A book about moss? Yes, a book about moss has been my first interesting read of 2024, and I could almost venture that, in the absence of the last two chapters, the acknowledgments and a glossary that (sorry) I am going to skip, I will gratefully remember this one for a while. essay about the tiny plants that cover soils and rocks and that we associate with the most humid corners of the forests, apart from the Christmas nativity scene. Botany professor Robin Wall Kimmerer (New York, USA, 1953) wrote 'Musgo Reserve' in 2003, a title now published by the Captain Swing publishing house, with a translation by David Muñoz Mateos, and I can only applaud that among so many texts about ancient Rome, war economy, geopolitics, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, a rarity about non-vascular vegetation reaches bookstores.
Moving surprisingly quickly through the narrative of Robin Wall, director and founder of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment (she is a descendant of the Potawatomi tribe, the Algonquian Indian people), one learns everything about moss. : in addition to its different taxa (drawn beautifully by his father, Robert Wall), its importance in stopping soil erosion and conserving moisture, its conversion into organic matter to nourish other plants, and even its function in improving quality of the air we breathe.
We also take note of the sexual frenzy of some species, that others are celibate, and even some episodes of transsexuality. In these plants without complexes “the gender alternates quite freely,” we read. And it is certainly clear to us that we should not confuse moss with either lichen or fungi.
THE BOOK
-
Qualification
'Moss Reserve' -
Author
Robin Wall Kimmerer -
Translation
David Muñoz Mateos -
Editorial
Captain Swing -
Price
€20 (232 pages)
However, as is often the case with this type of book, the moss is just an excuse, a bait for us to enter the trap of the story about the author's experience in, with and for nature. Especially during her annual research stints at the Cranberry Lake Biological Station, where each spring she occupied a log cabin to study her beloved mosses armed with a Bausch & Lomb magnifying glass. And where there is no other way to get there than aboard a precarious canoe in which she embarks everything necessary for her scientific stay, including her two daughters.
«I spent two summers on all fours on the forest floor with Craig Young, one of my students. Dead logs and moss communities became our entire world. We describe each cavity in the moss layer to the millimeter. The humidity, the light, the pH, the size, the position, the trees that gave it shade and the species of moss that surrounded it: we wrote everything down in a notebook,” writes the author of 'A braid of sacred grass'. (also in CS and, curiously, the singer Camila Cabello's favorite book).
Robin Wall integrates into his scientific analysis the beliefs of indigenous communities and the connection with what he calls “non-human family”, compared to the consideration of nature as “mere merchandise or property.” A very necessary way of approaching the world, surely, to dedicate a good part of a professional career to the study of moss. Just for that, thank you!
#read #moss
