Transcript: KERRY KNUDSEN on Lichen and Life after Capitalism [ENCORE] /258
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Welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Kerry Knudsen, originally aired in April of 2019. While we draw upon Kerry's extensive knowledge of lichen, we also dream into navigating beyond the chaos of today. We hope you enjoy this special encore episode.
Kerry Knudsen Anything citizen scientists can do to help professional scientists or to, like me, develop a career of your own is tremendously valuable at this time because the environment is changing way faster than we imagined and may even be changing faster than is currently projected.
Ayana Young Today we are speaking with Kerry Knudsen. Kerry is a mycological taxonomist and lichenologist at the University of Life Sciences in Prague. Kerry founded a lichen herbarium at the University of California at Riverside (UCR) and has published 215 papers and articles on lichens. He is a specialist in the lichen biodiversity of southern California and in the order of Acarosporales, which occur around the world. With his wife Jana Kocourkova, who is also a lichenologist, they have begun a four-year project working on lichen biodiversity in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico.
Well, Kerry, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Like I was mentioning earlier, I'm absolutely mesmerized by lichens, as I'm sure you are. And it's really wonderful to be able to share this time with you and focus on these incredible creatures. So Kerry, you are credited with discovering over 60 species of lichen previously unknown to the scientific field, yet your fascination and dedication to lichen is, as you describe, unorthodox. While it’s a simple question, I would love to begin with you sharing your personal story. How and when did you become so enamored with lichens and their complexity?
Kerry Knudsen Well, I wanted to study botany and I was forced into retirement by a disability, so I prepared to go back to college to study botany and the rehabilitation people said I was too old to invest in a college career for me. So I was really depressed and one day at my desk, where I had my microscope and stuff, I told my daughters, I said, “Whatever's behind the house, lichens are mosses, that's what I'm going to study.” And luckily, that day, I found three lichens and I knew there weren't many people working on biodiversity in that field, and no one in Southern California working on it. So I began studying it and from the very beginning, I aimed to be a professional scientist. So after about two years of study, I joined the Sonoran Flora Project, describing Acarosporales for Arizona and Southern California, and at the same time, I started a herbarium at UCR specializing just in Southern California’s lichen and flora, and Southern California is really diverse because it has deserts, mountains, and even eight islands, a large coastal area, and eight islands. So for the last 18 years, I studied this whole area, built up a herbarium just in Southern California, and wrote mostly about Southern California lichens.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing that and your story is an inspiring reminder of the importance and tremendous impact that “citizen science” or perhaps, intimate immersion with the Earth has, especially during this time. Can you share more on the beginnings of this process? Does citizen science take on new meanings in an age of loss?
Kerry Knudsen Well, yeah, one thing, especially here in America you can see under Trump, there's an attack on scientific funding. Also, in terms of museums, herbarium there's a low amount of investment going on in all of North America in these institutions and in most universities. So right now, if a person can do professional work or help people doing professional work, it's invaluable, because at this time, taxonomy, and biodiversity, despite all the talk about them, is really being ignored. See, right now we came out of a molecular, biological, revolution in science, this is really important and it'll change the whole 21st century, how we look at this, but in this earlier phase, it was de-emphasized fieldwork and understanding species in order to master molecular biology. Now, that's been balanced in the field now, but still, there's lagging in taking care of the biodiversity of the Earth here, especially in North America.
See, for instance, people studying biodiversity go down to the tropics, of course, because the Amazon, for instance, is being deforested at a tremendous rate, but at the same time here in places like California, with climate change going on, you have constant droughts all through the Southwest, California included, and having these tremendous fires, for something slow-growing like lichens or even rare plants, these fires come through and wipe out a whole habitat. As you know, some of these fires are as big as New Jersey, which have happened in California. So anything citizen scientists can do to help professional scientists or to, like me, to develop a career of your own, is tremendously valuable at this time, because that the environment is changing way faster than we imagined, and may even be changing faster than is currently projected.
Ayana Young I deeply agree with everything you said, from the importance of people becoming involved and knowing that they're really needed, people are really needed in supporting data collections, because although I do have some issues around data collections, this type of biodiversity collections I think is so meaningful and important right now, because like you said, we're losing things quicker than we can even understand or project.
