Get value.
You can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our finest Meil deal for two starring one main, two sides and dessert for only sixteen euro like succulent Board, be approved Virus Shined the Strip loin Steaks with peppercorn butter or Delicious Virus Chicken Parmegama served with creamy potato gretam under a mix of rainbow root vegetables and enjoy Goozillionaire or Solder caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that shop in store or
online Tesco. Every little helps available to most doores, prices very inn express.
Oh hey, it's the guy on next door who is like, does anyone want some zucchinis? Because no one warned him that unattended zucchinis can grow to be the size of a human baby. Ali Ward back with an instant classic episode of Ologies. This is an episode you're gonna listen to more than once. I'm going to tell you right now, not because the subject matter demands it for comprehension, but because it is the very ethos of ologies, all wrapped up in the most soothing, mellow audio. Hug you will
ever lay yours on. It's overlooked beauty, It's following bliss, It's Mythbustinger. Okay, let me just run through the things. Let's get to the show. So thank you to all the supporters. At patreon dot com slash Ologies. You can join for as little as a buck a month and submit questions. Perhaps hear yours asked in future episodes. Thanks to everyone wearing Ologies shirts and hats and bikinis and new face coverings at ologiesmirch dot com links in the
show notes. Tag yourself in hashtagologies. Merch on Instagram will repost you. Thanks to everyone who rates and subscribes and leaves reviews. I read all of them. They help Ologies stay at the top of the science charts.
Thank you.
I like cheese Rich, who wrote, not only is information put in accessible language, but it also opens up your eyes to all the wonderful things there are to know and do in the world. Oh, I like cheese Rich.
You have no idea.
This is right in line with that. If anyone else left a review this week, I one hundred percent read it and appreciated it, including some suggestions for future episodes on rocks and squirrels and the unhoused crisis appreciated. Okay, briology. Brio in Greek straight up means moss, So thank you Greek.
That was quick.
So this briologist is perhaps the most beloved in her field. She got her bs in botany from Sunni Environmental Science and Forestry and a master's and a PhD in botany from the University of Wisconsin. She has published numerous papers on mosses and plants and traditional ecological knowledge. She is a distinguished teaching professor. She covers botany, ethnobotany, indigenous environmental issues.
She's been a TED speaker. She's an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatami Nation and the author of two huge books, The Gorgeous Gathering Moss, a Natural and cultural history of mosses, and the New York Times bestselling Braiding Sweet Grass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Many many people have suggested and begged that I get her on the show, So thank you to brain Picking's own Maria Popova for the nudge in her direction. We set up a time
to meet. Virtually, I listened to this ologist's velvety, soft voice via audiobooks so much that I was so nervous. I was afraid I'd be too loud or jarring, or I'd make an airhorn noise with my mouth. So I did my best just to keep calm. And this episode is just a gorgeous stroll through the forest floor, an eye opening loop, squinting gaze at hidden mysteries, and an intro.
To your new hero. We cover what is a moss?
Where do they grow?
Can you eat them? Should you have one as a bath matt?
Are they soft to nap on? What's up with lichen? How to incorporate your native teaching into your science work, or how to recognize and appreciate indigenous knowledge without appropriating it? And moss smoothies with the moss wonderful briologist Doctor Robin Wall Kimmerer.
After, of course, well there's that.
And so now you are talking to me from from New York right now?
Yes, I live in upstate New York.
How are the seasons changing right now?
Oh, it is just the height of June. I live out in farm country and so it's hay making weather. So the air is just full of the wonderful scent of new cut hay. And wildflowers. It's really sort of the peak of photosynthesis right now. So it's pretty lovely.
I know from reading you know, your books that you've you've always been obviously drawn to the outdoors. Do you remember some of your first kind of interactions with looking at plants and looking at at wild growth.
You know, it's it's really almost impossible for me to pinpoint that because I just grew up in the natural world. It was always part of my being and part of my family experience, and so it's hard to say there was a moment when I really connected. But I had the benefit of a rural childhood and parents who were avid outdoors people and naturalists, and I think that I was mostly shaped by these old farm fields that were
around where I grew up. That meadow kind of array of wildflowers and wild strawberries and all of that was certainly the formative landscape for me as a naturalist. I'd call it my backyard, except it was, you know, the landscape, not my yard.
And what about different plants?
What drew you to mosses in particular?
You know, it's a it's an odd story in that I've always been, of course drawn to plants. And when I went away to college to be a botany major, I took every botany class I could get my hands on, and there were a lot of them. And the only one I didn't take was the ecology of mosses. No, really, I left it till the last I thought, oh, really, you know, it's just this tiny, little green film. How
could that be interesting? So I'm really familiar with this notion of the overlooked world because I did it myself. I was really interested in forest ecology, and so I overlooked the masses. But then I took one class in it. That moment, I remember it was the first day of my Ecology of mosses class, and putting a lens on the mosses and seeing a forest in nature, and it was love at first sight. Oh so yeah.
And I remember in gathering moss you mentioned that you had kind of a loop, a magnifying glass, and you spent some of your some of your money to get your own.
Uh huh.
Yeah, And I still have it.
When I think of the innumerable objects I have lost in my life, I have never lost my loop.
And you know, this is.
Such a This is obviously a stupid question but what is a moss For someone who doesn't know, Well, how do you even define a moss?
I'm glad you asked, because when people hear about my passion for mosses, they look at me really funny and they think, like, you mean that green scum? Like, no, no, I don't mean green scum. Mosses are the oldest plants on the planet. People say they are primitive. Really, they're very sophisticated, I think, but they're primitive because they're so small and simple. That's why people classify them that way.
But mosses are members of the plant kingdom, the first plants to colonize land three hundred and fifty million years ago. When I think about what is a moss, a moss is really a miniature forest.
Did I just purchase a thirteen dollars loop to go look at mosses and pretend like I'm in a movie called Honey I shrunk the biologist? I most definitely did.
And are they do?
