. I spotted something that might have stepped out of a Japanese anime: long and low, with two fine antennae at the front and two at the back, poised and sprung like a virile dragon or a flying horse. It was a bristletail, or dipluran.

As I worked my way through the lump, again and again I found animals whose existence, despite my degree in zoology and a lifetime immersed in natural history, had been unknown to me. After two hours examining a kilogram of soil, I realised I had seen more of the major branches of the animal kingdom than I would on a week's safari in the Serengeti.

That this thin cushion between rock and air can withstand all we throw at it and still support us is a dangerous belief

But even more arresting than soil's diversity and abundance is the question of what it actually is. Most people see it as a dull mass of ground-up rock and dead plants. But it turns out to be a biological structure, built by living creatures to secure their survival, like a wasps' nest or a beaver dam. Microbes make cements out of carbon, with which they stick mineral particles together, creating pores and passages through which water, oxygen and nutrients pass. The tiny clumps they build become the blocks the animals in the soil use to construct bigger labyrinths.

Soil is fractally scaled, which means its structure is consistent, regardless of magnification. Bacteria, fungi, plants and soil animals, working unconsciously together, build an immeasurably intricate, endlessly ramifying architecture that, like Dust in a Philip Pullman novel, organises itself spontaneously into coherent worlds. This biological structure helps to explain soil's resistance to droughts and floods: if it were just a heap of matter, it would be swept away.

It also reveals why soil can break down so quickly when it's farmed. Under certain conditions, when farmers apply nitrogen fertiliser, the microbes respond by burning through the carbon: in other words, the cement that holds their catacombs together. The pores cave in. The passages collapse. The soil becomes sodden, airless and compacted.

But none of the above captures the true wonder of soil. Let's start with something that flips our understanding of how we survive. Plants release into the soil between 11% and 40% of all the sugars they make through photosynthesis. They don't leak them accidentally. They deliberately pump them into the ground. Stranger still, before releasing them, they turn some of these sugars into compounds of tremendous complexity.

Making such chemicals requires energy and resources, so this looks like pouring money down the drain. Why do they do it? The answer unlocks the gate to a secret garden.

These complex chemicals are pumped into the zone immediately surrounding the plant's roots, which is called the rhizosphere. They are released to create and manage its relationships.

Soil is full of bacteria. Its earthy scent is the smell of the compounds they produce. In most corners, most of the time, they wait, in suspended animation, for the messages that will wake them. These messages are the chemicals the plant releases. They are so complex because the plant seeks not to alert bacteria in general, but the particular bacteria that promote its growth. Plants use a sophisticated chemical language that only the microbes to whom they wish to speak can understand.

When a plant root pushes into a lump of soil and starts releasing its messages, it triggers an explosion of activity. The bacteria responding to its call consume the sugars the plant feeds them and proliferate to form some of the densest microbial communities on Earth. There can be a billion bacteria in a single gram of the rhizosphere; they unlock the nutrients on which the plant depends and produce growth hormones and other chemicals that help it grow. The plant's vocabulary changes from place to place and time to time, depending on what it needs. If it's starved of certain nutrients, or the soil is too dry or salty, it calls out to the bacteria species that can help.

Take a step back and you will see something that transforms our understanding of life on Earth. The rhizosphere lies outside the plant, but it functions as if it were part of the whole. It could be seen as the plant's external gut. The similarities between the rhizosphere and the human gut, where bacteria also live in astonishing numbers, are uncanny. In both systems, microbes break down organic material into the simpler compounds the plant or person can absorb. Though there are more than 1,000 phyla (major groups) of bacteria, the same four dominate both the rhizosphere and the guts of mammals.

Just as human breast milk contains sugars called oligosaccharides, whose purpose is to feed not the baby but the bacteria in the baby's gut, young plants release large quantities of sucrose into the soil, to feed and develop their new microbiomes. Just as the bacteria that live in our guts outcompete and attack invading pathogens, the friendly microbes in the rhizosphere create a defensive ring around the root. Just as bacteria in the colon educate our immune cells and send chemical messages that trigger our body's defensive systems, the plant's immune system is trained and primed by bacteria in the rhizosphere.

Soil might not be as beautiful to the eye as a rainforest or a coral reef, but once you begin to understand it, it is as beautiful to the mind. Upon this understanding our survival might hang.

We face what could be the greatest predicament humankind has ever encountered: feeding the world without devouring the planet. Already, farming is the world's greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of the global loss of wildlife and the greatest cause of the global extinction crisis. It's responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that's happened this century. Of 28,000 species known to be at imminent risk of extinction, 24,000 are threatened by farming. Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry. Just 4% of the world's mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%.

Unless something changes, all this is likely to get worse - much worse. In principle, there is plenty of food, even for a rising population. But roughly half the calories farmers grow are now fed to livestock, and the demand for animal products is rising fast. Without a radical change in the way we eat, by 2050 the world will need to grow around 50% more grain. How could we do it without wiping out much of the rest of life on Earth?

Just as farming is trashing crucial Earth systems, their destruction threatens our food supply. Sustaining even current levels of production might prove impossible. Climate breakdown is likely, on the whole, to make wet places wetter and dry places drier. One more degree of heating, one estimate suggests, would parch 32% of the world's land surface. By the middle of this century, severe droughts could simultaneously affect an arc from Portugal to Pakistan. And this is before we consider the rising economic fragility of the global food system, or geopolitical pressures, such as the current war in Ukraine, that might threaten 30% of the world's wheat exports.

It's not just the quantity of production that's at risk, but also its quality. A combination of higher temperatures and higher concentrations of CO ₂ reduces the level of minerals, protein and B vitamins that crops contain. Already, zinc deficiency alone afflicts more than a billion people. Though we seldom discuss it, one paper describes the falling concentrations of nutrients as " existential threats ".

We might barely detect the loss of a soil's resilience until, when drought strikes, fertile lands turn to dustbowls

Some crop scientists believe we can counter these trends by raising yields in places that remain productive. But their hopes rely on unrealistic assumptions. The most important of these is sufficient water. The anticipated growth in crop yields would require 146% more fresh water than is used today. Just one problem: that water doesn't exist.

Over the past 100 years, our use of water has increased six-fold. Irrigating crops consumes 70% of the water we withdraw from rivers, lakes and aquifers. Already, 4 billion people suffer from water scarcity for at least one month a year and 33 major cities, including São Paulo, Cape Town, Los Angeles and Chennai, are threatened by extreme water stress. As groundwater is depleted, farmers have begun to rely more heavily on meltwater from glaciers and snowpacks. But these, too, are shrinking.

A likely flashpoint is the valley of the Indus, whose water is used by three nuclear powers (India, Pakistan and China) and several unstable regions. Already, 95% of the river's flow is extracted. As the economy and the population grow, by 2025 demand for water in the catchment is expected to be 44% greater than supply. But one of the reasons why farming there has been able to intensify and cities to grow is that, as a result of global heating, glaciers in the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas have been melting faster than they've been accumulating, so more water has been flowing down the rivers. This can't last. By the end of the century, between one- and two-thirds of the ice mass is likely to have disappeared. It is hard to see this ending well.

And all this is before we come to the soil, the thin cushion between rock and air on which human life depends, which we treat like dirt. While there are international treaties on telecommunication, civil aviation, investment guarantees, intellectual property, psychotropic substances and doping in sport, there is no global treaty on soil. The notion that this complex and scarcely understood system can withstand all we throw at it and continue to support us could be the most dangerous of all our beliefs.

Soil degradation is bad enough in rich nations, where the ground is often left bare and exposed to winter rain, compacted and wrecked by overfertilisation and pesticides that rip through its foodwebs. But it tends to be even worse in poorer nations, partly because extreme rainfall, cyclones and hurricanes can tear bare earth from the land, and partly because hungry people are often driven to cultivate steep slopes. In some countries, mostly in Central America, tropical Africa and south-east Asia, more than 70% of the arable land is now suffering severe erosion, gravely threatening future production.

Climate breakdown, which will cause more intense droughts and storms, exacerbates the threat. The loss of a soil's resilience can happen incrementally and subtly. We might scarcely detect it until a shock pushes the complex underground system past its tipping point. When severe drought strikes, the erosion rate of degraded soil can rise 6,000-fold. In other words, the soil collapses. Fertile lands turn to dustbowls.

Some people have responded to these threats by calling for the relocalisation and de-intensification of farming. I understand their concerns. But their vision is mathematically impossible.

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A study in the journal Nature Food found the average minimum distance at which the world's people can be fed is 2,200km. In other words, this is the shortest possible average journey that our food must travel if we are not to starve. For those who depend on wheat and similar cereals, it's 3,800km. A quarter of the global population that consumes these crops needs food grown at least 5,200km away.

Why? Because most of the world's people live in big cities or populous valleys, whose hinterland is too small (and often too dry, hot or cold) to feed them. Much of the world's food has to be grown in vast, lightly habited lands - the Canadian prairies, the US plains, wide tracts in Russia and Ukraine, the Brazilian interior - and shipped to tight, densely populated places.

As for reducing the intensity of farming, what this means is using more land to produce the same amount of food. Land use is arguably the most important of all environmental issues. The more land farming occupies, the less is available for forests and wetlands, savannahs and wild grasslands, and the greater is the loss of wildlife and the rate of extinction. All farming, however kind and careful, involves a radical simplification of natural ecosystems.

Environmental campaigners rail against urban sprawl: the profligate use of land for housing and infrastructure. But agricultural sprawl - using large amounts of land to produce small amounts of food - has transformed much greater areas. While 1% of the world's land is used for buildings and infrastructure, crops occupy 12% and grazing, the most extensive kind of farming, uses 28%. Only 15% of land, by contrast, is protected for nature. Yet the meat and milk from animals that rely solely on grazing provide just 1% of the world's protein.

One paper looked at what would happen if everyone in the US followed the advice of celebrity chefs and switched from grain-fed to pasture-fed beef. It found that, because they grow more slowly on grass, the number of cattle would have to rise by 30%, while the land area used to feed them would rise by 270%. Even if the US felled all its forests, drained its wetlands, watered its deserts and annulled its national parks, it would still need to import most of its beef.

Already, much of the beef the US buys comes from Brazil, which in 2018 became the world's largest exporter. This meat is often promoted as "pasture-fed". Many of the pastures were created by illegally clearing the rainforest. Worldwide, meat production could destroy 3m sq km of highly biodiverse places in 35 years. That's almost the size of India.

Only when livestock are extremely sparse is animal farming compatible with rich, functional ecosystems. For example, the Knepp Wildland project in West Sussex, where small herds of cattle and pigs roam freely across a large estate, is often cited as a way to reconcile meat and wildlife. But while it's an excellent example of rewilding, it's a terrible example of food production.

If this system were to be rolled out across 10% of the UK's farmland and if, as its champions propose, we obtained our meat this way, it would furnish each person here with 420 grams of meat a year, enough for around three meals. We could eat a prime steak roughly once every three years. If all the farmland in the UK were to be managed this way, it would provide us with 75kcal a day (one 30th of our requirement) in meat, and nothing else.

Of course, this is not how it would be distributed. The very rich would eat meat every week, other people not at all. Those who say we should buy only meat like this, who often use the slogan "less and better", present an exclusive product as if it were available to everyone.

Campaigners, chefs and food writers rail against intensive farming and the harm it does to us and the world. But the problem is not the adjective: it's the noun. The destruction of Earth systems is caused not by intensive farming or extensive farming, but a disastrous combination of the two.

So what can we do? Part of the answer is to take as much food production out of farming as we can. As luck would have it, the enabling technology has arrived just as we need it. Precision fermentation, producing protein and fat in breweries from soil bacteria, fed on water, hydrogen, CO ₂ and minerals, has the potential to replace all livestock farming, all soya farming and plenty of vegetable oil production, while massively reducing land use and other environmental impacts.

But this remarkable good fortune is threatened by intellectual property rights: it could easily be captured by the same corporations that now monopolise the global grain and meat trade. We should fiercely resist this: patents should be weak and anti-trust laws strong. Ideally, this farm-free food should be open source.

Then we could relocalise production: the new fermentation technologies could be used by local businesses to serve local markets. As some of the world's poorest nations are rich in sunlight, they could make good use of a technology that relies on green hydrogen. Microbial production horrifies some of those who demand food sovereignty and food justice. But it could deliver both more effectively than farming does.

Such technologies grant us, for the first time since the Neolithic period, the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship with the living world. Vast tracts of land can be released from both intensive and extensive farming. The age of extinction could be replaced by an age of regenesis.

A British farmer's revolutionary model of horticulture looks like magic, but is the result of years of meticulous experiments

Of course, we would still need to produce cereals, roots, fruit and vegetables. So how do we do it safely and productively? The answer might lie in our new understanding of the soil.

On a farm in south Oxfordshire, techniques developed by a vegetable grower called Iain Tolhurst - Tolly - seem to have anticipated recent discoveries by soil scientists.

Tolly is a big, tough-looking man in his late 60s, with etched and weathered skin, a broad, heavy jaw, long blond hair, one gold earring, hands grained with earth and oil. He started farming without training or instruction, without land or any means to buy it. After a string of misadventures, he managed to lease seven hectares (17.3 acres) of very poor land at a reduced rent, 34 years ago.

"No conventional grower would even look at this ground," he told me. "It's 40% stone. They'd call it building rubble. It isn't even classed as arable: an agronomist would say it's only good for grass or trees. But over the past 12 months, we harvested 120 tonnes of vegetables and fruit."

Astonishingly, for these 34 years Tolly has been farming this rubble without pesticides, herbicides, mineral treatments, animal manure or any other kind of fertiliser. He has pioneered a way of growing that he calls "stockfree organic". This means he uses no livestock or livestock products at any point in the farming cycle, yet he also uses no artificial inputs.

Until he proved the model, this was thought to be a formula for sucking the fertility out of the land. Vegetables in particular are considered hungry crops, which require plenty of extra nutrients to grow. Yet Tolly, while adding none, has raised his yields until they've hit the lower bound of what intensive growers achieve with artificial fertilisers on good land: a feat widely considered impossible. Remarkably, the fertility of his soil has climbed steadily.

On my first visit, one June, I was struck by the great range and health of Tolly's crops. One plot was a blue haze of onion plants, another a patchwork of sea greens: young cauliflower plants, several kinds of cabbage and kale. There were rows of rainbow chard with gold, green, white and crimson stems. Broad bean pods had begun to sprout from tight pillars of flower. His potatoes were in full bloom, nightshade sinister, stamens like yellow stings. Courgettes extruded rudely behind their trumpet flowers. There were carrots, tomatoes, peppers, beans of all kinds, herbs, parsnips, celeriac, cucumbers, lettuces. He raises 100 varieties of vegetables, which he sells in his farm shop and to subscribers to his veg box.

Separating the plots were untended banks, in which scientists studying his farm have found 75 species of wildflowers. These banks are an essential component of his system, harbouring the insect predators that control crop pests. Though he uses no pesticides, none of the vegetable plants I saw showed signs of significant insect damage: the leaves were dark and wide, with scarcely a hole or a spot.

Almost single-handedly, through trial and error, Tolly has developed a new and revolutionary model of horticulture. At first it looks like magic. In reality, it's the result of many years of meticulous experiments.

Two of his innovations appear to be crucial. The first, as he puts it, is to "make the system watertight": preventing rain from washing through the soil, taking the nutrients with it. What this means is ensuring the land is almost never left bare. Beneath his vegetables grows an understorey of "green manure", plants that cover the soil. Under the leaves of his pumpkins, I could see thousands of tiny seedlings: the "weeds" he had deliberately sown. When the crops are harvested, the green manure fills the gap and soon becomes a thicket of colour: blue chicory flowers, crimson clover, yellow melilot and trefoil, mauve Phacelia, pink sainfoin.

"There's green manure under the green manure," Tolly told me. "As soon as we cut the bigger plants, it comes into flower, and the bees go crazy."

Some of the plants in his mix put down deep roots that draw nutrients from the subsoil. Every so often, Tolly runs a mower over them, chopping them into a coarse straw. Earthworms pull this down and incorporate it into the ground. "The idea is to let the plants put back at least as much carbon and minerals as we take out."

Tolly tells me that "the green manure ties up nutrients, fixes nitrogen, adds carbon and enhances the diversity of the soil. The more plant species you sow, the more bacteria and fungi you encourage. Every plant has its own associations. Roots are the glue that holds and builds the soil biology."

The other crucial innovation is to scatter over the green manure an average of one millimetre a year of chipped and composted wood, produced from his own trees or delivered by a local tree surgeon. This tiny amendment appears to make a massive difference. In the five years after he started adding woodchip, his yields roughly doubled. As Tolly explains: "It isn't fertiliser; it's an inoculant that stimulates microbes. The carbon in the wood encourages the bacteria and fungi that bring the soil back to life." Tolly believes he's adding enough carbon to help the microbes build the soil, but not so much that they lock up nitrogen, which is what happens if you give them more than they need.

What Tolly appears to be doing is strengthening and diversifying the relationships in the rhizosphere - the plant's external gut. By keeping roots in the soil, raising the number of plant species and adding just the right amount of carbon, he seems to have encouraged bacteria to build their catacombs in his stony ground, improving the soil's structure and helping his plants to grow.

Tolly's success forces us to consider what fertility means. It's not just about the amount of nutrients the soil contains. It's also a function of whether they're available to plants at the right moments, and safely immobilised when plants don't need them. In a healthy soil, crops can regulate their relationships with bacteria in the rhizosphere, ensuring that nutrients are unlocked only when they're required. In other words, fertility is a property of a functioning ecosystem. Farm science has devoted plenty of attention to soil chemistry. But the more we understand, the more important the biology appears to be.

Can Tolly's system be replicated? So far the results are inconclusive. But if we can discover how to mediate and enhance the relationship between crop plants and bacteria and fungi in a wide range of soils and climates, it should be possible to raise yields while reducing inputs. Our growing understanding of soil ecology could catalyse a greener revolution.

I believe we could combine this approach with another suite of innovations, by a non-profit organisation in Salina, Kansas, called the Land Institute. It's seeking to develop perennial grain crops to replace the annual plants from which we obtain the great majority of our food. Annuals are plants that die after a single growing season. Perennials survive from one year to the next.

Large areas dominated by annuals are rare in nature. They tend to colonise ground in the wake of catastrophe: a fire, flood, landslide or volcanic eruption that exposes bare rock or soil. In cultivating annuals, we must keep the land in a catastrophic state. If we grew perennial grain crops, we would be less reliant on smashing living systems apart to produce our food.

For 40 years, the Land Institute has been scouring the world for perennial species that could replace the annuals we grow. Already, working with Fengyi Hu and his team at Yunnan University in China, it has developed a perennial rice with yields that match, and in some cases exceed, those of modern annual breeds. Farmers are queueing up for seed. While annual rice farming can cause devastating erosion, the long roots of the perennial varieties bind and protect the soil. Some perennial rice crops have now been harvested six times without replanting.

Perennials are their own green manures. The longer they grow, the stronger their relationships with microbes that fix nitrogen from the air and release other minerals. One estimate suggests that perennial systems hold five times as much of the water that falls on the ground as annual crops do.

The Land Institute is developing promising lines of perennial wheat, oil crops and other grains. The deep roots and tough structures of perennial plants could help them to withstand climate chaos. The perennial sunflowers the institute is breeding have sailed through two severe droughts, one of which entirely destroyed the annual sunflowers grown alongside them.

While no solution is a panacea, I believe that some of the components of a new global food system - one that is more resilient, more distributed, more diverse and more sustainable - are falling into place. If it happens, it will be built on our new knowledge of the most neglected of major ecosystems: the soil. It could resolve the greatest of all dilemmas: how to feed ourselves without destroying the living systems on which we depend. The future is underground.

George Monbiot will discuss Regenesis at a Guardian Live event in London on Monday 30 May. Book tickets to join the event in person, or via the livestream here.

Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot is published by Penguin Books at £20 on 26 May. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing - and the key to our planet's future

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Don't dismiss soil: its unknowable wonders could ensure the survival of our species

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SEE THE FILM

Fantastic Fungi is now available!

"Schwartzberg's film quickly proves to be one of the year's most mind-blowing, soul-cleansing and yes, immensely entertaining triumphs."

"As researchers describe the workings of vast underground networks of mycelium, the filmmakers offer CG that is just as polished as the time-lapse, and more colorful. It's spookily beautiful, even, especially when envisioning what lies unseen beneath old-growth forests."

~ John Defore,
The Hollywood Reporter

"Captain Marvel ain't got nothing on fungi"

"Fantastic Fungi is a film that is rife with hope and joy."

~ Michael Frank,
Cinema Sentries

"If you've never thought much about fungi before, prepare to be amazed. You'll be awed by Schwartzberg's remarkable time-lapse images. His passion for fungi is written into every fibre of the film and it's infectious."

"Fantastic Fungi makes the case that the answers to disease, anxiety, depression and global warming might be found underfoot. And they're tasty to boot."

"He makes mushrooms look totally sexy as they explode into "sporegasms," releasing their reproductive bits into the environment."

"... Mind-Blowing Science..."

"Awe-Inspiring"

WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE A DONATION TO THE FILM?

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SEE THE FILM Fantastic Fungi is now available! "Schwartzberg's film quickly proves to be one of the year's most mind-blowing, soul-cleansing and yes, immensely entertaining triumphs." "As researchers describe the workings of vast underground networks of mycelium, the filmmakers offer CG that is just as polished as the time-lapse, and more colorful.

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My Octopus Teacher | Official Trailer | Netflix

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A new study has highlighted how little is known about microbes - the hidden majority of life on Earth.

Life on the planet relies on an enormous quantity of bacteria, fungi and other tiny organisms. They generate oxygen, keep soils healthy and regulate the climate. Microbes play a crucial role in food production, such as cheese, beer, yoghurt and bread.

But despite their importance to human life and the health of the Earth, a new scientific paper has shown our "profound ignorance" of microbial biodiversity and how it is changing.

"We have no idea whether global microbial diversity is increasing, decreasing, or staying the same," said David Thaler, a biologist at Basel University and author of the paper. "Most scientific papers tell us new facts. This is a different kind of paper; it does not answer anything but asks a new question."

Many plant and animal populations are rapidly decreasing, with about 1 million species at risk of extinction, according to a 2019 UN-backed report. Plants and animals are counted over time to monitor how their populations change.

Microbes are often found in extreme environments - surviving at the bottom of the ocean, frozen deep inside glaciers and even inside a toxic volcanic lake - making them hard to study. Although poorly understood, bacteria and other tiny organisms are widespread in the deep biosphere below the Earth's surface.

Prof Frederick Cohan, a microbial ecologist at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, who reviewed the study prior to publication, said that although animal and microbe extinctions may go hand in hand, new bacterial species could form at such high rates that they may be increasing regardless of plant and animal extinctions.

"When a mammal species goes extinct, we should expect that all the microbes that depend primarily or exclusively on that species should also go extinct," he said.

"On the other hand, microbial ecologists like me who study the diversity of extremely closely related bacteria find that there are always new bacterial species being formed. There are always new ways for bacteria to divvy up the existing resource to allow for new species."

Microbial communities on the surface of kelp. Around 90% of the ocean's total weight of organisms is microbes. Photograph: Tabita Ramirez-Puebla and Jessica Mark Welch/Marine Biological Laboratory

The paper considers how to study changes in global microbial biodiversity, including by monitoring small sequence changes similar to those used to track Covid-19 variants, and analysing the molecular machinery of gene transfer. Researchers hope the study will inspire others to investigate.

"Socrates called ignorance of what we do not know 'profound ignorance'. This kind of ignorance was also termed 'unknown unknowns' by former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This paper identifies what is, or was, as of now, a biological unknown unknown," said Thaler.

Jesse Ausubel, director of the Rockefeller University'sprogramme for the human environment, a sponsor of the study, said: "Linnaeus started his Systema Naturae in 1735, almost 300 years ago, and we still do not have a complete list of the plants and animals species that he started to catalogue. It will not be easy to do something similar with probably 1,000 times as many microbes and measure the changes."

Microbes in the human body have been linked to conditions from obesity and type 2 diabetes to food intolerances and anxiety. But the consequences for the planet of humanity's ignorance about how microbial life is changing is also unclear, the study finds.

About 90% of the ocean's total weight of organisms is microbes, according to the 2010 Census of Marine Life. Microbes are critical in carbon capture, they breakdown organic matter and form the basis of the food web.

Kelp microbes. These tiny organisms sit at the bottom of food chains, breaking down organic matter so it can be used by other living things. Photograph: Tabita Ramirez-Puebla and Jessica Mark Welch/Marine Biological Laboratory

Viruses such as Covid-19 and other microbes, such as the Yersinia pestis bacterium responsible for bubonic plague, can cause illnesses and are increasingly linked to the destruction of the natural world. Understanding changes in the abundance and diversity of microbes is important for understanding the health of the planet.

"There is no agency yet monitoring the state of the microbial world, and no WWF or Nature Conservancy for microbes. Perhaps one day soon we will realise and rectify our neglect and lift our respect for the diversity of microbial life," said Ausubel.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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Microbes are 'unknown unknowns' despite being vital to all life, says study

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A new study has highlighted how little is known about microbes - the hidden majority of life on Earth. Life on the planet relies on an enormous quantity of bacteria, fungi and other tiny organisms. They generate oxygen, keep soils healthy and regulate the climate.

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becoming: an exhibition based on a course with Camilla Nelson

Transreading Interspecies Empathy & Innovative Poetics

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Transreading Interspecies Empathy & Innovative Poetics

an exhibition of language art

BECOMING is a creative enquiry into the relationship of human and nonhuman organisms that blends techniques borrowed from poetry, sound art, fine art and performance. This project investigates what it is to BE fungus, plant, insect, bird and animal in a shamanistic effort to try on other ways of being, to better explore and integrate these different ways of being within our human selves.

In Spring 2020, as government responses to coronavirus shut human activity down, the rest of the world thrived. Unmown verges flowered and seeded. Animals moved into urban centres. Air and water cleared. Bird, fish and insect populations began to recover. BECOMING builds on this heightened sensitivity and commitment, developed during the pandemic, to finding a better way to live with nonhuman life forms.

The work exhibited here investigates what happens when we combine human language with fungal, plant, insect, bird and animal forms, behaviours and methods of communication. Trying on nonhuman structures in our own language-making in order to better understand the world beyond us and to explore how nonhuman patterning can open up new avenues for human expression.

The artwork for this exhibition was developed by participants of BECOMING: Transreading Interspecies Empathy & Innovative Poetics (May-July 2022), a course developed and run over 5 fortnights by Camilla Nelson (Singing Apple Press) for the Poetry School, as part of the Transreading series co-curated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese. The aim of this course was to develop extra-human and extra-linguistic poetries that embrace nonhuman strategies of being in the world; to identify nonhuman presence and influence within human language in order to explore what it means to speak with, rather than merely on behalf of, other life forms. For details of similar courses, look here.

We hope you enjoy the show!

"I sat with the same sea kale over 2 days, listening , feeling , meditating , licking , eating and viewing it in an attempt to absorb its essence. In my mind and feelings, human classification and description - in any language - do not hold any relevance to the sea kale within its life and have attempted to move beyond the subjective / objective view of ' us ' and ' it 'within the poem where separation and dualistic perception become irrelevant."

benjamin cusden's first pamphlet Cut the Black Rabbit is published by Against the Grain Poetry Press. His poetry has been published in the UK ; Eire ; Canada ; the USA and Brazil. benjamin has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, Live Canon's International Prize and in 2020 he was selected for the London Library's Emerging Writers Programme. https://www.benjamincusden.com

As a visual artist, Christine's work explores our entangled relationship with impermanence, place, and nature. Her sites of thinking-through-doing: a woodland, an abandoned mine, an old railway. Spaces full of stories of ownership, extraction and rewilding that collect like leaves and find their way into my paintings, photographs, artists books and poems. www.cpartist.co.uk

7 dialekter af Gulspurv // 7 sonograms of the Danish Yellowhammer

(15 May 2022; Høvblege, Møn)

Typical Yellowhammer song lasts 3 seconds; full song structure, which conveys stronger territory defence, finishes with a shorter high sound and a longer low sound. In Denmark, the Yellowhammer (also called Scribe, Scribble Lark, Writing Lark) is known to count to 7. Only 3 out of 7 Danish Yellowhammer dialects can be distinguished by our human ear. Female Yellowhammer chooses for her partner a male speaking her dialect.

1 Hare in 6 Klintholm Havn Rothkos

an artist's book

On my first evening on the Danish island of Møn (20 August 2020), I saw a Hare. Since then, I've met more Hares in this UNESCO biosphere, but I keep returning to the first encounter: shying away from 'poetic/symbolic' readings of the Hare; learning from this Hare how to see sunsets (not only in Klintholm Havn/Harbour).

Note: Section v uses phrases borrowed from Lawrence Alloway on Rothko, quoted in 'Under the Influence: Robert Ryman and His Obsession with Mark Rothko's Paintings,' Artspace (Sept 7, 2017); section vi is an abridged quote from Rothko's 'How to Combine Architecture, Painting and Sculpture,' 7/1951, Writings on Art, ed. Miguel López-Remiro (Yale UP, 2006) 74.

Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese writes with/in English, Polish and Danish. Her multimedia texts rely on fieldwork, artmaking and research-based writing in conversation with Møn: a small island in south-east Denmark; UNESCO biosphere shaped by its more-than-human and human communities, the Baltic and, long ago, a retreating glacier which thrusted chalk deposits to cliffs.

insta: @elzbietawojcikleese

"I've felt the thrips around me and created a font with their bodies.

This poem is part of a series of experiments with pastel."

ash eyelash

light eyelid

hot

salt

silence*

* text of the poem in alternative font

The drawing : I've felt all the sides of my phalaenopsis. I've listened to it with a stethoscope. I've looked at some graphic music and dance scores. The drawing is part of a series of experiments with pastel. The video is the dance part of the score.

The dance : Session of MaAb (absorbing walk)*, in conversation with the graphic score created by Isabela Montello, as a guide. June 2022, Cirque de Campuls, Pyrénées ariégeoises. Drawing (graphic score): Isabela Montello. Image (video) - movement (dance-walk) : Pénélope Laurent-Noye.

*MaAb is one of the three experiential protocols that emerged from the improvisational process I have been developing since 2007, which is called archeopia (archaeology of presence in interactions).

Isabela Montello was born in Brazil. She lives and works in France. Her poems have appeared in zarf, Só a poesia salva (Primata) and I Jornada Internacional de Poesia Visual.

Penelope Laurent-Noye was born in Lyon in 1988 and currently resides in the French Pyrenees. Dancer, walker, improviser, meditator, continual learner and practitioner of the arts of attention, she trained and works in the fields of dance making and mindful awareness practices with a focus on making visible the implicit dimension of interelatedness between human and other-than-human sentient beings.

Rachel Ellen is a poet living in Oxfordshire with a deep love of words, their music, and encounters with the more-than-human world.

Documenting a series of mini experiments: I began by listening to Red List birds, thinking about how we keep missing their calls. If they FaceTimed, would humans finally answer?

Over the course of one week becoming bird, from the squash court to the cemetery, I wondered could a higher calling be heard?

https://genreunknown.cargo.site/

Sara Vanore Rewkiewicz is based in London with her canine soul mate, fungi kin and human companion. If she could live in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park she would, but for now simply visiting will do.

Mechanosensory Score for Ensemble

Image Description: Close up of beach sand with piles of small dead fish, alewives, shored up with driftwood in their usual spring cyclical die-off on Lake Michigan. Flies flit between and land on the corpses. Subtitles available by clicking on CC or text is shared below film.

time signature in tandem airborne beats then touchdown feet antennas to death's details the particular smoosh & suck of it claws & pads jerk quickquick quick! alight then cling to smooth choreography of decay bandits diptera two-winged swivel flock shift flawless landing on flank of alewife silver die-off buffet horizon line on the beach flashy fishy skin pulses black pause black with green iridescence buzz zz! z!z! codes switch to funk smell blown southeasterly business of flies answers the decomposition riddle: feed / mate / incubate / hatch one-stop maggot cycle fury big lake waves wash other rhythms jagged driftwood hum sand bar quake stone roller shuffle backdrop for advanced aerobatics

Stephanie Heit is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe land in Ypsilanti, Michigan, US. She is the author of PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017).

All work was generated forB ECOMING: Transreading Interspecies Empathy & Innovative Poetics (May-July 2022), a Transreading course developed & run for Poetry School by British language artist, Camilla Nelson.
The Poetry School Transreading series is co-curated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese.

If you are interested in more BECOMING courses, please visit

https://www.singingapplepress.com/workshops

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"I sat with the same sea kale over 2 days, listening , feeling , meditating , licking , eating and viewing it in an attempt to absorb its essence.

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by Valentina Lagomarsino
figures by Hannah Zucker

When scientists first studied the structure of nerve cells that comprise the human brain, they noted their strong resemblance to trees. In fact, dendrites, the term to describe projections from a nerve cell, comes from the Greek word Dendron, for "tree." While the connection in the appearance of nerve cells was made to trees, the comparison may have been more apt than originally realized: scientists are starting to uncover that trees have their own sort of nervous system that is capable of facilitating tree communication, memory and learning.

Forests are complex systems

Forests cover 30% of Earth's land surface and hold over a billion trees. Forests are known as "carbon sinks" because trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air, store the carbon in their trunks, and exhale oxygen. Scientist have leveraged this property to measure the ratio between two naturally occurring forms of carbon ( ¹²carbon and ¹⁴carbon) to assign an age to trees, a technique termed carbon dating. Using this technique, scientists found that trees living in forests, like the tree colony called Pando, tend to live longer than trees living in urban environments, often in isolation. Dendrologists, scientists who study wooded plants, thought that perhaps trees that lived together were helping each other by sending resources through their roots. To test this out in North American forests, dendrologists utilized a technique called isotope tracing. In this experiment, scientists injected carbon dioxide gas replaced with radiolabeled ¹⁴carbon into the trunk of Birch trees (Figure 1). When nearby Fir trees were covered by shaded cloth, to block their ability to acquire nutrients through photosynthesis, scientists found a higher level of radiolabeled ¹⁴carbon in their trunk, meaning they must have received sugars from the Birch. These experiments confirmed that trees are indeed communicating with each other and sharing nutrients through their roots, forming a complex system sometimes referred to as the "wood wide web."