Kerry Knudsen Oh, yes, for sure, we're losing them fast. A good example is right now, we're working on a paper describing six new species for California, Southern California, and luckily, these are in the desert where they have a longer chance of lasting but some of the stuff we recently described, we have only two or three locations of in areas like in conifer forest where fires are happening at a really rapid rate.
Ayana Young I’d imagine many of us, even those who see a great deal of beauty in lichen, might not know much about their ancient presence. I have read that some samples of lichen from the Arctic are over 8,000 years old, and that lichens, as an organism, have been around for perhaps 400 million years. Could you share some of the common traits of lichen, like their extraordinarily long lifespans or their slow and steady growth?
Kerry Knudsen Yeah, most lichens grow really slow like maybe a micron a year or so. There are exceptions in tropic areas and in the Arctic, some things like Cladonia grow really fast, but overall if you see, for instance, in the Mojave Desert, you can see a lichen the size of a 50 cent piece or a silver dollar, and it can be 50 or 60 years old. The reason they grow so slow, as they have an alga or cyanobacterium, it is a symbiont, and most of the time, they only are photosynthesizing are actually alive and working only like early in the morning, during rainstorms, high humidity, and then the rest of the time they're dormant. So, if there's a secret to long life in lichens, it would be that we spend most of our time asleep.
Ayana Young On looking for lichens, you have said, “When I’m looking for lichens, my mind is clear and I’m completely visual…there is an art to looking for lichens, a non-rational appreciation of reality.” I was hoping you could expand upon this and then perhaps share with us your appreciation of lichens from a contemplative or aesthetic perspective as dreamlike objects of wonder rather than items of scientific categorization.
Kerry Knudsen Yeah, because science is basically a rational process. I mean, if I'm looking at diversity, I'm analyzing it, I spend most of my time in a lab looking at a microscope, doing measurements, studying literature, writing, all that is a real rational activity. And you can get sucked up into that. Also the collecting, I can agree with you that there's a lot of miss-collecting being done and that's, that's another part of it, it becomes like an avarice rational activity of collecting things. Now, two things I really think we have in nature are both, first thing, the contemplative part. I'm an atheist, of course, but in nature, even when I'm doing scientific work, I try to stop several times during the day and maybe every time I look at something, I just stop, and have my mind completely silent, and just feel complete unity with reality. And that's a feeling that you can get in nature in small areas, or in big, large areas, like a redwood forest, it's in you and it's feeling that unity with reality, and with life, that we're part of a giant process of life that goes back billions of years. Every scientist should be practicing that, and all of us can appreciate that in nature.
The other part is the aesthetic part, that's a little different. That means your mind's clear, and you really observe. So you enjoy, like the colors for me, the lichens are beautifully colored, most of them, but you enjoy the colors, the shapes, you enjoy the beauty of the relationships of things, and that's basically very visual, but also includes your hearing, hearing sounds, and that part's aesthetic, but that's a different wavelength in your brain. And the second part, what I was first talking about, the contemplative part, that takes a little relaxing and for some people that they have to get beyond just thinking or just being active, hiking and as a sport, and you just have to relax and really let yourself go.
Ayana Young Thank you so much for sharing that, I felt you in it and I feel really similarly myself when I'm in the forest and I'm building relationships with the plant life and the mycological life, the lichen life, and I agree lichens are just incredibly beautiful and mesmerizing, and the colors are incredible, the shapes and the way they grow onto one another, like the one I'm thinking of, that I don't know the name of, but it is kind of is like the seafoam green and then at the end, there are these little dark orange-red balls at the end of it and they're just, you know, you look at them and it feels like there are worlds within worlds in lichens. So I yeah, I really feel you.
Now I want to go back to, you had mentioned fires, and lichens as you also mentioned take an incredibly long period of time to grow. Further testament to this would be that it takes over 50 years for lichens to recover after being exposed to fire. In California, especially Southern, we have seen an increase in fires…I’m curious as to what the lichen population is going to look like in California should these fires continue to grow? Or even how the lichen population has changed in the last couple of years?
