[Note: This was going to be published in a collection of texts about lichens, but I forgot to check the proofs in time so it went to press without me!]
The Romans looked to nature to advise them on the future. The word ‘augury’ comes from the practice of bird-divination. Depending on which direction the birds flew in, their flight would be understood as a sign about things to come, for better or worse. To read nature as a series of signs is to open oneself up to particular and peculiar forms of love and understanding. Information and knowledge can be found in all kinds of natural phenomena, if only you know how still to be. Even in the city, in a world made metropolitan, where nature seems far away and its magical qualities almost completely disenchanted, it is still possible to access these moments of secret narrative: what can nature tell us?
In Patrick Keiller’s 2010 film, Robinson in Ruins, the third in his loose trilogy about the enigmatic Robinson, the narrator, voiced by Venessa Redgrave, tells of Robinson’s biophilic research. Biophilia is the love of life, and living systems. In E. O. Wilson’s Biophilia he writes the following:
[I]t is possible to spend a lifetime in a magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree. That as the exploration is pressed, it will engage more of the things close to the human heart and spirit. And if this much is true, it seems possible that the naturalist’s vision is only a specialized product of a biophilic instinct shared by all, that it can be elaborated to benefit more and more people. Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.[1]
Biophilia is the aesthetic dimension of science, we might say, as well as the naturalist instinct of all humans who have access to nature. In the age of Extinction Rebellion, we can turn back also to earlier feminist ecological projects in order to recognise the continuity of feeling around the Earth and nature – although we should note the important difference between an ecological politics that wraps itself around extinction and death, and one that focuses on life and growth.
In Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (1984), Mary Daly writes in the Preface that ‘thousands of women struggle to re-member ourSelves and our history, to sustain and intensify a biophilic consciousness … our Creation involves striving for biophilic participation in Be-ing, transcending the forces of necrophilic negation of such participation.’[2] A feminist biophilic consciousness is one that recognizes the specific ways in which women participate in nature, and nature participates in women. In our age, we are accustomed to imagining we are beyond nature, in this sense and in many others, as if skyscrapers and language do away completely with any underlying reality or essence. ‘Essentialism’ is one of the greatest insults you can fling at someone, and nature is a dirty word.
But sometimes, even in the most urban environments, there are reminders, however dialectical, of the fact that we live in a world entirely comprised of ‘nature’, and that the relationship between what humanity builds, what it believes, what it says and what it does, is also natural. We are the strangest, most artificial creatures: and that is our nature.
In Keiller’s film, Robinson, a highly liminal character who lives, when not in prison, in a mobile home or formerly in a house now demolished and in the midst of being reconstructed, is here referred to in the third person, his notebooks and film cannisters having been discovered, following his disappearance, in a battered old caravan. The narrator, his former lover, recounts memories of the man: ‘Robinson had once said he believed that if he looked at the landscape hard enough it would reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events’. To this end, Robinson is particularly interested in Xanthoria paretina, or maritime sunburst lichen, as it is also known. This leafy lichen, first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1753, is, according to the narrator, particularly adept at growing in places exposed to nitrogen pollutants and is often found near busy roads.
What can Xanthoria paretina tell us? in Robinson in Ruins we encounter a particular road-sign at Kennington Roundabout, the lichen growing around some of the letters, like a gentle, botanical rust, thriving in the nitrogen-heavy environment of a busy road. The alphabet here is corroded by nature, semiotics softened around the edges, a non-human intelligence that is largely hidden and marginal, except to those, like Keiller and Robinson, who pause to hear what the lichen might tell them. Robinson says that he believed that if he looked at the landscape hard enough it would reveal to him ‘the molecular basis of historical events’. The hexagons of the road-sign, their material geometry are like fragments of crystal balls, illuminated by botany.
If we accept the thesis that nature – and what else could – tell us how the future will be, then where best to look than at the life that grows in the midst of ruins, in the heart and in the heat of collapse and catastrophe? Robinson in Ruins is an oblique look, through the lens of nature, at the history of enclosures, the use of fossil fuel, the ever-present and imminent collapse of the global economy, particularly in the light of the 2007/8 crisis. Like much of Keiller’s work, it uses static, but not still, film, where a single frame, of a combine harvester working on a field, or a butterfly on a plant, or a field of opium poppies swaying, is held, moving, for several minutes. We are encouraged to slow down, to carry the depth of the poised image back into the world. To become a little like Robinson, an environmental detective, looking for clues in one domain (Nature) to take back to another (History).
This Historical Naturalism is profoundly important in the panoply of political approaches available to us today. It neither accepts the inevitability of industrialism, nor proposes an abrupt primitivist return to the wild, but rather oscillates on the dialectical line between the city and the countryside: they ate ultimately inseparable, the one growing in the other, always. Historical materialism, dialectical materialism must always be supplemented with a strong conception of nature – otherwise too much is conceded to the machine, to the inevitability of technology and industry. In an era in which degrowth is more profoundly necessary than ever, to sit and listen to the lichen is no idle Rousseauian fantasy, but rather a necessity: it may thrive in nitrogen-rich areas, but we and other non-human animals may not.
Lichen is a diagnostic device, a green augury without wings. They are sometimes extremely old, just as birds are secretly dinosaurs. In a fit of pareidolia, Robinson sees Goethe or a Berkshire magistrate in the lichen. At the same time, he is committed to the idea that objects should look like life itself: ‘As a surrealist, Robinson believed that designers of artefacts should seek to emulate the morphogenesis of life forms’. Biophilia works both ways: the love of life itself is a love of nature; but it is also the love of nature in things, of thing-nature, of the intertwining of dead things and alive things, of cities and countryside. We are all biophilic, as Wilson points out, it’s an instinct shared by all, not just the naturalists among us.
To learn to read the signs is to understand the future, and to understand how best to preserve it for all.
[1] E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 22.
[2] Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (London: The Women’s Press, 1984), p. vii-ix.