With a little help from my friends

This complex network connecting trees is dependent on a symbiotic relationship with microbes in the soil like fungi and bacteria. Symbiosis is when two separate organisms form a mutually advantageous relationship with each other. Fungi can cover a large surface area by developing white fungal threads known as mycelium. Mycelium spreads out on top of tree roots by up-taking sugars from the tree and by providing vital minerals back to the tree, such as nitrogen and phosphorus (Figure 2). This symbiotic relationship between tree roots and fungi is known as the mycorrhizal network (from Greek, Myco, "fungi" and Rhiza, "root").

To identify the species that constitute the mycorrhizal network, scientists have utilized recent technological advances in DNA sequencing and big-data analysis. Microbiologists have identified different species of fungi and bacteria that form symbiotic relationships with different species of trees. Scientists believe all trees have a mycorrhizal network, but trees only communicate with each other if the fungal and bacterial species that constitute their mycorrhizal networks are the same. The most common combination of fungi constitute the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) network, which has been found to be important for nutrient uptake in 65% of all trees and plant species. The remaining 35% of tree and plant species may have combinations of other fungi varieties that comprise their networks.

By investigating the different interactions between species of trees, scientists found that trees leverage similarities and differences in their microbial "makeup" to recognize other trees of their own species, and they preferentially share nutrients with them through their mycorrhizal network. This behavior, known as "kin recognition," was recently explored when multiple families of Douglas Fir trees were planted in a plot and carbon tracing experiments indicated that trees of the same family shared more carbon than between trees of different families. Scientists are still investigating why this is happening, but it is hypothesized that all plants evolved to have kin recognition for reproductive purposes. Similarly, there is cross-talk between different species of trees that share the same mycorrhizal network, such as between Birch and Fir trees (Figure 3). Interspecies tree communication has been shown to increase the fitness and resiliency of trees.

Mycorrhizal networks are extremely important for tree health during times of danger. Certain species of fungi can facilitate tree resilience to certain environmental stressors such as predators, toxins, and pathogenic microbes that invade an ecosystem. By using a technique called allelopathy, in which a chemical signal is sent through the mycorrhizal network, trees can warn their neighbors about an invasive predator or to inhibit growth of invasive plant species. Surrounding trees can then defend themselves by releasing volatile hormones or chemicals to deter predators or pathogenic bugs. It was even found that trees can send a stress signal to nearby trees after a major forest disturbance, such as deforestation.

Climate change affects the microbiome of the forest

Trees rely on a healthy forest ecosystem to thrive and protect themselves from danger. Humans rely on a healthy forest ecosystem to be able to inhale clean oxygen. Last year, millions of people around the world experienced the devastating effects of climate change. Not only is climate change impacting human health and wellbeing, but it is also affecting the ecosystem of our oceans and forests. Human-initiated deforestation contributes to climate change by reducing the number of trees that are available to soak up carbon dioxide. Deforestation not only removes the trees that are being cut down, but also impacts trees that are still alive by disrupting the mycorrhizal network that is important for intra-tree communication.

Changes in climate, as seen through increased droughts and extreme temperatures, may further disrupt the biodiversity of the microbes in the forest. This decline in biodiversity is known as human assisted evolution, or " unnatural selection". The altered microbiota of the forest may then change the nutrients that trees are able to receive and we may start seeing changes in tree morphology, particularly in the shape of leaves. This would change the photosynthetic capacity of the tree; for example, smaller leaves have less surface area for light absorption, which will negatively impact their ability to absorb the sun's rays and produce sugars through photosynthesis. This could potentially inhibit tree growth and the amount of carbon that trees can share with fungi. Furthermore, without a biodiverse mycorrhizal network, trees are becoming more susceptible to destruction from invasive, harmful insect species. It is clear that the impact we are making on the environment is self-perpetuating and heading in a dire direction for the health of our forests, but there is still hope. Some scientists are trying to combat climate change by using gene-editing techniques to restore ecosystems that have become extinct and by engineering synthetic microbes that are important for a thriving ecosystem.

Trees are considered to be the oldest living organisms on the planet. Over centuries, they have been resilient to changes in their environment due to their symbiotic relationship to fungi and other microbes. There are so many more discoveries to be made to understand the ancient wisdom of our forests and the invisible microbes that keep our ecosystems in harmony.
Valentina Lagomarsino is a first-year PhD student in the Biological Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard University. Hannah Zucker is a second-year PhD candidate in the Program in Neuroscience at Harvard University.
For more information:

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Exploring The Underground Network of Trees - The Nervous System of the Forest - Science in the News

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by Valentina Lagomarsino figures by Hannah Zucker When scientists first studied the structure of nerve cells that comprise the human brain, they noted their strong resemblance to trees. In fact, dendrites, the term to describe projections from a nerve cell, comes from the Greek word Dendron, for "tree."

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How trees talk to each other | Suzanne Simard

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Scientists estimate that there are about 8.7 million species of animals on Earth - give or take 1.3 million. But in the beginning there could be only one.

That animal was very likely the simple sea sponge, according to a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Based on new genetic tests, the team of scientists can say with confidence that molecules produced by sea sponges have been found in 640-million-year-old rocks. These rocks significantly predate the Cambrian explosion, the period 540 million years ago in which most animal groups took over the planet, suggesting that sea sponges may have been the first animals.

The researchers write in the study, which was published Friday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that their testing provides " the oldest evidence for animal life. "

"We brought together paleontological and genetic evidence to make a pretty strong case that this really is a molecular fossil of sponges," explains David Gold, a post-doctoral researcher in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), in a press release.

Paleontologists have long struggled to determine which type of animal was the first to the evolutionary line. While they have unearthed a large number of fossils from the start of the Cambrian explosion, the fossils that are known from before then are peculiar in many respects.

EAPS Professor Roger Summons has spent more than two decades searching for the animal kingdom's extended evolutionary tree. His lab has been looking for clues in molecular fossils, trace amounts of molecules that have survived in ancient rocks long after the rest of an animal has decayed.

The so-called "'sponge biomarker hypothesis" was first hypothesized in 1994 and partially confirmed in 2009. It focuses on 24-isopropylcholestane, a lipid molecule, or sterol, that scientists have found in unusually high amounts in Cambrian and slightly older rocks. Genetic testing by Dr. Gold adds "a further layer of evidence supporting" the theory that sponges or their ancestors might be their source, Dr. Summons said in the release.

The results of the study provide strong evidence that sea sponges appeared on Earth 640 million years ago, much earlier than any other life form.

"This brings up all these new questions: What did these organisms look like? What was the environment like? And why is there this big gap in the fossil record?" Gold says. "This goes to show how much we still don't know about early animal life, how many discoveries there are left, and how useful, when done properly, these molecular fossils can be to help fill in those gaps.

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Did all animal life on Earth begin with a sea sponge?

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Scientists estimate that there are about 8.7 million species of animals on Earth - give or take 1.3 million. But in the beginning there could be only one. That animal was very likely the simple sea sponge, according to a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

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Find a spot outside this week, a place you are exposed to the elements and can watch animals and insects. This could be in a wilderness area, neighborhood greenspace or park, your own backyard or front porch stoop, or even a balcony or designated balcony where you can see outside. For this practice you are intentionally distancing yourself from other humans so you can focus your senses on all of the wild others that also occupy that space.

Spend at least 30 minutes getting to know the place with all your senses, consciously waking up your animal body. Notice the lay of the land, what the air feels and smells like, where the wind comes from, how the water (if any) moves. Which plants, animals, and insects live there?

After you have spent time noticing the landscape with your senses, introduce yourself to the place. This of course will feel strange, and that is okay! We are discovering that anything "normal" is subjective and fleeting anyway. Verbally articulate who you are, where you come from, even why you are to your place. See if anything happens in response - at first nothing may, because places need time to know us. As John Fire Lame Deer (Lakota) said, "A good way to start thinking about nature: talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as to our relatives."

You are beginning the practice of seeing the land and wild ones as what Thomas Berry would call, "a community of subjects, not a collection of objects." The simple act of deeper noticing and self-introduction begins the critical shift needed to see creation as a community with whom we can be in communion. This is essential for creating your wild sanctuary.

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Sacred Sit Spot Practice #1 - Waymarkers

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You are beginning the practice of seeing the land and wild ones as what Thomas Berry would call, "a community of subjects, not a collection of objects."

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Tools to Cope With Climate Anxiety (and Your Climate-Denying Uncle) | Atmos

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A climate-aware therapist answers your questions on how to cope with fear, talk to skeptics, and keep showing up.

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Braided Way Magazine - Faces and Voices of Spiritual Practice

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The locust leaves lie like golden scales across the stones. I imagine, last night, a honey-colored snake winding along the path, parallel to the river, rubbing off the skin of the past year. A light rain frills the air, hung on wind, refusing to fall, swept forever sideways as if guided by another gravity. It is almost Samhain. A time when some believe that the dead are closest. Although ancestral celebrations punctuate the entire calendrical years, each tailored to different ecosystems and practices. The dead, outside of our idea of time as a linear progression, paradoxically mark the passing of time.

How do we honor our ancestors? What are the rituals and the spells necessary to mark this time? I want to offer that although rituals are powerful and spells can summon the unexpected, there is no need of special instruction or initiation. All you need is your hands, your eyes, and the constant infinity loop drawn between your lungs and the churning, sporulated air of the entire world.

You do not need to build an ancestor altar. You do not need to trace your bloodline back ten generations. Ancestry isn't a lineage. It is a nonlinear tangle of animacy with multiple points of entry. For me, ancestry extends beyond the human. It is rhizomatic, rooting into different species and deep time.

Your body is an ancestor. Your body is an altar to your ancestors. Every one of your cells holds an ancient and anarchic love story. Around 2.7 billion years ago free-living prokaryotes melted into one another to form the mitochondria and organelles of the cells that build our bodies today. All you need to do to honor your ancestors is to roll up like a pill bug, into the innate shape of safety: the fetal position. The curl of your body, then, is an altar not just to the womb that grew you, but to the retroviruses that, 200 million years ago taught mammals how to develop the protein syncytin that creates the synctrophoblast layer of the placenta. Breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath loops you into the biome of your ecosystem. Every seven to ten years your cells will have turned over, rearticulated by your inhales and exhales, your appetites and proclivity for certain flavors. If you live in a valley, chances are the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot, the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very molecular make up of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes. Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized into the fossil fuels. You are threaded through with fossils. Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates and blood lineages. You are the ongoing-ness of the dead. The alembic where they are given breath again. Every decision, every idea, every poem you breathe and live is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself.

Today I realize that due to the miracle of metabolic recycling, it is even possible that my body, somehow, holds the cells of my great-great grandmother. Or your great-great grandmother. Or that I am built from carbon that once intimately orchestrated the flight of a hummingbird or a pterodactyl. Your body is an ecosystem of ancestors. An outcome born not of a single human thread, but a web of relations that ripples outwards into the intimate ocean of deep time.

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Your Body is an Ancestor - Braided Way Magazine

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You do not need to build an ancestor altar. You do not need to trace your bloodline back ten generations. Ancestry isn't a lineage. It is a nonlinear tangle of animacy with multiple points of entry. For me, ancestry extends beyond the human. It is rhizomatic, rooting into different species and deep time.

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When I was a teenager, I embarked on a personal mission to consciously transform my connection with nature.

By far, one of the most impactful things I ever did to achieve this result was the decision to use a sit spot.
A sit spot (or secret spot) is simply a favorite place in nature that you visit regularly to cultivate awareness as you expand your senses and study patterns of local plants, birds, trees, animals, etc.
By choosing one place outside that you visit over and over again, it teaches you to develop the most ancient parts of human awareness and gradually acquire enhanced sensitivity to nature.

Many people describe the sit spot experience as like waking up because it gently coaxes your senses to function at a higher level.

With practice, this routine will facilitate a complete transformation of your ability to observe patterns through all aspects of the outdoors and even in your every day life.

It's also the simplest way to cultivate naturalist skills like animal tracking, bird language, knowledge of plants & wilderness survival.

So today I'm going to walk you through all aspects of how to get started with a sit spot routine and get all the amazing benefits for yourself.

We'll start with the underlying philosophy, and then look at how you can actually do the sit spot routine step by step.

There's a lot to cover here so I've created a table of contents to help you quickly find what you're looking for:
Section 1 - Sit Spot Philosophy 1.1 Why Sit Spot Matters In Modern Times Section 2 - Sit Spot Practice 2.1 The Importance of Keeping Sit Spot Simple Section 3 - Integrating Sit Spot Into Your Life 3.1 Integrating Sit Spot With Daily Life
3.2 Choosing Where To Put Your Sit Spot
3.3 Finding Time For Sit Spot (And How Long...)

Technology has changed what modern humans put into their brains...

3.4 Finding Security (Money And Sit Spot)
3.5 Final Conclusions And Next Steps...
2.2 Focus On Nature Observation & Sensory Awareness
2.3 Four Essential Sit Spot Awareness Exercises

Emotional intelligence

Problem solving

Self control & willpower

Creativity

Empathy & communication

Ability to think in terms of systems & big picture

Focus & Memory

Musical & artistic talent

Overall success & happiness in life

The problem is that most people today program their brains with electronics & technology, video games, social media, smart phones and world news, rather than nature (like our primitive ancestors).
2.4 Common Experiences At Sit Spot (What To Expect On The Journey)
1.2 Effects Of Technology On Human Evolution

Human brains evolved in a palaeolithic environment

1.3 How Sit Spot Balances Nature & Technology
1.4 Benefits of Having A Sit Spot In Nature

1. Our communities rapidly grew in size & complexity.

2. People spent less time immersed in nature through hunting & gathering.

3. This is the emergence of possession & ownership of material things.

4. It's also where we find the first evidence of inequality between classes & sexes.

There's a lot to cover, so let's get started with section 1 - Sit Spot Philosophy.
Most important is to realize that new technologies actually change what human beings put into their brains on a daily basis...
Why Sit Spot Matters In Modern Times...

So you might be wondering...

Why would anyone in the modern world even want to develop their awareness by sitting in nature?

Well, the modern benefits of having a sit spot in nature really come down to evolution and the effect that nature has on the human brain.

Here's what I mean by that...

You can think of the human brain as like an organic computer that has been gradually evolving into it's current state over millions of years.
Human society has seen more changes in the last 50 years, than in the entirety of preceding human history...
And just like any computer, your brain needs programming in order to be used effectively.

So while everyone starts out with the pretty much the same hardware... as a course of life & how we're raised, we each learn to use our brains differently and therefore get dramatically different results.

This is why some people end up being so much more successful or happy than others despite having basically the same intelligence, opportunities and overall potential.

Plus - because of neuroplasticity, we also know that the way you use your brain on a daily basis will gradually change how your brain functions.

Modern human environments dull the senses and have massive negative effects on mental health

So the way you use your brain (or not) over long term patterns can gradually cause growth or atrophy of essential human skills like:

It's this almost constant bombardment of disorganized data that is shown to have significant detrimental effects on the human brain.

Even the best minds in companies developing those technologies are talking about the loss of human connectivity, citing the loss of creativity and communication skills.

The Effects of Nature VS Technology On Human Evolution

The result of a brain programmed by technology is a stark contrast to what happens when human brains are exposed to nature.

For the vast majority of human evolution, nature was the primary source of programming for the human mind.

This means almost all of our sensory stimulation came from cultivating deep knowledge of birds, plants, trees, animal tracking, wilderness survival skills, and the stories of our elders.

We lived in very small & close-knit tribes, where depth of relationships is emphasized over quantity of relationships.

Then with the discovery of farming around 12,000 BC, for the first time in human existence, our species took a dramatic turn as a result of new technology.

Here's what happened when humans discovered agriculture:

For the first time in human history we experienced how technology can dramatically affect our daily environment, thereby causing large-scale cultural shifts that impact human quality of life.

And farming was just the beginning.

The technology of agriculture was followed by thousands of years of further progress & development that both improved human life while simultaneously creating new and unforeseen challenges.

This is a significant thing that affects each living person on our planet today.

It's almost like there's an inverse, one-to-one relationship between nature & technology...

With each new step forward humans take with technology, there is always an associated and complimentary step back and away from our wild origins.

And it's really just in these last 50 years that the biggest changes have taken place.

To the point where for the first time in history, there are people alive today who have almost no discernible connection with nature.

Sit spot awakens the deepest and most ancient of human awareness potential

They've never stepped foot in a forest, or heard bird song anywhere other than movies & video games.

There are people today who live their entire lives inside computer screens, text messages, and busy schedules that scatter their focus to the wind.

Humans function at their peak intelligence, emotional openness and creativity when we are sensorily connected to nature...
And all this creates side effects that wilderness author & survival skills expert Tom Brown Jr called "The Land of The Living Dead."

He describes it as people shuffling down busy city streets in clumps like herds of domesticated animals, day after day, with almost zombie like expressions on their faces.

Their eyes look but they don't really see.
Their ears hear, but they don't really listen.

And while these people may be technically alive, there's a certain passion & spark for life that has been lost in the modern age of electronics.

Just think about it:

What is this doing to our species?
What is the effect of all this disconnection on the future generations?

Well, we know from modern research that human environments that lack connection with nature are associated with epidemics in clinical depression, attention deficit & anxiety disorders.

We've effectively created a society where creativity, passion and a genuine spark for life are stifled.

And this is why taking time to sit quietly and cultivate awareness in nature matters.

Sit spot is truly the simplest cure for this modern disconnect from our full sensory, emotional & intellectual potential as human beings.

Improved sensory awareness & sensory acuity

Enhanced critical thinking, problem solving, deductive & inductive thinking (especially when Sit Spot is associated with studies in animal tracking)

Improved creativity

Better naturalist skills, wildlife tracking, bird language, plant identification, etc.

Greater capacity for releasing emotions & negative thinking through a natural state of meditation that promotes mental & physical relaxation

Close encounters with birds, plants, trees & animals that inspire a sense of awe & wonder

A renewed sense of happiness & joy coming from inside

A developing sense of inner vitality & razor sharp focus

Greater peace & joy in daily life

A sense of connection to the past ancestry of our species and planet

Greater flexibility of consciousness, enabling you to see life from a wider and more balanced perspective.

Simply by going outside, sitting your butt down on the ground and consciously opening your awareness, it's possible to invigorate your brain in ways that most modern humans never touch.

If you give it a chance, it's also some of the most fun you'll ever have in your life!

How Sit Spot Balances Nature And Technology...

Now, I want to make it clear that none of this is to say technology is inherently bad...

I think it's important to acknowledge that humanity really has gained a lot from all the progress we've made through the years.

Our understanding of the physical universe has grown tremendously. We're now able to save lives of loved ones who would never have survived without modern medicine.

We've gained a lot of positive benefits from evolving new technologies, so I'm not suggesting that we try to go back in time.

But there's an incredible amount that we've lost.

What I am suggesting is there's a way to balance our relationship with technology & nature so we can improve the level of mental well-being in our society.

Sit spot is an opportunity for humans to merge the best of modern times with the best of our prehistoric origins.

I truly believe this is truly one of the biggest opportunities we have as an species right now.

The crazy thing to realize is that this technological age is only just beginning.

The coming 20 years will bring more technological advancement than there has been since the dawn of time.

And we are currently at a turning point for our species, our relationship with the natural world and our palaeolithic origins.

1. You just go outside.

2. Find a place in nature to sit down.

3. Practice opening your senses & observing nature.

4. Repeat as often as you can.

Right now we can choose to step into an age where humans live in harmony with both nature & technology together in a balanced way.

This is why I've devoted the last 10 years of my life to sharing these teachings with the world.

Benefits Of Having A Sit Spot In Nature:

Connecting with nature through a Sit Spot is a way of optimizing and harmonizing the biology of our human nervous system.

Richard Louv talks about this by saying that nature is like vitamins for the human mind.

It's a way of giving yourself the mental, emotional, spiritual, and creative fuel for your own personal evolution in modern times.

People who practice sit spot enjoy:
Intentionally Connecting With Nature...
Humans are biologically designed to fall in love with nature, and we operate at our highest capacity when we get to live out our biological potential!

Section 2 - Sit Spot Practice

Now that we've talked about why sit spot matters... let's take a closer look at how you can actually do all this!

It's not enough to simply understand the philosophy and benefits of sit spot on an intellectual level.

At some point you have to get your butt outside and actually do something about it. That's really where you begin to see the transformation for yourself.

The most important predictor of success with having a sit spot in nature is actually doing it!

And here's how...

The Importance Of Keeping Sit Spot Simple

Look around at where you are...

Notice what's happening with the plants, trees & birds of this place

Check what kind of sounds you can hear in the landscape

Are there birds? Insects? Squirrels or other mammals?

Notice the overall level of activity (or lack thereof) and see if you can track what's causing these conditions

Pay attention to whatever is present in this environment, and tuck it away in your memory so you can identify the differences later on

One of the biggest secrets to success with having a sit spot in nature is to keep your practice routines extremely simple.

Remember - a sit spot is really about giving yourself the opportunity to quiet your mind and focus your senses on nature (rather than technology or any other distractions).

And this is something that can be done almost anywhere, anytime.

Even 5 minutes sitting in some grass with nearby ground feeding birds is all you really need to get started and be successful.

It's not necessary to be completely immersed in a massive secluded wilderness for days at a time in order for this to work.

In it's most basic form:

This truly is one of the most simple things you'll ever do in your entire life.

It simulates the palaeolithic environment and feeds your brain with stimulation through all five senses at the same time.

In fact, there's a good chance you've already done sit spot type activities in the past, without calling it a sit spot.

Maybe you can remember being a kid at the beach, or a time when you just sat by a lake & chilled out in the sunshine.

Well congratulations - that was a sit spot!

It's really nothing new. People have been doing this activity for hundreds of thousands of years.

The main difference is that now we're going to approach it with a lot more intention.

In the past - you probably weren't focused directly on being present with nature.

You probably didn't realize the positive benefits this activity was having on your brain (though you may have been aware of a good feeling).

You were probably just hanging out & relaxing.

So now... we're just going to do the exact same thing, but we're going to approach the scenario with a lot more intention and awareness.

Rather than completely zoning out, instead we're going to consciously activate the animal parts of our brain.

There are specific awareness activities & exercises that you can do at your sit spot to help you tune in at a much deeper level.

Focus On Nature Observation & Sensory Awareness

The main thing you should always have in the back of your mind whenever you go to sit spot is consciously tuning yourself to the patterns of nature.

I cannot stress enough the importance of tuning in rather than zoning out!

Even if your reasons for doing sit spot are more for personal growth than any specific naturalist or wilderness tracking goals...

It's really this whole process of deeply tuning your senses with local birds, plants, trees & environment patterns that sparks a surge of new connections in the brain.

Most humans only use a very small portion of their innate capacity to be aware, whether in nature or in the office or walking down the sidewalk.

Yet with practice and attention, it's possible to develop your sensory awareness far beyond what most modern people ever realize.

It's very much like dusting off old neural connections and firing up the more animal parts of your nervous system.

Just notice what you feel inside both physically and emotionally

Allow yourself to relax and release any feelings, tight muscles, discomfort, etc.

Relax your breathing & allow it to slow down a bit

Allow your mind to clear (as best you can)

You might want to close your eyes and really get into your body for a few minutes

This facilitates an expanded state of awareness that's very practical both for hard skills like tracking & nature observation, yet it also has significant mental/emotional/spiritual repercussions.

Connecting deeply with nature will result in tremendous personal growth, however you do need to practice the fundamental awareness skills before the desired evolution in your personality will emerge!

This is crucial!

If your primary goal for using a sit spot is to facilitate emotional or spiritual growth, then you need to be very careful not to get so focused on your inner journey that you disconnect from your senses.

You cannot force growth to happen by introspecting and getting lost in a maze of thoughts and ideas!

Simply focus on going as deeply as possible into nature and everything else will take care of itself.

(We'll talk more about what to expect in the evolution of your sit spot learning journey in an upcoming section)

So here's what you need to do...

4 Essential Sit Spot Awareness Exercises

When you get to your sit spot, you'll find it useful to develop a consistent practice routine that helps you get the most from your time outside.

The repetition of simple exercises that stretch your sensory awareness & nature observation skills will help you progress along the journey much faster than just sitting outside with no plan.

So here are 4 things you should include in every sit spot experience:

1. Relax, Breath & Tune Into Your Body
Touch
When you first start going to sit spot, it's perfectly normal to feel a bit fidgety or unsettled.

Most modern people are so trained on constant distraction that when you drop everything and just sit quietly outside, it can feel a bit uncomfortable.

You might head out with the intention of really connecting with the birds, plants & trees of your landscape, only to discover you feel anxious or frustrated inside.
Hearing
You might sit down in a beautiful place only to discover you have very little capacity to be quietly present.

This is a sign that your daily life is putting too much stress on your nervous system (again, it's extremely common if you live a fast paced or technology driven lifestyle).

This is why early on in the sit spot journey, I highly recommend you begin with some conscious mental & physical relaxation exercises.

Your state of awareness is linked to your state of mind, so if you're distracted inside, then you'll also likely be distracted externally, which dulls the senses and makes you feel disconnected.

You can help yourself relax into the moment by consciously tuning in with your body and releasing any tension:

Simply look for a feeling of peace or inner relaxation, like a very casual state of meditation.
Sight
Don't worry if peace & relaxation doesn't immediately appear in the first few minutes.

And don't worry if you can't release 100% of the stress right away... even 10% is great!

Just do your best, then move on to the next step and try again later 🙂

2. Sensory Awareness

You'll notice that as you begin to relax your body physically, suddenly your senses will also become much more acute and aware.

As soon as you feel this opening sense of relaxation inside, you're ready to switch your attention towards the external world.

There's an old saying, "Lose your mind and come to your senses"

It means that in order to see life with clarity, you have to let go of your thoughts.

But it also works the other way around... the more you come to your senses, the easier it will be to loosen your grip on the constant stream of mind chatter!

By consciously exercising your sensory awareness abilities, you will amplify any feelings of inner peace & relaxation, while simultaneously firing up and massaging the perceptive parts of your sensory brain.

Simply take a few minutes to focus very consciously on each of your five senses.
Smelling & Tasting
If your eyes are still closed from the relaxation portion, you might want to start with your sense of hearing or touch.

Notice how your body feels sitting against the ground. Feel the temperature & humidity of the air. Feel the sunshine against your closed eyes.

Really stretch your sense of touch into areas of perception that you don't normally engage. Try and go so deep into your sense of touch that you can even feel your heartbeat.

Then do the same thing with your sense of hearing.

Put your physical awareness in your ears and try to listen more deeply than you've ever listened before.

Notice what sounds are happening in the environment. Do you hear birds? Wind? Even motors or other human noises.

Don't worry if you can't identify the things you're hearing. Just focus on listening deeply.

Try and push your ability to listen far into the distance. What's the quietest sound you can hear? How many sounds can you track simultaneously?

If you're a musician or naturally inclined towards sound, this will likely come quite naturally. But if you struggle at first, just keep feeding your auditory sense and it will gradually open up more and more.

Be patient and kind to yourself!

Next you can open your eyes and take in the whole scene through your visual sense.

Don't just look at things directly with the central focus of your eyes, instead, allow your field of vision to open up into the periphery.

Allow yourself to gaze forward softly and wiggle your fingers at the sides of your visual field.

See if you can find the edges of your visual awareness. It will look like a large horizontal oval.

Just sit and be fully aware of your entire stretched out visual field.

Notice that you can take in the entire landscape all at once without focusing directly on any one thing.

You'll notice that your sense of movement becomes immediately sharper when you do this.

You'll spot insects & pollen floating softly through the land. The slightest flick of a bird's tail many yards away will tell you when there's a cat stalking through.

See how many different landscape elements you can track simultaneously.

With practice, your peripheral vision will become gradually clearer and clearer until can identify birds, plants, trees in a split second without even looking directly at them.

This will represent a massive shift in your ability to perceive beyond what most modern people ever develop.

I often lump smelling and tasting together because they're very closely related.

These are the chemical senses. Rather than detected waves of energy, they tell you about the physical environment.

Spend a few minutes really honing in your sense of taste & smell.

You'll notice that each landscape, season, even time of day has it's own particular character that can be experienced through your sense of smell & taste.

Notice that the middle of a pine forest on a warm summer day has a very particular smell to it. This sense includes how moist or dry the air as.

You can even put your nose to the earth & take in a deep breath.

Just work that sense of smell and it'll get better and better!

3. Practice Nature Observation

It's important to realize that sensory awareness is not the same thing as observing nature.

It's possible to have your senses completely switched on, yet still be completely oblivious to what's happening with the birds, plants & trees around you.

It means there's a huge difference between simply seeing a bird... and actually taking the time to watch that bird, and interpret that bird as an individual... those are two very different skills.

The real secret here is that we're stacking together different yet complimentary brain skills that activate various parts of your brain all at the same time.

We started with the physical relaxation which slows your heart-rate and brainwaves.

Then we added in massaging the sensory parts of your brain by consciously seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting.

And now we're adding in the actual awareness of patterns, relationships & sequences happening with the birds, plants, trees, etc.

So how do you do this?

You simply need to practice carefully watching, listening & observing whatever is unfolding in the environment around you!

During your sensory awareness practice you probably noticed certain trees, plants, birds, or animals occupying the space around you.

But how much did you really observe these things?

Did you really take the time to watch that bird moving along in the grass and recognize it as an individual?

What was that bird doing? Was it feeding? Was it listening & watching for predators like hawks or cats? Why was it acting that way?

Did you make a real connection with that bird?

This is really what it means to observe nature. It requires a level of perception and attunement beyond sensory awareness.

And this is where you really begin to connect deeply with the things that live in this place:

Take a few moments to consciously recognize the birds, plants, trees, activities, events, sequences, relationships, forest features & signs of animals.

You might find that the first few times you visit your sit spot, these things have very little meaning to you.

You might even believe there's nothing to observe.

But as time goes on and with repetition, something gets triggered in your emotions where you begin to feel like a sense of kinship with all the things in your surroundings.

With practice, you're in for a real treat as this landscape which was once unfamiliar, confusing & seemingly lacking in life, suddenly becomes a world of opportunity for new discoveries every time you step outside.

If you really want to get good at the skill of nature observation, I created a great introductory program called the nature memory journal that walks you through all the basics. It's just 7$ and you can get the details here.

4. Move Slowly!

Finally - In everything you do at sit spot, one of the big keys to success is moving slowly.

We live in a society that is programmed by technology to move fast and constantly flip from one thing to the next.

Instead, at sit spot, you want to savour each and every moment, and with practice it becomes like a dynamic meditation.

The best way to really tap into how this works is to imagine you've been transported back in time to a place filled with sabre toothed cats, poisonous snakes & dangers around every corner.

The ability to be aware of your surroundings is rooted in an ancient survival instinct.

You'll notice that when humans are surrounded by the possibility of danger around the corner, their minds become extremely quiet, and the senses become very sharp.

It's not an imminent danger flooded with adrenaline and stress... but simply the knowledge that if you're not completely quiet and aware of what's happening around you, then one false step will get you killed.

If you've never experienced this state it might sound a bit weird. But this is an extremely effective trigger for what modern psychologists call a "flow state".

Your mind will become incredibly quiet. Sounds in your environment will become amplified, colors and movement will be brighter and jump into your awareness. You'll be able to hear at much longer distances.

Another way to help you trigger this state of primal awareness is to simply focus on doing everything at least twice or three times as slow as you normally do.

Literally slow down your body movements, step softly and quietly when you move, stop frequently, even slow down your rate of blinking!

If you really want to push yourself, you can try stalking through the forest at night (no flashlights!) and pretend you're a mouse on the lookout for owls & foxes.

Always be intelligent when you do this. Don't get lost! Don't fall into any holes! And tell someone where you're going!

If you're moving slowly and consciously enough, you'll be amazed at what the human sensory system is capable of doing in almost completely dark conditions.

Stalking through the forest to your sit spot at night, you might have moments when your humanity seems to disappear and your inner animal mind takes over.

It's an incredible feeling, and the more you practice the easier it will be to do this any time you choose.

The golden rule is to visit your sit spot as often as you can, and practice these 4 awareness exercises.

Simply do this, and you'll find yourself making incredible progress along the journey and have awe-inspiring experiences in nature!

Next we'll talk about what kinds of experiences to expect as you continue to you visit your sit spot and cultivate awareness...

Common Experiences At Sit Spot (What To Expect On The Journey)

Having a sit spot is like going on a journey because there are different stages of development (or evolutions) that happen along the way.

This means that what you experience on the first day sitting quietly in nature will be very different from what happens on day 30 or day 90 or day 365!

As you grow in your ability to perceive the natural world, it's almost like nature seems to change before your own eyes... bringing you new and more rich experiences that grow deeper with time.

This process is actually very similar to falling in love or building a relationship with a lifelong friend.

At first, you're just taking things slow and getting to know someone. You might ask them little questions and have shared experiences.

Then gradually as time goes on, you have deeper feelings and a more mature emotional connection begins to develop.

Connection is something that all human beings crave.

And it's really this long-term bonding process that makes it possible to have your most meaningful life experiences with people and with nature.

Laughing together till it hurts, crying and comforting each other when one of you is hurting or troubled, supporting each other to grow through the ups and downs.

These aren't things you typically do with someone the very first day you meet them... and it's the exact same with your connection to nature!

The most meaningful connections always develop organically over a period of months or years.

Humans are biologically designed to have these deeply rewarding & meaningful experiences with nature just as much as we are designed to have it with other people.

But just like all relationships, you need to invest a little bit of time upfront before you get to the really good stuff!

So here are some signs and symptoms of growth you can expect along the way...

Stage 1: Orientation and Acclimation

Early on in the sit spot journey, you'll notice the experience mostly revolves around getting oriented to your new surroundings.

Remember - you're learning to engage your awareness capabilities in a way that's probably very new, so it's perfectly normal to go through a phase of adjustment while you figure things out.

For some people this can be a frustrating time because you desperately want to feel a deep connection with nature, but you haven't yet developed the awareness skills to fully satisfy that longing.

It's very important that you don't give up at this early stage!

Most people in the modern world are so disconnected from their senses that even when they surround themselves by birds, plants, trees & animals, it's almost like their brain is filtering it out.