Kerry Knudsen Well, there are two things going on. One thing is well, we'll take Cajon Pass, you leave Southern California's coastal area between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains and go out to Mojave This is a long pass through there. It had a lot of fires in the 1990s, it had good Chaparral, good soil conditions, good rocks, a lot of rocks, and it would have been a good lichen area. There are even some historical records from 100 years ago from this area. After the 1990 fires, when I was doing a survey of the San Bernardino mountains, I could not find any lichens through this whole area and that's after 20 years, and that's a little bit drier habitat. So we're getting these lichen deserts, okay, where the fire has burned through and because of fragmentation of the environment with housing, urban development, freeways, and, and other things. It’s not easy for the lichens to recolonize an area. So you have either these lichen deserts or if the conditions are right, and at least some lichens get back established, there's lower diversity.
So because the good lichen habitats, say like on the Channel Islands, where there have hardly been any fires off the coast of California, these habitats, even though they've been destroyed by grazing somewhat, some of the vegetation and things, this is a continuous habitat since before the Pleistocene. So you have literally 300-400 species all within a 20 square mile area. So we don't know how much diversity has already been lost in Southern California from fires, but I would say that it's been, there's one thing, another factor besides this not being able to recolonize well, is during the Pleistocene, a place like Southern California or parts of the desert, even New Mexico were a different habitat, they usually had summer and winter rains. And they were much moister than they are now, a good example in Southern California is fir trees grew down to 1500 feet, they're now up around 5000 feet, and so you had a lot of things that had moved from the glacier South during the Pleistocene, and then as the climate change into the Mediterranean period, and we grew, for instance, Southern California, and in Southern California, there are no summer rains. So as that climate developed, most of the species that had moved from the North in this direction, began to disappear. In fact, many of the species that we know were even collected at the beginning of the 20th century are now 500 miles north of here. So those things have been disappearing for sure.
In the Santa Monica Mountains, for instance, along the coast, okay, there was a collector of lichens there from 1890-1918. From 1890 to 1918, when he collected, it was the beginning of a period when the rainfall along the coast began to decrease and there's been a general decrease since the turn of the 20th century in the amount of rain in Southern California. When this man died in 1918, he had been collecting in the Santa Monica Mountains for over 20 years and his records are at Harvard. Now I went through all his records, and at least 70 lichen species that he collected, I could not find. And in the Santa Monica Mountains, for instance, this area is Chaparral, oak trees, and Chaparral can get really thick, if it stays moist year round it won't catch fire so bad. I mean, if it stays moist, and there's constant rainfall and stuff, you don't have a drying out of the brush and stuff. But what happened is that starting in the 1920s large-scale fires, and so we can say pretty well, except for some things like building highways along the coast, almost all of those 70 species disappeared probably within about 20 years.
Ayana Young That's unbelievable to just learn how fragile these species are.
Kerry Knudsen Oh yeah, because they can’t reproduce fast enough.
Ayana Young Well additionally, as someone who is now studying lichen outside of Southern California I was hoping you could speak to how lichen populations and diversity will change as a result of climate change, residential and commercial development, and pollution. Especially pollution, which as I understand it, is one of the most serious threats to the health of lichen, we already know that lichens are unable to grow in cities or around industrial sites, so with the increased and widespread air pollution that is transpiring globally, it is apparent that lichens face more than one threat. To what extent are lichens facing endangerment? Is your immense cataloging and recording of lichens propelled by the understanding that the landscape is rapidly transforming?
Kerry Knudsen Well, one thing with the air pollution thing is just from nitrates, even if the lichens are able to absorb the nitrates and not be affected, it changes for instance, once on bark, it changes the pH of the bark and causes a decrease in habitat. It causes an acidification of the bark and so that's the main problem with air pollution. It was much worse when we were in sulfur dioxide and having acid rains. So some stuff is coming back but it's been limited by these nitrites which are selecting towards certain species that are more common.
