How much have we been looking past?
This lichen, growing on the bark of a Douglas Fir tree, is not a single organism but a living multi-organism formed by the symbiosis of specialized fungi and green algae. These cooperative species take on a great deal of vital Earth-work including nitrogen fixation, providing food and nesting materials for myriad species, serving as essential environmental and air-quality indicators, and a lot more hard-sciencey stuff that I don't understand and am not qualified to elaborate on...
This particular specimen is a member of the Parmeliaceae fungi family, a family with more than 2,700 separately identified species—a guess I have for the specific species is Usnea perplexans. But unless you’re working directly with these lichen, prepping for a related dissertation, or have taken up identification as a hobby, there’s little need for most of us to bog ourselves down in scientific classification. All we need to do is retrain our minds and senses to See the world around ourselves.
Imagine how different our current reality would be if we, as a human collective, simply remembered how to feel and understand that all things—ourselves included—are necessarily and fundamentally connected?
This particular specimen is a member of the Parmeliaceae fungi family, a family with more than 2,700 separately identified species—a guess I have for the specific species is Usnea perplexans. But unless you’re working directly with these lichen, prepping for a related dissertation, or have taken up identification as a hobby, there’s little need for most of us to bog ourselves down in scientific classification. All we need to do is retrain our minds and senses to See the world around ourselves.
Imagine how different our current reality would be if we, as a human collective, simply remembered how to feel and understand that all things—ourselves included—are necessarily and fundamentally connected?