It's possible (and even common) to sit quietly in the most amazing natural surroundings and yet somehow convince yourself that nothing is happening.

Simply do your best to accept any feelings of boredom or doubt and keep getting out there!

Keep visiting your sit spot and practice those awareness exercises! Because if you stick with it, you're in for a real treat!

Thankfully, the early challenges of this orientation phase will also be punctuated by moments of really seeing nature with new eyes, sometimes for the very first time in your life.

There's a good chance you'll have close encounters with some very cool wildlife early on your sit spot journey.

It's also very common to have moments of sudden inspiration or peace welling up inside as you see the world with newly opened eyes.

If you've never been up close with a wild songbird, or had a porcupine walk silently past you in the woods, this can be an incredible awe-inspiring experience that gets permanently imprinted into your memory.

I remember the first time I consciously activated my senses and focused 100% of my attention on nature.

I was amazed by all the life surrounding me, and the realization of what I had been missing that whole time.

It changed my life and taught me there's no limit to how far I can stretch my consciousness just by focusing my intent and tuning in.

With repetition and practice, you'll gradually experience less of the boredom and self-doubt, and more of the joy and awesomeness whenever you immerse yourself in nature.

Stage 2: Curiosity & Aliveness

The next stage of your sit spot journey is what I call Curiosity & Aliveness.

After a bit of practice, you'll begin to notice there are moments in nature when you feel a genuine and spontaneous sense of curiosity about the plants & animals sharing your sit spot.

You might start to notice there's a particular songbird that shows up repeatedly during your sits and maybe even comes to check you out.

Or you find your gaze being repeatedly drawn to certain distinctive trees, plants or rocks while doing your observation & awareness practice.

You'll hear bird & animal noises in the distance that you'll name things like "squeaky wheel bird" or "techno-blip call".

At this stage, you might not have the least clue about what species of bird or tree you're looking at, but there's just an overall sense of familiarity beginning to form.

Along with this familiarity, it becomes easier and even joyful to sit with open awareness for longer and longer periods of time.

You begin to really look forward to your time outside and think about your songbird friends before you get there.

People in this stage often start to feel like a kid again because they're relating to the world in a much more open and free kind of way.

Your body might sometimes be filled with energy after an awesome encounter at your spot... and other times you might feel extremely calm and peaceful.

The big challenge in this stage is finding plenty of ways to constantly feed your emerging curiosity and reward your new interests with the thrill of solving natural mysteries.

You're ready to have your knowledge pushed a little bit, but if you push too hard, it's still possible to get discouraged.

This is often where you might be inspired to acquire your first field guides to birds, trees, or plants only to discover how dry and overwhelming these books can be.

You're aware of this tremendous desire to know about the birds & plants living at your spot, but you aren't always sure what questions to ask or how to approach the learning process in a way that's both fun AND effective.

If you're not challenging yourself and rewarding curiosity with really good questions, it's still possible to get discouraged or bored with your progress.

This is why it's essential at this stage to have a mentor who can guide you to reach the next level by hearing your stories & asking good questions that draw the knowledge and insight out of you.

This is exactly why I created NatureMentor!

When I first started making progress with my Sit Spot, I had to travel to a completely different country on the opposite side of the continent in order to find a mentor who could really guide me into the deepest connection with nature.

The experience changed my life so much that I wanted to make mentoring opportunities globally available to everyone who wants it.

It's my desire to see you succeed on the deep nature connection journey 🙂

Rest assured that even when you hit challenges while trying to really push your knowledge & awareness, it's actually a sign of progress!

When all else fails, just keep going to your sit spot and you'll be on the right track!

Phase 3: Embracing

If you stick with your sit spot for long enough, eventually you'll reach a third phase that I call "embracing".

This is where you've become so intimately tuned and comfortable with nature, that it's almost like you leave behind the human parts of your psychology and become part of nature.

Your connection with the birds, plants, trees & animals has become so deep and intimate, that it feels like being in touch with a living consciousness behind all nature itself.

If that sounds like a weird thing to say, just think of it kind of like the feeling of getting a really good hug from someone you love.

It just feels like you're being hugged and embraced by nature.

Your mind will become very quiet and peaceful, which enables your sensory and perceptual capabilities to operate in a more balanced and harmonious way.

This is all because your normal state of awareness has shifted to the point where that you begin to move through nature in a sort of dynamic meditation.

People sometimes get glimpses of this state in earlier stages during encounters with animals or any kind of life moment that takes your breath away.

But the difference is that at this embracing stage, it becomes a permanent state of consciousness that you can access anytime, anywhere.

In my distance group mentoring program, I refer to this stage of development as the awakening of your natural instincts.

1. Indecision or dissatisfaction with finding a sit spot location

2. Finding the time to invest in your sit spot practice

And the experience will spark a host of interesting changes on many different levels... sensory, physical, emotional, mental, and even spiritual (if you're inclined to that sort of thing).

As soon as you step outside, there's an immediate sharpening of your senses, very much like waking up first thing in the morning.

Because your perception capabilities have shifted, you can now walk through the same forests and landscapes you visited in the past with new eyes.

You begin to move differently & walk differently in nature.

You'll see things in the patterns of nature that are invisible to 99% of the world's population simply because they don't know how to look.

Animals will even respond to you differently because your body language is broadcasting a much more peaceful and aware state of mind.

You're using your body and mind more like a wild animal, so you blend into the forest.

This is often where students might develop special connections with particular animals like foxes or bobcats.

My personal favorite example was a time when I was visited by a female cougar & her 3 kittens at my sit spot.

This huge cat stepped out from the bushes and I was so shocked that my body blasted out a tremendous rush of adrenaline that seemed to jumpstart my entire nervous system.

Every since that day it's like my senses have been dialled up to a higher level.

These peak experiences in nature have a harmonizing effect on your mind & body.

You begin to think from a more global perspective and your perceptions literally change how the world appears to you.

And All this is why nature truly is the cure for Tom Brown's "Land Of The Living Dead Syndrome".

This is an awesome moment because if you can reach this stage in your sit spot journey, the experience is so amazing, inspiring and feels so good that it's unlikely you will ever stop.

There are plenty more signs, symptoms and experiences you'll have along the journey, but these are really the 3 main stages to be aware of.

There's lots of surprises and excitement waiting for you, and all you have to do is start practicing!

So let's talk about how to really integrate all this with your daily life...

Integrating Sit Spot With Daily Life

As I mentioned earlier, the most important thing for achieving success is actually getting yourself to be consistent and integrate the sit spot with your daily life.

The biggest pitfalls are:

So let's tackle these now and you'll fully equipped for success!

Choosing Where To Put Your Sit Spot

Sit spot can be done literally anywhere because it's all about awareness & being present.

If you have a backyard, use it!

Look for intersections of plants, birds, trees, water, etc... but always prioritize convenience and utility over wilderness.

If your sit spot is further away, go less often, but stay for longer visits.

One of the biggest questions you need to ask yourself first is where would you like to position your sit spot?

By far - the most important thing to consider when positioning your sit spot is convenience...

Ask yourself: How easy is it for me to get there?

The most common reason why people fail at sit spot is because they're too picky about where to go.

So here's a couple things to keep in mind when choosing where to put your sit spot:

#1 Do You Have A Backyard?

If you have a backyard, I would highly recommend using that as your primary sit spot location.

Everyone I've ever met who really went to the deepest level with sit spot had the common feature of staying close to home.

It's important to remember that sit spot is not about having an amazing location... It's about YOUR OWN AWARENESS.

If you can't open your senses in any average backyard, then traveling to a remote wilderness area isn't going to help you!

And likewise - if you can successfully train your awareness in a city environment, then when you eventually get out to somewhere more wild, you'll really be ready to have your mind blown!

The more travel or time requirements you place on yourself to visit your sit spot, the less likely you are to actually create a long term habit.

If you take action, then you get results. If you don't take action, then you get no results. It's that simple.

#2 What If You Don't Have A Backyard?

If you don't have a backyard, then just focus on whatever your closest opportunity is.

You can use a nearby park, or anywhere you find a few trees, grass & birds.

You can even sit up on an apartment balcony!

You'll be pleased to discover there are infinite things to be observed in nature even with the most common things like urban crows, pigeons & starlings.

As a last resort - it's also possible to have a secondary sit spot you can visit once per week that gives you a more wild environment to practice in.

You've got a spot close to home...

You're aiming for a minimum of 5-10 minutes to start out with...

In this case you might visit less often, but give yourself more time to practice the awareness exercises whenever you go.

Main points to remember:

How Long Should You Stay At Your Sit Spot?

The truthful answer to this question of how much time per day/week is very individual...

The most important thing is to be honest with yourself about how much time you can realistically invest at your sit spot... and don't feel bad if you need to start small!

There have been times in my life when I had very effective sit spot practices lasting as little as 5 minutes per day, combined with a longer sit on weekends lasting around 30 minutes.

How busy are you?

On a scale of 1-10, how busy is your mind on any average day?

How much time do you spend letting yourself unwind and reflect?

This was a time when my lifestyle was pretty busy, and some days the absolute maximum I could manage was 5 minutes of sense meditation on the front porch.

Then there were other times in my life when I had a lot more freedom, and I would often spend an hour or more at my sit spot every single day.

Where are you currently spending your time?

What time investments are serving you vs draining you?

What are the least fulfilling things you do on a daily basis?

Do you have any relationships or habits that are draining you?

It's all about looking at your own life and deciding what will enable you stick with this as a long term practice.

If you ever find yourself saying you want to do sit spot, but then repeatedly unable to do so because of time -

Here are 2 things to look at:

First - Are you trying to make sit spot too complex?

Some people just set unrealistic goals like: I'm going to sit spot for an hour every day at 6am... Then they beat themselves up when they fail!

Trust me... You don't want to burn yourself out in a week by trying to go every day for 2 hours!

You'll probably have much better results by aiming low and gradually increasing as you get more comfortable, rather than starting off at the exact level you want to be in the future.

Starting off at 60 minutes will probably be too challenging for most people! So for starters, just try 10 minutes and see how that goes...

If you feel like stopping there, head on home and feel good about your practice. Even 10 minutes can be 100% success!

Then as you begin to establish this daily rhythm of short sits, you might also notice days when you feel inspired to stay a bit longer... so go ahead and do it!

Pretty soon you'll find yourself so immersed in watching what's happening around you, 30 minutes will go by and it will feel completely effortless.

Second - Is your life too complex?

Okay, so let's say you've tried to shorten the time and make your sit spot routine super simple.

But you still just cannot get yourself to do it.

If you seriously can't find time for a 5 or 10 minute sit in the backyard, the problem is usually that your life itself has an overwhelming amount of complexity in it.

In this case, we might need to do a bit of lifestyle engineering first.

One of the least desirable byproducts of this fast paced, technology driven world we live in is that most humans have taken on an overwhelming amount of complexity in their daily life.

This means that even the simplest of good habits (like sitting quietly outside in nature) can become so overwhelming that you might avoid it.

So take a moment to reflect on your life...
You'll find that when you start from this place of simplicity with your finances, it enables you to have a lot more choice about where you invest your energies... and that includes energy to visit your sit spot!
If your answers to these questions center around being very fast-paced and/or busy, then I would encourage you to take inventory of your life and start eliminating everything that isn't serving you to be at your best.

Start by looking at how you're currently using your time.

Quite frankly, most people just try to pack way too much stuff into their days.

How is your relationship with money?

Where are you currently spending more than you can afford?

Do you have monthly payments on things you don't want or use?

Where is it possible to downgrade your expenses and still be just as happy?

Are you spending money on things that just make you busier?

If you are someone who always seems to be on the go with not enough time for things that are truly important to you, consider this...

People vastly overestimate the number of things they can do in a day... and they vastly underestimate the value of doing even just one thing really well.

If your life always feels very busy, it's almost guaranteed that you're doing a bunch of things that simply are not serving you to be your best.

It takes a bit of honest reflection, but eliminating these things is one of the best things you could possibly do to really stay on track with your commitment to sit spot!

Finding Security (Money And Sit Spot)

One of the great things about having a sit spot in nature is that it's a totally free way to learn, grow and have fun outside.

But I've also noticed that sometimes when people have very messy financial habits, this can put tremendous stress on their ability to settle into a sit spot routine.

It's important to note that "messy financial habits" can happen at any level of income, so this has nothing to do with how much money you make.

It's really more about whether you're currently living beyond your means.

I see a lot of people these days getting locked into big financial commitments they can't actually afford.

Then they have to work extra hard in order to keep up with their expensive lifestyle, and it stresses them out so they can't focus.

At extreme levels, sometimes people end up losing everything because they can't keep up.

Or else it just becomes this background level of stress and feeling like you never have enough.

Many people get conditioned from a young age into thinking we need all kinds of gadgets & things in order to live a complete and happy life.

It can be a huge relief to realize that you can be perfectly happy and satisfy all your needs with a lot less.

Rather than building an extravagant lifestyle and then striving to bring your income up to that level...

Instead, try setting your lifestyle well below your current income and generate your wellbeing from inside by growing personally.

It might sound crazy, but if you always aim to live below your means then you'll never have to stress about money.

This doesn't mean you can't gradually build up to a more lavish lifestyle. It simply means you're doing it on your own terms.

You'll probably even find it easier to get into your ideal career and financial situation when you aren't constantly scrounging just to survive.

It's much easier to balance your personal wellbeing & growth with work and creative output when you're not being crushed under a mountain of stress.

I know these might be tough questions for some people.

It does take a bit of careful reflection, but if you're serious about going on the sit spot journey, you definitely owe it to yourself to have some stability in your life.

Conclusions:

Always remember that sitting quietly in nature with open senses isn't just something that can be done on vacation or for fun.

If you can integrate a simply daily sit spot routine into your life, it will dramatically change your relationship with nature, and with yourself!

You will definitely notice results every time you go outside, but the greatest benefits come from compounding over time.

Whether you're a budding naturalist or wildlife tracker, or passionate about personal & spiritual growth, or if you just want to cultivate a relationship with nature...

Sit spot is one of the absolutely best way to really open yourself up and connect with life on so many different levels.

Thank you so much for reading this guide!

I hope you enjoyed being on this adventure with me and if you'd like help on the journey, check out my distance mentoring program or any of the programs offered through NatureMentor!

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Complete Guide To Using A Sit Spot In Nature

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A sit spot (or secret spot) is simply a favorite place in nature that you visit regularly to cultivate awareness as you expand your senses and study patterns of local plants, birds, trees, animals, etc.

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Tonight's class reminded me of this great film. You may have seen it.  I love the heart beat orchestrating devt and propulsion - Rivka

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See a Salamander Grow From a Single Cell in this Incredible Time-lapse | Short Film Showcase

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Michael Levin: The electrical blueprints that orchestrate life

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DNA isn't the only builder in the biological world -- there's also a mysterious bioelectric layer directing cells to work together to grow organs, systems and bodies, says biologist Michael Levin.

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Cell Signaling Technology is well known for their pathway diagrams. Inspired by the work of David Goodsell, Digizyme worked with CST to bring a new level of context to the pathways. Could we take the diagrams and show them in the crowded environment of a single cell, to highlight overlaps and connections between signals?

The challenges were immense. How to represent proteins with differing amounts of known structural data? How to distinguish hundreds of "hero" proteins from thousands of "background" elements? How could users interact with the images to filter out proteins or pathways of interest?

Working with (and eventually at) Digizyme over the course of six years, we produced six interactive landscapes that tile seamlessly into a large-scale poster. I encourage you to visit the interactive versions, which are live at cellsignal.com.

Concept, layout, art direction, interactive programming: Digizyme
Models, shading, renders, compositing, interactive pre-production: Evan Ingersoll
MODO, Molecular Maya, AfterEffects, Photoshop, Illustrator, NUKE

↑ Back to Top

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ANGSTROM IMAGES - CST Interactive Molecular Landscapes

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Cell Signaling Technology is well known for their pathway diagrams. Inspired by the work of David Goodsell, Digizyme worked with CST to bring a new level of context to the pathways. Could we take the diagrams and show them in the crowded environment of a single cell, to highlight overlaps and connections between signals?

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Mammal fetal development (dog, dolphin, elephant)

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Mammal fetal development (dog, dolphin, elephant)

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“a living arrangement of two different organisms in an association that can be either beneficial or unfavourable”, which “were frequently greeted with skepticism and even hostility”.

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Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis has variously been regarded as a revolutionary and an eccentric. The web encyclopaedia Famous Scientists calls her "one of the most creative scientific theorists of the modern era", and renowned sociobiologist E. O. Wilson said she was "the most successful synthetic thinker of modern biology". Science magazine called her "science's unruly Earth mother".

Born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 5, 1938, Margulis "led a life devoted to science", writes biologist Bridgett Payseur.

A review of her 1998 book Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, said Margulis "has made a career of proposing wild, improbable ideas that later became mainstream science. In this fascinating volume, she shows that co-operation has been as potent a force as competition in the evolution of life."

In its article on Margulis, the Encyclopaedia Britannica says she was generally considered a radical by her peers, who took traditional Darwinian "survival of the fittest" approaches to biology.{%recommended 6178%}

It says her ideas focused on symbiosis, "a living arrangement of two different organisms in an association that can be either beneficial or unfavourable", which "were frequently greeted with skepticism and even hostility".

Some of her most important work was centred on her "serial endosymbiotic theory" (SET) of the origin of cells, which in 1970 she described in her first book, Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, and further explored in her 1981 book, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution.

Payseur explains that Margulis was most interested in the effect of symbiosis on evolution.

"'Sym' means together, and 'biosis', of course, means living," she says. "So, symbiosis describes how two organisms live together. She was particularly interested in a part of the cell called the mitochondria, which helps make energy for the cell. Upon seeing a mitochondrion, she noted that it looked like a bacterium."

Margulis hypothesised that a free-living bacterium had "moved in" with an ancestral eukaryote - any cell that possesses a clearly defined nucleus - and eventually became a part of it. The bacteria took over the job of energy production. In plant cells, bacteria also moved in and became chloroplasts, the specialised structure within the living cell that performs photosynthesis.

"This process was called endosymbiosis, which means one organism lives inside another," Payseur says. "In this case, a free-living bacterium was living inside a larger eukaryotic cell."

This hypothesis was ridiculed by others - the long-standing belief of scientists at the time was that evolution only happened slowly, by random chance mutations.

"However, new genetic tools allowed scientists to compare the DNA found in mitochondria and in bacteria," writes Payseur. "They found a very close relationship, indicating that Margulis was probably correct. The concept of endosymbiosis is now widely accepted among evolutionary scientists."

Late in her life, Margulis courted controversy. In an interview with Discover magazine she appeared to question the causal link between HIV and AIDS, leading to accusations that she was an "AIDS denialist".

A 2012 biography written by her son Dorion Sagan revealed that she was convinced the 2001 World Trade Centre attack had been a "false flag" operation.

Margulis died on November 22, 2011, following a stroke.

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Lynn Margulis, contrarian to the end - Cosmos Magazine

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Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis has variously been regarded as a revolutionary and an eccentric. The web encyclopaedia Famous Scientists calls her "one of the most creative scientific theorists of the modern era", and renowned sociobiologist E. O. Wilson said she was "the most successful synthetic thinker of modern biology".

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+ Gaia theory

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Holobiont: a new way of seeing the world

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T he British biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake has been fascinated by the often mysterious world of fungi since he was a small boy. He used to bury himself in heaps of fallen leaves and inhale the piquant odor of rot. "I think of fungi as ecological connective tissue," he says, "the living seam by which much of life is stitched into relation."
Although we haven't always known it, our lives have long been entangled with fungi, from microorganisms such as yeasts and molds to the more than ten thousand varieties of mushrooms. They are neither plants nor animals, occupying their own kingdom of eukaryotic organisms, and they make it possible to produce such foods and beverages as wine, beer, bread, cheese, vinegar, and soy sauce. Many medicines are the result of an engineered or naturally grown fungus, including penicillin, cyclosporine, and other antibiotics. Digesting food would be impossible without the fungal microbes that inhabit our gut. And if you've ever had athlete's foot or tried to grow grain crops without pesticides, you know that fungi are not always our friends. "Fungi change the way we understand life," Sheldrake says. They "illustrate that it is possible to solve complex problems without a brain. And human existence has been profoundly influenced by mind-altering drugs like psilocybin and alcohol, both derived from fungal life." He was frustrated growing up, Sheldrake says, because he wanted to study both the humanities and the sciences, and the education system forced students to go into one or the other. He had to work to find the places where the "artificial" barrier between the arts and the sciences was porous, and then spend as much time as he could there. Sheldrake received a PhD in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in the forests of Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He recently published his first book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (merlinsheldrake.com). He is also a musician and keen fermenter who filled his college dorm room with experiments in mead making and beer brewing, some of which went horribly wrong.
In 2013 I interviewed Sheldrake's father, the scientist Rupert Sheldrake, for The Sun, and he told me tales of young Merlin's precocious interest in mycology, or the study of mushrooms. When I read Entangled Life, I found Merlin's description of the fungal world revelatory and his vision of future possibilities mind-boggling. After the pandemic made it impossible for him to undertake a planned U.S. speaking tour, I arranged to interview him by video chat. Despite our distance, his enthusiasm and curiosity for science came through loud and clear.

Leviton: You've said that fungi are possibly closer to animals than they are to plants.

Sheldrake: Yes, in the way their metabolism works. Unlike plants, which are what we call autotrophs - meaning they make their own energy and organic compounds from sunlight and carbon dioxide - fungi are heterotrophs. That means, like animals, they have to find organic matter in the world and digest it.

They're also more closely related to animals in an evolutionary sense: they branch off the tree of life at a juncture closer to the animal branch than to the plant branch. Fungi are partly responsible for life moving from the ocean onto land, which at the time, around 500 million years ago, was a mainly hostile place. Temperatures fluctuated wildly, and most of the landscape was dusty and rocky. There was no real soil. The only organisms would have been a few photosynthetic bacteria and the fungi living in crusts. There was nothing like what we recognize today as plants. It was fungi that allowed plants to evolve from single-celled aquatic green algae into land-based life-forms with seeds, flowers, and so forth. So fungi are responsible for all macroscopic life on land today, because plants lie at the base of the food chain.

Leviton: Is it fair to say that plants can't really exist without help from fungi?

Sheldrake: That's correct. Even today 90 percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal relationships. [ Mycorrhizae are symbiotic associations between plants and fungi - close biological relationships that benefit both partners. - Ed.] Mykes is Greek for "fungus," and rhiza is "root." All outdoor-grown plants that have been examined have fungi that live in their leaves and shoots.

What we call plants originated with algae that evolved to farm fungi, while at the same time the fungi evolved to farm algae. When you look at a plant, you're looking at the outcome of that relationship.

Leviton: How is it that science is only now discovering this complex, infinitesimal reality?

Sheldrake: The process of discovery largely has to do with access. We studied plants first because we can touch and taste them. They're macroscopic and immediately available to our senses. They very obviously shape our existence, whether as food or medicine or shelter materials. At the microscopic level there's a fungal world and also a microbial world, and we have more access to these realms now because of new technologies like DNA sequencing, which allows us to grind up the DNA from a teaspoon of soil and find out who lives there - something we simply couldn't do even a few decades ago.

Leviton: And these new tools are transforming the way we look at ecology?

Sheldrake: Absolutely. We have realized that all life-forms depend on microbes. Animals have trillions of microbes living in and on them, without which they could not grow and live.

Fungi have bacteria and viruses living inside them, too. Even large bacteria can have small bacteria living inside them, and bacteria can have viruses living inside them, and larger viruses can have smaller viruses living inside them. As biologist Lynn Margulis writes, all life is the story of "the long-lasting intimacy of strangers."

As we find out more about the enormous role microbes play in evolution, we're starting to reexamine some of the categories we took for granted in the past. Biology, the study of living organisms, is transforming into ecology, which is the study of the relationships among organisms, because each organism is itself a kind of ecology. We're starting to see life as a series of nested relationships. It's "relationships all the way down," to borrow a concept from Hindu mythology that says the Earth rests on a giant turtle, which rests on another turtle, and so on. It's turtles all the way down.

Leviton: What methods do fungi use to proliferate?

Sheldrake: Most fungi produce spores, which spread over large distances on the wind. In fact, fungal spores make up the largest portion of living material in the Earth's atmosphere. Fifty million tons of fungal spores are produced every year, enough to influence the weather.

Fungi also have a powerful ability to regenerate. You can take a mycelium from a mycelial network, replant it, and generate an entirely new network. [ Mycelia are the branching, threadlike "roots" of a fungus. - Ed.] That process can go on indefinitely, meaning that fungi are potentially immortal.

Leviton: The mycologist Paul Stamets describes a mycelial network as a "vast microscopic web, an infinite number of roads leading everywhere." What do you see when you study these networks?

Sheldrake: It's like a Zen koan: Are these large networks of fungi one organism or an interconnected set of individual organisms? Fungi play games with the notion of individuality from the cellular level upward. Most fungal networks can move cellular content through the network over long distances.

Large bacteria can have small bacteria living inside them, and bacteria can have viruses living inside them, and larger viruses can have smaller viruses living inside them. As biologist Lynn Margulis writes, all life is the story of "the long-lasting intimacy of strangers."

Leviton: What do you mean by "cellular content"?

Sheldrake: The word cell was coined by Robert Hooke in the seventeenth century. While looking at cork plants under the microscope, he saw what looked like little rooms, each containing a nucleus and various parts, the way monks' cells contained a bed and a desk. So we got the word cell to describe these neatly bounded subunits of life.

But in many types of fungal networks the nuclei are free to move through the network. So they're not cellular in the traditional sense of the word. We sometimes refer to them as being in a "supracellular state." You can have different types of nuclei traveling within one network, and one spore can have multiple, often genetically different, nuclei within it.

So there is a confusing question of where to draw the line and what criteria to use to define an individual fungal life. New discoveries suggest that "individuals" are not so much a natural fact as a category that depends on our point of view.

Leviton: It reminds me of how the brain of an octopus is dispersed throughout its body.

Sheldrake: Yes, you can cut off an octopus tentacle, and it can still explore its environment. They take advantage of a much more distributed brain and nervous system than we have.

Likewise, fungi are decentralized. They're able to coordinate their behavior without anything resembling a brain. They can connect perception and action without having a special place to do so. The coordination somehow takes place everywhere at once, and also nowhere in particular.

Leviton: This brings up the question of how we define intelligence.

Sheldrake: We should assess all organisms' intelligence on their terms, rather than on our terms, which reflect our human needs and sensibilities. Traditionally humans have been used as a yardstick to judge the intelligence of other organisms, placing us firmly at the center of the inquiry. It reveals our species' narcissism.

There are a number of definitions of intelligence, but most refer to an organism's ability to adapt to change, accomplish tasks, solve problems, decide between alternative courses of action, and process information from its environment in a way that helps meet its needs. By this measure, almost all organisms would qualify as intelligent to some degree.

This perspective is now quite widespread in biology. Scientists have started to ask not whether organisms have intelligence, but to what degree an organism displays intelligent behaviors and what kind. I think this helps to alleviate our human-centeredness and allows us to connect more with the unfolding event that is life.

I don't know many serious scientists who would think of animals - human or otherwise - as mere stimulus-response machines at this point. It's a welcome turn. As far as I can tell, the people who do still think like that do so not because they've carefully considered the matter, but because they haven't.

Leviton: You also write about seeing our natural environment - the mountains, the rivers, the deserts, and so forth - as having a kind of spiritual life that connects them to humans.

Sheldrake: Yes, I quoted Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma, who points out all the ways the English language encourages us to view the universe as made up of unchanging things rather than of processes. The Potawatomi language is full of verb forms that attribute aliveness to the nonhuman world. The word for "hill," for instance, means "to be a hill." Hills are in the process of actively being.

Biological processes are never black-and-white. Context is crucial. Why should the stories and metaphors we use to make sense of the universe place us in a world of inanimate objects, of static things?

In biology, and within science in general, there's a tension between what you might call a "substance ontology" - which posits that reality is made up of unchanging stuff, and that even we are sort of moving things - and another current, which posits that the universe is made up of constant change, of process. This idea of process is supported by modern physics, which understands atoms to be thrumming with fervent activity. Mass, in fact, is energy, when you boil it down, and energy is in constant process. We aren't made of unchanging stuff. We are patterns of stability within a sea of change. This view seems to more accurately describe the way the living world works, and it helps coax us out of our little boxes.

Leviton: You give many examples in your book of fungi and plants attracting the right kind of insect or animal to help them spread, propagate, or gain protection. For instance, when broad-bean plants are attacked by aphids, they release volatile compounds that attract wasps who prey on aphids.

Sheldrake: One fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis infects carpenter ants and strips them of their instinctive fear of heights. In a syndrome called "summit disease," they climb higher than they normally would and bite the vein of a leaf, whereupon the fungus kills the ant and consumes it from the inside. Eventually a stalk bursts from the victim's head, sprinkling spores over a considerable distance.

Leviton: Is it being anthropomorphic to say the fungi "decide" on this strategy for survival?

Sheldrake: We like to think of ourselves as being one of the few organisms that make decisions, but lots of organisms, when presented with options, make choices. They can behave differently when confronted with one environmental circumstance versus another. They wouldn't be very successful if they behaved exactly the same way in a flood or a drought.

If we broaden our understanding of decision-making to include the decisions made by an organism without a brain, then I don't think it's too hard to accommodate these observations.

Leviton: It's fairly easy to understand why an organism takes steps that are in its own best interest, but you and other scientists have observed behavior that may not be in the immediate interest of the individual. Rather it appears to be in the interest of the entire species, or of maintaining ecological connections.

Sheldrake: Yes, for example, when a fungus and a plant are engaged in a symbiotic relationship, both can exert some kind of control over that relationship. The fungus can provide phosphorus to a plant, and the plant can reward the fungus with more energy compounds: carbons and sugars. The fungus, in return, can supply more phosphorus. They finely manage their exchange in such a way that neither can hijack the relationship for their own exclusive benefit.

It's a very intimate relationship, and an ancient one. The exchanges between fungus and plant have had hundreds of millions of years to evolve.

Traditionally humans have been used as a yardstick to judge the intelligence of other organisms, placing us firmly at the center of the inquiry. It reveals our species' narcissism.

Leviton: But there are situations in which it's more difficult to see what's in it for one of the partners.

Sheldrake: Yes, there are mycorrhizal fungal networks through which nutrients can pass from plant to plant. People sometimes call it the "Wood Wide Web," an underground network that connects trees and other plants. The nutrients that pass through it can be energy-containing carbon compounds or minerals like nitrogen and phosphorus and water. Even signaling compounds - molecules that transmit information between cells in bodies - can pass through a fungal network. The question is: How is this being controlled, and who stands to benefit?

Evolutionary theory doesn't cope well with altruism, which in biological terms is when an organism assists another organism at a cost to itself. Within conventional evolutionary theory, if you assist a potential competitor at a cost to yourself, your competitor is more likely to survive, and your altruistic genes will soon be weeded out by natural selection.

But there are ways around this. One is kin selection: if an organism assists organisms that are related to it, then it can expect its genes to be passed on to the next generation. You can also have reciprocal altruism, in which organisms help each other at different times, such that both are ultimately more likely to survive.

This can help explain the behavior of shared mycorrhizal networks. Many orchids receive nutrition from fungal networks when they're young, and only start to provide carbon to the fungus when they're older. Some experiments have shown that plants tend to supply more carbon to neighbors who are their kin. That would explain it a little bit. But a lot of the time it happens among plants who aren't kin. So the question remains.

So far we're talking about the fungal network as a passive pipeline the plants use to send material back and forth, but we might also think about it from the point of view of the fungus, a living organism with its own needs and interests. It will survive better if it has a thriving community of plant partners. So it will support a plant partner that's doing less well by harvesting nutrients from a plant partner that's doing better. The fungus becomes a kind of broker, managing its clients for its own ends.

Leviton: But the theory of natural selection still says every organism is working only for its own survival or the survival of its kin.

Sheldrake: Yes, that's the conventional view. But we see a lot of intimate cooperation as well as competition. Organisms have a multitude of organisms living in them and on them and somehow cooperating with each other or balancing their respective needs against the needs of the collective. From that perspective, the history of life has a lot more cooperation in it than we might read about in the more conventional natural histories, which frame life as unending conflict and competition. If you think about collaboration as being a combination of competition and cooperation, then there's room for . . . well, more.

Leviton: It seems that, in so many areas - biology, botany, anthropology, psychology - there's a new focus on the ability to cooperate. Maybe we've reached a point in our own evolution where we should reemphasize cooperation, because competition has done such damage to the global environment.

Sheldrake: For sure. Consider the evolutionary thinking in England in the late nineteenth century. T.H. Huxley was known as "Darwin's bulldog" for his early and spirited defense of evolutionary theory. He talks about evolution as a gladiators' competition, whereby the strongest and fittest live to fight another day. Such views of evolution mirror the views of social progress within an industrial-capitalist system.

In the Soviet Union in the twentieth century, however, there was a much greater emphasis on cooperation in evolution, which mirrored the views of the socialist/communist system there. The debate didn't fall perfectly along East-West lines, but broadly speaking the split was noticeable.

Jan Sapp is a historian of symbiosis. He talks about the first international conference on symbiosis, which happened a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union almost went to war. The conference organizers said that global affairs might have led to their decision to hold the conference right then: they saw the need to cooperate. Maybe if scientists looked more closely at the way other organisms cooperate in the world, it would have a political or social impact.

Our scientific thinking mirrors contemporary views on human behavior. And then it feeds back on itself as humans try to justify their behavior as "natural." You can learn a lot about humans by studying the history of how these different relationships are perceived: masters and slaves, men and women, the relationship between nations. This is why I have studied the history of science, the history of scientists as people, and how science has been influenced by culture. It's a shame that so many scientists are taught science without being encouraged to think about its history. I think we'd get a lot farther in our knowledge, and scientists would have more fun, if they received a thorough history-of-science education.

Leviton: Darwin is such a giant figure in the history of science. Can you talk about his "root-brain hypothesis" and why it's still relevant?