They have roots systems that are much different than trees. How are they able to cling to so many surfaces?
Well, that's really the important question, you know, when you said what is a moss? Oftentimes the best way to answer that is what do mosses not have? Ali They don't even have roots, really, no, who are not rooted plants, and that's how they can cling. They do have these little threadlike structures called rhizoids, which allow them to attach, but they're not absorptive the way roots are. They don't have the capacity to take up water and nutrients. They're really just points of attachment.
So think of a muscle like a bivalve attaching to a rock or a boat. They're not eating through those fibers. They're just hunkered down.
And so when we think about what mosses are, one of the ways to characterize them is by what they don't have in comparison to all the plants that are around us. They don't have roots, they don't have flowers, they don't have the xylum and flow them that vascular tissue that allows water to be moved within the plant. They don't have any of that. And yet they're able to occupy virtually every habitat on the planet and endure
all kinds of different kinds of environments. So they're super simple, but in their simplicity is kind of the key to their success.
And so without flowering they reproduce with spores.
They do yep, just like in higher plants, there are females and males, there are eggs and sperm tucked in among the little tiny leaves of the moss. And you know, like flowering plants, we know about insects moving pollen around for fertilization. For mosses, it's they need water for that to happen. There has to be a continuous bridge of water between male and female for the sperm to swim along, sometimes just along the surface of a leaf to go find the female.
So the water acts like the ultimate wingman, just pass sing a long sperm like a note and class like, hey, h my friend wanted you to have this that boom you're pregnant with moss babies.
And once the sperm does fertilize that egg, yeah, then it sends up this little stalk called a sporophyte that will puff out clouds of spores that will go off and germinate. They don't make seeds, but they work from the dispersal of spores.
And so all of this is happening in miniature. When we're taking a walk through the forest and we just maybe see a green log and take it for granted.
All of this drama is happening.
All of this drama. Yes, yes, and you know, it's like anything. The closer you look, the more drama you see. And if you start to set aside those notions of what mosses don't have and say, okay, I think of mosses as real rule breakers in the plant kingdom because they live their lives in ways that are so different than all of the other plants. But yeah, when you start to pay attention, they are successful because of their differences, I guess.
Would be the way to say that, Yeah, you know, where can they grow? You mentioned that they can inhabit all these places other plants can't. I'm trying to picture like the outer reaches, like where are some of the most surprising places mosses have been found?
One of the mosses can grow pretty much anywhere. The only place that they can't tolerate are salty environments. So they're not in the ocean, they're not in the seashore, but every place else they occur. And we tend to think about mosses as like you said, being on a wet log. They're in a shady forest, they're next to a waterfall or a stream or a bog wet places, but one of the most surprising places to find them is in the desert. They yeah, yeah, there are mosses
that live off from morning dew in the desert. That's all the water they ever get. So to me, those are some of the most surprising and one of the beauties of When you ask where do mosses live, there's the big answer of everywhere except for marine environments. But if we go to smaller to think about the world, like a moss, mosses live on surfaces for the most part.
You know, think about where you see them. They're they're on logs, they're on trees, they're on rocks, they're on pavement in city mosses mostly they don't live on the soil, although some do because they're out competed by the bigger flowering vascular plants. So they tuck themselves in on all of these surfaces where it doesn't matter if you don't have.
Yeah, that's so smart, it's so clever of them. I know that we might take them for granted because our eyesight just doesn't allow us to kind of identify or notice their differences.
But when you're looking through a loop.
How are their edges different, and how are their forms and structures different?
Well, they are at the scale of a loop, and even at the scale of just being on your knees and looking carefully. One moss is as different from the next as a oak tree is from a birch tree from a pine tree. Their leaves might have toothed edges, the leaf might be pleated, the leaf might be round, it might be long, it might be like a hair
like extension. There's tremendous diversity of form within the mosses, and that alone is a wonderful introduction to mosses, just to see that they have tiny stems and they have beautifully arrayed leaves. People think about them as a green film, almost like there's nothing structural within it. It's just like a green textile or something. But no, they are tiny little plants with world leaves and leaves that might be flattened, spiraled. There's tremendous diversity of ways to be a moss. And
that's why I always say to people. People say, oh, there's moss on that rock. Really, there's no such thing as moss. There are mosses on any given rock there might be ten different kinds of moss that until you start to look, it just looks like green wallpaper. But then when you stop and look, you see that it's a whole world.
And how are all of those different mosses categorized? How I know that.
They don't have a lot of common names.
True. Unfortunately, mosses within sort of Western natural history, shall we say, have been so overlooked that for the most part they don't even have common names. Although just and there weren't even field guides to them until a few years ago, and there are now some nice photographic and drawing based field guides and some attempt to put common names on them. I'll admit they're not very interesting common names. Hooker's branched carpet moss. You know, it's, you know, not
really very evocative. But maybe as people start looking more they'll they'll have better, more colorful names.
So when you call a moss side note, you usually call it by its buttoned up formal Latin name. But since doctor Kimmer is like the bryologist, I asked, is she going to get to name any like Kimmer's shag or heck in cool green fluof? She was like I'm good.
I'm really more of a moss ecologist, and so I'm more interested in their relationships and their adaptive structures. And the names are convenient ways to discern one from the other, and of course they're important in understanding evolutionary relationships. But my fascination with them is is much more in what they're doing rather than who they are in a in a taxonomic sense.
That's a great way to put it. And what is their role ecologically? That's a huge question, I realized, But what.
Are they what are they busy doing?
Well, I'm so glad you asked, because they're They're tiny little plants and yet they have a huge role to play. Where to start. One of the most important things to think about in terms of the roles that mosses play is that their whole bodies, their whole way of being, is designed at the scale of water drops. They are designed to attract and hold water, and so one of their major roles is to do exactly that. Mosses are like sponges. They hold the water and then they release
it slowly into the environment, so they create humidity. For example, they also create a moist seed bed for other plants to seeds to fall on, and then those seeds are essentially falling on to a damp sponge that's holding on to that moisture. Their moisture holding capacity influences nutrients too.