The other thing, even in the Pacific Northwest and stuff, this constant drought is the main problem though, because it's still a fire hazard. That's probably the biggest danger I see going on even in the next 100 years. But yeah, air pollution is a problem but yeah, that's a problem here in Southern California too. But in my own observations in, for instance, Southern California, and this is an area with heavy nitrate pollution we still have overall, if you just go even a little bit into the mountains or out into the desert, we still have high diversity. So that's not as serious as this fire thing. Even in the desert, in Joshua Tree, there's grass, different kinds of Bromeae’s came in, our invasive grasses, that are in the desert so what used to be a fire that would start and just burn for some brush and be uneven now has all this fuel from the build up and just burns through and burns down the Joshua Trees, one of the biggest Joshua Tree areas was completely burned with some of the biggest trees that are in Joshua Tree, and it's all from this buildup of grasses. See, that's another thing that's a problem with all these lichens is it's these invasive species that come in and add to the fuel load in areas too, besides the fire. So lichens are gonna have a tough time anyway, in the next 300 years as we go through this extinction event we're living through.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's fascinating and really depressing to hear what happened in Joshua Tree and these invasive grasses that are giving more fuel and helping the fires burn longer and more potently. So it's hard to hear, but it's important to hear and I do want to just mention around air pollution. I remember when I was learning about Usnea, and I had heard that if you were seeing Usnea that is a good sign that air pollution is not overtaking the area per se. But then I also thought about how I read that Usnea was uptaking Cesium-137, from the Fukushima Fallout, and so I was kind of trying to balance the understanding that these lichens can survive when there isn't so much air pollution yet they are uptaking pollution from the air. And, you know, I know Usnea for a lot of people is used for herbal medicine, and so to think about what are the lichens uptaking and then how is that going into our body if we are using it as medicine, but then, of course, the flip side of that is, if it's in the medicine, then it is in everything. We can’t escape. So you know of course we should be careful about what we take into our body and where it’s coming from, but there’s nowhere to run from this-
Kerry Knudsen There's one thing that's a little bit different with lichens is they have a, in order to have a to grow algae or cyanobacteria within it, the fungus develops a thallus that contains the alga from which it derives its nutrition. Okay, this thallus, whether it's stringy like Usnea, or it looks like a leaf, or like Crustose lichens, looks like a bunch of bumps. This thallus has a lot of space in it and the lichens are able to like, make cysts out of stuff, they're able to have these chemicals come in, and they just isolate them within themselves. So in an air pollution study that my wife was just working on in the Arctic, in Norway, up in the very top in Norway, they decided that lichens, it was better to study the top layer of a moss that grows year by year, then to study lichens for trying to calibrate the air pollution over a period of time. The reason is the lichen keeps storing the pollutants within it and it has the space to do that and isolate it without being poisoned so, if you're in an area where you're concerned about air pollution or radiation or whatever, lichens are more likely to have concentrated this stuff than say a plant that grows in one year or moss. So I yeah, I'd watch where I collect my herbal medicines.
Ayana Young Well like all living organisms, lichens too of course play meaningful roles…they are food sources to many beings; slugs, squirrels, mites, and even humans alike…They serve as nesting material and are a home to many microorganisms and insects, and aid in soil formation and establishing vegetation…I raise the topic of their ecological importance in connection to the way in which we assign value to the natural world. I assume many of us would overlook lichen or dismiss it as an inconsequential being, and I know culturally we fail to recognize the inherent value of any organism…human beings included…So I’d love to transition to a conversation on what you noted as a utilitarian versus capitalist view in the field of lichenology and beyond…And especially, it seems that now more than ever if we don’t change our value system…we stand to lose so much. I think about how the fate of lichens in the Anthropocene is akin to that of insects, wherein so little is known about either, that it is not feasible to even understand what the repercussions are should they disappear. How do these value systems influence the way in which we understand lichen?