Sheldrake: He put forward the root-brain hypothesis at the very end of a book called The Power of Movement in Plants, which he cowrote with his son Francis. The idea was that the root tip appeared to be making the decisions about which way the root would grow. The tip was where the "inflection" would happen as the root changed direction to grow around an obstacle. The roots were "piloted" from there, as it were. Information from the rest of the plant was being integrated at the root tips, Darwin thought, making them the decision-making part of the plant - the root-brain. But you can argue the same about shoots aboveground, which behave in quite similar ways. Rather than having one brain like animals do, plants have lots of decision-making parts, all acting in a kind of swarm.

The root-brain hypothesis has caused a lot of controversy over the years. Some scientists think Darwin was brilliantly pushing us to think beyond our narrow human cerebrocentric framework. Others think it's preposterous to say that plants have anything at all like a brain.

Leviton: Does this compare to the hyphae - the long, branching filaments of a fungus - and how they work?

Sheldrake: Yes, hyphae are piloted by their tips very much the way roots are. The tips are somehow able to integrate information from different parts of the fungus and make decisions about what to do next. Picture fluid flowing through a pipe, but the pipe can change and regulate the flow - using a valve, perhaps. The amount of work that the hyphal tip has to do is much greater, however. You could also think about mycelial networks as a swarm of hyphal tips, but of course it's not a swarm, because they're not individuals. They're all actually connected.

Leviton: "Homing" is another factor in how mycelium grows. Can you talk about how it works?

Sheldrake: Say you have a mycelium growing on a plate. It will expand into a kind of fuzzy circle, the tips growing away from each other, avoiding other parts of the fungus. But at a certain point in the life cycle of this network their inclinations pivot, and they start to grow toward other hyphae, making more cross-connecting paths rather than these radial spokes. When they become attracted to each other, that's a kind of homing. Very young hyphae of some types of fungi have pheromones that attract the others, so they can fuse to form a larger, more interconnected mycelium.

Leviton: Over the last few decades the study of the human brain has become the study of electrical activity, of neurons, those specialized cells that transmit nerve impulses. Do plants and fungi have neurons or an equivalent?

Sheldrake: There's a lot of interest right now in electrical signaling in plants, fungi, and bacteria. We've known for a long time that plants produce waves of electrical activity that are analogous to the impulses in our nerves.

In the nineties a Swedish researcher named Stefan Olsson was working on mycelial networks, examining their foraging behavior. It struck him they might be using electrical signals, because they seemed to be able to coordinate their behavior too quickly for simple chemical communication to be in use. So he borrowed a microelectrode rig from a researcher who was using it to measure the impulses in moths' brains. Olsson replaced the moth brain with a fungal network and found that rhythmic, spontaneous impulses passed along it. He was examining wood-rotting fungi, and when he put a block of wood on the network, the rate of firing of these impulses increased. This seemed to suggest that some fungi - especially those that form longer-lived networks over greater distances - had an increased need to coordinate their behavior and might be using electrical signals to do so. But there wasn't much follow-up, and his findings were left in relative obscurity for twenty years or so. Thankfully people are starting to investigate the phenomenon now, an effort that coincides nicely with recent research finding that plants use electrical coordination to manage growth and development.

It turns out bacteria are electrically active beings, too. They live in colonies and what are called "biofilms," where they stick to each other and to a surface. Dental plaque, for instance, is a biofilm. Bacteria can coordinate their activity across the colony with waves of electrical excitation.

We are beginning to understand that our brains didn't evolve neurons from scratch; neurons reflect ancient properties that are present in most living cells. In our brains' neurons the electrical excitability is more rapid and a lot more specialized, but the difference is in degree rather than in kind. Electrical signaling seems to be a fundamental property of living organisms in general.

Leviton: We sometimes talk about our "lizard brain" and how it still influences modern human behavior, but it's a stretch for me to think of our ancestors as actually being plants.

Sheldrake: Well, if we're talking about ancient properties of life, it all goes back to bacteria. Humans are a very specialized, optimized version of that early life.

Leviton: Let's talk about the way yeasts, bacteria, and other microorganisms work in human bodies.

Sheldrake: All animals have what's called a microbiome: an ecological community of microorganisms inside them. These microorganisms make it possible for us to live. We can't exist without them: They guide the development of our immune systems. They help us digest food. They produce key molecules that regulate our behavior. They reduce toxins. We simply would not be who we are if we had zero bacteria living inside us.

Leviton: And when we ingest probiotic foods such as yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi, we are introducing health-enhancing bacteria into our bodies, correct?

Sheldrake: Yes, probiotics contain live microorganisms that help us digest, bolster our immune system, and so forth. Western medicine has gone for decades without a thorough understanding of how much we depend on our microbiomes. A lot of the things we do to stay well are actually terrible for our microbiomes. Antibiotics, for example, kill many bacteria that we need, as well as the bacteria that we want to get rid of. Microbiomes ravaged by antibiotics can become unhealthy.

One way to restore life to a ravaged gut is to take probiotic supplements, but what's often most effective is a fecal-microbiota transplant. You have the feces of a healthy person added to your malfunctioning gut or colon through capsules or a tube. That way you get the full flora from a functioning gut, rather than just a few strains that were convenient to grow in a processing facility. It might sound strange, but for some patients it resolves 90 percent of severe problems due to a lack of bacteria in their digestive system.

Leviton: One aspect of what we consider "civilization" is the continual effort to be cleaner and get rid of dirt and vermin, but that's had an unintended side effect: by distancing ourselves from dirt, we've made our bodies more vulnerable.

Sheldrake: Totally. Allergies, autoimmune disorders, and all sorts of other problems have their roots in oversanitization of our surroundings. Our immune systems developed in dialogue with the microbes that live around us, on us, and in us. If you take those microbes away, our immune systems don't really learn what's "us" and what's "other," or what's a tolerable kind of other or an intolerable kind of other.

The germ theory of disease - that microorganisms from outside were interfering in the normal operation of our bodies - developed as early as the eleventh century in Europe, but it wasn't widely accepted until the nineteenth century. Before that, the "miasma theory," which held that disease was caused by "bad air," was the operating science. Germ theory was a big step forward for modern medicine, but it also led us to wage total war on the microbes in our lives, without realizing that we were also killing microbes we need and depend on. We need a more targeted approach.

Leviton: And compounding the issue was a parallel development of pollution from fossil fuels and industries. We've been simultaneously cleaning up and befouling our environment.

Sheldrake: Exactly. Something similar happened in modern industrial agriculture, which failed to take into account the life of the soil, which you might think of as the guts of the planet. If you believe all fungi are bad for plants and you spray crops with fungicides, without also supplying organic matter to preserve the integrity of the living soil, then you cause damage. You breed crops that are unable to form high-functioning relationships with fungi. You create all sorts of dysfunction. And you get crop-disease epidemics. It mirrors the side effect of germ theory on human health.

Leviton: Speaking of fungi, let's talk about mushrooms and lichens. I love that you call lichens "living riddles." They cover 8 percent of the earth's surface. There's more lichen than there is rain forest.

Sheldrake: Yes, in terms of surface area, that's true. Lichens prosper where other things can't.

A lichen is a composite of fungus and algae. The Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener called the fungal partners "parasites, although with the wisdom of statesmen." His "dual hypothesis" - that two different species could come together and build a new organism with its own separate identity - was opposed by many taxonomists. They argued that it was impossible for diverging branches of the tree of life to unexpectedly converge after millions of years.

Lichens play important ecological roles. They thrive on the scorched surface of deserts, where they prevent further desertification. They grow on bare rock. Their dead bodies generate soils in which other plants can then take root. Lichens are a kind of go-between linking the living and nonliving world. They are able to make energy from sunlight and air, to digest minerals from rock, and from that they produce organic tissue that becomes food for other organisms. Lichens occupy a very interesting station where inanimate geological cycles cross over into the metabolic cycles of the living.

Leviton: When you were studying lichens in British Columbia, did you go there with a preconceived sense of what they were doing, or were you surprised?

Sheldrake: I'm always surprised by lichens. [ Laughs.] If you look at Ernst Haeckel's illustrated 1904 book Art Forms in Nature, lichens are endlessly startling in their forms and shapes and colors. It's like an alien landscape.

Lichens played a big role in the evolution of modern, Western scientific thought. They are gateway organisms to the idea of cooperation in nature. In 1877 the German botanist Albert Frank imported the word symbiosis into biology to describe lichens, because it had become clear that they weren't just a type of "lower plant." They had a photosynthetic component and a fungal component. Now we know that there can be multiple fungal and multiple photosynthetic components, as well as bacteria, in these living ecosystems.

Before the word symbiosis was coined, if you were sharing bodily space with another organism, it meant one of two things: parasitism or disease. The dual hypothesis seemed improbable at the time: How could you have a useful and invigorating parasitism? This was inconceivable. It meant evolution could no longer be thought of solely in terms of competition and conflict but had to include inter-kingdom cooperation.

After that 1877 discovery many new symbiotic relationships were uncovered. There were plants and their mycorrhizal partners, the symbiotic nature of corals, and so forth. The biologist who discovered bacterial viruses called them "micro-lichens."

Leviton: It turns out lichens can help certain plants that cannot photosynthesize, right?

Sheldrake: That's the mycorrhizal fungal network - the Wood Wide Web - which nourishes plants that have lost the ability to photosynthesize. Instead these plants pull nutrients from other plants through fungal networks.

Leviton: What would be the evolutionary advantage to losing the ability to photosynthesize? It seems like a very basic need for plants.

Sheldrake: Good question. For these plants the ability to get nutrition from other plants via fungal networks allows them to survive in heavily shaded understories, where very little light can reach. With not much sunlight penetrating the forest canopy, there was no advantage to maintaining their ability to photosynthesize. It just took a lot of nutrition and energy. Might as well ditch it. With that choice came this new dependence on the fungal networks.

Leviton: What do we know about our human ancestors' use of mushrooms?

Sheldrake: Humans have been eating mushrooms and using them as medicine for many thousands of years. Ötzi the Iceman, whose frozen, mummified corpse was found by hikers in an Austrian glacier, lived sometime between 3400 and 3100 BCE. When he died - probably as a result of a wound from an arrow - he was carrying a type of fungus that grows on coniferous trees, and it was prepared quite carefully, kept in a bag strung around his neck. It was a "tinder fungus," a mushroom that has been used for thousands of years to start and carry fire, an enormously important thing to be able to do.

He was also carrying a birch polypore, a mushroom that he probably used to treat disease and parasites. So he had a highly developed knowledge of the ways these fungi could be useful. It's not that surprising, when you think about it, that a hunter-gatherer who depends entirely on the organisms that surround him would have a sophisticated working knowledge of how useful mushrooms can be.

It's fascinating to examine the relationships that humans have formed with these organisms - how humans have used psychedelics, for example. Some cultures have a deep history with psychedelic mushrooms, which influence human thought and shape culture and religion.

I also love to learn about the use of mushrooms as medicines. Broadly speaking, China is a mycophilic, or mushroom-loving, culture. The Shennong Ben Cao Jing, written about 200 CE, is one of the first medical books ever produced. It features the reishi mushroom very prominently for its potential to prolong human life. The Chinese figured out how to cultivate shiitake mushrooms about the year 1000 CE, and at a temple festival in Qingyuan County, Zhejiang Province, they celebrate that discovery as a feast day every year. It's hard to imagine that happening in England.

Leviton: We should talk about yeast as well.

Sheldrake: Yes, the history of agriculture is intimately entwined with yeast. It's been debated for some time whether it was for bread or for beer that people first gave up their nomadic lifestyles and settled to grow grains.

Leviton: So the desire to brew beer may have been the start of modern civilization?

Sheldrake: The "beer before bread" hypothesis has been steadily gaining supporters. [ Laughs.] In either case, humans feed yeast before they feed themselves. You can view this as us domesticating yeast or as yeast domesticating us.

About 10 million years ago a mutation in our genome gave us an enzyme that allows us much more efficiently to break down alcohol, which is the byproduct of the fermentation of grains, fruits, and other sources of sugar. Before this mutation alcohol was more toxic to us. The mutation seems to have allowed our primate ancestors to eat overripe fruits that had fallen to the forest floor, which may have played a part in our moving out of the trees and into a ground-dwelling existence.

Of course, everything is constantly tending toward rot and fermentation. Before refrigeration, food preservation was solely an effort to steer these metabolic processes in ways that were amenable to our culinary predilections and not just "off" and disgusting. Some of the greatest flavors in the world to this day are fermented: wines, cheeses, chocolate, olives, yogurts.

Fermentation is a basic feature of human life because it had to be. During that long period of time before we could artificially cool food and slow these metabolic processes, we learned to domesticate fermentation, to tame this chemical transformation, which is overseen by a chorus of microbial beings. I like fermenting foods because that jar in my kitchen reminds me we live in a world of metabolic processes that are mostly outside our notice.

Leviton: Psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel at UCLA believed there is a strong biological drive to seek intoxication. Do you agree?

Sheldrake: It's true that humans seek out intoxication. And not just humans: there are many examples of other animals seeking intoxication, too.

I think a pretty good case can be made that the desire for altered consciousness is a fundamental human trait. Andrew Weil cowrote, with Winifred Rosen, a book called From Chocolate to Morphine, in which he talks about how even young children have a tendency to alter their mental state by spinning around until they become dizzy. Whether or not we have a drug to assist us, we have an urge to somehow "get outside" our normal waking consciousness, which can lead us toward social, cultural, and spiritual enrichment and teach us something about what it means to be alive. Of course, psychoactive substances can cause problems. But mind alteration is here to stay.

Leviton: Let's talk about a relatively new field: using fungi to clean up the environment by breaking down oil spills, plastic, and so forth.

Sheldrake: First of all, this idea is very old. Mycoremediation, as it's called, has gone on forever. [ Remediation in ecology is a reversal of environmental damage. - Ed.] Fungi are veteran survivors of ecological disruption, and they are prodigious decomposers. When you make alcohol, it is a kind of remediation: you're encouraging yeast to remediate sugar into alcohol. When you make vinegar, you're encouraging the remediation of alcohol into acetic acid. When you make miso, you're encouraging a fungus to transform soybeans into a delicious, savory paste.

Now we are exploring how to harness the power of these fungal appetites to help us clean up pollutants. It's not always straightforward, because you might find a fungus that can digest a pollutant in a petri dish, but that doesn't mean you can just distribute this fungus into a full ecosystem and expect it will consume the contaminant, because there are all sorts of other organisms there. The fungus might not be able to get a foothold. For instance, the mycologist Peter McCoy trained Pleurotus mycelium to digest one of the most common types of litter: cigarette butts, which are saturated with toxic residues. His jam jar full of butts eventually broke down and transformed into an oyster mushroom. But can that process be applied to the 750,000 tons of cigarette butts thrown away every year?

And this big problem endures: just putting a fungus into an environment is not necessarily going to allow it to achieve a certain metabolic outcome. Some mycoremediation organizations and companies are now thinking that, instead of introducing a fungus into the environment, it's better to divert waste streams into waiting fungal appetites. A company called Mycocycle is promoting a "closed-loop supply chain" to convert carbon waste into a usable byproduct. Asphalt roofing, for instance, is a huge source of landfill waste. Rather than wait until the pollutant is in the environment and then try to solve the problem, Mycocycle wants to divert old asphalt roofing into one of the company's facilities, where fungi living in carefully controlled conditions are able to break it down in stages. This material is reduced to less-harmful byproducts, which might have a use or might just be safe to dispose of. This may be one of the most promising approaches to mycoremediation.

When the fungi break substances down, they do produce CO ₂, and potentially methane. But the alternative is to have a poisonous substance contaminating the environment, and it will break down eventually. It's better that we control that process rather than carelessly throw everything into a landfill where anything can happen.

Fungi are . . . sort of like cooks, combining ingredients. They lead us to see the world as made up of the relationships between organisms. We should be trying to understand organisms as wholes rather than as a list of their component parts.

Leviton: I interviewed your father for The Sun in 2013, and I see certain similarities in your work: You share his ability to avoid the straitjacket of rigid scientific thought. And you both value not only data and rigorous methodology, but intuition, enthusiasm, and emotion.

Sheldrake: My father's a brilliant student of the living world and is endlessly curious about it. He has the ability to communicate that curiosity and awaken it in other people. Growing up with him as my father was an exciting experience, because he taught me to be curious about the world. He's able to think very broadly, with little regard for the boundaries between disciplines. So he was an inspiring person and certainly encouraged my interest in biology and ecology. I learned from him to be suspicious of research programs that aim to reduce at all costs - meaning they want to break the world into pieces, chop up organisms and try to understand how they work by looking at the molecules that make them up. Reduction plays an important role in our efforts to understand the living world, but there's a lot we can't learn when we do that. We also need to look at the whole organism in its environment. We need to look at interactions between organisms.

Fungi are inherently integrative. They're connected. They facilitate connections between other organisms. They're sort of like cooks, combining ingredients. They lead us to see the world as made up of the relationships between organisms. We should be trying to understand organisms as wholes rather than as a list of their component parts.

Leviton: We have to critique how science functions in order to improve it, but we often see a rejection of science; a rejection of facts, statistics, probabilities. A U.S. president said, "I don't think science knows" - in the middle of a global pandemic and increasingly widespread drought, hurricanes, and wildfires.

Sheldrake: Right. This has been a major issue for much of the history of science.

It's not the first time that there have been these very vocal questions about what science is and should be: What is this discipline we call science? What's it doing? What's its role in society? How should it be funded? How does it relate to other aspects of human endeavor? How should we handle the evidence produced by scientists? Who are these people in our labs, universities, and medical establishments, and how are they taught?

There's a good phrase I've run across that defines science as the "journey toward less uncertainty." I think that's a helpful way of understanding a lot of scientific endeavors. It's not absolute certainty; it's less un certainty.

The universe was not made to be categorized, classified, systematized. We are wrestling with this unclassifiable, uncategorizable universe, and it's messy. We can't step outside the universe to observe it. There is no perfectly objective vantage point for us to observe from. The world is the biologist's flask, and we're in there with it.

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The Sun Magazine | Hidden Worlds | Mark Leviton | Issue 545

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T he British biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake has been fascinated by the often mysterious world of fungi since he was a small boy. He used to bury himself in heaps of fallen leaves and inhale the piquant odor of rot.

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Restoring the watercycle to stop climate change

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Restoring the watercycle to stop climate change

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Krista Tippett, host: She is the forest ecologist who has proven beyond doubt that trees communicate with each other, that a forest is a single organism, "wired," Suzanne Simard says, "for wisdom" and for what it is hard to call anything other than care. She has shifted her field of science on its axis and was an inspiration for the central character in Richard Powers's celebrated novel The Overstory.

But it's the understory of a forest that Suzanne Simard brought into the light. Modern forestry had applied a logic of human societies and what our eyes could see, assumed that trees compete with each other for light and soil, and thus tore out mature trees to plant marketable young species alone and set apart. Suzanne Simard began her rigorous, groundbreaking research with three types of coexistent species: paper birch, Douglas fir, and western red cedar.

What she helped the world see next is resonant intelligence about more than trees. The processes that make for a high-functioning forest mirror the maps of the human brain that we're also just now drawing. All of this turns out to be validating - catching up with - intelligence long held in Aboriginal science. Suzanne Simard calls the mature hub trees in a forest "mother trees" - parenting; eldering in a mode of mutuality and reciprocity; modeling what we also know to be true of genuinely flourishing human ecosystems.

[ music: Zoë Keating: "Seven League Boots"]

Suzanne Simard: The most powerful parts of our social systems can be the elder that has aged and is guiding younger people or guiding their culture. And yet, they can be almost invisible in the hierarchy of our social system. In forests, the same thing; the belowground world is a perfect example of that. These bacteria, the fungi, the archaea, they're the ones that are cycling the carbon, decomposing things, cycling nitrogen, filtering water, building soil, soil structure. And yet -

Tippett: The caregivers of the forest.

Simard: They are. They're the fundamental foundation of the forest. They're the legacy of the forest that helps move it forward.

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.

[ music: Zoë Keating: "Seven League Boots"]

Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. Her TED talks have captivated millions, and now she's released her book, Finding the Mother Tree.

You like to say that you grew up - you grew up in British Columbia. You like to say you grew up "in a province of old-growth forests." And I just wonder, as you speak that and you feel in your body that presence, that old-growth forest, as you were a child growing up in it, what did that mean? How did you experience it then?

Simard: Well, it was all I knew. Of course, we would go away from the old-growth forests, and then I would think, "Oh, I've got to get back," because it's in my blood and bones and DNA. You know, my ancestors for many generations lived in these inland rainforests, and it's just the way we were. And so I guess when I went away, so into the drier areas, for example, where there's grasslands, I thought they were beautiful, too, but I always wanted to get back and felt so much at home when I was among the big, old trees.

Tippett: And there is this moment you describe with your grandfather, when you had this glimpse of what you say - call a "palette of roots and soil." And you saw that this was the foundation of the forest. And it seems to me that, in some ways, you ended up pursuing that glimpse in what you did later as a scientist.

Simard: Yeah - you know, who I was, how I grew up, being among the trees, and of course, as a child, spending a lot of time on the forest floor, [ laughs] because that's where you are, you're small - and building forts with my brother and sister, and rafts that we would take on the lake, it was just - the roots and the connection in the forest was just one of us. We just knew it that way.

And then, of course, when I did become a scientist, and I - a forest scientist, eventually, and I embarked on - well, I started out with an undergraduate degree, thinking I wanted to be just a forester, because I loved - I loved forestry, and my grandfather was a horse logger. And I loved what he did, and I wanted to be part of that. But what I entered into was a much different worldview and way of treating the forest, which was really not about caring for the forest, it was more about exploiting the forest.

Tippett: Right. It's so interesting, too, because one of the things that you started to really pay attention to and illuminate are the fungi and mycorrhizae, which probably is - is this what you saw with your grandfather there, when you were young? It's what you were looking at without having a name for?

Simard: I mean, I was aware of mushrooms in the forest, [ laughs] especially when - everybody, we see these, and they're so magical and mystical and colorful, and it's a special part of the forest. But I didn't really understand, as a child, what they did in the forest. I just knew they were a part of the forest, an integral part of the forest.

Tippett: And it's fascinating, as I also learned from you, that this kind of Darwinian approach to forest management only focused on fungi that are pathogens. And that is a reality, but not - what you saw is this fungus root - that under a single footstep, there could be hundreds of [ laughs] kilometers of, how do you say, mycelium?

Simard: Mycelium.

Tippett: Mycelium. It was so much more complex, again, than the thing growing aboveground that our eyes could perceive.

Simard: Yeah, so you're right, foresters were very much focused on the pathogens, because they kill trees. And there was huge efforts to get them - to reduce that mortality due to pathogens, and these kind of crazy forest practices where, if there was this one pathogen, Armillaria ostoyae, the practice was to pull the stumps out of the soil - literally take these huge machines and rip these stumps out of the soil so the roots were exposed, killing the pathogens, which just is a really good example of the extent that we would go to in order to create these so-called productive environments for trees to grow and for stands to be fully - what we call "fully stocked" with fast-growing crop trees.

Tippett: You also came to - so there's this web of vitality that we hadn't been able to understand. And you also - you use the language of conversation, of the trees talking to each other. And I loved - there's a moment in the book, Finding the Mother Tree, where you tell the story of the first time - and you're using this language, but I want you to open this up for us - that you first "listened to" a fir tree, that you heard it with a Geiger counter. So what were you hearing?

Simard: Yeah, so we'd done this experiment where we grew these 80 triplicates of birch, fir, and cedar. And just building on the story, that birch was considered, and still is, a competitor in forests, a weed, even though it's a natural part of succession. After disturbances, birch and aspen and cottonwoods, they come back, right, and they're like the healing process of a disturbed forest. But foresters viewed them as unnecessary competitors and had launched an all-out war on trying to get rid of these deciduous trees. And that war is still going on to this very day, creating policies and practices that support that.

And what I wanted to know was whether they really were competitors with Douglas fir and cedar or if they had a more sophisticated relationship. So I did this preliminary work, and I discovered - I knew that Douglas fir and paper birch shared these mycorrhizal fungi, these species in common, and actually, potentially linked them together. And I was building on earlier research done in the UK in the laboratory, where David Reed and his colleagues had found that pines grown in little clear plastic root boxes in the lab, that when they were connected - they could be connected by a mycorrhizal fungus, and that when he labeled one seedling with radioactive CO ₂, he could trace it going to another one.

So I kind of used that same approach. I thought, does this happen in real forests? And so yeah, so what I did is I - to find out if this network existed and whether or not - what was it doing? Was it facilitating any kind of relationship between paper birch and Douglas fir? And so I labeled paper birch with radioactive carbon dioxide. That means I put a plastic bag over the shoot, and I injected radioactive CO ₂, and I let the birch photosynthesize for a couple of hours, taking up that radioactive CO ₂.

Tippett: Just a couple of hours?

Simard: Just a couple of hours.

Tippett: That's all it took.

Simard: That's all it took. And then with the Douglas fir, I labeled it with a different isotope, a stable isotope that doesn't decay over time; it's not radioactive. So then I could distinguish if these carbon molecules were going back and forth between these two species. And so I did - I labeled it for two hours, as well, put a plastic bag over Douglas fir, injected the C-13, CO ₂, and then came back six days later with my Geiger counter.

And the first thing was: did the labeling work? Was I able to label the paper birch with the radioactivity? So I held the Geiger counter up to it, and sure enough, it just went wild. It was crackling like crazy. It had worked, right? I had totally made this paper birch hot. And so then I went over to the Douglas fir, and I held the Geiger counter up to it, and there was a faint crackle. And that's when I knew. I knew that they were sharing carbon, which was mind-blowing.

[ music: "Cornicob" by Blue Dot Sessions] Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today with the groundbreaking forest ecologist Suzanne Simard.

[ music: "Cornicob" by Blue Dot Sessions]

All the way through the book - and this is the discipline of science, right - you raise a question, and then you pursue it. And so your question here was: how were paper birch and Douglas fir communicating? And it turns out they were conversing not only in the language of carbon, so that the language in which they were conversing, as you found, is in carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and water and defense signals and chemicals and hormones.

In 1997, you publish this Nature article, which - well, first of all it was rejected. And you went back and rewrote it, and I get the feeling that you did not expect that they would put it on the cover. [ laughs] They put it on the cover, correct?

Simard: They did, yes.

Tippett: And that it would catapult you into visibility - and not surprisingly, because you were saying things people hadn't said before in this way, and you were a woman in a male-dominated field and - fields, probably; forestry as well as science. And you - there'd been a lot of resistance. But you published this work, and - did you use the language of "wood-wide web" or did someone else, or did Nature say that?

Simard: Yeah, they put that on the front cover, with a picture of these diverse forests with all these different tree species.

Tippett: Do you like that little shorthand?

Simard: I do. I mean, I think the "wood" part is quite utilitarian, but it's catchy. And it's become almost like a meme now, and - which has been highly effective in helping people think about the forest in a different way. And it was also at the same time that we - people had just discovered the worldwide web, right? 1992, right? [ laughs] So it was - yeah, it was actually - it was great.

Tippett: So what they were picking up on was this imagery of the forest having nodes and links, right, like the internet. And that's in there. I also feel like what you are describing is something more alive, [ laughs] more - well, it was more biological than the internet, right? I mean, you were talking about these nodes that are hub trees that you call mother trees, and that the forest is not just wired, but wired for wisdom and care.

Simard: And actually, when the Nature paper was published, we didn't know what the pattern of the network looked like belowground. That, actually, that work came quite a bit later. And I'll explain why. Eventually, in - about ten years later, I was getting really worn down by the reviews of my work and also just the state of the science. We were - scientists were just kind of wringing their hands over whether this network existed, because you can't see it very well with your own eyes. It's belowground. These fungal mycelium are - some of them are invisible to the eye.

And then there was just a lot of distrust about this communication going on or this collaboration, because we were so heavily steeped in the idea that trees only compete. And so there was a great handwringing over whether or not this actually helped the plants or helped the fungi. And so I got a grad student, Kevin Beiler, and we decided to map what that network looked like. What emerged out of that mapping, these hubs and nodes and links and mother trees, which [ laughs] has got a story unto itself.

Tippett: Well, say some more. Say some more.

Simard: Yeah, so when we did this - so I felt like, we've got to move this field forward or it's going to die. [ laughs] It's going to mired in having to prove the same things over and over again. And so I picked a forest that is a Douglas fir forest, an interior Douglas fir forest in British Columbia. These are drier forests that are what we call "uneven aged," in forestry language. That means that you have big, old trees, but you have lots of young trees, too. They grow up underneath the shade in a canopy of the old trees. It's kind of a self-regenerating forest. And so it's got multiple ages.

And so just to give context: so in this forest, we estimated about 100 species of fungi, in these little patches of forest, that were mycorrhizal fungi. We looked at two sister species of one fungal species, Rhizopogon. So we looked at a tiny, tiny fraction. And what we found [ laughs] was that every tree was connected to every other tree by these two sister species of this one species alone. Can you imagine if we'd mapped all 100? It would've been like, incredible.

Tippett: [ laughs] Right. Right.

Simard: So every tree is linked to every other tree. All the little trees - the seedlings, the saplings are all linked into the networks that these old trees had established through their lifetime, and that the biggest, oldest trees were the hubs of the network. They were the nuclei. They were what everything else was linked into. And they were linked to each other, these other, smaller nodes, as well. But the biggest linkers were these big, old trees.

And that's kind of - it makes sense, because the big old trees have big root systems. They've got many points of contact. And they have great big photosynthetic crowns that basically transmit energy into the ground that feeds the network. And so the interpretation was that these seedlings, the seedlings, the young regeneration had regenerated within the network of the old trees. So basically, they germinated, their little root systems developed, linked into the network of the old trees within a month or two, and they started to get subsidies directly from the old trees: carbon and nitrogen - and water, which we found out later - and they also benefited from just this vast mycelium that was just, like, like an iceberg, right? [ laughs] It was huge. And so they were - immediately had a head start and could survive in this otherwise fairly dark forest, where photosynthetic rates were really, really low, with their tiny little needles. There's no way they could've survived without these subsidies.

Tippett: Right. Well, and it's so interesting, too, because you were - you were becoming a mother yourself, in these years of your research. I mean, you - let's be clear. You had to be so rigorous in your science, right, to be taken seriously. So you don't make these - you don't use these metaphors lightly or carelessly.

Simard: No; not at all.

Tippett: And at the same time, some of the qualities that you describe, some of the things that these mother trees do, absolutely mirror the intelligence that human beings possess in mothering, parenting, and eldering, right: passing wisdom on, sending warning signals, aiding others through sickness and distress, delivering nutrients. [ laughs]

Simard: Yes. No, you've hit on exactly kind of the struggle, as a young scientist trying to establish their credibility in this very competitive and critical field [ laughs] and using the language that was only accepted at the time. If you didn't do that, you would be tossed to the dogs. [ laughs] And I never even considered, as a 30-year-old, or as I was developing my creds, of ever using language like mother trees or communication. I knew I would get tossed to the dogs. And so it was with a great deal of trepidation, to use this language, and I am getting a lot of backlash over it, especially since the book has been published, but -

Tippett: Oh, you are, again, now - still?

Simard: Yes, I am. But to me, we're at the point where we have to - I feel, you know - I felt it was really important. We've got to move beyond this, right? We've got to embrace our place in nature as one with nature and that these trees, they evolved long before we did, and these networks - for example, the biological neural networks which we've found, they exist throughout nature. These patterns exist throughout nature, because they're efficient at moving stuff around, at communication, and they're resilient. And they're meant to help us be reproductive societies.

Tippett: Well, right. And as you say, we are of nature. We're not separate. And also, it feels important to me that - and I don't see people pointing this out, when they talk about your work - that the larger context, one of the larger contexts of this is that there is, within the field of evolutionary biology, our generation of science and humanity is growing up and complicating and deepening that idea. But evolutionary biology in its many fields has been tempering and complicating and qualifying this idea that competition alone is the primary engine of evolution, and that a human superpower is cooperation; that that leads to flourishing groups and the flourishing of our species. And the language you used, of the qualities of the forest, of reciprocity and mutuality, are also qualities of high-functioning humans. And that's a scientific observation in our generation.

Simard: Yes. Social systems, human social systems - you know, ecosystems, they're built fundamentally in similar ways. They're what scientists are now calling complex adaptive systems. And that complexity has a pattern, and that pattern is highly evolved. And then how that system works, like through these networks, whether you're in a human social network or a fungal network in the forest, it's evolved to, basically, to propagate species, [ laughs] which I don't disagree with Darwinianism in that way, in that, yes, species want to survive and reproduce, but the way they do it is much more sophisticated than we've thought about or that we've developed our science based on. But even now, it's becoming more mainstream, known, that endosymbiosis has been highly important in collaboration and cooperation.

Tippett: That was - I think - was that the term that Lynn Margulis initially coined - the endosymbiosis? So describe what that is.

Simard: Yeah, so that's - in the evolution of eukaryotic cells - and prokaryotic cells, as well - what we've discovered now, or scientists have discovered, is that it really - that evolution involved the engulfing of one organism of another, and that led to the development of organelles like mitochondria. Now we know that it's not just the evolution of a species by itself. And so that endosymbiosis means it's a symbiosis. They live together, that's what symbiosis means. "Endo-" means, like, the engulfing and creating the eukaryotic cell with a nucleus and ribosomes and all the other organelles that are really an evolution of this collaboration, this cooperation, and even in the human genome, as we've discovered that, that we are full of DNA that is from other organisms - viruses and bacteria, and ... So now it's actually accepted that this is, you know, this has been fundamental to evolution. But it did take a long time, and I think Lynn Margulis took a lot of heat [ laughs] for her ideas.

Tippett: She did. Like you, she was ridiculed for a long time. And I - you know, it seems to me that - just as we're speaking, it seems to me the kind of catchphrase, the soundbite of Darwinianism has been survival of the fittest. But what you have been looking at in the forest and what I feel like more of our attention, including scientific attention, is going towards now is: what is the nature of vitality and flourishing, not mere survival?

Simard: That's such a great point, you know. I mean, a fit organism puts on biomass, right? They grow. They flourish. They don't just merely survive. And I'm really glad that you brought that up, because when we manage ecosystems - when I look at forestry practices or agriculture practices or fishing, it's like we manage them just to survive. We don't manage them to flourish. We push them to the brink of collapse, right - take as much as we possibly can. And I think, yeah, I think we need to step away and look at how all interrelated the science is with this management and what shape we're in right now, the trajectory that we're on. These things are all connected together.