Think about that moss on a log that you were invoking, Well, if that moss is keeping the log damp by virtue of being a sponge, that means that the decay fungi are hard at work inside that log, breaking it down recycling nutrients much more effectively than if that log didn't have a moss blanket on it. So they keep the environment moist which allows many many other processes to unfold. That's certainly one of their major roles. You can, you'll you'll have to turn me off, alick.
As I know, I love this. My ears are open, Okay.
One of the other things that that I think people are fascinated to know is that mosses have been termed the coral reef of the forest because within a moss there are hundreds of little organisms living in that. When we say well the mosses are a miniature forest, they're not only a miniature forest of tiny little trees, but they have metaphorically birds living in that canopy. There are all kinds of invertebrates that travel up and down the trunks of the mosses, if you will, from the top
of the moss canopy down to the soil. There are herbivores, there are grazers, there are predators. There's a whole food chain happening inside a little clump of moss. The most insane festival the world has ever seen. So they are tremendous reservoirs of biodiversity, and that's why they get called the coral reefs of the forest.
And what eats moss? Who grazes on it? Yeah, it's a great question. For the most part, mosses are so well chemically defended that not much eat them. Within that little microcosm, there are some invertebrates which will eat them. The invertebrates that have piercing mouth parts will sometimes stick that stylet into a moss cell and take out the contents. There are some larvae that will actually consume the leaf, but for the most part, mosses themselves are not consumed.
So what do I mean by grazers. Well, within that little moss forest there are a little algae and bacteria and fungi, that live on the moist moss leaf surface, and there are insects that come along, invertebrates excuse me, that come along and actually scrape off the little epiphytic algae and fungi, and that's what they're eating, not the moss. They're living the stuff. They're eating, this stuff that's.
Growing on the moss.
Okay, side note, epithetic means stuff that grow on other stuff. So any epiphyte is a plant that grows on another plant and just needs air and moisture. It's not parasite, it's just chillin. It just uses the other plant for support. Few epiphytes are mosses, air plants, orchids, and Spanish moss, which is not a moss. It's just named after its resemblance to a beard lichen. But it's also not a lichen,
nor is it from Spain. So whenever you feel bad about yourself, just remember people had three shots to name Spanish moss and they screwed up three times. So you're doing fine, buddy. Oh and what kind of chemical defenses are the mosses producing.
Well, I guess I should back up to answer that to say that that for the most part, vertebrates do not eat mosses. The only ones that do. Birds will sometimes eat the capsules the sporophytes, which are protein rich, but they almost never eat the leafy part of the plant, in large part because that leafy part of the plant is so low in nutrients. It's mostly just sell wall
and water. There's not a lot of sugars or proteins in those leaves, so it's kind of a why bother You shouldn't eat them because they're nothing but fiber, and they have a lot of anti microbials in them, and that's where the chemical defenses come in. I mean, if you think about it, it's a superb adaptation because mosses live on wet surfaces, right, They live on bark and soil and logs and rocks, and so therefore they would be subject you would think, to attack by fun dry
by bacteria. But they have over a long evolutionary history, they have anti microbials, primarily polyphenolic compounds and tannins that are in those leaves that make them unpalatable as well as not very rewarding for any organisms to eat them.
So if you're like, yes, yes, a polyphenol, but you don't know what one is, don't worry, I gotcha. So, a polyphenol is a carbon containing chemical and it's characterized by usually many repeating phenyl groups. A phenol is a C six H five oh.
So.
Polyphenols can do things like release or suppressed growth hormones. They can protect plants from UV rays, they can deter moss munchers. They can even signal to other plants like hey, what's up, let's ripen. They can also fight infections, and those last types are called phyto alexins in case you're ever in need of that word. Now, a tannin is
a type of polyphenol. And if you've ever had like a dry tongue feeling from red wine or a green banana, or god forbid you eat an unripe per cinmon, which is so cringe inducing you just you might as well just try to get a tongue transplant, because it's brutal. It's game over. But yeah, then you've had tannins. Now, what if you ate stuff that other people don't want
to eat? Would anyone want to eat you? And have those antimgroobigal properties ever been used by other animals in their own defense against microscopic critters.
There's a hypothesis that exactly that, because the only place in the world that vertebrates do eat mosses is in the Arctic. Terriboo will eat mosses. Lemmings and voles will eat mosses, and some of the studies have suggested that while they might eat them, they can't digest them. There's you know, there's really just not much there to digest. But there's a suspicion that they eat them because of their anti microbial properties, and that they may do something
to to regulate digestion in the animals. It's not well understood, but animals do exploit the antimicrobial properties of mosses, including things like birds. Mosses are really prime materials for nest building by songbirds. You'll often see songbirds foraging for mosses and they'll be flying around with trailing some brack athesium from their beaks and they build it into their nest
and it's soft, it's insulating, but it's also antimicrobial. And the birds that primarily use mosses in their nests are the songbirds that whose babies actually poop in the nest, and so those the mosses in the nest are thought to have a hygienic effect on reducing the microbial load in the bird nest.
Oh, that's so fascinating.
I mean in lieu of diapers.
Just yes, yes, you can't body train a tiny bird, it's.
True, but you know you're right. But in fact, perhaps you know mosses have long been used as diapers for by humans.
Really yes, yes, okay, tell me a little bit about that if you don't mind.
Oh, no, of course not. Yeah. Because of mosses absorbents, this ability to grab onto and hold water like a sponge, they've been very important culturally and ethnobotanically among indigenous peoples worldwide. And one of the very common uses for mosses is in diapering. And because the mosses are so absorbent of water,
you put that dry moss around the baby. And in fact, in my culture and Potawatomy culture, we talk about wrapping the baby and what's called a moss bag, and so you stuff that bag with dry moss and then it's absorbent. It's like a disposable diaper, but it's also antimicrobial. So you have this absorbent, antiseptic soft insulating diapering material amazing. So that's just one of the cultural uses of mosses that exploits their ability to hold water and to have these defensive chemicals in them.
