Book review | “The Lichen Museum” by A. Laurie Palmer

Readers who think that lichens are not the most exciting subject for a book have good reason to be concerned. Because these organisms, which have arisen from the relationship between fungi and algae or cyanobacteria, are known to do nothing and often do so for a very long time. They do not move, they do not think, they exist in the small spaces they inhabit. Yet artist and activist A. Laurie Palmer does her best to find or create meaning and metaphors through an imaginative exploration of her unlikely subject matter.

The latest book in the fascinating Art After Nature series from the University of Minnesota, The Lichen Museum appreciates the postmodern aspect of these “composite beings whose collective constitution confounds our grammar and … complicates attempts to describe their diversity.” Appropriately, Palmer frames her book “as a composite organism composed of numerous voices and ideas from other writers, makers, thinkers, and observers, as well as interviews with lichenologists.” The Lichen Museum contains travelogues, memoirs, historical and scientific texts, black-and-white and color photographs, and plenty of theories that, depending on your taste, either add intellectual weight to the book or cause it to falter (a bit of both, in my opinion).

At times you can feel the author’s ingenuity being tested as she finds yet another way to look at lichens. They allow us to reconsider our relationships to each other, to capitalism, to sentience, to language, to racism and crime, and to pretty much any other issue that might arise. And as far-fetched as some analogies may seem at first, Palmer always finds a way to turn the size and stillness of the lichens into an opportunity for real reflection: “Freedom and independence are bound up with movement—the ability to get away, to go and return, to explore and exploit. If you hold on to something, if you stay in one place, you run the risk of becoming an object, and potentially an object that can be used.”

At one point, in an effort to change “the typical way of understanding” that “does not re-impose a colonizing approach,” she wonders whether the algae are “voluntarily” surrendering to the fungi. She acknowledges that in doing so, she is reinforcing “the mutualistic myth,” which, according to one lichenologist, “is similar to the belief that domestic cattle have a comparable relationship because we provide them with food and shelter and increase their populations before we slaughter them.” Of course, Palmer does not actually believe that fungi and algae are intelligent beings, but she asks, “Why does it feel like there is so much at stake in answering the question of who is in charge?” Her considered answer is that “human values have been applied to these things in apparently ‘neutral’ descriptions which in fact reflect historical structural relationships which can change, are changing, and whose change can potentially be promoted by a different description.”

Ultimately, lichens are symbols of something we should strive for: “small, local and sustainable relationships of material coexistence, even relationships of reciprocity.” They offer a way to “interrupt the narratives that have created and continue to contribute to the slow path of destruction of our planet,” and offer “a tiny gesture” toward sustainability “by opening up an unlikely connection between worlds.” At least The Lichen Museum invites readers to pause long enough to reflect on their environment and the many creatures in it that they ignore every day at their mutual peril.

This review originally appeared in California Book Review.