[ music: "Bivly" by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: After a short break, more with Suzanne Simard.

[ music: "Bivly" by Blue Dot Sessions]

I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today I'm with the forest ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her research has shown that a forest is a single living organism, and this is transforming our scientific and cultural understanding of trees. She was an inspiration for the scientist at the center of Richard Powers's celebrated novel The Overstory. But a conversation with her also sheds light on the vitality of the living system that is a human family or society. Her book is called Finding the Mother Tree.

One of the things you saw, have seen in the forest, is that the chemicals that are being transmitted are identical to our neurotransmitters; that these processes that we've only recently been able to map in the human brain, it sounds like it's the same process, or it's a kindred process to that.

Simard: They have similarities it is hard to ignore. [ laughs] So yeah, I mean, when I did my studies with my students, we were - we were looking at carbon and nitrogen and water and how it's moving between plants, and then looking at the stoichiometry of these chemicals, these elements moving together. And I realized the stoichiometry was the same as glutamate - you know, of carbon and nitrogen. And I'm just like, Oh. You know? [ laughs] It's glutamate that's moving through these; or is it?

Tippett: And say what glutamate is.

Simard: Glutamate is an amino acid. It's got carbon and nitrogen in it, and it happens to also be one of our neurotransmitters.

Tippett: Yeah, so it's essential in our bodies, as well.

Simard: Yes. And so I - you know how, as scientists, they have their scales that they work at? I do cross scales, but I don't really cross into the scale of what the molecules are. I go from the forest down to these - to networks, but I have to rely on other scientists to do that more molecular, detailed, biochemical work. And so other people had discovered that glutamate was one of the main amino acids that actually moves through networks.

Tippett: Yeah, it's fascinating. And - and - something that you also, along the way, realized is that this way of seeing and redefining what feels like discovery to us and is being discovered and kind of named, in terms of scientific - in scientific vocabulary, is actually, in some ways, you could say that it's modern science joining, meeting intelligence that has been there in traditional societies and Aboriginal societies. So there have been humans who understood; didn't have this particular language. But that's also a conversation you've been having kind of around the edges of your own research. Is that correct?

Simard: It is. You know, I've had such great fortune to, in the last decade, to work with Aboriginal scientists and Aboriginal people. I got a postdoc, Dr. Teresa Ryan, who is a salmon fishery scientist, and I'd been struggling so much in this Western science sphere, with my colleagues and publishing my work and fighting to get the interpretations accepted of collaboration and wholeness of the ecosystems. And I just started talking to her, and she's like, "Well, our worldview is that we are part of these ecosystems; that we are all connected together, we can't be separated from each other, and that yeah, collaboration is all part of it; that the world is an entwined place." And she even showed me this oral history and writings by a man, subiyay, Bruce Miller of the Skokomish Nation, and he had written about these fungal networks in the soil - and that was before these discoveries - and how his people had known about these networks and how it kept the forest strong for millennia. And I'm like, oh my God, we've been so narrowly focused on reductionist science, pulling things apart and then trying to understand them, that we lost our way to actually see these as whole systems.

And so I felt so, suddenly, accepted, you know? I felt like, I belong again. I don't feel like I'm going to get - my science is going to be ...

Now I need to get on track with really moving it forward and not fighting, you know, fighting the criticism. I need to just move forward. And yeah, that was such a blessing for me. It's just opened up my whole world. And now I'm working a lot with Aboriginal people and just opening up how do we work together, and viewing - you know, Western science is really just the little sister to Aboriginal science, which has been going on for millennia.

Tippett: [ laughs] Right - for so much longer. There was someplace, also, you'd been talking about some of your newer work near the end of the book, about understanding the connection between fish and rivers and inland forests and that that's also a connection that has long been made in these other bodies of intelligence and practice.

Simard: Yeah. So I'm working with the Heiltsuk Nation, which is in the Mid-Coast region of British Columbia. And the Heiltsuk have a large, large territory. They're actually a combination of many nations - but that's another story. But so we work with the Heiltsuk Nation in going to a number of watersheds that had different salmon runs. And this is a long, long story, [ laughs] but basically what we were after is, we wanted to understand the role of salmon in forest productivity, and building on work of the Aboriginal people who knew about these connections between salmon, trees, and themselves, and also some earlier Western science that had made discoveries that salmon nitrogen was inside of trees and plants and insects. And so we wanted to know what was the pathway -

Tippett: So amazing.

Simard: Yeah, it is absolutely amazing. [ laughs] So we were embarking on what is the pathway? How does the salmon get into these trees? And so that's - yeah, we've been unraveling that story.

Tippett: Yeah, that's amazing. Something that you often have been fascinated and amazed by is also the self-healing properties of the forest and that these are regenerative systems. In your book, you really do also - like the best books, I think, you're telling multiple stories together; and so the story of the science unfolding, the understanding unfolding, and also what you were living through as a human being. And you did have cancer. And the way I think of this is not anthropomorphizing, but actually applying - letting different kinds of intelligence be in a reciprocal relationship, right? So you experienced - you know, somewhere you said about yourself, you started to understand that we are made for recovery and that there were echoes there with the regenerative system that is a forest that you were studying and living in. Can you say a little bit about that?

Simard: Yeah, that was an incredible learning moment for me, in a very personal and visceral way. I mean, I was - I got breast cancer. It wasn't great. It had spread to my lymph nodes. You know, I was facing death. And I had to really embrace all that I could to survive. My kids were 10 and 12 at the time, or 12 and 14. And I needed to be there for them, and I was worried that I might not be. And I had to do anything I could. And I learned - you know, I actually learned from my doctors, I learned from my friends, all the other women going through chemo, my family. And we all - you know, we came together as a - [ laughs] as a system, really, as a group that, you know, we were helping each other.

Just as an example, my - I call them my BFFs, my "breastless friends forever" - we all lost our breasts. And we all went through chemo together; it was really, really hard. And the way we supported each other by just being there, always. And still, today, almost ten years later, these are some of my best friends, and we're constantly in contact. And it's like the network, right? It's a reinforcing, resilient network. It's regenerative. It helps you be happy and healthy. And you know, in the forest, that's how forests regenerate, as we talked about, how seedlings establish within the network of this collaborative system; you know, the old trees, they're nurturing them and bringing them up. And this is exactly how our own social systems work and what keeps us healthy and alive and productive and happy, too.

[ music: "This Is For Our Sins" by Andy Othling]

Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today with the groundbreaking forest ecologist Suzanne Simard.

[ music: "This Is For Our Sins" by Andy Othling]

I'm fascinated with the language of ecosystem and just - you know, it's about - that word is about 100 years old in our vocabulary, and strangely, I think it takes about a century for some really tectonic shift in understanding to start to penetrate. I mean, just like Einstein completely reframed the nature of time, but we're still living in this clockwork world, because [ laughs] we haven't caught up yet. And it does feel to me like ecosystem is a total reframing, and we're just catching up in all these ways we've been talking about and learning about the ecosystem in our bodies and, as you said, with new, cutting-edge scientific tools, seeing the ecosystem in something like a forest.

I just want to read something you wrote, just this incredible passage from your book:"We can think of an ecosystem of wolves, caribou, trees and fungi creating biodiversity just as an orchestra of woodwind, brass, percussion and string musicians assemble into a symphony. Or how our brains, composed of neurons, axons and neurotransmitters, produce thought and compassion. Or the way brothers and sisters join to overcome a trauma like illness or death - the whole greater than the sum of the parts."

I kept thinking, when I was reading you, about a conversation I was in a few years ago with a bunch of people who were in their 20s. And there was a breakout group, and the title of it was "Communal Scaling." Communal scaling would be about vulnerabilities and resilience getting interconnected. It would mean that everything wouldn't just get bigger and bigger. There would be things that got smaller, there would be things that died, and their learnings would be incorporated into the ongoing vitality. In some ways I look back at that, and I think about how the intelligence and the vision in that conversation was - is very much reflected in what you've learned about how forest ecosystems work.

Simard: Yeah. I mean, forests are really dynamic places, just like our own societies. And it does involve death, it involves pulling back, it involves learning, or redirecting your resources, sometimes, to learn something new - so it's not always about growth. It's not always about becoming bigger and better in a traditional or a visible way that we might measure as wealth, for example, or power. You know, the most powerful parts of our social systems can be the elder that has aged and is guiding younger people, or guiding their culture. And yet, they can be almost invisible in the hierarchy of our social system.

In forests, the same thing. The belowground world is like a perfect example of that. We don't see it, we don't necessarily, unless you're looking belowground. And here it's doing all the fundamental work, right? These bacteria, the fungi, the archaea, they're the ones that are cycling the carbon, decomposing things, cycling nitrogen, filtering water, building soil, soil structure. And yet -

Tippett: The caregivers of the forest.

Simard: They are. They're the fundamental foundation of the forest. They're the legacy of the forest that helps move it forward.

Tippett: There's this very quiet - there are these quiet sentences that I just want to put back - from you again: "There is a necessary wisdom in the give-and-take of nature, its quiet agreements and search for balance. There is an extraordinary generosity."

Simard: Yeah. You know, species, they don't live in isolation. It is a world of give-and-take. It is a relationship of silent agreements between species. We all need each other, to create these healthy systems. You know, it - yeah, I can't emphasize that enough, that the community, the ecosystem is a complex place. And it's about working together. It's not just about the parts. They are more than the sum of the parts.

Tippett: Yeah, and there's a way that that just lands, at least in some of us, as common sense, which is also fascinating, because given how much [ laughs] rigorous work you had to do to be able to formulate those ideas inside the field.

Simard: Yeah, I mean, maybe we'll look back on this period and go, what were we thinking? [ laughs] But it's pervasive, right? Like agriculture - look at agriculture. It's going through transformations away from industrial, high-input agriculture to more regenerative agriculture. And some systems are almost irretrievable, now that we've hammered them so hard with this kind of thinking; like, for example, the crash of our salmon populations. We need to really regenerate these systems and change our thinking so that they can be healthy again.

Tippett: I want to ask you a couple of less serious questions, just things I'm really curious about, but I suspect they might be related to this. So in the book, you have a lot of wonderful photographs, starting with photographs when you were a child with your family, and all the way through. Something that you do in here, and I just think there must be a reason for it, is - you know, often when you have a picture, when we show photographs, we'll name the ages of children, right? So here's the first one in the book, I think. It's your siblings and your mother, and you say, "Kelly, 3; Robyn, 7; and mom, Ellen June, 29. I'm 5." And then all the way through the book, you name the ages of all the adults, right? So it's not just the 5-year-old, it's the 89-year-old. And there's something - it just - it made me sit up and think about the generations in a different way. And anyway, is there a reason that you did that?

Simard: Well, I wanted to tell the story of how my life was so essential to the questions I asked in my science. And I wanted to tell that story in a way that people could understand and follow; make it simple and so you could trace what was happening. I wanted people to realize that this scientific endeavor was really a life lived. And it wasn't just my life, it was generations that came before me and the generations that come after me; we're all linked together. And I felt that that might help people to see that line, if you want to call it a line - it's not really a line, it's kind of a cycle. But yeah, I felt like it was a good touchpoint, a touchstone for people to really grasp the development of the story.

Tippett: A word that you use a lot in your writing and when you're talking about the work you're doing is "humus." You say it that way, right?

Simard: Yes.

Tippett: At some point in the last couple of years - I think it was after I read Andrea Wulf's book The Invention of Nature, about Alexander von Humboldt. I don't know if you read that.

Simard: I haven't.

Tippett: But it's really about the trajectory of, you know, going from natural philosophy, where science saw itself as - it was multidisciplinary and connected to all kinds of other disciplines that we don't consider to be science now. And anyway, that language of humus, and I started thinking how interesting it was that the root of "humus" and "human" and also "humor" - [ laughs] how those three words are so - and there was this line of Henry David Thoreau, in Walden: "Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould" - which is, I guess, another way to talk about humus - "myself?" I don't know. I've never had anybody to talk to about that with. But ... [ laughs]

Simard: No, I mean, that's really brilliant of you. Those root words are, you know - [ laughs] it's connected together. The humus is the foundation of the forest. It's where the decay happens. It's where the nutrients are. It's where most of the carbon in the soil is. It's an absolutely fundamental part of the being of the forest. And humor, [ laughs] for example, is - that is also our, what makes us fundamentally happy and interesting people and gives us - makes us relax and enjoy our lives; happiness; to be human. [ laughs] And I love that you've made that linkage together. That is brilliant. I love it.

Tippett: [ laughs] Oh, OK. Well, thank you. I'm happy to discuss it with someone.

I mean, if I ask you, through this life, this professional life, but also a human life that you've spent in the forest, with the forest - not just with the forest, but that as your passionate focus, how would you talk about how that has shaped and evolved, and maybe right now, today, continues to evolve your understanding of what it means to be human?

Simard: Yeah. I think that we all kind of struggle with that, right? That's kind of our life's work, is to understand, what is it to be human? What is the meaning of my life? And we go through these changes, these dramatic changes at different points in our life, and I think, as a child, I didn't really think about it that much, other than that I just loved - [ laughs] I just loved this place that was my home, which was the forest. And then I went through all of these incredible journeys of - and not always fun, right - like a lot of difficulty, a lot of frustration and second-guessing myself and - and yet, out of it, I've grown into a more whole person, myself. And maybe I'm back to where I was as a kid, right - like, to enjoy, just be happy with this whole life that I have.

Tippett: And you have such a good cheer, I would say both in spite of and because of what you see - the intelligence of nature, the innate intelligence we have the capacity to possess. You've said the forest is wired for wisdom, which is such an intriguing idea. I mean, do you - and I know, I mean, there you are in British Columbia, and we're speaking - we're speaking in a time in which fires and the consequences of living the way we've been living are really coming home, are intensifying. But I feel like you hold onto all the complexity; you also hold onto this capacity for regeneration and self-healing that you've seen. And you said forests are wired for wisdom, and I feel like you also think we are, although it's not necessarily the destination. I don't know.

Simard: Yeah. You know, I've learned through my work, in studying how systems work, that they are regenerative systems. You know, they're built that way. They've evolved that way - that the old help the young, that the large helps the small, and it's reciprocal, and that this network, this system, will grow. And out of it emerges incredible stuff, like the ability to sequester carbon in our ecosystems, for example; the productivity of a beautiful cathedral forest; the sense of wonder and health and vitality and health you get - that we get when we interact with that incredible place. You know, even in our own societies, look at what we've achieved, and look at the joy we've developed, listening to the symphony, watching our children grow. It's just full of joy.

And we're built for that. And that's what gives me incredible hope, and honestly, hope is the only way to go, right? And it's also - that hope is based on understanding. It's an understanding that our ecosystems are meant to heal themselves, and yes, there are tipping points, and yes, we do - if we don't make changes, they can collapse, but they can also go the other direction. The system will respond, if we make those choices, and it will rebuild and re-self-organize again in a way that is going to be healthy for maybe even the human population, the human society, right? I think it's all there. We have all the tools. We have all the fundamental building blocks. We just need to make the right - make good decisions.

Tippett: We have to re-self-organize, as well. [ laughs]

Simard: We do.

Tippett: We have to get regenerative, too. [ laughs]

Simard: We do. We have to [ laughs] re-self-organize. But we're doing it. We see it. There's hope everywhere.

[ music: "Lakal" by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: Suzanne Simard is Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. You can connect with her ongoing work at mothertreeproject.org. Her book is called Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

[ music: "Lakal" by Blue Dot Sessions]

The On Being Project is: Chris Heagle, Laurén Drommerhausen, Erin Colasacco, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian Vo, Lucas Johnson, Suzette Burley, Zack Rose, Colleen Scheck, Julie Siple, Gretchen Honnold, Jhaleh Akhavan, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Ben Katt, Gautam Srikishan, Lillie Benowitz, April Adamson, Ashley Her, and Matt Martinez.

The On Being Project is located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

On Being is an independent, nonprofit production of The On Being Project. It is distributed to public radio stations by WNYC Studios. I created this show at American Public Media.

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And the Ford Foundation, working to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement worldwide.

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Suzanne Simard - Forests Are Wired For Wisdom | The On Being Project

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Krista Tippett, host: She is the forest ecologist who has proven beyond doubt that trees communicate with each other, that a forest is a single organism, "wired," Suzanne Simard says, "for wisdom" and for what it is hard to call anything other than care.

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Anna L. Tsing on Creating ‘Wonder in the Midst of Dread’

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Through her writings and the collaborative curatorial platform Feral Atlas, the anthropologist is offering new ways of imagining – and representing – our relationship to nature

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If we want to tackle the climate crisis, we need to address a global blindspot: the vast underground fungal networks that sequester carbon and sustain much of life on Earth.

Fungi are largely invisible ecosystem engineers. Most live as branching, fusing networks of tubular cells known as mycelium. Globally, the total length of fungal mycelium in the top 10cm of soil is more than 450 quadrillion km: about half the width of our galaxy. These symbiotic networks comprise an ancient life-support system that easily qualifies as one of the wonders of the living world.

Through fungal activity, carbon floods into the soil, where it supports intricate food webs - about 25% of all of the planet's species live underground. Much of it remains in the soil, making underground ecosystems the stable store of 75% of all terrestrial carbon. But climate change strategies, conservation agendas and restoration efforts overlook fungi and focus overwhelmingly on aboveground ecosystems. This is a problem: the destruction of underground fungal networks accelerates both climate change and biodiversity loss and interrupts vital global nutrient cycles. These networks should be regarded as a global public good to be mapped, protected and restored as a matter of urgency.

Fungi lie at the base of the food webs that support much of life on Earth. About 500m years ago, fungi facilitated the movement of aquatic plants on to land, fungal mycelium serving as plant root systems for tens of millions of years until plants could evolve their own. This association transformed the planet and its atmosphere - the evolution of plant-fungal partnerships coincided with a 90% reduction in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Today, most plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi - from the Greek words for fungus ( mykes) and root ( rhiza) - which weave themselves through roots, provide plants with crucial nutrients, defend them from disease and link them in shared networks sometimes referred to as the "wood wide web". These fungi are a more fundamental part of planthood than leaves, wood, fruit, flowers or even roots.

We are destroying the planet's fungal networks at an alarming rate. Based on current trends, more than 90% of the Earth's soil will be degraded by 2050. Modern industries, from agriculture to forestry, have failed to take account of the life in the soil. Despite the fact that mycorrhizal fungi supply as much as 80% of a plant's nutrients, intensive farming practices - through a combination of ploughing and application of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and fungicides - severely reduce the abundance, diversity and physical integrity of fungal networks. Logging wreaks havoc below ground, decreasing the abundance of mycorrhizal fungi by as much as 95%, and the diversity of fungal communities by as much as 75%. A large study published in 2018 suggested that the "alarming deterioration" of the health of trees across Europe was caused by a disruption of their mycorrhizal relationships, brought about by nitrogen pollution from fossil fuel combustion and agricultural fertiliser.

Mycorrhizal fungal networks make up between a third and a half of the living mass of soils and are a major global carbon sink. When we destroy them, we sabotage our efforts to limit global heating. Plants supply carbon to their fungal partners in exchange for nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus - much of the phosphorus that makes up the DNA in your own body will have passed through a mycorrhizal fungus. In their exchange, plants and fungi engage in sophisticated trading strategies, striking compromises and resolving dizzyingly complex trade-offs. The influence of these quadrillions of microscopic trading decisions spills out over whole continents.

Globally, at least 5bn tons of carbon dioxide are sequestered within mycorrhizal networks each year, a quantity roughly equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide emitted annually by the US (unpublished data suggests this figure is closer to 17bn tons). Even small reductions in the prevalence of fungal networks have significant consequences: a release of just 0.1% of the carbon now stored in Europe's soils is equal to the annual emissions from 100m cars.

Mycorrhizal fungi are keystone organisms that support planetary biodiversity; when we disrupt them, we jeopardise the health and resilience of the organisms on which we depend. Fungal networks form a sticky living seam that holds soil together; remove the fungi, and the ground washes away. Mycorrhizal networks increase the volume of water that the soil can absorb, reducing the quantity of nutrients leached out of the soil by rainfall by as much as 50%. They make plants less susceptible to drought and more resistant to salinity and heavy metals. They even boost the ability of plants to fight off attacks from pests by stimulating the production of defensive chemicals. The current focus on aboveground biodiversity neglects more than half of the most biodiverse underground ecosystems, because areas with the highest biodiversity aboveground are not always those with the highest soil biodiversity.

Mycorrhizal fungal networks and the nutrient flows and processes they manage should be considered a global public good, analogous to clean air and water. For millennia in many parts of the world, traditional farming and land management practices have attended to the health of the soil and thus supported plants' fungal relationships implicitly. But over the course of the 20th century, our behaviour has led us into trouble.

Organisations like the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (Spun), the Fungi Foundation and GlobalFungi are advocating for soil ecosystems, and leading a massive global sampling effort to create open-source maps of Earth's fungal networks. These maps will help chart the properties of underground ecosystems, such as carbon sequestration hotspots, and document new fungal species able to withstand drought and high temperatures. Researchers will be able to track the distribution of fungal networks as they shift in response to changing climates and patterns of land use, much as they already do for global vegetation, climates and ocean currents.

A deeper knowledge of these dynamic living systems will support conservation projects and policies that aim to halt their destruction and encourage their recovery, besides driving much-needed innovation in underground ecosystem science and technology.

Mycorrhizal fungal networks have long sustained and enriched life on our planet. It's time they receive the attention they deserve.

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A powerful and underappreciated ally in the climate crisis? Fungi | Toby Kiers and Merlin Sheldrake

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If we want to tackle the climate crisis, we need to address a global blindspot: the vast underground fungal networks that sequester carbon and sustain much of life on Earth. Fungi are largely invisible ecosystem engineers. Most live as branching, fusing networks of tubular cells known as mycelium.

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In warm weather, zebra finches sing heat calls to their unborn offspring, and this programs the nestlings to produce less heat inside their cells

Zebra finches sing a special song to their eggs to warn them about hot weather, and these calls seem to program the hatchlings' cells to harness energy from food without creating excessive heat. This may help their offspring adapt to warmer temperatures.

Zebra finches, which mostly live in arid areas of Australia, sing "heat calls" at temperatures above 26°C. Previous studies have found that the calls seem to reduce the growth of offspring in hot nests and increase their reproductive success as adults. A smaller body size may help young birds cope better in higher temperatures, as the result is a larger surface area to volume ratio which means they can lose heat more efficiently.

Now, for the first time, we have evidence that when zebra finch eggs are exposed to heat calls, it changes how energy-generating units inside cells, called mitochondria, work in chicks after they hatch.

Mitochondria convert energy from sugars and fats into a molecule called adenosine trisphosphate (ATP), which powers cells. They can also use energy from food to generate heat by a process called leak respiration.

"Hearing heat calls changes the balance of how much ATP versus heat mitochondria produce," says Mylene Mariette at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. "Under mild heat [below 35°C], mitochondria of heat-call exposed birds produce relatively more ATP, because they don't need to produce as much body heat."

To investigate, Mariette and her colleagues allowed 59 male and 52 female zebra finches to breed and collected the eggs on the same day they were laid. The team kept the eggs at 37°C for 10 days, before transferring them into one of two incubators.

In one incubator, the researchers played recordings of heat calls from 10am to 6pm every day until the eggs hatched. In the second incubator, they played other zebra finch calls that aren't associated with high temperatures.

When the chicks hatched, the team placed them in nests with foster parents for rearing. To avoid parent-specific effects, the researchers placed a mixture of hatchlings from the two playback groups into the same nests. For 12 days, they placed the nests at different locations with temperatures ranging from 22°C to 34°C.

At 13 days after hatching, the team collected blood samples from a total of 46 nestlings and measured how well the mitochondria in their red blood cells produced ATP and heat. Across all nest temperatures, they found that mitochondria from birds exposed to prenatal heat calls produced more ATP relative to heat compared with offspring that developed with control calls.

"The fact that acoustic cues alter mitochondrial functions is a pretty impressive finding," says Riccardo Ton at Macquarie University in Sydney. But we don't yet know whether these mitochondrial changes remain in the adult stage and if the changes confer a survival or reproductive advantage.

"Given the increasingly noisy world we, and wildlife, live in, understanding the effects of sound on physiology is quite important," says Mariette. "Considering the unprecedented rate of climate change, it is also important, and encouraging, to discover the special adaptations desert specialists have to cope with the heat."

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.1893
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Zebra finch songs alter the behaviour of their chicks' mitochondria

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In warm weather, zebra finches sing heat calls to their unborn offspring, and this programs the nestlings to produce less heat inside their cells Zebra finches sing a special song to their eggs to warn them about hot weather, and these calls seem to program the hatchlings' cells to harness energy from food without creating excessive heat.

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At the recent U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sen. Marsha Blackburn triggered controversy when she asked Jackson to define the word "woman." After Jackson declined, several Republican congresspeople chimed in with definitions for "woman" that ranged from dubious to shocking, including "the weaker sex," "someone who has a uterus," and "X chromosomes, no tallywhacker."

Such notions haven't evolved much since 1871, when naturalist Charles Darwin told the world that "man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than women, and has more inventive genius." Most 19th- and 20th-century evolutionary theories (and theorists) asserted that evolution created two kinds of creatures-male and female-and individuals' behavior and nature reflected this biological binary.

Today a chorus of scientific-sounding claims about "blue and pink" brains, testosterone, and male primate aggression are offered up as natural explanations for masculine and feminine behavior, along with gaps in pay, jobs, political and economic leadership, and sexuality. In the political and legal realms, the belief that biology creates two types of humans is invoked in a range of attempts to mandate and enforce how humans should behave.

These assertions and beliefs are wrong. In addition, the commitment to a simple binary view creates a fictitious template for a "battle of the sexes" that manifests in miseducation about basic biology, the denigration of women's rights, the justifications of incel and "men's rights" violence, and the creation of anti-transgender laws.

Science points to a more accurate and hopeful way to understand the biology of sex. By recognizing the true diversity of the human experience, humanity can embrace an expansive and multifaceted way of envisioning and experiencing human nature. This evidence-based outlook is not only far more interesting than the simplistic and incorrect "tallywhacker versus no tallywhacker" perspective, but also more conducive to respect and flourishing.

Starting at the most basic level of animal biology, there are multitudes of ways to be female or male or both. The oceans are filled with species of fish that change from one sex to another midlife, and some who change back again. There are invertebrate hermaphrodites and ladies-only lizards who reproduce by recombining their own chromosomes. In some mammals, females are brimming with testosterone and have large "penises." In various fish and mammals, males do all the caretaking of infants. And in a variety of species, females are authoritarian, promiscuous, and-yes, Darwin-pugnacious.

Of course, there are patterned differences between females and males in many species. But there is far more diversity, complexity, and collaboration than most people realize. When one looks closer at the biology of sex in animals, including humans, it is clear that Darwin, biologist E.O. Wilson, geneticist Angus Bateman, and various Republican politicians are minimally way off base and mostly flat out wrong.

Man/woman and masculine/feminine are neither biological terms nor rooted exclusively in biology.
Sex, biologically, is not simply defined or uniformly enacted. In humans, having two X chromosomes or an X and a Y chromosome does not create binary bodies, destinies, or lives. If we could crawl into the womb with a fetus at about six to eight weeks of age, we'd see a few clusters of cells in the emerging body get nudges by DNA activity and start to generate new organs, including the clitoris and penis, labia and scrotum, ovaries and testes. All genitals are made from the exact same stuff. Since they have a few differing end functions, their final form is different. But there is a lot of overlap.

In fact, of the 140 million babies born last year, at least 280,000 did not fit into a clear penis versus labia model of sex determination. Genitals, hormone levels, and chromosomes are not reliable determinants of sex. There are, for example, people with XY chromosomes who have female characteristics, people with ambiguous genitalia, and women with testosterone levels outside the typical "female" range.

Biologically, there is no simple dichotomy between female and male. As I demonstrate in my book Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You, brains are no more "sexed" at birth than are kidneys and livers. Rather, brains are "mosaics" of characteristically female and male features.

Read an excerpt from Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: "Busting Myths About Sex and Gender"

Of course, there are clear bodily differences in capacities to give birth and lactate, and ranges of patterns in the development and distribution of body size, strength, and myriad other processes. But such patterns are mostly overlapping, and only a few are distributed in clear or functional dichotomies. Numerous studies have found that the differences between adult men and women are overhyped and largely influenced by the dynamics of biology and culture. Humans are naturenurtural-a fusion of nature and nurture.

For example, many explanations for differences between males and females rest on assumptions about the disparate evolved costs of reproduction between them. But human reproduction is more complex than two individuals having sex, then the female giving birth and taking care of the offspring. While today it is common in many societies for women to raise children on their own or with a male (who often does not contribute equally to child-rearing), this setup developed very recently in human history.

There is massive evidence that the genus Homo (humans) evolved complex cooperative caretaking more than a million years ago, changing the patterns and pressures of our evolution. Such "alloparenting" practices are still widespread among many human groups, in which mothers and fathers, grandparents, other female and male relatives, and boys and girls in the community all help feed, teach, and care for children. This complex overlap in social and reproductive roles is exciting and hopeful. When it comes to raising kids, humans don't come in two kinds. Rather, we evolved to be a collaborative and creative community.

The data-driven bottom line is that "man/woman" and "masculine/feminine" are neither biological terms nor rooted exclusively in biology. The lack of an explicit binary is especially evident in humans given the complex neurobiologies, life histories, and morphological dynamics in our species. There are many successful, biologically diverse ways to be human, and millions of people embody this diversity. Growing up human means growing up in a world of varying gender expectations, body types, reproductive options, family structures, and sexual orientations.

So, instead of listening to people who are misogynistic, sexist, or homo/transphobic; incels; or politicians who base their ideologies on a biological sex binary and myths about its evolution, we can and should be open to a serious understanding of biology and its better options for human flourishing. The simple male/female binary does not effectively express the normal range of being human. Understanding this and incorporating it into our education, lives, and laws offers better possibilities, greater equity, and more joy for human society.

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Biological Science Rejects the Sex Binary, and That's Good for Humanity

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At the recent U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sen. Marsha Blackburn triggered controversy when she asked Jackson to define the word "woman." After Jackson declined, several Republican congresspeople chimed in with definitions for "woman" that ranged from dubious to shocking, including "the weaker sex," "someone who has a uterus," and "X chromosomes, no tallywhacker."

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Imagine for a moment that when you ate food a part of your body siphoned off the energy and stored it in structures which did not contribute to the overall homeostasis of the organism, but instead converted the energy into cellular structures which did not give back to the body. Instead these entities were unproductive and undigestible, forcing the body to adapt to them in a further loss of energy. As these entities grew larger the body would become weaker and increasingly malfunction until, overwhelmed, it would no longer be able to function at all. The rift in its metabolism would go from being a disruption to an assassin.

In the human body this is a fair description of cancer, and in the ecology it refers to much of the technological infrastructure of industrial capitalism. Both the generation of cancer within the human microcosm and the generation of techno-industrial capitalism within the world ecology bring disfigurement, inflammation and death in their wake.

Karl Marx, not usually thought of as an ecological philosopher, articulated this way of understanding ecological disruption as "metabolic rift" early in his career as a writer and philosopher. John Bellamy Foster, in his "Marx's Ecology", retrieved this analytical tool from the dustbin, helping to energize the renewal of ecosocialist thought.

The idea of metabolic rift names the dynamics between human and non-human nature as "metabolic relations"; arguably a more intimate and creaturely metaphor than "systems thinking" or "interdependence" (or Morton's "mesh").

The basic idea is that what humans consume we must return, whether literally in the form of human biological waste (which prior to modern municipal systems was an important manure) or in forms of collective waste (the return of decaying civilizational artifacts or collective industrial waste materials) in forms that can be re-consumed by the earth. This is ecological metabolism or the "circulus" of early eco-socialist thinkers.

One benefit to the concept of metabolic rift is that it neatly preserves a distinction between human and non-human nature while also asserting their unity within one metabolic system (this is somewhat theoretical benefit which appeals to critical theory nerds for the most part).

Two more practical uses quickly follow. One is that metabolic rift clearly identifies capitalism for what it is: the rift itself. Capitalism dematerializes the economy so that people are hypnotized by the trade in imaginary currencies and now, digital goods, while forgetting the inescapable material economy in which we live (also known as the ecology). To put it another way, capitalism posits as the ultimate good capital itself (in the form of currency) instead of the metabolism itself. Yet the metabolism is the actual world we live in (Morton's "symbiotic real") and its health determines the health of all human beings (and nonhuman beings, who should be an object of our ethical care as well).

To put it plainly, Capitalism disregards the global metabolism by siphoning off energy from it to turn it into money. It does so by generating inefficient industrial-technological structures which are disruptive and destructive from an energy point of view (a metabolic point of view) but are efficient at generating one thing: capital, and this for only a very small number of people: capitalists themselves.

The accomplishment of this feat requires the metabolic rift - it is the rift. Thus the concept usefully combines ecological and economic thought into one analysis, as well as clearly pointing the way to the enemy of most living things on earth for the last two hundred years: not just the current form of industrial capitalism, but capitalism itself, the ideology which instead of seeking avenues of human creativity and flourishing within a global energy metabolism which sustains all life seeks only the generation of a one way shute pouring money into their own pockets.

A system with capital as its organizing principle will not simply generate another form of energy ("money is just energy, man") rather the immaterial, anecological nature of currency (at its heart) tends towards the disruption of the true material economy in which we live.

The second practical take way from the concept of metabolic rift is that it provides a formula for application wherever we live. Through it we can identify rifts in our local metabolism and find ways of closing them. This can be applied in our houses, in our neighbourhoods, in our cities, and wherever else our sphere of personal influence extends. By re-establishing the circulus- the circulation of energy within a harmonious metabolism- we can improve the health of any mini-ecology and its denizens, a victory in a minor key but still something.

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Imagine for a moment that when you ate food a part of your body siphoned off the energy and stored it in structures which did not contribute to the overall homeostasis of the organism, but instead converted the energy into cellular structures which did not give back to the body.