In gathering moss. Doctor Kimmerer also mentions moss's use as a sanitary napkin, which she describes as difficult information to track down because ethnographers collecting these stories probably did not have vaginas, so they didn't ask. But with all due respect, who knows how many stories have been lost of period havers joking in their native language about having to ride the green carpet that week. Too many to count, and
I'm sad about it. I asked her what else she came across in her research, If there's anything about that you'd love to share, I know I love to hear it.
Sure, there are long lists of the ways that people have traditionally used mosses. Diapering is certainly one of them, but they're also really commonly used for insulation. If you think again about mosses as being absorptive, they're holding water well when they're dry. All those little capillary spaces that would hold water when they're dry, they're holding air. So it's air space. It's contained airspace between leaves and between cells,
and that's essentially like closed cell foam insulation. And so people for a long time used mosses as insulation in boots and mittens and hats and bedrolls, and so long as it's dry, it's really effective insulation. It was even used architecturally in things like wigwams. Traditional wigwams for the wintertime would have one dome and then another dome inside it, and then that intervening space would be packed with dry moss,
an excellent insulating material. So all kinds of uses for bride flights.
And I'm also trying to figure out how they photosynthesize in such under such a dense canopy. How are they doing that?
That's a great question, because many mosses are driving at something like five percent of the ambient available sunshine right.
Living on only five percent sunlight, Like hit the dimmer switch.
They don't care.
They're moss. They got this, and their balance of chlorophyll A, B, and C is adjusted to the spectrum of wavelengths of light which is available to them in the dense shade, So they actually have a different pigment balance and modified photosynthetic pathway that allows them to be efficient at really low light levels. But it also comes from the fact that they don't grow very fast, they don't get very big,
they don't have really high energetic demands either. So it's this matter of adapting to the resources that are available to them and doing it superbly. But at the same time, there are mosses that live in full sun in the desert, and so they're able to utilize different wavelengths of light, and they're really well adapted to those habitats.
So how are these soggy green babies also thriving in the desert? Doctor Kimerer dishes.
But you know, this gets us to one of the other totally amazing thing about losses is that think about that desert moss for a second. You know, it has no axylum and fluam, It has no roots, it has no way to store water. So what happens to it is that it dries up. It dries up and becomes this just little black crust on a rock or in a soil crevice, And if you just walked by it, you'd think it was dead. But it's not dead. It's
just waiting. And mosses are what are known as poikilo hydric, which is well, you know, there's poikolo thermic, right for cold blooded animals, animals whose temperature is the same temperature as the environment. For mosses, their poikolo hydric. Their water content reflects the water content in the environment. So when it dries out, the moss dries out. But unlike the plant on your windowsill that gets crisp and it's done for, right,
the mosses are not done for. They go into this state of I guess we'd just call it sort of a suspended animation, and they're dry and crisp and just sitting there. They can't photosynthesize unless they're wet, but they're just waiting, and then it rains and within twenty five minutes they're back to full photosynthesis. Oh wow, it's amazing.
You mentioned it as sort of a crust on our rock.
And I know a lot of people are so curious. How can you tell a lichen from a moss?
Hey, great question, because lichens and mosses often live together right at the same scale, and lichens are not differentiated like a plant into stemina leaves. Lichens are going to be a Thallus right, sometimes powdery, sometimes kind of leathery, but they're not going to have a stem with leaves on it. Where's mosses do? And lichens, which by the way, are also Poikola hydric, have this amazing water stress tolerance.
They tend towards the spectrum of gray and blue and sometimes have olive green as well as the gorgeous orange and yellow ones, colors that you don't see in mosses, but a real grassy greens are our mosses, well, except for the ones who live in the desert, and they are black and crusty, and that the blackness of the of the mosses are caused by these flavonoid pigments and
it's essentially sunscreen. The mosses have laid down this pigment layer to prevent them from having the photosynthesis and the chlorophyll being photodegraded in the intense So I'm like.
Oh my gosh, that's so smart.
What about how airflow influences their growth?
What a good question.
Thank you, oh man.
I have been so nervous to meet her because she's so cool and I like her book so much, and every time she says I have a good question. I just want you to know that I'm just like floating on air currents inside, like oh uh, like I'm blushing talking about her right now.
Okay. Anyway, airflow, of course is going to make things dry out right, It's going to sweep that water away. It's going to increase evaporation. And because mosses can only photosynthesize when they're both wet and illuminated, airflow can be a great detriment to the growth of mosses. And that's one of the reasons they are so small. Because it turns out that there are places in the world, in
the whole landscape right where airflow is minimal. Those places of minimal airflow or what are known as the boundary layer. And a boundary layer is this area of extremely still air right at the surface of any surface, a log, a rock, a tree, your house, there's this little area of still air. And because in that space the wind doesn't blow, there's just so much friction with the surface. This region of still air is where mosses live. It's they live within the boundary layer, and that way they
can stay moist. They don't have so much evaporation because of wind flow and if the mosses got bigger than the boundary layer which is created by their surface, they would dry out. And you can almost measure the depth of the boundary layer by the height of the mosses.
Oh wow.
Ah, So that's ecologically, that's part of the puzzle and how it all fits together.
