Ancient Green: Moss, Climate, and Deep Time
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
—Contributed by Jean Ponzi (Green Resources Manager, EarthWays Center of the Missouri Botanical Garden)
This essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer—mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation—takes a long, clear moss-eye’s view of Life on Earth, in the loving story mode that made her 2013 book Braiding Sweetgrass an instant ecological classic.
Kimmerer’s exquisitely fused Indigenous Science perspective presents Bryophyta as both her keen botanist’s focus—Bryology is her academic specialty—and as ancient beings she has learned from, deeply. She states, rock-solid, the power of moss as transformer:
“In the Anishinaabe languages…our words for moss, aasaakamig and aasaakamek, carry the meaning ‘those ones who cover the earth.’ Soft, moist, protective, they turn time into life, covering the transient and softening the transition to another state.
“They do not discriminate in their coverage, be it a post-glacial boulder or a car long abandoned in the woods—all are blanketed. I once found a pair of logger’s boots on a cut stump, robed in moss, with sporophytes rising through the eyelets. In their vibrant verdancy, they seem to say, Where there is light and water, life will win.”
Kimmerer shares her joy in learning from these subtle, steadfast kin. As she kindly and firmly directs our much younger species to join the lesson, her practice of respect precludes calling our kind a flailing, heedless gang of Captain Destructo two-year olds, and her mother understanding of toddler nature firmly informs her premise that moss can teach us: strategies to persist amid the climate, habitat, diversity, and relational changes we are (this is my term: insanely) driving.
We see how mosses, over eons, thrive with minimal demands on their surroundings, “following the rhythms of the natural world, growing in periods of abundance and waiting through periods of scarcity: a wise strategy for life that is in tune with uncertainty.”
Climate content is increasingly tough to take, with mighty good reasons. Robin Wall Kimmerer always writes, speaks, and teaches from exquisitely fused knowledge, appreciation, and hope for healing change:
“I can almost hear the billionaires sneering in response to these lessons of moss. ‘Don’t tell me to live like a moss. I have become a giant among men.’ We’d do well to remember that the dinosaurs were big too. Living small is not a sign of weakness or complacency. Rather, it is the surpassing strength of self-restraint, to live simply so that others might simply live.”
Bonus! You can read and hear the luminous words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, published April 2022 in Emergence Magazine. Please bookmark this online source of in-depth stories with the “potential to shift ways of thinking and being in our relationship to the living world.” https://emergencemagazine.org/