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n the cusp of winter 2021, I went for a walk in the woods near my house in Oxford. By a bench that overlooks the city, I happened upon a moss-covered log that glistened green under the overcast sky. The moss's leaves were as tiny and intricate as the finest embroidery, and as thin as clingfilm. I brushed my fingertips over the feathery bed in awe of its minuteness and complexity, before taking a dozen photographs. When was the last time I had touched moss? When was the first? I remember trees, rivers, mountains, but not moss. But, that day, I felt as if moss summoned me to pay attention to its rigour and beauty amid its great arboreal cousins.

Or rather, moss represented something for me. I'd been thinking about touch, about how out of touch with nature I am. I live in a city that has many parks and meadows, but I don't touch nature enough; rather, I see it - the ornamental birches, the canal, the roses on the hedgerows. In summertime, I'll swim with friends, or sunbathe and roll in sand and grass, but once we are back in our sanitised homes, I continue to live out of touch. I seek nature in small, appropriate, hygienic doses.

Winter is the only true season of touching. In winters, no matter how efficiently you dress up, a raindrop will find you. Fogs will enshroud you and leave their wetness on your face. Dry, cold air will crack your lips. As you inhale, mist will touch your nostrils and the inside of your throat. You will feel winter's touch on the backs of your ears. Winter's physicality reaches everywhere. But moss works the hardest in winters. Over every log, rock and crevice, it grows and glows.

Over the course of that winter, I touched mosses everywhere in the city: on footpaths and walls, on the barks of willows, on metal-based drain covers, on tombstones, on the roofs of houseboats, on abandoned bicycles, under the railway bridge. Moss likes to grow everywhere as long as there's enough shade and moisture. A nonvascular plant, it lacks an elaborate root-and-shoot anatomy; it has no roots to speak of. Mosses absorb water and nutrients from their one-celled leaves, which are uniquely designed to hold water up to 30 times their own weight. In winter, if you've ever paused to gaze at a moss bed and touch its surface, you'll feel as if you've touched a wet sponge. You'll also realise that while a moss bed may feel soft at first touch, it is a multi-textured world down there. As I carefully brush the backs of my fingers against moss beds, tiny stalk-like beings tickle me. Jutting out of moss leaves, these stalks are known as sporophytes; each sporophyte contains a capsule of spores at its outermost end. As wind and water carry these spores away from their source beds, mosses multiply. The sporophytes grow considerably taller than the bed, to allow the spores to travel far and start a new commune, a new family.

One of the most common mosses in urban settlements is Tortula muralis, or wall screw-moss. It was the first one I noticed, like most beginners do. One day, under a bright blue after-rain sky, I observed that the sporophyte capsules of a wall screw-moss bed growing on a brick fence had swelled to almost three times their usual size. It astonished me, and I thought it might be another stage in their development that I hadn't read about yet. Down on my knees, at eye level with the bed, I reached out with a fingertip towards a sporophyte, but my hand stopped itself midway. It took a while for my eyes to adjust, but I realised that the capsules had not swelled at all. Each sporophyte was merely holding a tiny water droplet around itself, like a miniature water balloon, or a pregnant belly.

Many minutes had gone by. It started raining again, and more water fell and seeped into the moss bed. I remembered to go about my day, which seemed a bit absurd, if not insignificant in front of a moss bed. This, then, is the first lesson that moss taught me: you can touch time. Not our human time, not even mammal time, but Earth time. Hours later, when I returned from my chores in the city, the sporophytes were still there, still holding water. Often, it can take 25 years for a moss layer to put on one inch. But moss has been around for at least 350m years, being one of the first species to make the journey from water to dry land: moss is our elder relative, as Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us in Gathering Moss. It is a species that shares our cities and apartments, a witness to human time and its catastrophic speed. If only touching moss were enough to let us experience moss time.

ristotle claimed that touch is the most universal sense. Lately, I've come to believe that touching nature may be the most effective means of reconnecting with it. Several studies argue that activities that involve touching nonhuman entities with our bodies - walking barefoot or swimming, for instance - might help us nurture affective and ethical relationships with the nonhuman world.

The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty spent his life thinking and writing about the question of human perception. For him, it was through the body's perception and proprioception that we come to know the world. While sight is important here - for it is through sight that we tell, in relation to our bodies, whether an object is far or near, large or small - touch is equally, if not more, important.

Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being - to the inevitability of others, human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. The analogy that Merleau-Ponty uses in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), is this: when my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies.

The idea that touching nature could bridge interspecies borders makes sense intuitively. And is there any being in the plant kingdom that embodies touch more than moss and its family, the bryophytes? Moss is touch. It doesn't poke the skin of the being it touches. And it takes practically nothing from the host it is in contact with: moss is no parasite. Yet it softens trees, prevents soil erosion, and shelters animals too small for us to notice. It is continuously in touch with Earth and all its beings, including us. Inside a rainforest and on the city pavement, moss beckons us.

n the 900-year history of Oxford University, my current home, moss's touch has enchanted many people. But, as the historian Mark Lawley notes, a separate study of mosses in Britain did not begin until the late 17th century. One of the key figures who recorded the diversity of mosses in Britain in painstaking detail was Johann Jakob Dillenius, a German botanist. Dillenius studied medicine, while maintaining a strong interest in botany, at the University of Giessen, where he wrote his first major work, Catalog of Plants Originating Naturally Around Giessen (1718). In it, he identified several mosses and fungi, under the heading Cryptogams, denoting plants that reproduce via spores, also known as "the lower plants".

Perhaps only a handful of botanists at the time would have bothered spending their days with their hands touching the ground that other people walk on and animals relieve themselves on. But Dillenius did, and his work impressed William Sherard, a leading English botanist. Sherard had recently acquired a huge collection of plants from Smyrna (present-day İzmir in Turkey) and had been searching for somebody to help organise it. He offered Dillenius a job at his garden in Eltham, just outside London; and, in 1721, Dillenius migrated to Britain to work on Sherard's plant collection, the mosses of Britain, and a pinax (an illustrated catalogue) of Britain's plants.

For the first seven years of his time in Britain, Dillenius lived between Eltham and his own lodgings in London. In 1724, he produced his first book in Britain, the third edition of Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum, originally written by the Cambridge-based botanist and naturalist John Ray in 1670. In the second edition (1696), Ray had identified 80 types of mosses, to which Dillenius added, according to George Claridge Druce's account, 40 types of fungi, more than 150 types of mosses, and 200-plus seed plants. Dillenius divided cryptogams into "fungi" and "musci", excluding ferns and equisetums.

For perhaps the first time, somebody had paid meticulous and singular attention to the "lower plants". It fascinated me to imagine an 18th-century gentleman spending hours and years touching and collecting the mosses of Britain. We don't know much about Dillenius's inner life, but one can glean from his letters that he loved mosses and liked his life in their company. His life among English people? Not so much.

After three years of exacting work, his edition of Ray's Synopsis was published, but it did not bear his name. His publishers (and Sherard) feared that the people of Britain would not appreciate the name of a foreigner on a book about the mosses of their land. In a letter to Richard Richardson, another leading English botanist and a colleague, Dillenius announced the publication of his anonymous Synopsis, and regretted that he didn't have the opportunity to dedicate the book to Richardson publicly. Despite this omission, he wanted Richardson to convince Sherard to let him work on his dream - the History of Mosses. He wrote: "I mean the History of Mosses, if I could find time to finish it ... would [you] please ... persuade him to let me have one day in a week for this purpose."

It wouldn't be until 1732 that Dillenius could find that one day a week he needed to write his history. While Dillenius enjoyed his work on the pinax, his true passion lay with the lower plants. For about four years, he worked on Sherard's pinax while hoping that one day he'd be free to devote himself to moss. When Sherard died in 1728, Dillenius's fate changed overnight. Sherard left his books and plants to Dillenius, and a considerable amount of money to Oxford University to be used toward the maintenance of a professorship of botany. In his will, he appointed Dillenius as the first such Sherardian professor.

In 1728, Dillenius moved to Oxford, where he lived until his death. Here, James Sherard, the younger brother of his former patron, who behaved rather contemptuously towards Dillenius, asked him to stop working on the mosses and the pinax, coercing him instead into writing a book on the garden at Eltham, Hortus Elthamensis (1732), for which Dillenius endured significant financial loss.

After Hortus, Dillenius pledged his career and life to the study of mosses and, in 1741, he published Historia Muscorum, or History of Mosses. In painstaking detail, over 576 pages and in 85 illustrated plates, the book described 661 taxa of lower plants, including mosses, fungi, lichens, algae, liverworts, hornworts and lycopods. He divided the mosses into six genera: Mnium, Hypnum, Polytrichum, Bryum, Sphagnum and Lycopodium - classifications that are useful today. But the book, his life's mission, did not fare well in the market. Soon, he started writing an abridged version that he thought people might want to buy at a reduced price, but time had bested him. His Italian contemporary Pier Antonio Micheli had already written a detailed and genre-defining book on the cryptogams more than a decade before. In 1747, Dillenius died of a stroke at his home in Oxford, the abridged version of the History of Mosses unpublished.

The saddest part of Dillenius's story is that even today, his contribution is grouped under Continental Botanists in the history of British bryology. He is neither celebrated in Germany, his homeland, nor in England, where he lived and is buried. His was a migrant's fate. I felt an immediate affinity with Dillenius, a stranger who'd become a friend to me. During my walks along the Thames, I kept his stunning illustrations to hand and learned to differentiate polytrichum from mnium in his company. I'd always enjoyed gazing at trees and listening to the woodland winds, but it takes an intentional reorientation of the mind and the senses to attend to moss. Moss doesn't leap at you, it doesn't arrest you like a pine's needles or an oak's arms; even when it appears marvellous, it doesn't sustain your interest long enough to observe its minutiae. I wondered why a person such as Dillenius, a rather unwelcome immigrant, poured all his energy and hope into plants we tend to overlook?

As a historian, I'm tempted to list reasons: the rise of the scientific worldview, colonialism, the impulse to taxonomise the world of plants and peoples, the establishment of a botanical garden in Giessen in 1609. And all this might well be correct, but still, why mosses? Why this man? The archive is never complete.

grew up in a rain-drenched town in Punjab, India, where most months of the year I waded through mud and blocked rainwater to reach the corner shop of my neighbourhood. During monsoon, while the heavens poured and thundered, I'd play catch with my friends in the community park. I remember slipping over moss-covered rocks. I remember our bruised hips. We'd slip over kai twice, sometimes three times in one game. In Punjabi, kai doesn't exactly mean moss. We don't taxonomise lower plants into one category, like bryophytes, based on their method of reproduction. The ancient texts of ayurveda (a traditional healing system of north India) such as Susruta Samhita and Caraka Samhita classify plants into different categories based on their shape, texture, appearance, medicinal properties and habitats. Any plant growth, especially near the ground, that makes you slip, fall or both, is kai.

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The phrase that we use to refer to algae, lichen or a slippery moss over a rock is pathar utte kai jammi hoyi hai. The phrase has two meanings, at least. Roughly, it means: "Moss is frozen over the rock" or "Moss is birthed by the rock". The rock is to moss what the soil is to a tree. I don't mean to romanticise things, but I suspect the business of scraping and selling moss will never take off in Punjab. In the UK, however, moss is used ornamentally in homes, airports and hotels. Sphagnum moss, also known as peat or bog moss, is used to increase the productivity of gardens; its habitats are home to rare wildlife and carbon reserves, but its use in horticulture is colossal. I wonder if, in addition to the labyrinth of a world-political economy in which Punjab has mostly been a site of agricultural experimentation and extraction, rather than consumption, language has had a role to play in these historically different approaches to moss?

In English, moss "carpets" a garden. Built into the language is the idea of moss as decoration, moss as a beautiful addition to nature. The word carpet originates from the Latin carpere, which means to "pull to pieces". To carpet an object is to pull and cover, cover and pull, the two actions deciding the fate of moss.

In the centuries that followed Dillenius, moss was pulled from all over the world to cover other worlds. In the name of science and civilisation, colonisers extracted and exploited Indigenous peoples and foreign lands and ecosystems. Historians of science such as Patricia Fara and Zaheer Baber have demonstrated that botanical expeditions of English and European scientists such as Joseph Banks helped consolidate Britain's imperial power. In accompanying colonial officials on expeditions around the globe, botanists acquired economically and culturally pertinent botanical and agricultural knowledge through their practices of collection in various parts of the world, including India.

In the 1780s, the third Sherardian professor of Botany at Oxford, John Sibthorp, travelled to Greece and present-day Turkey to observe and collect lichens. In April 1795, Sibthorp went to Cardamoula (present-day Kardamyli in Greece). Remarking on his journey, he wrote: "The nature of man seemed here to recover its erect form; we no longer observed the servility of mind and body which distinguishes the Greeks subjugated by the Turks." This was the era of colonialism and orientalism; Sherardian professors of botany were no exception. Modern botany and its near-global dominance owes a considerable debt to opportunities provided by colonialism.

That the scientific collection or extraction of plants and the subjugation of peoples occurred simultaneously means that the colonisers touched everybody. It was in 1744, just a couple of years before Dillenius's death, that Robert Clive first touched India, arguably defining the course of British colonialism in the subcontinent. By 1794, the year Sibthorp wrote his Flora Oxoniensis, the most valuable historical account of the flora of Oxfordshire we have today, the East India Company had firmly established itself in India.

The modern history of touching moss is one of elitism, colonialism and racism. When I touch moss on the ancient walls, cobblestone streets and gated colleges of Oxford, I realise touching moss has never been a question of intent, but one of access. In 19th-century Britain, there were many working-class botanists, men and women who'd taught themselves botany by memorising the Latin names of plants in pubs after long and taxing work hours. But the idea of doing botany in a public house was utterly disgraceful and horrifying to the elite classes. While artisan botany became widespread in Manchester and Lancashire, it didn't take off amid the spires of Oxford.

In Britain's colonies, colonialism turned touch into a privilege. While colonisers employed Indigenous peoples to do the touching for them, they retained the rights to knowledge about that which the "natives" touched: mosses and the more-than-human world. They also repudiated any emotions and affects that anybody may have had towards the nonhuman. A plant became an object to be scrutinised. A moss, a carpet to be scraped and examined. You touch moss to bring it home and look at its structure under your university's new microscope. You touch moss, and yet you do not touch moss. Touching mosses, I did not feel at one with nature. I felt severed. There is no pure touch. No return to an unadulterated relationship with nature. No moss time. Between my fingertips and the sporophytes of a moss bed exist centuries of exploitation and extraction, and behind them, human hands, and the all-too-human touch.

hile working on this essay, I regularly visited an ash tree near my house. On its trunk, two types of mosses had begun to grow: common striated feather moss and Atrichum undulatum, a moss species with star-shaped leaves. I touched them every other day, but I didn't know what to think or say about them. I wanted moss to tell me its story. Quiet, humble and peaceful, it said nothing.

Perhaps it is absurd, even fatuous, to contemplate if there is anything redemptive about touch. If touch itself, as an intersubjective sense of perception, has become corrupt, where does that leave our forever touching bodies and selves? I want to push against this interpretation. Because there is a touch beyond the history of touching too: the human capacity for touch and its existential, precarious, fleshy nature. The kind of touch that animated Dillenius's days in Oxford, despite everything. In a history of botany in England, the author Richard Pulteney in 1790 calls Dillenius as a "recluse", described by a correspondent once as "busy in painting fungi". Busy touching nature.

Touch as a haunting reminder of the violence inherent in the body. Touch that returns us to the past and its rugged terrain. As a kid, I used to play touch-and-go with my friends, the whole premise of which is that one person chases everybody else in an attempt to touch them. You had to tread the fine line between running with full force towards your friends, and hurting them with your eager hand. It wasn't easy, and we sustained a few injuries, but we also came up with a solution: your touch counts only if it doesn't hurt anybody.

Touch as a cautious hand. The fleshiness of touch bares us to the other - human and nonhuman, but also ourselves. The act of touching constitutes the perceived and the perceiver, proposes Merleau-Ponty. In touching the nonhuman, I'm thrown into the world, over and again, and each time I must reintegrate myself as what I was before touching. In this continuous operation of disintegration and reintegration, there is a generative moment where I'm not certain who I am, neither past-me, nor future-me. Am I human? Am I a part of this world? Can I change?

If, in the act of touching nature, I'm not practising guileless nature connectedness but a complicitous, historical and also utopian touch, perhaps touch can be reconceptualised as a complex, layered and resilient sense-perception. Perhaps it is the other way round. Not touch itself as the deliverance of one-dimensional, immediate experience, but what we - our history and present - have engineered it to be. Perhaps the apparent superficiality of touch is the fiction. The histories of human relationships with the nonhuman may have whitewashed and pigeonholed touch and its potential for radical reciprocity and for reckoning with the past and the present. I wonder if I can cultivate and harness touch not as a cure for my estrangement from the nonhuman world, but as an open-hearted exposure to that world, and ours. Touch from the old French toche - a blow or, even, an attack. Touch as a prizing open.

Just before spring, I went for a walk in the woods. More logs had fallen. Glittering wood-moss, a moss species with red stems and feathery leaves, shimmered on the forest floor. I was reminded of the poem Wild Garlic by Séan Hewitt, in which he writes: "The world is dark / but the wood is full of stars." With no moon in sight and an overcast sky, the walk back home was melancholy. I pulled out my keys from my jacket and they fell on the ground. Under the streetlight, a silver-green moss, Bryum argenteum, shone out, cradling my keys. Moss is Earth's memory living at my doorstep. I must welcome it inside: I must touch it and let it undo me.
This essay was originally published in Aeon

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The long read: Moss is ancient, and grows at a glacial pace, but it lives alongside us everywhere, country and city, a witness to the human world and its catastrophic speed. What can we learn by tuning in to 'moss time'?

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The world's healthiest, most biodiverse, and most resilient forests are located on protected Indigenous lands. That's according to a new study that suggests that protecting Indigenous and human rights is not only compatible with climate conservation goals, but key to future efforts.

"The combined positive effects of state legislation and Indigenous presence in protected-Indigenous areas may contribute to maintaining tropical forest integrity," the authors write in Current Biology. "Understanding management and governance in protected-Indigenous areas can help states to appropriately support community-governed lands."

Years of research has shown that Indigenous peoples are the world's best land stewards and a crucial part of protecting biodiversity. Indigenous land contains 80 percent of the world's remaining biodiversity of which nearly a quarter is managed by Indigenous people. According to a 2020 paper, 47 percent of threatened mammals live on, and are protected by, Indigenous land and management. When Indigenous peoples are given legal and financial support for land management, the results benefit the world.

There is also strong evidence contradicting popular international theories that the best way to protect land is by keeping people away from it. In Brazil, researchers found that granting Indigenous property rights significantly reduces deforestation while another study examined 12,000 years of population data and land use and found that around 75 percent of terrestrial nature was shaped by human involvement. "Current biodiversity losses are caused not by human conversion or degradation of untouched ecosystems, but rather by the appropriation, colonization, and intensification of use in lands inhabited and used by prior societies," researchers wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Forests, which are home to more than 80 percent of terrestrial plants and animals, store carbon, and provide economic and social benefits, are a key defense against climate change. Indigenous lands cover about a quarter of the world's surface and overlap with roughly a third of the world's forests. Because of the crucial role that forests play globally, protecting them is a key part of international climate goals. But despite clear evidence that Indigenous peoples must play a central role in these efforts, they are often left out of conservation plans that restrict access to lands, allow extractive industry to move in, or face eviction or violence from state or eco-security guards to create wildlife reserves.

"Pursuing global targets without due attention to power imbalances among local governance actors often results in social inequity and failed environmental objectives," the Current Biology paper reads. Researchers assessed forest integrity, which is a metric that evaluates the overall health of a forest, including its ability to store carbon, sustain biodiversity, preserve ecosystems, and provide social benefits.

The study in Current Biology found over two-thirds of high integrity forests have some human population and only 17.2 percent of the lands studied were wildlands: areas without any humans. Most of those high-integrity forests in Asia and Africa were landscapes shaped at least in part by humans. Despite these results and other research highlighting the efficacy of Indigenous land management, global conservation efforts still prioritize fortress conservation tactics, a conservation practice which holds that humans must be absent in order for biodiversity to thrive.

These tactics, which include violent evictions, murder, and other human rights abuses, have taken place on Indigenous lands around the world by conservation organizations and governments. For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is home to high-integrity forest mentioned in the study, Indigenous Batwa have faced years of brutal violence removing them from their forest lands. "Safeguards are needed to ensure that communities who have not contributed to damaging ecosystems, or who may be actively contributing to protecting ecosystem integrity, are not harmed in the process of securing conservation outcomes," the study reads.

One surprising finding is that In Asia and the Americas, Indigenous lands that were not protected had the lowest integrity of all territory studied. For example, in Indonesia, a Human Rights Watch report found that palm oil companies failed to properly consult with Indigenous peoples, destroyed the forest, and burned down villages. Indonesia legally recognizes Indigenous rights, but in practice those protections are not applied to individual Indigenous groups and communities. According to the Human Rights Watch report, Indigenous people still live within the palm oil plantation, meaning that even though most of their land has been stolen and deforested, the broader area could be considered non-protected Indigenous land.

"In a lot of Asia, Indigenous lands and Indigenous rights are not recognized. So, while an area may be categorized as traditionally Indigenous, Indigenous people may not have control over the land," said Jocelyne Sze, the report's lead author. "Also, because lots of minerals, oil, and gas deposits are often found within Indigenous lands, it's not surprising that those lands are often really exploited."

In Africa, lack of legal recognition of their status and rights also prevents Indigenous peoples from accessing their land, practicing their traditions, and enjoying their human rights. In the United Republic of Tanzania, Indigenous Maasai have been violently evicted from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. But the Tanzanian government does not recognize Indigenous peoples, which limits the Maasai's legal options for recourse.

The report highlights the ways that Indigenous peoples can enhance forest integrity, including by resisting extractive industries and agribusiness, as well as planting trees that help create complex forest structures. A 2021 report revealed that Indigenous activism stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equal to a quarter of total U.S. and Canadian emissions. To amplify those efforts, Indigenous communities need more direct funding, legal support, and freedom to manage their land.

The authors suggest protected areas that allow for Indigenous land management, funding programs like a conservation basic income to incentivize conservation over extractive industry, and for states to work with Indigenous communities to establish protections for lands and territories.

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The world's healthiest forests are on Indigenous land. Here's why.

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The world's healthiest, most biodiverse, and most resilient forests are located on protected Indigenous lands. That's according to a new study that suggests that protecting Indigenous and human rights is not only compatible with climate conservation goals, but key to future efforts. "The combined positive effects of state legislation and Indigenous presence in protected-Indigenous areas [...]

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MQFF32 - Uýra: The Rising Forest TRAILER

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Are.na is a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge.

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2022 documentary called To the End. It traces the creation of the Sunrise Movement—the US climate organization for people under 30, started in 2018—and their launch of the Green New Deal.

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2022 documentary called To the End. It traces the creation of the Sunrise Movement—the US climate organization for people under 30, started in 2018—and their launch of the Green New Deal.

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Filmed over four years of hope and crisis, captures the emergence of a new generation of leaders and the movement behind the most sweeping climate change legislation in U.S. history. The award-winning team behind Knock Down the House follows four exceptional young women- Rep.

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We build non-lingusitic concepts through body; far and near, fast and slow, inside, underneath...the importance of play and affect

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We build non-lingusitic concepts through body; far and near, fast and slow, inside, underneath...the importance of play and affect

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Roundtable discussion featuring Robert Fagen, Joanna Gewertz Harris, Steve Paxton, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, and Daniel N. Stern

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Dance, Movement, and Bodies: Forays into the Nonlinguistic

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As fungi grow, they are constantly sensing, learning, and making decisions. Fungi are like polyglots: they both "speak" and understand a wide range of chemical signals. They release and respond to chemicals that float through the air and flow through water. Fascinatingly, fungi not only perceive but actively interpret a chemical's meaning depending on the context and in relation to other chemicals.

Studies of how fungi communicate lag way behind research on communication of plants and especially of animals. Most are based on several "lab rat" species, so knowledge about other types is limited, but here we summarize what's known about three realms of communication: within a fungus, between fungi of the same species, and with other organisms.

Within a fungus

Each growing tip has both autonomy from and accountability to the whole organism, akin to the relationship of social insects to the hive. Between the cells within every mycelium flows a stream of chemicals, nutrients, and electrical impulses. Their movements act to keep the whole informed about happenings and coordinate actions across the network. Research by Andrew Adamatzky, a professor of unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, suggests that they influence the mycelium's internal bioelectrical signals, which may form a sort of "language." While a mycelium neither is nor contains a nervous system, mycelia share much in common with these systems. Both have branched structures, reinforce or prune pathways as needed, and use some of the same amino acids to transmit information.

Between fungi of the same species

Many fungi are sexual and must mate to reproduce. They send out pheromones and "sniff" out those of others, and then they grow toward those that seem attractive (based on whatever it is fungi are attracted to). Whenever two mycelia meet, they communicate to negotiate their relationship, which can range from fusion (to form a reproductive or nonreproductive partnership) to indifference to physical exclusion and even chemical antagonism. Each mated mycelium negotiates the physical dynamics of fusion, and of life in partnership thereafter.

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As fungi grow, they are constantly sensing, learning, and making decisions. Fungi are like polyglots: they both "speak" and understand a wide range of chemical signals. They release and respond to chemicals that float through the air and flow through water.

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Scientists' recent discovery of a "new" part of the human body, the interstitium, is an invitation to think differently about our relationship with the world at large

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Scientists' recent discovery of a "new" part of the human body, the interstitium, is an invitation to think differently about our relationship with the world at large

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This essay is a companion piece to an episode of Radiolab, titled The Interstitium. You don't need to have heard it for this essay to make sense, but listening to it will no doubt enrich your understanding.
IN 2018, SCIENTISTS discovered a new organ (?) in the human body. You'd think after centuries of cutting ourselves open, we'd know the intimate details of the structures within us by now. Strangely, this body part wasn't missed because it was invisible; it was overlooked because of what our belief systems wouldn't let us perceive.

Until quite recently, if doctors wanted to study human tissue from a living person, they had to remove it first. Then they'd essentially mummify it: drying, freezing, slicing, and fixing it on a slide so they could peer at its shriveled dead form under a microscope to ascertain what was happening at a cellular level. As a result, scientists and doctors were taught in medical school that collagen tissue is essentially a dense wall: a barrier.

But a new endoscope, a microscope that snakes into the body through one of two holes (pie- or butt-), now enables us to see and study tissue inside a breathing body with a beating heart. And once this special endoscope shone its light just below the skin into the collagen layer, it revealed something much more like a sponge than a wall, with fluid rushing between a fractal, honeycombed network.

The 'they,' here, of course doesn't include everyone. Where Western, allopathic medicine focuses on isolating and treating symptoms, Traditional Chinese Medicine has for 2,500 years looked at the body as a dynamic, fluid-oriented system, and takes a more holistic approach to understanding root causes of discomfort and disease. Western doctors and scientists have often lacked the rubric to appreciate the efficacy of acupuncture, despite studies by reputable bodies like the NIH showing its measurable benefits.

Nor have Western doctors come to fully understand and appreciate the role of fascia - the dense collagen network that supports the structure of our musculature and keeps our bones and body aligned. Rolfers, Osteopaths, myofascial workers have been working for years with fascia structure and the fluid within it, looking at the health of the entire body through a lens of interconnection, dependent relationships, and movement.

We now have a shared language, or at least a word, for this system - or this organ, or this infrastructure (depending on whom you ask) - that's been revealed as a fluid-filled superhighway spanning the entire body. It's called: the interstitium. It's a new word that my autocorrect feature keeps wanting me to change it to "interstitial."

Here's just a glimpse of what's becoming known about it. The structure of the interstitium is fractal; it exhibits the same pattern at various scales. It's unified. While scientists had seen glimpses of this mesh-like network before, they had not realized that it connected the entire body - just underneath the skin, and wrapping around organs, arteries, capillaries, veins, head to toes. It's juicy. It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does. The fluid isn't blood, it's a clear and "pre-lymphatic" substance, carrying within it nutrients, information, and new kinds of cells that are only just being discovered. It's also a conduit for cancer spread. Turns out that cancer cells moving through the interstitium's channels are fast.
The interstitium (Illustration: Arthur Jones)
In short: it's very important. And it's wild that, although the interstitium can be seen with the naked eye during surgery, it wasn't really noticed until now. There is an entire scientific revolution set to unfurl as more studies are peer-reviewed and more science books and classrooms integrate its existence into their cosmologies. We are at the beginning of it all.

I FIRST LEARNED about the interstitium from a friend, Jessica Clark, who does not work in science or medicine. She runs her own business, fittingly called "Dot Connector Studio," which does work weaving insights across technology, media, futurism, philanthropy, and climate solutions, to name a few domains.

She and I have a lot in common. We do not function well with rigid job descriptions or within organizations. We're misfits who work on a systems level, transcending any one function and making no sense in a world that wants to explain and contain everything into discrete categories. It's hard for us to sum ourselves up on LinkedIn or at a dinner party. Whereas job titles are nouns, we're verbs. This means we get overlooked, and wrongly, sometimes disparagingly, classified as dilettantes, or as Jackie's of all trades, masters of none.

It turns out, we're interstitionaries. That is, our work is on all things in between - connecting insights, people and resources between sectors, industries, companies, projects and individuals. Here are two quick illustrations: during early COVID, my company Hearken created infrastructure (technology) and a process to connect public and private institutions including churches, truck companies, hospitals, local businesses as well as individual volunteers to the city of Chicago's emergency response. The city was able to collect invaluable resources from the network of locals - like N95s, goggles, surgical gloves, hotel rooms for hospital overflow, and people who wanted to volunteer sewing masks and doing contact tracing. And in the journalism and democracy space, we saw the need to connect the best-of resources for reporters on what they can do to combat democratic backsliding, and created The Democracy Toolkit . I can't give you a number of how many lives were helped or saved by these actions. That's the nature of field catalyst work: it's impossible to track the impact, it's very hard to find flexible funding to do it, but absolutely it's necessary.

The interstitium's existence - this golden metaphor rooted in our own biology - has finally given me words for the role I play, and what I've been noticing others doing everywhere, but couldn't articulate. And if anthropomorphizing a body part is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Just as scientists can now see the interstitium everywhere they look, I see these people everywhere who are bridging, connecting and serving as conduits, keeping systems in communication, operable, healthy. Most of these people I see doing this interstitionary work are women. None of them get paid (or paid enough) for the tremendous value they generate in the world. Their kind of genius would never win a MacArthur fellowship, as their expertise is in the magic of how they do, not just what they do. Their impact transcends any one area, and has been essentially hidden from how we organize, track, measure and reward people in our economy and society.

They aren't just weirdos like Jessica and I who are attempting to build movements and bridge sectors with our work. Interstitionaries show up everywhere. They're the auntie who knows everyone's birthday, favorite foods and friends. They play the role of that invisible glue holding the relationships within a company together - knowing everyone from the CEO to the custodial staff. They are block club captains, organizers, hosts - people who are looking at the whole picture, making sure goods, services or information is getting where it needs to go, and that things work.

THE REASON I'M so hyped about this discovery, despite my last science class having been decades ago, is that the interstitium is a conceptual skeleton key, unlocking a more sophisticated, accurate way of seeing everything in the environment.

In the early modern period, Western scientists conceived of the world in terms of parts, of individuals. Everything was seen as a unit. A molecule, a cell, an organ, a person, a ... noun. That's no accident. The microscope plays an outsized role.

Before microscopes were invented, the composition of the body was a matter of philosophical debate. Aristotle, for instance, believed that the heart was the seat of intelligence and that the brain was a cooling mechanism for the blood. There were long-held beliefs attributed to divine influences, and diseases and recoveries were due to the favor or wrath of deities.

And if anthropomorphizing a body part is wrong, I don't want to be right.

But once the microscope came along, it ushered in a worldview premised on individual identity. The first eyes to peer through those early eyepieces spotted what looked like empty boxes. English scientist Robert Hooke in 1665 coined them as "cells" because they reminded him of the small rooms where monks lived in monasteries. This formative moment led to a worldview called "cell-doctrine" - focusing on things - cells, this basic unit of life from which all living things are composed. Similar cells bundle to form tissues, which then cooperate to form organs, which then carry out the functions necessary to sustain the life of an organism, was how the thinking has gone.

We didn't pay attention to all of the dynamic, fluid phenomenon, unseen and in between, which connects the organs to one another, and allows the whole system to communicate and stay in homeostasis.

And we grafted this same thinking onto how we organize labor and society. Similar people bundle to form departments, which then cooperate to form companies, which then carry out the functions to sustain our collective communities, countries and world. The enforcement of this model starts young. We ask children, " do you want to be when you grow up?", not " do you want to be when you grow up?" We divide knowledge into subjects, disciplines, majors, then sectors and industries and specific job titles.

We need more navigators skipping between these constructed categories to subvert and replace a perspective of separation that has reached its limits and logical conclusion.

AT A RECENT conference for a movement I accidentally co-founded which is now woven into the economic policy of Japan , I met a fellow named Arthur Brock , who, in his own words "builds targeted currencies which shape the social dynamics of our emerging post-industrial economy." Before I even mentioned the interstitium, Arthur said: "We're in a paradigm shift. We're moving away from the scientific way of looking at the world as objects, to seeing a system-based world that's all about fluid, currents, connections and relationships."

Exactly. This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius , after all, when the mystics tell us we "shift from matter to spirit; from egotistic materialism and hope for personal redemption to shared feelings and aspirations; from the long ago matriarchal/patriarchal tensions to an age of equality and androgyny." It's all about that thing that envelops the spaces between any two nodes: the relationship, the dynamic, the warm data and the energy that animates their movement, direction, and leaves everything changed through the very act of connection.

Other fields are revealing this same truth, seemingly all simultaneously. Ecologists now perceive the trees in forests as connected to one another, trading information and nutrients across long distances, calibrating an ecosystem's health. Mycelial networks are now part of conversations of people who, until recently, knew nothing about mushrooms. Cooperative businesses and mutual aid are experiencing a resurgence as more people recognize their own interdependence and trade value with one another.

The National Science Foundation is, for the first time, investing in dialogues between Indigenous knowledge and Western science . A friend in Chicago is trying to create a civic interstitium to connect and cultivate more interstitionary talent to work between agencies and grassroots organizations, improving overall city health. There's a whole field emerging called Community-based Participatory Action Research for Health, which focuses on understanding community health through studying the network effects of relationships. This focus on relationality and connection is one way out of what our surgeon general calls an epidemic of loneliness and isolation .