Absolutely, absolutely, and that's why in the desert on a rock, the mosses are teatsy. You know, they might only be a couple of millimeters tall because they have to stay within the boundary layer of that rock surface, Whereas if they're living under the shady, moist canopy of a hemlock tree, they can be five inches tall because there's a much bigger boundary layer there in the because of the trees overhead and the logs that they might be living on,
so they can live within that little area. That little boundary layer is not only a place where the wind doesn't blow, where theoretically it's absolutely still air, but if you think about every surface of having this little boundary layer over it, it also means that within that area it's warmer because the sun will shine on the log, let's say, and then it's re radiated as heat, and that heat doesn't blow away, there's not as much convection,
and so it's caught in this little boundary layer. The moisture that's coming off from that log gets caught in the boundary layer. So mosses essentially are inhabiting a little greenhouse, a little greenhouse that lives that occurs naturally over every surface, a place which is warmer, moister, and as it happens, richer in carbon dioxide than any place else. And that's
where the mosses live. They're exploiting these little microhabitats that rather than trying to dominate and control the habitat, they're taking advantage of the laws of physics and exploiting these naturally occurring little greenhouses.
You know, that brings me to a question. We like to debunk flimp lamb. We like tom bust myths with ologismhen we can, But is there truth that moss tends to grow on the north side of trunks or is that total bunk?
It's so great that the one thing people think they know about mosses isn't true. No, this idea that moses moss only grows on the north side of the tree. No, if you use that for direction finding, you'd be going in circles. It is true. It is true that mosses will grow more prolifically in the cooler, shadier place. And are the north sides of trees cooler and shadier than
the south side. Sure, unless there's a forest gap overhead, unless that tree is leaning in a certain angle, unless there's a ravine over there, so many other factors that influence it. I think the only place that it would really make sense as a wavefinder is in places that are totally flat with a uniform kind of forest vegetation. And so it might be, and there's greater evidence for this in the boreal forest. There is more moss growth on the north side of the tree, but only in
those circumstances of flat terrain and homogeneous vegetation. So no, bring a compass instead.
Your moss is not your GPS. And I wanted to ask before we get into listener questions, a little bit about about your writing, because it's kind of surreal to talk to you because I've listened to your audiobooks because you you narrate them, you read them, and you're so you have such a wonderful voice and cadence, but you know when you when you first decided to write Gathering Moss, you know what really moved you to take that sabbatical and put all of this work into words, You know.
Ellie, it really came from a certain kind of frustration of only writing for peer reviewed, technical, scientific audience, in that I've spent so many wonderful years of my life learning from mosses, of just being with them, and when I test a hypothesis and report on it in an article for the Bryologist, everything that I've learned had to be boiled down into data tables and p values, and there was no room in that kind of writing for wonder or for talking about the amazing little things that
you see and the things that the mosses have to teach you. And there came to be a place where, ironically, as a science I felt like I couldn't really tell the truth by using only scientific writing. And so, having been given this privilege I've spent in my career among mosses, I felt like I really needed to do justice to the masses and tell a little bit more about how they live their lives and their incredible ways of being
and lessons that they have for us. So I set myself this goal to see if I could write in such a way that people could fall in love with mosses. And that was really my intent, tell the truth about mosses in such a way that these overlooked, ancient, wonderful little beings would get a chance to tell their story.
And you even personal experience and observation and setting and an atmosphere so well as well as you know, your your history and your indigenous culture, which Breeding sweet Grass also just hit the New York Times bestseller list too, write a few months ago. Congratulations on that. Yeah, thanks, you know, can you tell me a little bit about what that's meant to you to get to express that to more public audience than than you know, just your students or other biologists.
Yeah, it has been so gratifying and admittedly very surprising, uh, to see their response to to both of these books,
in particular Breeding sweet Grass. For me, it has been so hopeful because I really have this sense, with both Gathering Moss and Breeding sweet Grass that those books are meant to awaken something in reader's this sense of wonder for sure, but also the sense of wisdom of the living world, the wisdom that plants have for us, and I'm so gratified to know that people are open to that idea, that they're open to think about learning not just about plants, but learning from plants, and willing to
walk that path with me as a writer of trying on these different perspectives of let's look at the world through the lens of indigenous ways of being, let's look at the world through the lens of a tree or a lichen, and what might we learn. And it's just been so rewarding to have from so many different places
and cultures and experiences embrace that. And it makes me so happy to think that the plants stories get to be shared so widely, and that it might ignite even more stories of people and their relationship two plants.
I've got sixteen plants, and I have so many questions from listeners. Obviously we're not going to get to all three hundred and sixteen of them.
I hope there's some overlap.
There's some overlap, but people are excited and I'll just dive in if that's okay, you bet, okay, So we won't get to those questions in just a moment. But first, a word from sponsors who make it possible for us to donate to a cause close to the heart of theologist, and this week a donation is going straight to Sunni's College of Environmental Science and Forestries Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, which was founded by hi none other
than doctor Robin Kimmer. So. They are located within the original territory of the Hottanessauni or Iroquois Confederacy, with a mission to create programs that draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge in support of shared goals of environmental sustainability. And the center includes a significant outreach element that's focused on increasing educational opportunities for Native American
students in environmental sciences. There are also research collaborations partnerships with Native American communities to address local environmental problems. There
are scholarships and fellowships also available. We're also sending a do nation per doctor Kimerer, to the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, whose goal is to substantially increase the representation of American Indian, Alaska, Native, Native, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, First Nation, and other Indigenous peoples of North America in the fields of science, technology, engineering, math, and other related disciplines.
Now.
They were founded in nineteen seventy seven and they have awarded nearly twelve million in counting in academic scholarships. They also offer internships, professional development conferences, and more so. First donation was to the ESF Center for Native Peoples and the Environment and another donation to the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. Thank you for the heads up on those, doctor kimber So. A donation went to them thanks to some sponsors who you may hear about.
Now get value you can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our finest meal deal for two starring one main, two sides and dessert for only sixteen EU row like succulent board, be approved, Virus Shining the Strip, loin Steaks with peppercorn butter or delicious Virus Chicken Parmegama served with creamy potato gretam and our mix of rainbow root vegetables and enjoyed Goo Zillionaire or Soldier Caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that
shop instore or online. Tesco. Every Little helps available in most doores.
Prices very and express, Okay and now on to questions submitted by beloved patrons.
See there's one first time question.
