Awe. I struggle to think of aperture or composition, or what to cut out of the frame. I am overwhelmed. “Look for what speaks to you.” It is good advice. What if everything speaks to you? What if the mountains sing and the lichens chime and the moon calls you onwards and gives you butterflies? Which stories do I choose to tell? What do I cut out of shot?
I start with the stories moving in slower time, akin to Roy’s (2017) ‘tree time’: I fill my camera lens with lichen near the shore’s edge. Crustose lichens grow slowly, perhaps 1mm a year (Gilbert, 2004), living in a timescale even slower than tree time, not as incomprehensible as deep time. Lichen time is incremental and long: It grows old, living here for hundreds of years. Around it, violent changes in weather, coastal erosion processes, people. It lives as fungi and algae in symbiosis on this rock throughout it all. I choose the photo where the fruticose lichen looks strong and wizened.
We move locations and it is raining. Bad for camera lenses, great for lichen. I spot lichen with huge lobes, a striking feature in the miniature landscapes on tree trunks and rocks. This is a lungwort lichen: In south-east Britain, lungwort lichens experience regional extinction. Here, the air remains clean enough, the lichens resist extinction.
I resist the urge to move. Examining intermingled mosses and lichen, looking for those that speak to me, forces me to quiet and slow down. Not quite to lichen time, but enough to spend time with the lichen and stroke the mosses. I interact with lichen in this time. Showering ‘green walls’ (Knapp, 2019) in attention and taking tens of photos, I hope to frame the individuals and community as stars of the show.
I slip out of my lichen time. I do battle with my labelling brain: ownership and power. My untrained eye is tempted to label ‘wilderness’. To equate awe with ‘untouched by humans’. Our skipper for the week tells me that the original inhabitants of Doune Knoydart were forced from the land in 1853. I learn, piece by piece, of The Clearances. From Andy’s snippets and a little reading on the side, I come to realise we might now term The Highland Clearances a cultural extinction: Gaelic banned from schools; clan leaders kept purposefully busy away from their people; the ejection of those living on the land for centuries in favour of sheep farming; and pieces of ‘legal’ paperwork to say a wealthy man truly owns that land. I am reminded of terra nullius in colonial Australia, a term used to claim land without inhabitants, empty land.
Except it wasn’t empty or unmanaged. I am reminded of The Nutmeg’s Curse (Ghosh, 2021) and the repeat pattern of colonisation, still occurring. Andy tells me they found bloodstone arrowheads on Rum dated back 7,000 years. Jon and I explore an abandoned dwelling on the hillside of Loch Hourn. A long history of human entanglements. Now time: I choose to keep the canoe in my shot.
I flit between now time and slow, careful attention. I increasingly turn towards trying to show more-than human agency: the power of lichens as pioneer species; birds bringing treasures, foreign invaders, nutrients and noise. I watch a group of oystercatchers, their cries like squeaky dog toys; their run, comedic. Now time: I capture a shot of two birds, taking flight after I startled them. I wonder at photography as interspecies interaction.
On the Isle of Rùm, I hunt for the less-noticed, my back to the sea and the picture-postcard views. I find slime, several species enmeshed within. I poke it. I know what it’s not, but I don’t know what it is. Friendly enthusiasts in an online community group point me to it, with the help of my photographs: Nostoc, cyanobacteria. I wonder at photography as a web of interactions with enthusiasts.
I pay more attention to excrement as a playful way to say this place is more than pristine, more than ownership, and more than human-managed. I include dung in my visual messages, cut into the shot. I find fruiting fungi. I wonder at the power of the camera as a way to enhance interaction with harder-to-spot species, showcasing the liveliness of excrement and soil. I remember the recently discovered fungi in Cairngorm soils (Mackenzie, 2022) and wonder how much is yet undiscovered.
Jellyfish and ctenophores surface: reminders of other worlds I am blind to. Atlantic coral flung to a grassy headland of Muck. How much we’ll never know.
I look for the entanglements of species with one another: life brought by decaying corpses of the recently deceased. The flashes of orange and black as carrion beetles get to work on a lifeless badger, not so lifeless.
I try to take a shot from the perspective of a snail.
Awe. I struggle to think of aperture or composition, or what to cut out of the frame. I am overwhelmed. “Look for what speaks to you.” What if everything speaks to you? It seems interacting with more than humans is where powerful entanglements happen and connections grow. Interaction brings mosses out of the ‘green wall’; lungworts out of epibionts. Stroke that moss, photograph that lichen. Trying to identify mystery species, with the aid of my camera, I become more invested in communities of enthusiasts, located around the world, connected in joys of fungi, lichens, and mosses. Extinction of experience (Pyle, 1993) leads to ceased opportunities for live, organic interactions, personal to the individual: a loss for both sides. Interaction resists muteness, allowing a degree of agency on both sides. For me, it seems photography enhances interactions. Providing I can find what speaks to me.
About the Author
Serena is an interdisciplinary PhD student in the School of Earth and Environment and School of Biology. Her research background centres on human perceptions of nature. Her current research explores anticipated dark extinctions through cultural, philosophical and biological significance of tree extinctions and the extinction of their epibionts. Her work focuses on less charismatic forest flora, invertebrates, and fungi, in tandem with trees as microhabitats, to explore multidisciplinary perceptions of previously unseen future biodiversity loss. She is liable to talk at length about eDNA, slime moulds, the history of mycology, and education. Serena dips into ecology, applied psychology, education, philosophy, geography, and genetics, often through the lenses of multispecies justice and political ecology. She loves to hear about anything related to trees, forests, biodiversity, or extinction.
References
Ghosh, A. (2021). The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. University of Chicago Press.
Gilbert, O. L. (2004). Lichens: Naturally Scottish. Scottish Natural Heritage.
Knapp, S. (2019). Are humans really blind to plants? PLANTS, PEOPLE, PLANET, 1(3), 164–168. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.36
Mackenzie, L. (2022, July 14). Never seen before and ‘unknown to science’ fungus is discovered in the Cairngorms. HeraldScotland. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/20275319.new-species-fungus-unknown-science-found-cairngorm-mountains/
Pyle, R. M. (1993). The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland. Houghton Mifflin.Roy, S. (2017). How I Became a Tree. Rupa Publications.
Land Lines Project 