Just as happened with the body's interstitium, technology plays a role in revealing what we can now plainly see, albeit with the help of social graphs and data. Social media companies have mapped, and now essentially own, the complex web of our relationships and movements online to exploit our societal interstitium. With this recognition of our interconnectedness and by providing the tech infrastructure for our information flows, they've been able to sell us products, capture our attention, exert power on our systems of thought, governance, and being. Alongside the good information flowing through this infrastructure, they've also made it far easier to introduce and spread exploitative sentiments through the interstitium like a cancer in the form of misinformation.

"WE PERCEIVE ONLY that part of nature that our technologies permit," writes Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber , "and so too, our theories about nature are highly constrained to what our technologies enable us to observe." In other words, our cosmologies, worldviews, conceptions of the environment and how it works, are limited or expanded by what we can perceive. Our experiences then transmute into the metaphors and grammar that organize our thoughts. New language gives us new worldviews.

The Potawatomi plant ecologist, writer and an actual MacArthur fellow, Robin Wall Kimmerer, writes in Braiding Sweetgrass , "Science can be a language of distance which reduces a being to its working parts; it's a language of objects." And in Orion she writes , "The relationship between the structure of a language and the behavior characteristic of a culture, is not a causal one, but many linguists and psychologists agree that language reveals unconscious cultural assumptions and exerts some influence over patterns of thought."

She wonders, "Can we make a new world with new words?"

Which makes me wonder, how can we activate and apply this new word, interstitium, to harness its meaning and power beyond biology? What will it take to find ways of seeing, languaging and remunerating interstitionary work, so our systems have a chance at correcting and finding balance? No one sector, industry or organization will be able to solve the wicked problems we face in challenges like climate or poverty or corruption. So my last questions are, when can we start, and are you in ?

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This essay is a companion piece to an episode of Radiolab, titled The Interstitium. You don't need to have heard it for this essay to make sense, but

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Fungi live in their own world of war and peace, their competition unknowingly playing a major role in global climate change. Perhaps, when you think about fungi you think about mushrooms; this fruiting body of a fungi is produced as a means of reproduction, much like an orange to an orange tree. We have our favorite varieties, such as crimini, shitake, and portabella that make a tasty accompaniment to your salad or pasta. We might also think of yeast, another type of fungi, that is used to make some other favorites like bread, cheese, or beer.

While we were enjoying the benefits of these fungi, soil ecologist Daniel Maynard and a team of researchers at Yale University considered the lesser-known fungal communities living beneath our feet. Their research of the relationships between fungal communities in New England forests, published in Ecology Letters, shows that fungi are impacting our lives in more significant ways than we might realize.

A mutually beneficial relationship exists between trees and fungi wherein fungi, also known as mycorrhizae (pronounced: my - cor - rhi - za), attach themselves to tree roots. The fungi then provide nutrients and minerals that they break down from the soil in exchange for sugars produced by the trees.

It turns out that fungi, much like people and animals, take in oxygen and respire carbon dioxide (CO₂), a major greenhouse gas. There are an enormous variety and amount of fungi in forest soils throughout the world that live on the roots of trees. The fungi also decompose organic litter that falls onto the forest floor. If these fungi are breaking down so much carbon, it begs the question, where does all the carbon go?

Understanding what fungi do with carbon is important as we estimate forests' ability to capture CO ₂ from the atmosphere as human-produced greenhouse gas emissions surge. Researchers are trying to mitigate the impact of these emissions by storing some of this atmospheric carbon in the wood of trees or soil in the forest floor. The amount of CO ₂used by fungi to support their growth compared with the amount of CO ₂ they release back into the atmosphere can make a big difference in how forests impact the climate. This ratio of carbon input and output is also known as "carbon use efficiency." Many factors determine carbon use efficiency in fungi, including temperature, water, and nutrient availability. But, surprisingly, a major element involves complex territorial disputes and alliances between fungal communities.

For the study, Maynard and his research team investigated how inter-fungal relationships are influencing the amount of CO ₂ being sequestered and released by these communities. They established different combinations of wood-decaying fungi and grew them under controlled conditions. By supplying these fungi with plenty of carbon and nitrogen for food, they observed the effects of competition between the fungi. Maynard then observed where the fungi allocated their supply of carbon by measuring the amount of CO ₂ released, and the quantity of new fungal growth.

The experiment found that increased competition between species caused the fungi to release more carbon dioxide. Thus, fungi that spend time fighting off competition use their resources less efficiently. The amount of CO ₂ released by fungi also changed depending on other conditions like temperature and available nitrogen, but remained higher overall when compared to fungi that grew alone.

These findings show how difficult it is to estimate the amount of carbon a forest is removing from the atmosphere. As we search for ways to mitigate larger amounts CO ₂ in the atmosphere, forests provide an appealing option; if we plant more trees and protect our forests, scientists and policymakers hope, we might take enough carbon out of the atmosphere to slow the warming of the planet. Scientists and policymakers must also consider fungi in the forest equation. Fungal communities, like human societies, are incredibly complex and scientists are only beginning to make sense of them. Further investigation is critical for, as science shows, the forest floor is as important as the trees above.

You might like these articles that share the same topics

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Forest fungi and their implications for a warming planet

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Fungi live in their own world of war and peace, their competition unknowingly playing a major role in global climate change. Perhaps, when you think about fungi you think about mushrooms; this fruiting body of a fungi is produced as a means of reproduction, much like an orange to an orange tree.

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Trail Pheromones

Trail pheromones are used for recruitment, for marking pathways to resources, and for indicating resource richness. Often released with alarm pheromones, trail pheromones enable guards to aggregate around a nest invader. Furthermore, short-lived and persistent trail pheromones are known. In ants, trail pheromones are produced in the hindgut, Dufour's gland, the venom gland, and the tibial, tarsal, and abdominal glands. In some myrmecine and ponerine ants, the venom gland is the source of trail odors. Odor trails produced by termites originate from the abdominal sternal glands. In Zootermopsis nevadensis, sternal gland secretions deposited on a trail from a breached or damaged nest wall to the interior of the nest draws workers toward the area for nest repair.

Odor trails emitted by forest-inhabiting bees provide three-dimensional information on resource location. Some large stingless bees of the genus Trigona produce strong odor chemicals from enlarged mandibular glands. Trigona forage in tropical forests and utilize mandibular gland secretions to cue in other foragers to nectar sources. Foraging Trigona will release more trail pheromone near a food source, thus indicating proximity to the food source for other foragers. The trail pheromone components of T. subterranea include both E- and Z-citrals. Differences in pheromone composition between species may reduce interspecific trail following in stingless bees.

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123741448002460

Trail Pheromones

Trail pheromones are also found mostly in social insects, including ants, termites, bees, and wasps. When a worker locates a resource, she lays down a trail when returning to the colony that other workers can use to find the resource. Flying insects use trail pheromones to stimulate colony members to enter the hive. Bees mark the nest entrance with products from the Nasonov gland that induce workers to enter. There is also evidence for a pheromone deposited from the tarsi of bees and wasps that may serve as a trail pheromone at the nest entrance.

Venomous ants use their sting to lay down a product of the poison glands as a trail pheromone, while nonvenomous ants synthesize their pheromone in Dufour's gland or in the gut. These terrestrial trail pheromones serve as a sensitive index to the amount of food present at a distant location, because each worker returning from the resource adds to the trail's intensity. Once the food is exhausted, returning workers no longer lay down a trail, and it soon dissipates. Trail pheromones tend to be more stable than alarm pheromones, but they are still relatively volatile, a necessity if trails that are no longer informative are to be avoided.

Trail pheromones appear to have arisen as metabolic by-products that were eventually adapted as signals and may be exceptions to the rule that pheromones exist as specific component blends. A single component, 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine, is present in the poison glands of several species of Myrmica and is able to induce trail-following in all those species, but there are some other species that do indeed use multiple components.

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123694935500134

Trail Pheromones

Trail pheromones are also found mostly in social insects, including ants, termites, bees and wasps. When a worker locates a resource, she lays down a trail when returning to the colony that other workers can use to find the resource. Flying insects use trail pheromones to stimulate colony members to enter the hive. Bees mark the nest entrance with products from their Nasonov glands that induce workers to enter. There is also evidence for a pheromone deposited from the tarsi of bees and wasps that may serve as a trail pheromone at the nest entrance.

Venomous ants use their sting to lay down a product of the poison glands as a trail pheromone, while non-venomous ants synthesize their pheromone in Dufour's gland or in the gut. These terrestrial trail pheromones serve as a sensitive index to the amount of food present at a distant location, because each worker returning from the resource adds to the trail's intensity. Once the food is exhausted, returning workers no longer lay down a trail and it soon dissipates. Trail pheromones tend to be more stable than alarm pheromones, but they are still relatively volatile, a necessity if trails that are no longer informative are to be avoided. Cataglyphis desert ants foraging for dead arthropods on the hot salt pans of Tunisia do not employ trail pheromones that would not last long in the heat, but instead use path integration based on a skylight compass and visual landmarks to navigate. They are also able to use the odor they have associated with their nests to identify and return to the nest entrance.

Trail pheromones appear to have arisen as metabolic byproducts that were eventually adapted as signals, and may be exceptions to the rule that pheromones exist as specific component blends. A single component, 3-ethyl-2,5-dimethylpyrazine, is present in the poison glands of several species of Myrmica and is able to induce trail-following in all those species, but there are some other species that do indeed use multiple components. Argentine ants use ( Z)-9-hexadecenal, which lasts about 4 h before the signal fades for use by other workers if it is not replenished.

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012415819100012X

Regulation of Recruitment and Foraging Activity

Trail pheromones communicate information about food quality to nestmates that have not had direct experience with a food source. Trail-laying behavior regulates pheromone concentration (i.e., the amount of pheromone deposited on a trail), which in turn controls a colony's response. After deposition on the substrate, a trail pheromone diffuses. The chemical properties of the pheromone both determine the spatial and temporal structure of its active space and regulate foraging activity at the colony level. The concentration of trail pheromone mediates communication between groups of individuals, those that have fed and any potential foragers within the nest. In fire ants, the continuity of the sting trail, measured by causing a scout ant to walk over a smoked glass slide (removing soot from the slide where the ant's sting is dragged) depends upon the concentration of a sugar solution offered as a food source. The more concentrated and thus rewarding the solution, the greater the extent to which the sting is extruded and dragged continuously over the substrate, and the greater the number of workers that will lay such a trail after they have contacted the food source ( Fig. 2). The distance between the food source and the nest can also affect the rate at which food is retrieved, and thus the profitability of the colony's foraging.

The regulatory mechanism underlying foraging organization is called mass communication. Foraging is initiated when scouts locate new food, determine its quality, and deposit trail pheromone according to the food's energetic value and the colony's nutritional needs. This trail induces recruitment in nestmates, which repeat the cycle of food quality assessment and trail phermone deposition until the food source has been depleted or the colony satiated. The entire process is regulated by the concentration and evaporation of the trail pheromone. If the recruitment trail is not reinforced, the trail substance evaporates and foraging rate decays over time until food collection ends. Different ant and termite species show variations on the theme of mass communication that likely are associated with the foraging ecology of individual species.

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B Sternal secretion chemicals

Termite trail pheromones are a multicomponent blend with a common component eliciting movement and specific secondary compounds that determine the specificity of trails among species ( Arab Sillam-Dussès Bordereau and Pasteels, 2010; Sillam-Dussès et al., 2004; Kaib, 1999). Studies with different species showed different biological activity between trail pheromones and sternal gland extract, suggesting synergy with minor components ( et al., 2005). Chemical analyses of these minor components are lacking in the majority of termite species. The sternal gland is the only termite gland responsible for the production of the trail pheromone, and only a few molecules have been identified as worker semiochemicals to date, including decadienol, dodecanal, dodecenol, dodecadienol, dodecatrienol, C18 aldehyde, neocembrene, and some mixtures, including dodecatrienol + neocembrene, dodecatrienol + neocembrene + trinervitatriene ( et al., 2006, 2007, 2009a,b, 2010). Some termite genera and their respective trail pheromones are listed in Table 21.4.

Chemical analyses of secretions from the sternal glands of Isoptera reproductives have identified the following semiochemicals: decadienal, dodecanal, dodecadienol, dodecatrienol, neocembrene, and tetradecyl propionate, which function as sex pheromones (Table 21.5) (Bordereau and Pasteels, 2010; Costa-Leonardo et al., 2009a; Pasteels and Bordereau, 1998).

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4.04.5.3.11 C₁₂-units

The trail pheromone of the myrmicine ant Crematogaster castanea has been identified as ( R)-2-dodecanol ( A113). ⁴⁰⁵ Dodecanoic acid ( A112) was identified as the oviposition pheromone of the sand fly Lutzomyia longipalpis. ⁴⁰⁶ Although ( Z)-7-dodecenyl acetate ( A117) is used by many Lepidoptera as a pheromone component, it is interesting to know that it has also been identified as the sex pheromone of female Asian elephant Elephas maximus. ⁴⁰⁷ ( Z)-3-Dodecen-1-ol ( A114) is a trail pheromone of the termite Macrotermes annandalei, ⁴⁰⁸ whereas the related (3 Z,6 Z)-3,6-dodecadien-1-ol ( A116) serves this function in the termite Ancistrotermes pakistanicus. ⁴⁰⁹ (3 Z,6 Z,8 E)-3,6,8-Dodecatrien-1-ol ( A38) has the same function in Reticulitermes lucifugus grassei and R. santonensis. It also seems to function as sex pheromone in both sympatric species ⁴¹⁰ and is a trail pheromone of other termites as well. 411,412 ( Z)-3-Dodecenyl acetate ( A115), representing the structure of a typical moth pheromone, is a female-attracting pheromone of males of the flour beetle Tenebrio molitor. ⁴¹³ ( R)-1-Methylpropyl ( Z)-7-dodecenoate is a component of the female-produced sex pheromone of the zygaenid moth Illiberis rotundata. ⁴¹⁴

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1.2 Collective 'Decisions'

Further, the use of trail pheromones is also a mechanism of collective 'decision' making. Experiments with real ants combined with modeling have shown that trail laying often causes ants to choose the food source that is nearest to the nest (Deneubourg and Goss 1989). This observation seems to suggest that individual ants possess considerable cognitive capacities, but Deneubourg and Goss show in a computer model that ants may accomplish this remarkable feat without comparing distances to various food sources. When ants mark their path by pheromones and follow the more strongly marked branch at crossroads, then, by returning to the nest more quickly when the road to and from the food source is shorter, they obviously imprint the shorter path more heavily with pheromones. Thus, positive feedback is the result: as the shorter path attracts more ants, it also receives stronger marking, etc.

In subsequent extensions of this model (Detrain et al. 1999), path marking and following are shown to imply automatically risk avoidance (which agrees with observations in some species of ants), as follows: a hostile confrontation delays the forager for a certain time before returning to the nest. Thus the path to the dangerous food source automatically is marked more slowly and less strongly. Consequently, the safest food source is usually 'preferred.'

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Trail Pheromones

Social insects also commonly use pheromones to mark feeding or nest sites and trails. Trail pheromones are produced primarily by social insects that forage on the ground, such as termites and ants, although a few nonsocial insects also use them. Termites, for example, continually produce trail pheromone from abdominal glands and deposit a drop each time the abdomen touches the substrate. In this way, insects lay down trail pheromones as they walk and move, and the persistence of well-used trails is reinforced by those who follow. Tent caterpillars even overmark their original paths to a food supply by pressing the terminal abdominal segment along the trail as they return to their nest. Chemical trails can even be followed by flying insects. For example, stingless bees in the genus Trigona mark a food source with a pheromone composed mostly of citral and continue to lay down pheromone on the way back to the nest.

Pheromones also play important roles in maintaining the colony structure of social insects. For example, pheromones regulate many aspects of colony life in honeybees. In fact, honeybees use at least 36 different pheromones components, secreted by 15 different glands. Pheromones are involved in such diverse behaviors as foraging, trail marking, colony defense, nestmate recognition, colony fission, swarming, and mating.

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4.06.1 Introduction

This chapter focuses on the study of pheromones of marine invertebrates and algae. The term 'pheromone' refers to an intraspecific chemical signal, and includes alarm pheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect behavior or physiology. Up to the present moment, various pheromones have been identified in marine invertebrate and algae communication systems, particularly sex pheromones. Researchers in marine chemical ecology have been attracted to reproductive systems as well as predator-prey and competitive interactions, settlement cues, and defense substances against infection by microorganisms. To sustain precious marine natural resources, it is important to have a broad understanding of systematic biology and marine ecology. To achieve this, clarification of the function and role of chemical cues that significantly influence biological and physiological phenomena in marine creatures are becoming increasingly essential.

Several books and reviews dealing with general or specialized subjects in pheromones of marine invertebrates and algae have been published. Here we describe the recent progress regarding such pheromones, with a special focus on their structural and functional diversity.

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080453828000976

Behavioral Controls

Insects communicate in a number of different ways, for example, visually, through sounds, and chemically. Pheromones are used as communication cues between individuals of the same species. Ants use trail pheromones to help other members of the colony get from their nest to a food source and return to the nest again in an efficient manner. Alarm pheromones are used by aphids to warn other aphids that a predator is on the prowl. Aggregation pheromones attract individuals of the same species to locations for purposes of feeding and mating. Sex pheromones are produced and released by one sex to attract the opposite sex for purposes of mating. Sex pheromones are highly species specific, making them potential tools for monitoring and controlling pests.

Adolph Butenandt and colleagues identified the chemical structure of the first sex pheromone in 1959 from the silk worm, Butenandt Gaston Bombyx mori L. ( et al., 1959). Sex pheromones may be a single compound or a blend of several compounds each in a specific ratio that optimize attraction. Soon after the discovery of moth sex pheromones, it was suggested that these chemicals might be useful as tools to control pests in managed systems like agriculture ( et al., 1967). The use of sex pheromones as a form of pest control has been referred to as mating disruption because the mechanism of control was associated with the disruption of male orientation to the female, thus preventing or disrupting the mating process (Cardé, 1990; Cardé and Minks, 1995).

Once the chemical structure of a sex pheromone was identified, they were synthesized in the laboratory. Synthetic pheromones are chemically identical to those produced by the insect and are highly attractive. When placed in lures, these synthetic sex pheromones attract males of the same species to traps where they can be captured and counted as a means of estimating the population of the species. However, the most important use of sex pheromones has been their use as controls for many key pests of forest and agricultural crops.

When sex pheromones are placed into dispensers that release them over a long period of time (several months), the normal behavior of the targeted pest is disrupted and mating is prevented, suppressed, or delayed. The release rate of pheromone coming from dispensers varies but is always many times higher than the amount of pheromone released by the insect. For example, the codling moth female releases approximately 6.5 ng hWitzgall −1, whereas a single pheromone dispenser releases approximately 1000 times that amount or approximately 50 mg ha −1 h −1 ( et al., 2008). Because sex pheromones only impact one insect species, they are an excellent selective control for pests.

Pheromones have been used to control several pests in forests, vegetable, and perennial crops. More than 660 000 ha are treated with pheromones as controls for codling moth in pome fruit (apple and pear); Oriental fruit moth, Witzgall Witzgall Grapholita molesta (Busck), in stone fruit (peach and nectarine); European grapevine moth, Lobesia botrana (Denis & Schiffermuller); European grape berry moth, Eupoecilia ambiguella (Hübner), in grapes; pink bollworm, Pectinophora gossypiella (Saunders), in cotton; leafroller (Tortricidae) species in tea and other crops; and the Gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar (Linnaeus), in deciduous forests ( et al., 2008). et al. (2008) provide a review of the chemical ecology and management of codling moth. A specific case for the successful use of codling moth sex pheromones in apple IPM in Washington State is discussed later in this article.

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URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780444525123001753

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Trail pheromones are used for recruitment, for marking pathways to resources, and for indicating resource richness. Often released with alarm pheromones, trail pheromones enable guards to aggregate around a nest invader. Furthermore, short-lived and persistent trail pheromones are known. In ants, trail pheromones are produced in the hindgut, Dufour's gland, the venom gland, and the tibial, tarsal, and abdominal glands.

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Examined Life

A conversation with Jessica J. Lee and Zoë Schlanger

In celebration of their new plantcentric books, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging and The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, authors Jessica J. Lee and Zoë Schlanger sat down for ranging conversation about emerging science, plant intelligence, culture, memory, botanical belonging, and how our houseplants may influence our thinking.

Jessica J. Lee: Both of our books center on plants, but come at the topic from a specific angle. Why did plant intelligence capture your attention?

Zoë Schlanger: Plant intelligence is not an intuitive proposition. As humans we're terribly biased toward things that have faces and brains. But research over the last two decades-and older work, in the time of Darwin-is finding that perhaps a brain is not a prerequisite for intelligent behavior. I was intrigued by this, I had always been drawn to plants as calming, somehow reassuring companions. They do strike me as very competent, going about their lives with a certain sureness. What I didn't realize going into this was just how many decisions a plant is making at all times, how much vitality goes into their every phase, and how spontaneous and social they actually are. It brings a certain enchantment to my life now.

JJL: I love this answer. I think it's interesting that you mention that distance between us and plants, which stems from our tendency to connect with other creatures with faces. Because I think the thing that drew me to the subject of plants out of place was precisely that we pretend this distance exists, and then use really human language to describe plants. And think about them in so many of the same ways we think about people. I couldn't get this idea out of my head, literally for years... so I had to write a book about it.

ZS: Gorgeous. Yes, I'm thinking about Theophrastus now, who coined the term "heart-wood" to talk about the vulnerable core inside trees. He understood that humans needed metaphors like that to connect to other forms of life, but also that metaphors were more than simply devices, that there really are those threads of connection between us; between our bodies and, say, the structure of a tree. Speaking of which, I loved your chapter on the "plant explorers" which gets into this gritty place of humans layering humanoid language onto plants-perhaps while simultaneously ignoring the humanity of actual humans. You write about David Fairchild, who was responsible for the introduction of so many food plants in the United States: mangoes, hazelnuts, grapes, walnuts, olives, lemons, peaches, persimmons - but that there's an "uneasy beauty" in the archives of his and other "plant explorers." These explorers seemed to have an immense curiosity about plants in the places they "explored," while also having little or no concern for the people in those same places. And yet: These were exciting botanizing adventures.

How do you think about your own rapacious interest in plants, and how does it relate to these earlier examples of adventuring botanists?

JJL: I think one of the big things I wanted to unpack in the book was that troubled feeling of simultaneously being slightly horrified by the way botanical extraction was carried out, while also finding a part of myself wholly enthralled. Like holding the aesthetic appreciation of detrimental plants alongside knowledge of their impact. I wanted to investigate what it might mean to hold both those stories at once, to ask if I could come to a place of... not acceptance of how it was done, but perhaps coming to grips with my own inner, earlier longing for adventure, for what that looked like in the past. Really, it's about that co-shaping of culture and nature. You actually offer a provocative line, arguing that every thought we've ever had was made possible by plants. Can you unpack the ways plants shape us?

ZS: Oh yes. I meant that very literally. Plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide and water to spin sugar out of thin air. They're the only thing on Earth that can do that, make pure glucose energy out of thin air. As such, every molecule of sugar that has ever passed through our bodies was first woven by a plant. We're all just recyclers. And of course, our brains are organs that run chiefly on glucose, this plant-sugar. Without it our thoughts but also our lives more generally would cease. Our thinking about plants in this moment is made possible by plants.

Our thinking about plants in this moment is made possible by plants.

Plants are also geniuses at synthesising chemical compounds. Some of those compounds we know influence the behavior of animals; these are called "semiochemicals." Some plants are able to summon beneficial predators to eat whatever's eating them, or repel grazers, or induce a bee to visit them. Plenty of people have suggested we don't know the full scope of those compounds' influence on us. We may be more influenced by plants' semiochemicals than we realize. I find that thought unsettling but in a delightful way. We are influencing them, by way of agriculture and managed breeding and whatnot. But they are also influencing us.

JJL: That's such a beautiful circularity! Yet you also seem to point to how language then distances us from plants?

ZS: There is a lot of anxiety in the sciences about anthropomorphization. Plant scientists, I think reasonably, don't want to cast plants as little humans. Plants have worlds of senses we can't even really imagine; they do things we cannot, and their branch of life diverged from ours a very long time ago. We are in some ways aliens to each other. But I also think this anxiety about using human-legible language to talk about plants robs the general public of coming to grips with the ways our lives are in fact very parallel. I don't think it's a stretch to say a plant can feel one's touch-we know plants respond to touch, we can watch it in their bodies, how they activate their immune systems to deal with physical threats, how they'll change their growth pattern if you pet them. There's a sort of risk in using human language, that things will get too simplified, too untrue to what plants are. But I think it's a worthwhile risk. We have to deal with that ambiguity of otherness and similarity and hold both in our minds at once.

JJL: You write about a moment in the scientist Simon Gilroy's lab, where the plant lights up in response to your touch. How did that change you?

ZS: Oh, it changed me instantly. You're talking about an experiment where a modified plant imbued with fluorescent green proteins actually lit up in response to me pinching it with tweezers. I had been researching plant behavior and plant...alacrity, I guess you could say, for several years at that point. But I was struggling to connect the things I was learning to actual plants in front of me. This is the trouble: They react in ways either too slow or too invisible-as with chemical changes-for us to see. But then all of a sudden, I watched a plant react to my pinch in real time. Something clicked for me: Here was a very responsive creature. Any lingering doubts I had, and the whole intangibility of plant sensing, went out the window for me in that moment. It became very present. You can't unsee it!

I imagine you've had a similar turning point. Did this process of contemplating the plants in your life change your relationship to them? Do you see them differently now?

JJL: I think the big thing I noticed working on the book was that, somehow in tracing the biographies of these plants, it was like giving them space to show me who they were. It was an act of cultivating wonder, really. And now I find that the fullness of their lives-what brought some bok choy to my kitchen, what brought citrus to my table-is something that now attaches itself to how I greet these plants daily. I think it made my relationship less instrumental, more respectful. I take a quiet awe in their journeys.

ZS: That's beautiful. Exactly, it's a thing you can't unsee. In thinking about how an ethics of plants might arise, it does feel like a one-way thing: The circle of regard widens, it doesn't go the other way. Even with weeds! The most disrespected plants. Invasive species-type-weeds specifically. You write beautifully about weeds and the places they hold in our minds, how we come uncomfortably close to notions of nativism and purity when we talk about them. They tell us something about our human anxieties. When I was reading about the giant hogweeds so reviled in the United Kingdom, I was thinking about the Japanese knotweed that is often portrayed as a menace where I am, in New York. It takes over empty lots and I understand it can get into the foundations of buildings, exploiting cracks and widening fissures. Of course, from the plants' perspective, they're just doing an excellent job at being plants, finding ways to thrive where we've put them, even if that's far from where they originally evolved to live. What do you make of our human anxieties about weeds?
Revisit Jessica's thoughts on the most dangerous plant in Britian here.
JJL: I was SO scared to write that chapter of the book, unpacking invasion ecologies, because people get really riled up about invasive species. But I knew that if I wanted to write the book I was writing, it needed unpacking. I wanted to do my homework to really understand the terminology myself. And in writing it, I started thinking a lot about shifting contexts, like how at certain times certain species hold our attention in different ways: giant hogweed being a valued garden plant, until suddenly it isn't anymore. And how that's not the only shift taking place: that because of anthropogenic climate change, that species has to move again because winters in the place where it is "invasive" are not really cold enough for it anymore! It just really underscored how our value systems are liable to change. And of course, really drove home for me that resonance with how we discuss people: immigrants as good if they are "good immigrants", model minorities, as abhorrent if they don't fit into a desired frame.

When you write about invasion ecology in your book, you tie it to the idea of agency. I wonder what you make of this: the idea of plants having agency, and how that may differ from our conventional understandings of the term. I saw you refer to Jane Bennett a lot, for example. What's your take?

ZS: Absolutely. Intelligence and consciousness are loaded terms. I am very interested in them, but it is still unclear if we'll ever slough off our human-centric academic notions of them. "Agency" is more available for thinking about plants, and perhaps more precise. It gets at the idea that plants are not passive recipients of the world. They take into account their surroundings, the conditions, and shape themselves accordingly. The environment is working on them, and they are working on themselves in response. Their lives have direction, and it's a direction of their making. That's what agency-biological agency-here means: purposeful active determination of one's life. Jane Bennett talks about "vibrancy" being a useful classification-that lots of things in our lives have their own vibrancy, a livingness that sparkles with a kind of internal force. You don't have to talk about consciousness to talk about vibrancy. Plants have that. When I look at the Japanese knotweed poking up hard beaks of new shoots in an empty lot near my apartment-this is happening right now, because it's April-I see a deep will toward life, an agentive push to absolutely destroy a tarp someone set out to try to suppress them. They're solving their lives' problems and absolutely finding a way. That's agency.

The word "agency" gets at the idea that plants are not passive recipients of the world. They take into account their surroundings, the conditions, and shape themselves accordingly.

JJL: I love this idea. It has me thinking about how much your book is a kind of portrait of how science changes its mind. Or sometimes doesn't!

ZS: Definitely. The orientation of science toward plants (and lots of other nonhuman creatures) has shifted so much over the last 150 years. We of course all suffer from a sort of shifting baseline syndrome where the science of our day feels as though it was always true, a sort of natural truth. But a century ago medicine was very sure that dogs, for example, had no capacity for sensation, and so could not feel pain, leading to a lot of gruesome anatomy demonstrations on live animals. That of course now seems nuts. But that too was science! It's a reminder that ethics and philosophical considerations are often what intervenes in science when it comes to living creatures. Vivisection didn't stop because science changed its mind but because animal welfare societies picketed them enough. The culture shifted. That's sometimes what changes the direction of scientific thought.

I do think we're on the precipice of a cultural shift around plants-scientists themselves simply can't unsee the things they're learning now about what plants can do. Once that collides with the public's sense of ethics, there will be no going back. I was struck in your book when you were writing about tea, it was such a reminder about how slippery certain sciences are, in that case with regard to taxonomy. It took European science a really long time to realize black and green tea were the same plant, right?

JJL: Yes exactly! And this really brings into the open the fact that science isn't in a bubble. That the reason tea was mistaxonomized (is that a word?) was because the social and cultural knowledge that went with tea plants was not available to Europeans when the plant was "named" by Linnaeus: anyone with up-close knowledge of tea cultures in China, for example, would've known it was just about how the plant was processed. Science really needed that other cultural piece to get it right. And of course, that resulted in its own problematic and now-famous history of the British stealing not just plants but knowledge too.

ZS: Mistaxonomized should be a word, if it's not.

JJL: Speaking of taxonomy, there is a moment in your book where you're actually in Berlin, where I live, at the botanical garden. And you write about this plant, Nasa poissoniana -which you call a memory plant. What is the significance, do you think, of this idea of plants having memory? I'm struck that memory really links to this idea of plants and history and time unfolding, a kind of cultural embeddedness, to put it ineloquently.

Even the memory of a plant helps me feel like I have some kind of community to belong to.

ZS: No, that's very eloquent. Yes, that flower is the first, I believe, to be found to take note of time intervals between visits from its pollinator, and parcel out its pollen accordingly. There's a clear evolutionary utility to that: I was watching that flower do its thing in a German garden, but its home is at high altitude in the Andes, and sometimes there are very few pollinator insects flying around. They have to make sure every visit counts. They take note of the last time interval between visits, and present their pollen when they expect the next bee to arrive. It looks like they're predicting the future, but it's actually memory at work. Plants are living libraries of their own lives in more basic ways: Their body structure is a map of where water and sunlight was at different times in its life. Now when I see a bare branch on a side of a tree, that's a memory of where sunlight once fell, where it was once worthwhile for that plant to grow leaves to catch light. Eventually it got shaded out, and the plant switched efforts elsewhere, to a different branch. Plants record time passing in their body, the elapsed periods of cold and warmth and struggle, like drought, is all there, changing their approach to the world. It brings them closer to us: Our memories are also written in our bodies. I think of epigenetics, the emerging field of medicine that recognizes how generational memories are also inscribed in us. Generations of plants have this too, their parents' environment changes how they'll respond to the world too. We are all shaped by place. That's what your book really gets at: Placedness and how that arranges new possibilities for growth.

You moved over and over during the time you wrote this book. You were pregnant, then had your daughter. You were uprooted from your home in the U.K. because of rising housing costs, and had to start life again in Germany. It felt like you were in transition on almost every page, even when you were describing your childhood, moving between the two cultures of the sides of your family and also between their houses. How have plants moved with you, and how have your plant-worlds changed? What plants have remained the most consistent?

JJL: I love this question, and that it follows on you mentioning epigenetics. Because when I was pregnant was the first time I learned about that, probably from TikTok or something, and I have been haunted by that thought ever since. And really in a way, it's like every move I've made in my life, I've been haunted by past places and past plants. I think writing the book, really pulling at the threads of why a specific mango tree meant so much to my childhood, and why my mother had her own mango connections, and why soybeans signified such important things to me, it kind of drove home this idea that we make families, communities really, not just from human connections. That plants-especially those we eat or cultivate or have this kind of domestic, intimate closeness with-are kin. So even though I keep moving, and the book traces just a fraction of the moves I've made in my life, I carry those connections with me. Even the memory of a plant helps me feel like I have some kind of community to belong to.

ZS: That's beautiful. They make us and we make them.

Read More

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Learning the Language of Plants - Orion Magazine

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A conversation with Jessica J. Lee and Zoë Schlanger

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Earthwards: Transformative Ecological Education (9781912480913) published by Hawthorn Press. A handbook for ecological literacy and personal resilience.

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More like a verdant rug than a forest or pasture, the humble moss packs a surprising lot of punch for being such a small plant. In an amazing new study, researchers have only just discovered how vital this diverse group of itty-bitty botanicals is to ecosystems around the world.

"We were gobsmacked to find that mosses were doing all these amazing things," exclaims David Eldridge, an ecologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Sampling mosses from over a hundred sites across eight different ecosystems, Eldridge and colleagues estimated populations of the plant cover a staggering 9.4 million square kilometers in the types of environments surveyed. This is comparable to the size of China or Canada.