Asker uh Sigwani Dana says, I am Panopscat, a tribe from Maine, and I also teach high school science, and I find that I feel like I live in two worlds and they often clash. How do you mentally bridge indigenous culture and intuition with Western science?
And I hope I read that.
Earlier, and I tried to make sure I pronounced it right, but I'm not sure if I did, and I will re record it if I didn't.
No, it's perfect. It was perfect. Yeah, And I'm really grateful for that question. And I think one of the ways that that I try to bridge that that I work both in my own writing and with my own teaching, is to think about the fact that within indigenous knowledge systems, we recognize that that human people have at least four different ways of understanding the world. Certainly with the intellect
absolutely mental way of processing and generating information. We also have physical knowledge from observation, from measurement, right from sensing the world. But if we continue around that, think of it as this medicine real model, we have the knowledge of the mind the knowledge of the body in two of those quadrants. But then we have an emotional intelligence and we have spiritual knowledge spiritual ways of knowing, and all of those ways of knowing are valid and important.
They're like different tools that you deploy for different purposes, for different questions that you might have. So that's a very holistic way of thinking about knowledge as embracing all of those ways. But in Western science we've truncated that. In Western science we privilege the knowledge of the intellect and that which we can measure and very explicitly set aside emotional and spiritual knowledge and say that doesn't count, that doesn't matter, that's that's not the real valid knowledge.
And so the scientific way of knowing is a subset of indigenous knowledge. And that's the way I try to present it is that one is a subset of the other. Each of them has these powerful ways of knowing, engaging different tools that we as people have, And the real key to navigating that boundary of two worlds which I experience and understand is to think about them as of
different gifts, of different tools. And when you have a true false question, the scientific ways of knowing and hypothesis testing. That's a darn good tool for a true false question questions bigger than that, then you need not only what is true, but what is right and what is meaningful and what are the implications of it? And then the wholeism of indigenous knowledge can bring you to wisdom rather than just information.
That's great.
So to learn more about this, you can look up medicine wheels, which can also represent the four directions north, south, east, and west, or the seasons spring, summer, winterfall, the elements of earth, wind, water, and fire, or those four aspects
of mind, body, emotions and spirit. Now, if you are a non indigenous person and you would like to make sure that your naturalist teachings touch on indigenous knowledge in the right way, Patrons Ira Gray, Olivia Di Borcier, and Sophie Carine Mitty Thompson, Liz Ropke, and first time question askers Lanna mac bridgid Gwen Kelly and Siata Darcy all submitted awesome questions wanting to know if you think there are any good tools for for non Indigenous folks to
sort of incorporate that into their teaching or their botany courses, or you know, if they're if that's something that Alison bra says, what are some ways that non indigenous naturalists and educators can engage with or teach about traditional knowledge about native plants in their area without appropriating Native cultures.
M Yeah, excellent question. And I think that this I'll return to them to the prior question, because these ways of knowing that we might call indigenous ways of knowing all you know, mind, body, emotion, spirit, those are human ways of knowing, you know, and so bringing one's full humanity to being a scientist and teaching science is I
think really important. But more specifically to the question of how to teach about Indigenous ways of knowing without appropriating one of the most important things to do is what we do in Western science as well, and that cite your sources right acknowledge where that knowledge came from, and not to portray it as one's own, but to give full credit to the to the people who created that knowledge, who learned these things passed them on, and to me, that is a is the first step is to know
where that knowledge came from and and to to honor it and and essentially cite it the way that we that we do in Western science. I think it's also really important to when we're avoiding cultural appropriation, to have an authentic experience of engagement with place. You don't need to say, well, native people tell us to be grateful for the gifts of plants around us. Yes, that's absolutely true. But the way that you man assessed that gratitude should
be in your own cultural framework. You don't have to take another way of showing gratitude for the gifts of the earth. You can show it's your own way. And so coming up with authentic expressions of your own relationship with the living world is a way to make your experiences much more powerful because they're your own and it avoids cultural appropriation as well.
That's a beautiful way to look at it.
By the bye, I listened to some of gathering moss sitting on a rock under an oak tree in unseated Tongue of the territory in Southern California. Now ten out of ten highly recommend enjoying her dulcet voice on a blanket, watching squirrels, maybe on your city balcony, looking at a bee waggle its butt, or on a walk through the woods. Even more, finishing your taxes really actually no bad time or place, come to think of it. Anyway, I have a this is a funny question, Rebecca Pancoast says, first
time question asker. When I was little, I always imagined a patch of moss would be the most magical and comfortable place to take a nap. What species of moss do you think would make the best napping spot? And Emily Roth asked, also, if you've ever slept on a bed of moss and if it's comfortable?
The answer is yes, I sure have, and you know I'm not the only one, of course, moss as betting is a common traditional practice, and even Linnaeus, you know, the so called father of western botany. Anyway, as if before Linaeus people didn't have botany, it's a different story. But Linnaeus is said to have traveled with a bedroll made out of politricum juniporrhinum, a wonderful mossy bedroll. So yeah, I've taken a nap on all kinds of mosses. But one of the things to be really sure about is
to think again about that notion that they're sponges. They're full of water. So I have had many a wet bottom, thinking, Oh, this will be a really nice place to sit, and like, no, not so much. It'sl like soggy bossom there.
And you know to in terms of the things that are living in there too. Lilian Ledford and Julianne Gibson had similar questions. Lillian said, this is an adjacent question from their friend Emily Ford.
Do you squeal and coop.
With delight when you find tartar grades in moss specimens? And Julianne wants to know how many tarties can moss hold?
Do you ever see the little moss piglets? Oh They're just amazing, aren't they. Yes, I do squeal with delight such remark arkable beings. And in terms of how many are in a little clump of moss, you know that depends on the moss. Tartar grades especially like Sphagnum moss peat mosses because they're consistently moist. They also like the log mosses, those big robust wefts that grow on logs, But the shorter turf mosses will hardly have any tartar
grades in them. So the answer is the answer to most ecological questions.