Kerry Knudsen Well, I'll give you a good example of this attitude. I was giving a walk on one of the Channel Islands, Anacapa Island, for a bunch of people that were invited by the National Park. See lichens, no matter what people say, are basically in terms of human use, useless. I mean, the few you can eat are so few. I mean, their use in medicine we've been trying to learn if they can, if secondary metabolites, if it can protect against cancer and stuff, we still have not gotten any cures for cancer out of lichens, lichens are almost totally useless. In fact, in an area like the Mojave Desert which has 150 species, the Channel Islands has 450 species, in areas like this, almost every one of those lichens is totally useless in terms of human use. So I was giving a walk and I was explaining that and one guy got very angry and says, “This is not the way you should be telling people about lichens, you should be telling them how useful they are to people.” And the thing is, is that they're not useful. Just like most insects are not useful. Yes, they're useful for the total ecological landscape and relationships but in direct, utilitarian terms, they're useless. In fact, that's why lichen is not the best career to get into as a scientist either, because in most funding starting back even with Obama, most funding for science is going into “innovation, utilitarian values, utilitarian projects” that can end up being into enterprise and entrepreneurship. I myself deal with a field that is mostly useless to human beings in the direct sense, most of nature is like that. In terms of doing it in economic terms, I think we really have to move beyond it. We have no choice but to move beyond capitalism, if we're not able to do that during the next three to 400 years, as the climate changes, as environments are just degraded by climate change, we could end up in a period that is just terrible. I mean, you know, much more totalitarian than we are now. That’s I think it's the saddest thing to me about what's going on with climate change is because you see, the world is being destroyed so quickly the relationships before, and it'll happen so fast. Like, for instance, rising to the oceans, when it really gets going, it'll happen within 100 years, once the major ice fields melt, I mean, you're talking about most of the populations of the world being wiped out for where they live, they've done they have to migrate somewhere, it's gonna be a gigantic mess, and we have no way currently, as a united people of the Earth to deal with this problem, everything's divided up between different economic and political power groups. So unless we move beyond capitalism, we may be heading towards extinction.
Ayana Young Well, we are, you know, in so many ways we are. We are there, we are in the extinction crisis. It’s interesting to hear the 300-400 year scenario, I’ve never heard those numbers before. So, I’d just like to hear about that and maybe also in terms of extinctions, I was just reading that right now, there are only two lichen listed as threatened or endangered by the U.S. government and you can compare that to 942 plants and 1447 animals on the endangered species list, so I think that's interesting to note. And then also on the topic of extinction, I just wonder, what does and does not get recognized? You know, it's been brought to my attention in doing some of the research for this interview, just how much we become reliant on extinction as a metric, you know, so I'm wondering, do you see any problems with the sort of hyper attention around extinction because are we, you know, falling into this trap of only caring about one set of species at a time, once they tip towards extinction, rather than focusing our energy and acknowledging the tremendous inherent value of all life?
Kerry Knudsen Yeah, well, I totally agree with you, this whole idea of just concentrating on rare species is BS because as important as it is to save the wolves down in the red states, or make sure that redwoods continue to be repopulating, and all these things are really valuable, a real wild place is a gigantic relationship of many things that are common. Okay, many of the species are common, it's the whole environment that these rare species also exist in, but by concentrating just on the rare species it tends to take away from the habitat and appreciating the wholeness of nature and habitats. And a lot of that lichen habitat that is burning in, for instance, Southern California nobody would consider particularly valuable, they have maybe 3 or 4 main Chapparal plants or they have oak trees that are everywhere, coastal oaks, they have their granite areas, you know, and there is nothing there that is rare in terms of plants. Well, Southern California does have quite a few rare plants, but a lot of these areas are not that particularly rich in rare plants.
Yet when they go, and this is happening all over the world, when these common areas go you're losing a tremendous part of nature. It's just like when I was saying about these, lichen deserts, I mean, you go there and the plants that came back after the fire, the habitats there, the rocks, and the beautiful landscape, the thing is one part is gone. And with that one part gone, it's just like when you're in a forest, some of these artificial forests where they've been cut down and regrow or areas where you walk in and you hear no sound hardly. Yeah, I think a great thing about this program you got going with your group is that it concentrates on the wholeness of nature. Politically, these endangered species are under constant attack. So I mean, they're not really that effective overall anymore. They have a built-in economic factor that can be taken to court and that that still hasn't been worked out. So without some kind of political change, even this concentrating on rare species is taking us away from concentrating on the protection of all of nature.
So the thing I was talking about 300-400 years is, I believe that within 300-400 years, we'll reach the worst part of the melting, if we're going to go through melting of the polar ice cap in a raising of the ocean levels up to 90 feet, this should happen in I imagine 400-5000 years, and when we reach that point, when it’s over and we've gone through all the first part of everybody trying to migrate and all the wars that are going to come out of that, I think at that point, we'll reach a point where we'll be looking towards the future if it's not completely out of control, but we'll be seeing the nature, a large amount of the species that they exist now be gone, and so I just use that as a general figure.
