Science asks us to learn about organisms, traditional knowledge asks us to learn from them.Mosses

Science asks us to learn about organisms, traditional knowledge asks us to learn from them. Mosses are ancient, they’ve figured out how to live well on the earth. They are storytellers. In their simplicity, in the power of being small, mosses have become so successful because they live in these tiny layers on rocks, on trees, they work with the natural forces that lay over every surface of the world. They are examples of not only surviving but flourishing by working with natural processes. Mosses are superb teachers about living within your means. Mosses have, in the ecological sense, very low competitive ability, because they’re small, because they don’t grab resources very efficiently. This means that they have to live in the interstices, where the dominant plants can’t live. But the way that they do this really brings into question the whole premise that competition is what really structures biological evolution and biological success. Mosses are not good competitors at all and yet they are the oldest plants on the planet. They have persisted here for 350 million years… so they ought to be doing something right. One of those ‘somethings’ is their ability to cooperate with one another. Their ability to share the limited resources that they have to really give more than they take. Mosses build soil, they purify water, they are like the coral reefs of the forest—they make homes for this myriad of cool, little invertebrates who live there. They are engines of biodiversity. They do all of these things and yet they are only one centimeter tall. This is a time to take a lesson from mosses. -Some wisdom from Robin Wall Kimmerer, native storyteller and bryologist (studier of mosses). #ancestralwisdom #robinwallkimmerer #braidingsweetgrass #indigenousknowledge #gatheringmoss #bryology #moss #biodiversity https://www.instagram.com/p/CGkWaEQhpAm/?igshid=agu73912p5nf -- source link

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