It depends, It depends, and if you're like a tartar grade.
What's that?
Oh well, welcome to the best thing you're ever going to learn.
Ever.
So, they are water dwelling, eight legged, segmented micro annibals. They're also called water bears or moss piglets. And they look like kind of little loaves of bread, but with stumpy little legs, and then they have a face that looks kind of like a robot's butthole.
I love them.
They can live in space, they can live completely desiccated for long periods of time. Maybe they're aliens. They're not, but what if they were. Anyway, I've never seen one irl, but now I know to go for the bigger, more robust, longer soggy mosses. Don't mess with the shorter turf mosses. There's no water bears there. That's not where the tardy
party is at. And don't be tardy to the Tardi party or your asses grass hey speaking of Andrea Kendall, Burnell, Ell McCall, Lee, Sarah Lucesi, Evan Jude, Amanda Mueller, whose name I say wrong every time I think it's Mueller. I'm sorry, Courtney Ryan J. Gordon, John Sanston Allen Skelton, colleeni B, Jessica Mezzla, Amelia Hines, Maggie Bender, Emily, Elaine Labord, Samantha Heineke, John Sanson, Nicole Wackery, Corleno, and not a cephalopod all asked this next one. It's a good question.
That's why so many people asked it. I've a bunch of people had questions about moss lawns, replacing your lawn with something more sustainable and less water hungry. How do you feel about that? Or there is also it depends.
My take on moss lawns is that if the mosses come to your lawn, encourage them, help them become a moss lawn. But in most cases it is very difficult and not sustainable to try to replace a grass lawn with a moss lawn because mosses will almost always lose to lose out in a competition to rooted plants. And there is this movement, oh, well, let's go, let's go buy mosses and install them in our lawns so that we can have a lawn that we don't have to
mow or water. If those mosses were capable of growing in that setting, they would probably already be there. I am really not a fan of the of the notion of transplanting mosses from the places where they are perfectly happy and doing their work and bringing them to places where they are not going to thrive. You can create the conditions for them. What I always say to people when they ask me about this, if you build it,
they will come. If you make a place which is moist and shady and not conducive to grass or groundcover, mosses will come there and they'll colonize it very happily. But for the most part transplanting there's some exceptions to this. Of course, for the most part, transplanting mosses or using this moss milkshake method for getting moss lawns started, is I think unfair to mosses.
That's good to know.
If you're like, did she just say moss milkshake?
Did I hear that? Right?
She did?
You did?
So? A moss milkshake is something that you can purchase in what looks like a milk carton, or you can just frappe up one yourself. You can just grind local moss and water with a little corn starch, sometimes yogurt people do all kinds of things. You make a bubbly slurry and then you just painted on objects and cross your fingers. But remember right place, right moss is the key.
No your moss. Also, some folks use.
This method to create a live murals And if you don't believe me, you can google moss graffiti. So is your home even cute if it doesn't have a moss mural? Also, speaking of Pinterest design aspirations, a lot of people, so many including Amy car Adam Weaver, Medicine, John's, Molly Johnson, Lacy Ireton, Attie Capella, Britney Panos, Megan Lucian, Al McCall, KATHREYE Warren, Kimberly McCall and first time question asker Sekura wanted to know about this next one.
What about bath mats? Have you seen this?
I have no, no, and.
No okay, And to summarize no.
Conclusion, no no.
I put that in the realm of of a most torture. Will Will they absorb water? Sure they will? Will they like chemicals and soap scum and fluorescent light? No they will not, and they will they will just die. Leave them in the forest and have a cotton bath mat.
Yeah, and that kind of brings me to my my last question from listeners. Well, two people wrote in Addie Cappello and Carrie Simo. I'm not sure if those names are familiar to you, but they both students of yours.
It's kinda says are names.
And Carrie is a former student, says I took briology and ethnobotany with doctor kimer at esf two thousand and eight to twenty ten. I love you, doctor Kimerer, You've been such an inspiration. Just mossum and they are a restoration practitioner in Boulder County now. And one of the questions that Carrie had was is unsustainable harvest still an issue in the Pacific Northwest? Can we kind of discuss taking moss from one area and using it for something else? What should we know about that?
Thank you so much for that question, because one of the unintended consequences, of course, of people coming to love mosses is that they want to commodify them, they want to have them around, and much of the unsustainable harvest of the epiphytic moss communities of the temperate rainforest and
the Pacific Northwest is for horticultural work. You know, people are harvesting these old, beautiful moth carpets out of the woods and using them to line flower baskets or flower pots, or in some cases sewing them onto fabric to make these moss carpets for displays and so forth, and the mosses grow back really quite slowly.
It is.
I think an unsustainable practice at the current level, and especially when you think of everything that's lost by taking them, all those invertebrates, the coral reef of the forest, you know, made to line a flower pot. That doesn't seem to me to be an honorable way to relate to forest briefites. And there is a permit system in place in the
Pacific Northwest to regulate moss harvest. I am not current they at the moment state of affairs, but the last time I really looked into this it was largely unenforced. There's there's there's a permit system, but nobody there enforcing it. So again it's something that I would say is an unsustainable practice.
Oh and one more questions. People are going to be so mad if I didn't ask how well Casey Sisterson wants to know, does the proverb a rolling stone gathers no moss bother you in terms of as though gathering moss was a bad thing.
I guess I've never understood that proverb. Somebody told me that what it really means is that if you don't stay put, you will never get rich, you'll never accumulate wealth, i e. Gather moss. I don't know if that's really what it means or what's original intent was, but one of the beauties of mosses is their ability to remind us about being still, about staying in place. Mosses have a very high fidelity and loyalty to their home places, which is why they don't transplant. Well, they want to
live here, not somewhere else. They're very specific and invested in their places, and I think that's one of the wonderful teachings that they have for us. So, yeah, a rolling stone gathers no moss. Okay.
