Richard PowersLichens
I stand beside, beneath, behind, in front, around, in awe of lichen, all 20,000 kinds of them—filamentous, fructicose, foliose, squamulose, leprose, gelatinous, byssoid, or structureless—the creatures for whom human beings first coined the word symbiotic. Or rather, not creatures so much as entire communities, micro-ecosystems, associations with covenants and agreements that result in ways of being and patterns of behavior entirely different from those of its constituent members. Lichen are like nothing else alive: partnerships of two or more kinds of life from different kingdoms—fungi, algae, bacteria—parts as far apart as kinds of life can get.
They eat rock and make soil, pioneering the way for entire forests. In places, they contribute even more to biodiversity than do plants, but lichen themselves are not so much a taxonomic group as they are a style of growth, a form of alliance that has evolved independently many times over the eons, so that their wild, diverse collaborations are now scattered all across the tree of life.
Lichen can sit still like a tiny fleck of paint, unchanged for years, or spread out in continuous carpets for over a thousand hectares. A single boulder might be home to dozens of kinds whose colors and textures turn it into an action painting. Lichen can grow on stone, dirt, bark, leaves, walls, roads, brick, boards, concrete, metal sheets, mosses, liverworts, trees and plants of all kinds, the torsos of weevils, tortoises’ shells, crabs, sloths, and other animals, even other lichen: anyplace, in short, where they can get a footing, and they will grow on me, when my time comes.Their every substrate is a host of nutrients ripe to recycle.
Lichen do not age. They are functionally immortal. Individual colonies are known to be ten thousand years old. Lichen can thrive in every earthly environment from frozen icecaps to intensest UV. They can live underwater and inside solid rock. They have even survived in the vacuum of space.
Stand beside lichen, and you stand beside life. They were there near the beginning. They will be here at the end. The greatest competitor in the world is an act of cooperation.