Ayana Young Well, now that we're in the conversation of extinction and capitalism and how we are here, and what we have to do, or what I hope we do in order to protect as much as we can, it’s just, it would appear to be such a delicate balance between challenging the institutional and structural powers that uphold the system we're in, while also working on an individual or conscious level, it would appear that there is a mass parallelization by a state of unconsciousness, and I often think about how wounded we are as a society. And in a sense, it matters less what our governing bodies look like, for example, what does it mean to reject hierarchy and self-govern, if our selves remain untended? So I’m curious if you have any thoughts on direct action in changing society, or perhaps what you think reality and fantasy is if the façade of our democratic government truly crumbled overnight?
Kerry Knudsen Well, firstly, I don't think we're that democratic here in the United States, but anyway, say for instance, if it's possible for an end to capitalism, okay, I think we're entering the best possible period for this to happen. The first thing we have, we're facing a crisis that most people do not realize now, but within the next 100 years, everybody will realize we're facing this, we're facing this in the same way we'd be facing an alien invasion. We're all in it, and then at that point, it's the first time in history that we've all faced a common enemy. And so I think that's one thing that'll be historically different than even the period we're living in now.
The second thing is the failure of our current capitalist economy and the nation-state, individual nation-state organization we have in the world, will have proven itself to most people, that it's been a complete failure. Third, with the destruction of habitat, the vast migrations, the social chaos that will come out of this, large areas that will have problems with food, all of these problems will create pressures to push people towards action. Real change anytime in history has to come from real factors more than one individual choice. So I’m really positive that if ever there was a chance for a major change, it'll come out of these terrible events, because for once we have a reason to be united as a people around the Earth.
I think you have to also keep in mind this, if you were living in Rome, in the year 60, you wouldn’t be able to image that there would be anything beyond the Roman Empire, you might say “Hey man, I don’t really like these people fighting each other in the Colosseum and killing each other, but anyway, it's happening here.” You'd be complaining about “Yeah, only rich people run this society I’m in, I run a bar down here, I have to pay the Roman soldiers a bribe in order to operate here.” You wouldn't be able to imagine, or living in Europe in the Middle Ages, that things would ever be different. So we have to always keep in mind that while we should never be completely depressed by the period we live in, massive changes could happen within the next 100 or 200 years and there's no way we can imagine them or see how they're connected with our lives now. Like with this millennial thing that's going on about socialism, you know, at least this understanding that the government has to do more, it's not just a free market society, okay, that's millions of people are coming to this conclusion, this is the way change happens.
So there is a dynamic between your individual life, you should not feel alienated because you can't “do anything.” For instance, I work on these lichens all the time, I write papers about them, I do inventory so people know what's in a particular area, I describe new species, many of which may not even be here in 100 years. Okay, that's all I have time to do. In the rest of my life, I've had time to raise a family where I had to do a lot of work for, and I don't feel depressed by what's happening. And that's all you can do. For instance, you're doing this show, you guys have a good foundation, I was glad to donate $25 to it, and that may not seem like enough, but it's all of what we can do as an individual, it’s limited. We shouldn't feel despair, because we can't do more.
I think we need to just keep moving in the direction we're all moving, and there's big cultural changes going on. And we just go with these cultural changes and believe that just like the butterfly that beats his wings and causes a rainstorm around the other side of the world, you know, we have to embrace the chaos of our lives. I'm very hopeful for the future myself. But unfortunately, I think we're going to be entering into a new Earth and things are going to really change a lot. And it's unfortunate.
Ayana Young A lot of what you said picked me up a little bit from my drooping shoulder feeling -
Kerry Knudsen Yeah, it’s easy to get depressed.
Ayana Young Yeah, so thank you for saying all that and, and in terms of things that make me feel better, and kind of pull me out of that dark hole that I know I can get into, and I'm sure many of the listeners can get into when we're learning about all the destruction is, you know, for me, it's the forest or even the desert, or any of these incredible landscapes. But thinking of the forest, when I look at lichen and moss and spend time in the deep forest, there's times that I am reminded of fairy tales and of the magical stories that relate to the world of hidden forest and beyond, and in my mind, it's no accident that the forest is so often a canvas for magic. So, you know, I'd love to ask a question that I hope isn't too far-fetched, I'm thinking back to our notions of value systems, but this time in the context of magic, more specifically, do you think the loss of or degeneration of magic and dominant culture coincides with the destruction of life itself? And would you say that simultaneously as you learn about lichen have you found magic of sorts that's access through deep attunement to and with the natural world?