Ancestors of all today's living plants, these ancient organisms are more simplistic in their structure than their more modern descendents, with sprigs full of tiny leaves, typically just one cell thick. But that doesn't make them any less mighty.

"Mosses don't have the plumbing that an ordinary plant has, called a xylem and a phloem, which water moves through," says Eldridge.

"But moss survives by picking up water from the atmosphere. And some mosses, like the ones in the dry parts of Australia, curl when they get dry, but they don't die - they live in suspended animation forever. We've taken mosses out of a packet after 100 years, squirted them with water and watched them come to life. Their cells don't disintegrate like ordinary plants do."

The researchers compared soils with and without moss in each of their studied areas and found greater movement of nutrients in mossy soils, increasing the cycling of everything from nitrogen and phosphorus to organic matter. Moss also acts as a storage pool for nutrients, including carbon, currently keeping about 6.43 billion metric tons of this vital but currently problematic element out of our oversaturated atmosphere.

"You've got all the global emissions from land use change, such as grazing, clearing vegetation and activities associated with agriculture," explains Eldridge.

"We think mosses are sucking up six times more carbon dioxide, so it's not one to one, it's six times better."

What's more, the team found mosses seem to keep a lid on potential pathogens. The surveys counted fewer potential plant pathogens in soils where moss lived, and incredibly antibiotic resistant genes were less abundant in the microbiomes of mossy habitats compared to unvegetated areas.

"We posit that increases in soil carbon beneath mosses might reduce microbial competition and their need to produce antibiotic resistant genes," Eldridge and colleagues hypothesize in their paper.

Moss's shallow tangles of roots help hold the soil together, providing a stable surface for a succession of plant growth that leads to more complex ecosystems. Moss also helps maintain surface microclimates.

High densities of mat and turf mosses like , Hylocomium, and Ptilium, contribute the most to soil biodiversity and ecosystems, particularly in areas where trees don't grow, like deserts and tundra.

And after major disturbances such as volcanic eruptions, moss is one of the earliest organism to return, following cyanobacteria and algae.

"What we show in our research is that where you have mosses you have a greater level of soil health, such as more carbon and more nitrogen," concludes Eldridge.

"Mosses may well provide the perfect vehicle to kick start the recovery of severely degraded urban and natural area soils."

This research was published in Nature Geoscience.

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'We Were Gobsmacked': Giant Study Reveals Why Moss Is Vital For The Planet

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More like a verdant rug than a forest or pasture, the humble moss packs a surprising lot of punch for being such a small plant. In an amazing new study, researchers have only just discovered how vital this diverse group of itty-bitty botanicals is to ecosystems around the world.

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Akomolafe, Bayo. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/

Abrams, David. Spell of the Sensous,. Vintage Books, 1997. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Vintage Books, 2011

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.

Barad, Karen. Troubling Time/s and ecologies of nothingness: re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 2017.

Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010

Brentari, Carlo. Jakob Von Uexküll: The Discovery of the Umwelt between Biosemiotics and Theoretical Biology. Springer, 2015.

Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategies. AK Press, 2017.

Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge, Nelson, Lisa and Stark Smith, Nancy. Sensing, feeling, and action: The experiential anatomy of Body-Mind Centering®. Contact Editions, 2012.

Fancourt, Daisy. Art Cure: the Science of how Arts Transform our Health. Penguin, 2026.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. AK Press, 2020.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Hathaway, Michael J.. What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make. Princeton University Press, 2022

Ingold, Tim. Being Alive. Routledge, 2011

Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass; Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions/Oregon State University Press Ltd, 2013.

Kimmerer, Robin. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural

History of Mosses. Oregon State University Press, 2003.

Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. North Atlantic Books, 2021.

Macy, Joanna, and Molly Young Brown. Coming back to life: Practices to reconnect our lives, our world. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1998.

Margulis, Lynne. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution. Basic Books, 1998.

Merlin, Sheldrake. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House, 2020.

Micro-phenomenology

Morris, David. Merleau-Ponty’s Developmental Ontology. Northwestern University Press, 2018.

Naess, Arne. The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess. Counterpoint, 2008.

Nuding, Elise. Approaching eco-somatics:A consideration of potential pitfalls and their implications. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, Volume 13 Numbers 1 & 2. Intellect Ltd Academic Reflection, 2021.

Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Neimanis, Astrida & Hamilton, Jennifer Mae. How to Weather

Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change, Bloomsbury Academic, 2026.

Rolnik, Suely. Spheres of Insurrection:Notes on Decolonizing the Unconscious. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2019.

Shubin, Neil. Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. Vintage, 2009.

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Article: Rachel Liebert - What Could the White Body do For Decolonising Psychology? 

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Article: Rachel Liebert - What Could the White Body do For Decolonising Psychology? 

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Although this is in a psychology journal, it takes a deeply somatic approach to this question which has much wider reach.

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View of What Could the White Body Do For Decolonising Psychology? 31 Questions | Awry: Journal of Critical Psychology

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Saint Lucy for blindness and eye troubles. Saint Anthony for lost objects. Saint Peregrine for illness. Saint Christopher for safe travel. Saint Jude for impossible problems. In medieval Europe, there was a saint for every problem. Yes, a fever necessitated an herbal remedy. But it also needed a saint. Saint Patroclus of Troyes to be specific. Christian saints in the middle ages were syncretic animist deities from pre-Christian pagan practices. These beloved figures survived imperial control and Christian conversation by slipping sideways into the silhouette of Christian figures. Good examples of this are Saint Brigid, the chaste counterpart of the earlier Celtic fertility goddess Brigid and the mysteriously dog-headed Saint Christopher who harkens back to legends of the "dog-headed" Cynocephalus people who once lived in Europe. What we tend to forget, post-Enlightenment, is that early European Christianity was hardly monotheistic. It was a polytheistic romp of theriomorphic animal saints, magical grove and spring madonnas, and specific land spirits that saw the opportunity to survive by fusing into symbionts with Christian symbolism. Christianity was a cult of saints: unruly, folkloric, and inextricably entangled with the oral mythology of the people it tried desperately to convert.

Saints lived in certain places. Their relics were nestled in grottos and churches built over stone formations that had been sacred for thousands of years prior to the life of Jesus. You went on pilgrimage to a holy place, knowing full well that place and saint were synonymous. To touch the soil of a certain place was to touch the body of a being that could heal you. Saints were medicine. They were prescribed for ailments and heartache and conflict. Cunningly smuggled into the sterile realm of celibate sky gods, saints offered the feral medicine of specific ecosystems and landscapes. Covertly costumed as human beings, they continued to offer the medicine of the plants and animals and mountains and forests they had originally been understood to embody.

Hundreds of years and an ocean removed from the saints of my European ancestors, I wonder whom I should ask for help? Who are the landscape saints of North America? Who is the saint of this current moment? Who will provide a personalized medicine for me and my tricky body? Who is suited for this particular flavor of patriarchal capitalist death cult collapse? I think the answer is growing next to my car. And in the field near my house. And in-between countless rows of soybean and cotton plants. I think the answer likes disturbed soil. Polluted landscapes. Likes to salvage and adapt. Most of all, it likes to mate. So quickly, with half a million seeds per plant, that it genetically outpaces all the pesticides thrown at her. I think the answer is studded in cow manure. I think it is drifting, glittering against a gust of photons shot from a blistering August sun. I think my saint is a weed. Pigweed. Palmer Amaranth to be exact.

Palmer Amaranth is the bane of American monoculture. And, like the European land saints, it predates both Christianity and modern agriculture. Pigweed is a staple of indigenous people's diets and medicines stretching from South to North America. The tender spade-like leaves can be cooked like spinach or added to a salad and the emerald seeds are high in protein and useful as a grain-substitute. The plants are high in Vitamin A and C, while also providing niacin, iron, and calcium. The Hopi and Pueblo also used the seeds to make a rust-colored dye.

A New York Times article was recently published about the threat of Pigweed. It is officially resistant to the pesticides Dicamba and RoundUp. Recent studies show that it is uniquely equipped to outwit novel pesticides. The article characterizes the plant as invasive. As a bully. A poison. A problem. It says that the only way to get rid of it at this point is something called "flame-weeding", where fields are literally set on fire. But it is important to remember that Pigweed was here before colonial agriculture regarded it as fodder for pig's at best, and a weed at best. It is not an invasive. It is not a bully. It is an original dweller of American ecosystems.

Let's adjust the lens of the story. Let's center pigweed rather than late-capitalist monoculture. Maybe Pigweed is a gift. A saint providing a medicine again and again. Saying, "These crops you insist on growing are not good for your body or the land's body. What if you tried eating me? What if you tried listening to me? I've lived here much longer than you."

The most salient aspect of pigweed is its ability to metabolize and survive constant chemical assault. Pigweed is no victim. Pigweed survives. Pigweed is resistant to Dicamba, a poison so potent that only a teaspoon could kill a human being. I think of my grandmother. Just this last year it was legally proven in a class action lawsuit against RoundUp that she was one of the victims of that chemical pesticide. Her heart-failure following Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma was caused by the chemicals she used on her roses. I think of my own body's tendency to adversely react to every chemical and pollutant with which it comes into contact.

We are in a toxic soup of our own making: cultural and chemical. We will not be able to escape contamination. It is well known that pesticides drift. And so do conspiracy theories. And panic. And bad stories. There is RoundUp in our drinking water. Flame retardants in breast milk. The answer is not to try and escape. But, like Pigweed, to send down a deep tap root, and start to chemically, creatively, metabolically adapt. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, writes Audre Lorde. And pigweed is a tool the master of American Capitalism does not recognize. This tool doesn't dismantle the house. It overgrows it. Digests its stone walls. Grows up through the floorboards.

As we seek to survive in an age of ecological collapse and cultural chaos, perhaps it is to the weeds we should look for advice. I think of Pigweed, invading Europe as Europe colonized America. As Europeans took over America, Pigweed flowed back on the ships, into the countries that were invading its original ecosystem. It performed a reverse colonization. Pigweed originally only from the Americas is now dispersed across Europe and Asia. Pigweed says plant me in disturbed landscapes, dirty soil, chemical sludge. Plant me where the pain lives and I will learn how to survive. I will learn how to turn this poison into greenery, into stalk and seed and a tap root so long and sturdy it is almost a sword, capable of sucking up water not available the shallow rooted soy and cotton plants. My body needs to learn how to adapt to an increasingly chaotic environment. It needs a saint that teaches me how to get I touch with the wily, cunning knowledge of place. My saint is a seed on the wind. A vegetal plague. Pigweed.

Further Reading:
Attack of the Super Weeds NY Times Encyclopedia of Mystics, Saints Sages: A Guide to Asking for Protection, Wealth, Happiness, and Everything Else! by Judika Illes The Cult of Saints by Peter Brown Redroot Pigweed, a Humble and Underrated Wild Edible This Indelicately Named Invasive Weed Might Be a Gardener's Bane, But Is Good Eating - Edible Manhattan
Foods Indigenous to the Western Hemisphere Pigweed.

Happy to share this winding conversation with my friend David Abram that we had on All Hallow's Eve in preparation for my course Rewilding Mythology. You can watch here.

And deeply excited to share my conversation with Ayana Young on one of my favorite podcasts For The Wild. You can listen here.

The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine comes out November 29th! You can order your copy from any online bookseller or local bookstore.

If you live in the Hudson Valley and are around on November 20th please come to my costume party bacchanal book launch at 3 pm in partnership with The Golden Notebook. The event is open and first come first serve. More details here. I'll also be doing an event with my favorite local shop Chicory Naturalist on December 10th at 1 pm in Kingston.

My course Rewilding Mythology started last week and will be open for enrollment during the entirety of the 8-week journey. You can sign up and access past recorded sessions, resources, and the bumptious online community. Join me in the compost heap here! This Monday we have mythopoetic geniuses Tom Hirons and Josh Schrei discussing cycles and storm gods.

My first novel The Madonna Secret recently went up for pre-order! You can read more about the book here and pre-order from any online bookseller.

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I am overwhelmed with gratitude by how many of you have showed up here (and throughout the past year across platforms). As someone struggling to balance chronic illness (and just how expensive it is to be sick in America) with writing, know that you are very practically keeping me alive, keeping me afloat. Thank you deeply. I love you all so much.

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Saint Lucy for blindness and eye troubles. Saint Anthony for lost objects. Saint Peregrine for illness. Saint Christopher for safe travel. Saint Jude for impossible problems. In medieval Europe, there was a saint for every problem. Yes, a fever necessitated an herbal remedy. But it also needed a saint.

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 They are great indicators of air quality, and of heavy metals in the environment; because they have no epidermis, they’re intimate with the world. 

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 They are great indicators of air quality, and of heavy metals in the environment; because they have no epidermis, they’re intimate with the world. 

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Robin Wall Kimmerer can recall almost to the day when she first fell under the unlikely spell of moss. "It's kind of embarrassing," she says. "I've always been engaged with plants, because I grew up in the countryside. That was my world. But mosses I'd set aside in my mind as not worthy of attention. I was studying to be a forest ecologist. That little green scum on the rocks: how interesting could it really be? Only then there came a point when I'd taken every botany class our university had to offer, except one: the ecology of mosses. I thought I'd do it, just so I could say that I'd taken them all. It was love at first sight. I remember looking with a lens at these big glacial erratic boulders that were covered in moss, and thinking: there's a whole world here to be discovered." Ever since, she has rarely left her house for a walk without such a lens on a string around her neck.

Kimmerer, a professor of environmental biology and the director of the Centre for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York in Syracuse, is probably the most well-known bryologist at work in the world today. She may be, in fact, the only well-known bryologist at work today (bryology is the study of mosses and liverworts), at least among the general public. But her unlikely success - her fans include the writer Robert Macfarlane and the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Richard Powers, who gives daily thanks for what he calls her "endless knowledge" - hardly arrived overnight. In 2013, Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma, quietly published a book called Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants - a (seemingly) niche read from a small US press.

For a long time, nothing happened. Last year, however, it suddenly appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. It has since sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide. Thanks to this, her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, is now also to be reissued in the UK, no fewer than 18 years after its first publication.

The times we live in are creating a longing for a connection to land and nature: what I call a longing for belonging

Is Kimmerer surprised by these developments? Yes, and no. "There was no marketing push," she says. "The books were sold hand to hand. I think it's almost a case of critical mass. But I also think that the times we're living in are creating a longing for a connection to land and nature: what I call a longing for belonging. Both books provide a doorway to that kind of belonging, and maybe, too, we're finally coming to value those things that are not entirely tied up with commerce."

This, she believes, could be just the moment for the steadiness and intricacy of moss. "In the pandemic, people talk of lockdown," she says. "But I like the phrase 'sheltering in place', which suggests that we might have come to pay attention to the things that we have, rather than the things we don't have, spending time in our garden or in the woods, finding solace in landscape." Looking at mosses close up is, she insists, a comforting, mindful thing: "They're the most overlooked plants on the planet. But they're gifts, too. They provide us with another model of how we might live."

Read Kimmerer's book and you're unlikely ever again to waste precious gardening time scraping moss from paving stones. You may even find yourself trying to encourage its growth. As she reveals, beneath your feet, barely visible to the eye, is another world: a rainforest in miniature, though you'll need to fall to your knees to see it properly. (At the scale of a moss, walking over it is like flying over a continent at 32,000 feet.) The most primitive of plants, mosses lack flowers, fruits and seeds, have no roots, and no vascular system to conduct water internally, and yet there are 22,000 species, even if most are still so little known to the public that only a few have been given common names. The undisputed masters of their chosen environments, mosses succeed by inhabiting the places other plants cannot.

Red bogmoss on the shores of Loch Maree, Wester Ross, Scotland. Photograph: espy3008/Getty Images/iStockphoto

"We're busy looking for biological, ecological and cultural solutions to climate chaos," says Kimmerer. "But mosses, which have been with us ever since they arose, 400 million years ago, have endured every climate change that has ever happened." Quite apart from what she regards as their unique beauty, their mere existence should, she thinks, lead us to ask certain questions. Why are they so resilient? What can they teach us? What secrets might they hold?

Can mosses help us to read the state of the planet? "We don't know if they can in macro ways," Kimmerer tells me (she's speaking to me on Zoom from upstate New York). "But in small ways, yes. They are great indicators of air quality, and of heavy metals in the environment; because they have no epidermis, they're intimate with the world. They're storytellers. If I see a certain kind of moss, I'll think, Oh, I know you... you wouldn't be here unless there was limestone nearby. There are mosses that tell the story of land disturbance, and there are mosses that only come in after fires, and they're habitats, too, for tardigrades and rotifers [minute aquatic animals], for algae, and all sorts of other things. They are the coral reef of the forest, a microbiome in which the species of the bacteria that live in the angles of their leaves are different, say, to those on their rhizoids [the filaments found on their thallus, or plant body]."

Mosses can reproduce in more than one way - via spores or, in extremis, by means of cloning - and they tolerate stress like few other plants, going into suspended animation when conditions aren't right. A moss can lose up to 98% of its moisture and still survive to restore itself once the supply of water is restored. Even after 40 years of dehydration in a musty specimen cabinet, mosses have been fully revived after a quick dunk in a Petri dish.

"This is a primary adaptation to their role as the first colonisers of the land," she says. "There was no soil here then - nothing for roots to grab on to, and no way to conserve water - so this was an evolutionary imperative. It's quite remarkable, though not all mosses have it. Others have evolved to live in continuously wet places."

In Gathering Moss, Kimmerer attempts to trace the hidden history of these ancient plants (so little has been written down). Northern people, she discovers, traditionally lined their boots and mittens with soft mosses for insulation. Carolus Linnaeus, the so-called father of modern plant taxonomy, reports that he slept on a bedroll of portable Polytrichum moss as he travelled among the indigenous Sami of Lappland. Pillows made of Hypnum mosses were said to induce special dreams in the sleeper. Fishermen once used moss to clean freshly caught salmon. Most amazing of all, moss was often used for nappies and sanitary towels: as Kimmerer notes, Sphagnum moss can absorb 20 to 40 times its weight in water, a feat that easily rivals the performance of Pampers. Has all this given her any clues as to how moss might be used in the future? They are, alas, not good to eat (she has tried). But a lot of research is currently going on into their secondary chemistry, including their antimicrobial capacities. "This makes sense," she says. "Because they have long been a part of traditional medicine."

Tetraphis pellucida: 'Their architecture is so beautiful.' Photograph: Alamy

Does she have a favourite moss? Is it, perhaps, Schistostega pennata, otherwise known as goblin's gold, a moss she describes in her book as "a paragon of minimalism" for its ability to live in caves with little natural light? (It makes use, not of leaves, but of a fragile mat of filaments known as the protonema, and seems almost to shimmer in the gloom.) Kimmerer laughs. "That's a hard one," she says. "But I think it would be Tetraphis pellucida, a moss that hedges its bets reproductively [growing almost exclusively on rotten stumps and logs, it has uniquely specialised means of both sexual and asexual reproduction]. I love them. Their architecture is so beautiful."

In her book, she describes her efforts to inventory the individual shoots in Tetraphis colonies - a dense colony can have 300 shoots per square centimetre - marking each one with a bright pink plastic cocktail sword so she can find it again when she returns the following year (from this process she learns huge amounts about the moss's life cycle). She likes to imagine the baffled conversations of the hikers who might stumble on these mossy logs, bizarrely decorated with swizzle sticks.

There will be heartbreaking losses. But the evolutionary creativity of the plant world will renew itself

It is moss, she tells me, that keeps up her spirits when it comes to global heating. "It's going to be 100 degrees upstate today," she says. "That's wrong, though these extremes are no longer out of the ordinary. We expect them. Of course I worry that people are not going to do what needs to be done; that we're already too late. But I have faith in photosynthesis. The plants know what to do. They know how to sequester carbon. They know how to cool the air. They know how to build capacity for ecosystem services and biodiversity. Will the world be different? It will. Will there be tremendous losses? There will. Heartbreaking losses. But the evolutionary creativity of the plant world will renew itself. Plants will figure out how to come back to a homeostatic relationship with the planet."

Even as she notices the alarming fact that bloom times are arriving ever earlier, she is also increasingly aware of the natural movement of plants: "We've fragmented the planet in such a way that their natural migration routes are broken up. So it's our responsibility now to assist that migration, to essentially help forests to 'walk'. We have to help them get to where they need to go." Will we be here to witness a new world, the one that she believes will be regenerated for us by the plants? She hesitates. "I have less faith in that."

Goblin's gold (Schistostega pennata) is highly reflective, having tiny 'lenses' within the structure. Photograph: Nature Picture Library/Alamy

The engine of her next book will be "ecological compassion" for plants. She would like people to come to understand them as sovereign beings in their own right, if not people. "The research in plant intelligence that is being done is already revolutionising science," she says, "so my next project is designed to elicit in the reader a sense of compassion and justice for them. I would like people to recognise their culture. Take off your anthropocentric lenses, and you will see that they have very rich cultural lives."

Do plants have rights? Should they be given more protection under the law? She smiles. "My greatest hope for my book is that it will make perfect sense of their rights. Such rights are not for us to bestow. I believe that they have their own inherent rights."

Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer is published by Penguin (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Robin Wall Kimmerer: 'Mosses are a model of how we might live'

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The world's favourite moss scientist reveals the secrets of these primitive plants - and what they might teach us about surviving the climate crisis

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How is conservation preparing for a much hotter world? Experts share

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About 90 kilometers (56 miles) southeast of Cape Town lies the tranquilly-named town of Betty’s Bay in South Africa, home to less than 2,000 people. But it’s not the people that draw Nik Sekhran’s eye. “I enjoy watching the African oystercatchers,” says Sekhran, chief conservation officer at World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Big black birds with […]

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‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects

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A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly protected regions free of pesticides

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These were some of the main scientific critiques that evolutionary biologists mounted against Lovelock’s original articulation of the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s and ’80s. Our planet is not composed of the cooperating members of a single species, nor even of a single biome—it’s a massive ensemble of all existing ecosystems, which are themselves intricate networks of the living and nonliving.  Earth is not so much a superorganism as a metaecosystem. metaecosystem. 

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These were some of the main scientific critiques that evolutionary biologists mounted against Lovelock’s original articulation of the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s and ’80s. Our planet is not composed of the cooperating members of a single species, nor even of a single biome—it’s a massive ensemble of all existing ecosystems, which are themselves intricate networks of the living and nonliving.  Earth is not so much a superorganism as a metaecosystem. metaecosystem. 

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In 1910, while delivering a lecture to his peers, the American entomologist William Morton Wheeler made a bold declaration: The colonies formed by ants and other social insects, he proposed, were not just collections of individual organisms-they were organisms in their own right.

Wheeler was explicit that he did not mean this merely as an analogy, but literally as a biological fact. Like a cell or person, he explained, an ant colony "behaves as a unitary whole," maintaining itself and resisting dissolution. An ant colony, he continued, was effectively a giant amoeba-like creature, with the nest functioning as a kind of shell, the mass of ants as cytoplasm (the gelatinous substance that fills a cell), and the queen as a nucleus or storehouse of genetic material required for reproduction. The long lines of workers ceaselessly marching in and out of the nest were akin to an amoeba's fluid, limb-like extensions, known as pseudopodia.

By the 1920s, Wheeler began using the word "superorganism" to describe insect colonies, a term eventually embraced by such scientific luminaries as E. O. Wilson. But the idea it represented ultimately influenced much more than entomology. The concept of a superorganism has become a fixture of academia, percolating into disciplines as varied as psychology, economics, microbiology, computer science, philosophy, and anthropology. It frequently features in popular culture as well, with examples ranging from the hyper-technological Borg in to the neurobotanical Eywa in . And it helped inspire the modern understanding of humans as chimeric beings whose cells are at least 50% bacteria and other microbes.

Untangling the precise history of the term superorganism is important because it informs ongoing debates about individuality, evolution, and even the nature and definition of life. According to widely cited sources, the true origin of this influential concept is much older than Wheeler. and Encyclopedia.com , as well publications , state that eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton coined the word superorganism-not in reference to social insects, but rather to describe Earth as a whole. Hutton was a holistic and interdisciplinary thinker who characterized the planet as a "living world" and often referred to Earth's "physiology" and capacity for self-repair. Nearly two centuries later, British inventor and scientist James Lovelock cited Hutton's thinking as an important antecedent to his Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth is a single, living, self-regulating system.

While writing my recent book Becoming Earth , which explores Earth as a living planet, however, I discovered that this origin story-the one plastered across both the internet and research literature-is wrong. Hutton never used the term superorganism. Nor did the word originate with entomologists. The provenance, evolution, and meaning of the term have been repeatedly misunderstood and misrepresented, leading to countless inaccurate citations and conceptual confusion.

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Gaia Complex: Why Earth Is Not a Superorganism | Atmos

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Earth is not a single, giant organism. It's vastly more complex.

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What a Mushroom Lives For pushes today's mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life.

The book tells the fascinating story of one particularly prized species, the matsutake, and the astonishing ways it is silently yet powerfully shaping worlds, from the Tibetan plateau to the mushrooms' final destination in Japan. Many Tibetan and Yi people have dedicated their lives to picking and selling this mushroom-a delicacy that drives a multibillion-dollar global trade network and that still grows only in the wild, despite scientists' intensive efforts to cultivate it in urban labs. But this is far from a simple story of humans exploiting a passive, edible commodity. Rather, the book reveals the complex, symbiotic ways that mushrooms, plants, humans, and other animals interact. It explores how the world looks to the mushrooms, as well as to the people who have grown rich harvesting them.

A surprise-filled journey into science and human culture, this exciting and provocative book shows how fungi shape our planet and our lives in strange, diverse, and often unimaginable ways.

"Few readers, I suspect, have ever considered fungi to be sentient, but Michael Hathaway argues that mushrooms (as well as plants and other organisms widely considered as passive automatons), though not exactly conscious, nevertheless 'engage their surroundings in a dynamic way.' . . . The takeaway, Hathaway advises, should at least be a renewed appreciation of the interconnectedness of all forms of life, flora, fauna, and 'funga,' and a realization that the world is 'made and remade through relationships.'" -Laurence Marshall, Natural History

"Move over, Paul Stamets and Michael Pollan! Reading What a Mushroom Lives For is like having someone gently turn the living world inside out and upside down for you. In stunning prose, Michael Hathaway celebrates the liveliness and dynamic intelligence of those essential workers who dwell in a hidden biocultural landscape at our feet. Eloquent, erudite, and at times darkly funny, Hathaway's narrative sheds fresh light on the meaning of that hackneyed rhyme, 'there is a fungus among us.' "-Gary Paul Nabhan, author of Food from the Radical Center

"A truly delightful and much-needed journey into 'myco-centrism'! This book is an important invitation to think about interspecies organization from a collaborative point of view, with all its complexities and implications. Not only does it invite us to understand how some fungi live, but also how through their existence they can craft cultures and societies. It is much repeated that fungi are the interconnectors of nature, and this book takes that concept to another sociological and philosophical level."-Giuliana Furci, founder and CEO of the Fungi Foundation

"I found this book delightful. It is a poetic story of fungi and some of the ways in which they are beautiful, fascinating, and endowed with stories that entangle humans yet remain all their own."-Rob Dunn, author of A Natural History of the Future

" What a Mushroom Lives For is a captivating journey into a manifold of lives-arboreal, human, and otherwise-that make and are made by the distinctive matsutake mushroom. Michael Hathaway carefully weaves together stories, theories, field notes, drawings, and diagrams gathered over a decade to model ways in which readers might begin to inhabit mushroom worlds."-Elaine Gan, coeditor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

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What a Mushroom Lives For pushes today's mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life.

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“On Being,” Ms. Macy said that a “dance with despair” was the central experience of her life — but that by not running away from grief, she had learned that the feeling could be transformed.

“When we take it in our hands,” she said of grief, “when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.”

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“On Being,” Ms. Macy said that a “dance with despair” was the central experience of her life — but that by not running away from grief, she had learned that the feeling could be transformed.

“When we take it in our hands,” she said of grief, “when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.”

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Nature Podcast · Updated weekly · Transform your life with nature as your guide. As the editor-in-chief of Atmos Magazine, Willow Defebaugh has dedicated her life to illuminating the wisdom of the natural world. In “The Nature Of,” a …

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Philosophy Podcast · Updated weekly · For The Wild is a slow media organization dedicated to land-based protection, co-liberation, and intersectional storytelling. We are rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growt…

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Podcast Episode · Radiolab · 24 April · 20min

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"Beyond a mere critique of modernity, this is a book written for us as people who struggle with the everyday manifestations of modern power. Clear, creative, and cogent, the work offers cutting-edge philosophy at the same time that it furnishes usable guidance for how to cope with the coming perils of colonialism and capitalism. It's a book for the future, yet written to meet us where we are at right now as individuals living with trauma and facing ethical dilemmas about what it means to take meaningful actions under conditions of complexity."
-Kyle Whyte, PhD, George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan

"Asking the question 'What if racism, colonialism, and all other forms of toxic and contagious divisions are preventable social diseases?', Hospicing Modernity invites its reader to dare and educate themselves by undergoing a process of self-unmaking. Drawing on and moving beyond traditions of radical pedagogy, such as those inspired by Paulo Freire, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira has created a powerful tool for uncovering, undoing, and recovering from the deadly ways in which modernity also lives and dies as humans experience it subjectively."
-Denise Ferreira da Silva, PhD, professor at the University of British Columbia Social Justice Institute and author of Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt

"This book is rude. Like the shaman's confident cackle. Like the punch of an elder whose eyes shimmer with a secret. Like a trickster's feverish dance to a drumbeat in a time supposedly passed. And right there-my fellow modern citizen-right there, in the author's cosmological rudeness, lies her deepest medicine. Her generous gift to the need to upset the terraforming coloniality of white modernity. Navigating her rigorous work is an exercise in defamiliarizing modernity as the air we breathe, the site of our persistent illnesses, and the earthly thing that can give way to something else. It is time to gather. We can start here, together."
-Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

"This is not an ordinary book and it may not be for everyone: it is a thought experiment that skillfully and creatively creates conditions for us to shed our arrogance and to get our proverbial shit together. The author puts it beautifully but bluntly: she lovingly does not care about 'what' you think: your delusions of ends and means and your sense of self-importance are part of the problem. The book is about the necessary expansion of our capacity for dealing with difficult and painful things, to sit in complexity and uncertainty, to show up to difficult conversations and to exist differently and, put frankly, to grow up. It does not matter if you agree or not with the premise that modernity is dying and in need of 'hospicing.' If you take it hypothetically, and engage with the exercises, you will be a more decent human being as a result of reading this book. If what the author is saying resonates, if you are ready to do this difficult work, get over yourself and read it, for the sake of the people around you, and of the planet."
-Dan McCarthy, PhD, director of the University of Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR)

"This is not a book to be picked up lightly. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira is carrying stories that will do things with you. Her book will change you, if you let it. There's strong medicine here, badly needed. There are clues to how we find the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead, beyond the end of the world as we know it."
-Dougald Hine, cofounder of the Dark Mountain Project and A School Called HOME

"This is a book about breaking spells. And not just the obvious kind, but the grievously impacted, deep-in-the-psyche variety. Important and powerful, Hospicing Modernity diligently tracks a complex word-modernity-through the bewildering forest of our times. . . . Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's a real storyteller, and that's a praise word where I come from. Hospicing Modernity is a troubling gift in a big cultural moment, and I'm delighted to have encountered it. It seems alive, crawling around my desk, hooting at the moon."
-Martin Shaw, PhD, author of Courting the Wild Twin

"This is an outstanding book-truly original and profoundly perceptive in its contents and arguments, and multimodal in its pedagogic approach. It examines a range of urgent philosophical issues about modernity and its deep contradictions, and the ways in which its inevitable demise might be steered toward more morally and culturally productive futures. It is a book that is not only thought provoking but also helpful in guiding genuinely worthwhile discussions."
-Fazal Rizvi, PhD, emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"In a suite of stories, informed in part by Indigenous thinking, Machado de Oliveira ruptures certainty with the void that many Indigenous peoples have recognized for millennia, pushing the reader over the edge into mocking darkness. The reader (and the world at large) must now make a choice: does our agency lie in tentatively plaiting the gloom we're in, to make sense of our predicament and to try and grapple with it, or do we default to the brilliant intellect and its offer of comfortable certainty? Machado de Oliveira has established that we need to do the former and, with the telling of fragility, she promotes a new strength through mystery. Beware, though: this is not a book for the fainthearted. Be prepared to be confronted by the world-don't expect to have it nicely served up. The work she calls for is difficult, but ultimately it is the world that is at stake."
-Carl Mika, PhD, director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Waikato and author of Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence

"For Indigenous communities, the teachings that are necessary for engagement with sacred plants are very rigorous and require a lot of discipline. Informed by these teachings, this book is a call for responsibility and for collective healing, as we face the demise of the house of modernity, a house built upon delusions of separation and superiority. I invite you to read this book as a ritual that can prepare us to do the work that is necessary to interrupt the harm humanity is inflicting on itself and on the planet."
-Ninawa Huni Kui, president of the Federation of the Huni Kui Indigenous People of Acre

" Hospicing Modernity invites us to participate in a form of fieldwork that connects the very sense of who 'we' are with global legacies of harm that modernity and coloniality have wrought. It is a book of acute vision and insight, and taps into that most underused faculty we so desperately need to attend to 'the end of the world as we know it': the imagination. Through a series of thought experiments, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira compels us to truly face the enormity of planetary crises as well as the seemingly benign ways we are complicit in them. Written in a tone that directly addresses the reader through stories, metaphors, and rich imagery, this book resonates with the vitality of life itself, taking us on a transformative educational journey that inspires us to take seriously our profound interconnection to all others-past, present, and future-with whom we share this world."
-Sharon Todd, professor of education at Maynooth University, Ireland

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Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira: 9781623176242 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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A thought-provoking guide to facing global pandemics, climate change, and other modern crises with maturity, humility, and integrity-for fans of Everything Is F*cked and Against Purity This book...

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Milkwood: permaculture courses, skills + stories

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The Life Cycle of Fungi: Video - Milkwood

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How does a mushroom become a mushroom? This video runs through the whole lifecycle of wood-loving macro fungi (yep, like the ones you love to eat).