What is the meaning of life5/25/2023 ![]() ![]() The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Having previously written beautifully about the interleaving of life, Haskell details the ecological and evolutionary splendor of lichens as living symbiotes: Lichens come alive as an enchanting miniature of the miraculous interconnectedness of nature in biologist David George Haskell’s altogether fascinating book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature ( public library). In the final stretch of the nineteenth century, Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter punctuated her writing and her painting with a series of experiments with spores, demonstrating that lichens - which Linnaeus considered the “poor peasants of the plant world” - are in fact not plants but a hybrid of fungi and algae: living reminders that the supreme vital force of life is not competition but interdependence, that we survive and thrive not through combat but through collaboration. For epochs, their exact nature was a mystery - until an improbable revolutionary illuminated that they are, in fact, part algae. Lichens - which are not to be confused with mosses - are some of Earth’s oldest life-forms: emissaries of the ocean gone terrestrial. (Available as a print, as a backpack, and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.) Sometimes, it is the humblest life-forms that best intimate the majesty of life itself. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”īecause of this delicate interconnectedness of life across time, space, and being, any littlest fragment of the universe can become a lens on the miraculous whole. ![]() “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” the great naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote a century later as he considered the meaning of life. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” the great naturalist John Muir wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century.
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