Kerry Knudsen Well, I think that the essence of magic is imagination, in a modern world that we live in through our cultural changes, magic now is the ability to imagine the impossible. So just like we're talking about a world beyond capitalism, that's magic to imagine something beyond what we're living in now. The places like the forests, studying lichens, what's really, in that quietness that you get out of that deep experience that gives you a space for the magic of imagination. We have to imagine a world better than the one we live in now in order for it to come into being, and in nature, is that space, is that silence where the imagination can grow, you turn off your cell phone, you turn off your computer, you don’t watch any television, you go out there, where it's nice and silent, and you get in touch with yourself, and you get in touch with your dreams. And I think that's the magic that's in nature.
Ayana Young I agree with you that imagination is magic and creativity, and I always think to myself, I am connected to magic through the forest, and over this winter, things were really, really busy, and I felt at times that I was kind of drowning in the day to day, bureaucracy of life. And I remember thinking to myself, “Well, gosh, Ayana magic isn't going to come in, creativity isn't going to come in, if there's no place for it. You know, magic is magical, magic is the star of the show, and they need a place at the table, they need to be served, and they need to have offerings to them, and, and so it really was clear to me and I've and I know, I felt this before that, we have to turn off the TV, turn off the phone, we have to turn off these mechanisms that distract us in order to allow magic, creativity, imagination, to show us anything, to offer us anything, and if we're not offering that space, and that respect, and that gratitude, to magic, and so on, we're not going to be able to tap into the immensity of what it is. I can say for me, you know, when I get lost in despair, when I can tap into the magic of the land, and within myself, things begin to open and possibilities begin to open, I really feel that deeply.
And I wanted to go back a bit, because as we're talking about possibilities and imagination, and so on and so forth, it makes me think again about citizen science, and for all those who are listening to this interview and they're wanting to step in to the magical realm of lichens, or really, you know, any kind of science around citizen science around the land. What are some tips or tools or advice that you would give those folks who really want to commit and really want to dedicate themselves to the service of these creatures?
Kerry Knudsen First thing, there are books on lichens, and so the first part always in learning about an organism is the naming. Okay, I think the first part, actually the most important part, is to just get out there and experience and look and start to absorb whatever part of nature you're interested in. Then the naming comes in, you start to learn names. Okay, at that point, you usually need to contact other people and for lichens there's for instance, a Northwest lichenologist in the Pacific Northwest, there's a California Lichen Society in Northern California. There's, for instance, a new lichen curator at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden that's already in her first month, going out and taking people out into nature. You look for something like this, you may be too far away from something like that, so don't give up.
Lichens, like insects and stuff, are a little hard or hard to work on. So I started working on them with a dissecting microscope, just to look at them up close or with a hand lens, you need to look at them with equipment, you need to be able to look up closer than you can see with your eye. So that creates a problem with this because then you have to have a dissecting microscope and then if you're done to try to identify them, you usually need a compound microscope. So once you've made that commitment, then you're up into a different level and when you make that kind of commitment, then you're going to have to really study, it's like learning to play guitar, though you could do it in 15 minutes or half an hour a day and become good at it, but that the level where citizen science starts to become real science. Don’t forget, science wasn’t like it is now, it originally began with people studying stuff as a hobby, basically the word science is only a couple 100 years old, and now it's a whole academic thing, all government agencies and stuff.
Once you've reached that level, then you're going to need to connect with either people working at universities. Another thing is, is any area, even if you can't contact these social groups, or if you don't have a good contacts at a university or meet the right people at a university, go to any national park, any reserve, any national forest, there's people there, they are so understaffed, that anything you want to work on that you can, you can get help with, you can or you can volunteer. Say for instance at Joshua Tree, they have money to study the drying out in Mojave Desert, the rainfalls going down, and so they're worried about the existence of the Joshua Trees, you can go in and volunteer to help collect the data for that. Then if you're like me, when I started studying lichens, I wanted to understand what I was doing, so for the first two years, I never contacted anybody, I studied what was in the hills behind my house, which was basically private property, so we could collect there and then I went and called the National Forest, Cleveland National Forest, got hold of the botanist, and they gave me a permit to go out and learn. And all I was supposed to do is contact them if I found anything interesting.
