What We Can Learn From Moss
Return to moss.
“I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time. He is a moss-gatherer, and I have been a stone doomed to rolling. But my rolling days are ending, and now we shall have much to say to one another.” —Gandalf, “The Return of the King”
The zeitgeist of today is a crisis of meaning. Almost half a century ago, psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl defined the “existential vacuum”—the lack of purpose in life—as a triad: aggression, addiction, and depression. Sound familiar? Today, everything is designed to have you hooked on mindless repetition. Industries allege they’re here to meet basic human needs while they produce addictive artificial foods, dehumanizing media that encourage insubstantial and reductive human connections, and porn that reduces sexual satisfaction in real life. Instead of meeting nutritional, social, or sexual needs, industries manufacture them and destroy their customers’ quality of life in the process.
Considering the fact that mainstream cultural production seems to be hyper-focused on maximizing consumption and indifferent to turning out anything of substance, it’s easy to capitulate and decide that culture is dead. Postmodernism has imbued many with a visceral distrust towards politics and ideologies, so finding a system of thought to fill the purpose-shaped hole in our lives can sometimes feel like a Sisyphean effort. The end result is often a life reduced to the satisfaction of progressively less fulfillable basic needs: a joyless, repetitive trudge along the path designated by a culture that seems to have flatlined decades ago.
How do we transform survival from a dismal pursuit of stimulation to a state of strength, happiness, and wellbeing? Where can we extract meaning, considering that so many of its sources appear to be depleted? I may not have the answer. But I do have an answer.
The short answer is nature. It’s already been proven that contact with nature can improve traits such as self-discipline, cooperation, and a rejuvenated state of mind; notice how these are the exact opposites of the “mass neurotic triad” Frankl had identified as an “axis of evil” and cause of meaninglessness. However, we should go further than spending some free time in a park. We have the ability to interpret natural phenomena like we would an artwork or a piece of media. And no matter how you look at it–mystically or scientifically–there are things to be learned from nature.
[The Purpose of Humans on Earth]
The best part about nature is that it’s clearly visible when an organism is successful and when it isn’t. Unlike human ideologies, which can lure one in with false promises and sophistry, organisms in nature are either actually successful and survive, or flawed and eventually extinguished. Survival is a generally reliable measure of success—and who better to learn from than a 450 million-year-old success story? If you’ve read the title of this piece, you already know I’m talking about moss.
At first glance, moss seems like an anticlimactic choice; wouldn’t we have more to learn from a lion or eagle? A small tuft of green fluff might not seem like much, but hear me out: moss is one of the most valuable and capable organisms on the planet. In fact, we as a species may owe our existence to moss. Oxygen, in the breathable concentration that it’s found on Earth today, appeared as a result of the Great Oxidation Event 2.4 billion years ago. However, the it wasn’t until the first mosses colonized the land 470 million years ago that oxygen levels rose high enough to allow for the appearance of large, mobile, intelligent animals such as humans. “It’s exciting to think that without the evolution of the humble moss, none of us would be here today,” said Tim Lenton, a professor of earth system science at the University of Exeter.
Moss may resemble us more than we thought. Researchers at the University of Freiburg have found that cell division in mosses is similar to that of animal cells. During cell division in animal cells, the mitotic spindle—a network of protein filaments tasked with dividing the cell’s chromosomes among its daughter cells—moves around, whereas in plant cells it remains static.
However, over the course of experiments on an earthmoss (Physcomitrella), the research team documented the first instance of a mobile mitotic spindle in a plant. “Spindle movement had never been documented before in plant cells,” explained Dr. Elena Kozgunova, one of the researchers. Moss subverts the separation between the plant and animal kingdoms: like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, it is beyond the boundaries that the human mind has attempted to contain it within.
Embracing Resilience and Change
Modern society isn’t always conducive to personal growth. However, as Nietzsche put it, strength can be wrought “through protracted struggle against essentially constant unfavorable conditions.” Sequestered in the shadows of trees, moss has often had less access to sunlight. As a response, moss has developed a special type of chlorophyll that can catch the wavelengths of light that filter through foliage. “[Mosses] are limited by their mode of life, but also liberated,” writes Michael Charles Faraday; indeed, mosses have mastered environments that few other species have managed to conquer, like the barren faces of cliffs and rough, scaly tree bark.
Species of moss literally inhabit every environment on Earth. Even in space, mosses have succeeded in an unexpected way: unlike other plants which showed random growth patterns, moss cultures grew in space in non-random, “distinct spiral patterns.” Mosses have weathered mass extinction events and climate catastrophes, along with surviving being frozen in the Antarctic ice for 1,500 years. The key to these shocking survival skills is an unsurpassed talent for changing quickly: mosses have special genes that are activated by changes in temperature which set into motion the production of highly complex protective molecules. These genes, not found in any living organism except moss, allow it to survive temperature changes that would kill anything else.
Cherishing Our Children and Environment
Childcare is probably the last association you would think of when you imagine the reproduction of mosses, and yet mosses are capable of evolving their parenting skills. Marine moss animals, specifically the species in the order Cheilostomatida, have evolved specialized nursery cells on at least five different occasions. They have developed brooding chambers, the moss equivalent of uteri, to nurture their young, as well as a defense system to protect their offspring, by forming an “array of pincer-like appendages resembling disembodied bird beaks” which attack predatory fauna.
Many strains of New Age thought nowadays seek to portray nature, and especially plant life, as an essentially pacifist force. Some even define learning from nature as “surrendering to the Universe” and “trusting that what is meant for us will come our way.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Everything “natural” defends itself to the best of its abilities, and moss is no exception. Since moss cannot defend itself through movement, it has developed chemical compound called oxylipins which cause pests to avoid them.
[The Countere Guide to Mushroom Hunting]
Not only do mosses protect themselves and their young, they are also known to purify their surroundings. Researchers in Japan have found that mosses can decontaminate water supplies by absorbing, and tolerating, impressive amounts of lead. While other plant species would die in such contaminated water, the moss Funaria hygrometrica contains polygalacturonic acid in the cell walls, which allows it to absorb lead without being damaged. Additional research suggests that moss is also able to remove arsenic from water, and a product made from peat moss has been used to clean up oil spills.
Moss teaches us that there are no limits to how versatile an organism can be. My list remains incomplete; there’s too much to be learned from moss to fit into a single article. When mainstream media yields no answers to your questions and ideological theories and labels seem too abstract to apply to humans properly, you can always step back and look at the way other beings are living and thriving. When you’re between a rock and a hard place, be like moss.