Ps side note, I always thought that meant that you have to keep on your hustle or else you'll just become green and hairy. And yes, I looked it up, and it was originally supposed to mean that a tree that's moved a bunch bears no fruit. Also side note, the Rolling Stones just got that name when a journalist on the was like, hey, what do you call it? And Brian Jones saw a Muddy Waters album on the floor and read off one of the tracks being like, oh,
rolling Stones, like Jan Brady George Glass style. Also, if you think that the a rolling stone gathers no moss proverb is confusing, consider also that in the nineteen fifties, psychiatrists would read this idiom off to you and if you couldn't explain what it meant metaphorically, they would diagnose
you with schizophrenia. According to the nineteen fifty six publication Clinical Manual for Proverbs Test by one Montana based psychological test specialist, what this proverb doesn't even know what this
proverb means? Anyway, I don't think they do that anymore because it sucks now in that Vein the last two questions I always ask a aneologist is what is the hardest part about your job or about being a biologist, or what's frustrating or even if it's petty, or even if it's you know, a deep or silly, what's one thing that is kind of sticks in your crash?
I have never been asked that question, and I so love being a bryologist that I have a hard time thinking of that. I honestly, I can't think of anything.
In a way.
I suppose the thing that frustrates me is that people overlook mosses. There are times in the plant ecology literature, when scientific literature, when they're describing a forested community, they'll have a category called moss, Like, really, that's all you got. That's a category kind of like tree, because mosses have so much ability in their specificity to tell us something
about that place. Just to lump all these you know, seventeen thou species of beings into a category called moss is frustrating.
Yeah, that's so valid. And then this is gonna be hard. But what is your favorite thing about moss? What is the thing that just gives you the butterflies the most ors, just makes your heart swell.
Straight up? Their beauty. I've been looking at mosses for oh man, half a century, and it still gives me a thrill when I put my lens on them and think, oh my gosh, this just perfection in miniature. Their beautiful intimacy with water, their their quiet kind of elegance, I admire them.
That's beautiful, that's awesome. I think there'll probably be a lot of people inspired to invest in a loop and I hope.
So do you have one, Ellie?
Not yet, No, but I was like I was.
Thinking about it and just looking at the rocks in the yard and thinking, oh gosh, I want to see so much.
So yeah, I think that's next on my list. I yeah, Oh do it, absolutely, I can't. It's just this idea that there's this magical world that's.
Right underneath you, that you know that if you just kind of open your.
Eyes and get still enough to look.
I love it.
Yeah, exactly.
Thank you so so much for talking to me.
And doing this, and you've just been You've been on my list as someone I've wanted to talk to you for so long, and it it just Yeah, it feels surreal hearing your voice talk to me.
The person who reads you to sleep at night.
I know, it's weird. Yeah, you've been with.
Me on hikes and all kinds of things. You've done this with me. To have an interaction interaction is really surreal. But thank you so so much for doing this.
So ask awesome Bryologists, great questions or any smart people, stupid ones, and just know that there's a universe around you that is unfathomably large and it keeps expanding. And then there's also worlds in miniature underfoot just living out love and drama. Now, Doctor Robin Kimer's books once again are Gathering Moss, a natural and cultural history of mosses, and Braiding Sweet Grass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.
Both are wonderful.
So if you just fell in love with her words and her cadence and her outlook, get them an audiobook form if you like, and you can just have her in your ears as you go about your days. You can also become her fan at Facebook dot com slash Braiding Sweet Grass.
There will be.
Links to those in the show notes, as well as a link to donate to the Center for Native Peoples in the Environment, should you choose. You can follow Ologies at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm on both as Ali word with one. Now come be friends. You can join the Ologies podcast Facebook group. It's full of foreteen thousand, very loving, accepting humans and that's admined by the wonderful Ernie Michelle Campbell Talbert My friend since we were four.
You can also wear Ologies merch by going to ologiesmirch dot com. Thank you to Shannon Feltus and Bonnie Dutch. They host a very charming comedy podcast called You Are That and they help with merch which is agonizingly delayed at the printer's warehouse due to the pandemic. So thank you for your patience. Thank you Emily White for cranking out transcripts with all the folks in the Ologies transcriber group, I love you all. Caleb Patten bleeps the episode so
they're safe for kiddos. Those and transcripts are up for free at alleywar dot com slash Ologiestash Extras. There's a link to that in the show notes. Thank you to everyone on Patreon for helping me pay these amazing people to help out. Also, Noel Dilworth helps with all the scheduling. She's an angel on Earth. Kelly Dwyer updates the website
at alleywar dot com. And Jared Sleeper does the first pass edits and cuts out all my ms another nonsense, and the wonderful Stephen Ray Morris stitches all the pieces together.
To me make the moss quilt. You hear it today.
Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote and performed the theme music, which I think we should get on the iTunes store.
What do you say?
Should we do it?
Okay, Now, if you stick around at the end of the episode, you know, I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that sometimes when I eat a carrot, I eat like all the way up to the butt of it. You know, sometimes I'll even munch the butt a little bit. And I was telling my friend Mike about this once and he was like, you can do that. I'm like, I think, And anyway, he ate the whole
carrot butt and then he got terrible food poisoning. And now whenever I eat a carrot up to the butt, I think, oh man, poor Micah, I probably shouldn't eat the top of the carrot. Sorry, Micah. Anyway, I guess at some point you could just got to stop eating the carrot and get another carrot, and please nobody do this and get food poisoning.
Okay, thank you for listening to this public service announcement. All right, Byebride.
I'm experienced at foraging. I used to find edible mushrooms on my bath.
Matt, get value.
You can't argue with fat Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our finest meal deal for two starring one main, two sides and dessert for only sixteen euro like succulent board be approved Irish angle strip loin steaks with pepper corn butter or delicious Irish chicken Parmeshama served with creamy potato cretame and our mix of rainbow root vegetables and enjoy Goozillionaire or Soldier Caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that shop in store or online.
Tesco Every Little Helps available at most stores. Prices very in express