So this higher level, getting into the real science, and you're not just also just collecting data for say, like this Joshua Tree thing, but you don’t need to be botanist to do that, but if you’re to this higher level of science, no matter what you're studying, there's almost always a need for that, you can get help from the National Parks, and then usually, in most things you study, there's a regional expert, and these people are enthusiastic, if you can get hold of one, to talk to anybody that's interested in what they're interested in. So once I felt confident about what I was doing, and got my direction, once I got a permit, and then was able to collect more material and study it, then I started contacting scientists that were out there already, academically established, asking questions, writing them, you could do this with botany, insects, it's not just lichens, and I got answers for most of them. So there's different levels.
I don't like the term citizen science in some ways, but there's different levels of this involvement you can have without being an academic, and having a doctorate. So it's possible to go through these stages. Once you've reached the stage where you're working on a field, you won't be able to do molecular biology, so you'll have to realize when you're getting into something like lichens, insects are whatever you're studying, that you're not going to be able to have access necessarily to the the most advanced techniques, so what I did when I got into this is I said, “Okay, I'm not going to have money for molecular work, I'm not going to be able to go study that. So what I can do is biodiversity studies.” So you find out what you can do, look at the field, you can get an idea of what’s needed.
I knew that nobody was working in Southern California, I knew that the flora was coming up, that they needed information for that. I know that the places I went to were interested to know what likens they had, so I was able to fill a gap that was missing. So whenever you're getting into one of these fields, you look for a gap, where you can fill in a spot if you're going straight into science. And so you can, on that level, you can become a citizen scientist, a real scientist without having an academic degree. The only trouble with this, though, is making money. So I mean, you have to balance this with somehow making a living, I myself was forced into disability, so I had a pension coming in, so I was able to do it full time. And now I'm retired and I actually have a job at a university doing this. I was hired by this university in Europe, because of the amount of writing I do, which is much more than many, many scientists do. So it's unlimited what you can do, if that's what you really want to do in something like this, you just have to follow the advice I gave you and if you're working on this stuff, once you get into the science part, you have to, from the very beginning, aim to be really good. So that means really mastering the field. Even at a university where we train people, my wife has students all the time that I deal with, once you get past the initial first four years, basically, even a scientist at a university learns by doing it themselves. So you shouldn't like any inferiority complex to somebody that's going to university. In fact, in a lot of ways, you're more free than they are. I mean, you know, I'd be happy if just everybody noticed lichens and enjoyed them for their surreal and psychedelic colors, and if they didn't do science, just were aware of that. Then the second level, of course, is to learn to name them, and you can learn that by going to any of these groups, you go out with a group of people that know what they're doing, you can easily pick up 10-15 genera in a day, and a lot of them because they're by colors and stuff you can learn fairly quickly. Getting into real science then is dedication. I hope that helps a little I'm not sure what-
Ayana Young No, it helped, and I'm grateful for how thorough you were. I think it's gonna really be a good road map for folks listening who want to be more dedicated. Well, as we wrap up this wonderful conversation, thank you so much, Kerry, I just want to offer the floor one more time for anything that maybe wasn’t mentioned that you want to make sure people hear about. But otherwise, this has been such a rich and moving conversation. So thank you.
Kerry Knudsen Yeah, I just want to say I think it was great that we talked about a world beyond the one we live in now, because from the magic of imagining, the second part of magic is will and from that imagining we can get the will to change this world.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young. The music you heard today was from The Savage Young Taterbug. I’d like to thank our incredible podcast team, our podcast Audio Producer, Andrew Storrs our Media Researcher and Writer Francesca Glaspell, Eryn Wise with Social Media Coordination, Hannah Wilton with Guest Coordination, and Carter Lou McElroy, our Podcast Music Coordinator. If you haven't already, please rate us on iTunes. Also, check us out ForTheWild.world, and if you haven’t already you should definitely see what's happening over at Patreon. Alright, thanks so much and until next time.