58 pages • 1-hour read
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
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Themes
Learning Through Relationship With the Nonhuman World
In the collection’s preface, Kimmerer explains that “Long before [she] went to university […she] regarded plants as [her] teachers” (vii). One of her primary purposes in writing Gathering Moss is to share some of the lessons mosses have taught her and to demonstrate this educational process in action. She uses this collection of essays to argue that by developing an intimate relationship with the natural world and patiently observing it, people can learn valuable lessons about themselves.
She first illustrates the kind of patient, intimate relationship she is talking about in early essays like “The Standing Stones,” “Learning to See,” and “Kickapoo.” In “The Standing Stones,” she portrays her own intimacy with the land of the Cranberry Lake Biological Station. She depicts herself walking, barefoot, across the land that she knows so well that, even in the dark, she knows where each root and each rock is located. In “Learning to See,” she explains the value of many hours of patient observation of nature: it trains the neural pathways to recognize patterns, until “The unseen is suddenly plain” (9). In this essay, Kimmerer describes the beauty of specific mosses, offering vivid images that convey the intricate textures and forms she has observed and demonstrating her intimate knowledge of them. In “Kickapoo,” she describes a particular research project that requires true patience and intimacy: For hours, day after day, she stands in the river examining and cataloging mosses on an otherwise inaccessible rock wall.
From all of this patient, intimate observation, Kimmerer derives many lessons. She learns about the proper way to approach science and the importance of diversifying strategies from her observation of Tetraphis in “Choices.” In “An Affinity for Water,” she explains lessons learned from mosses about loss and change, and in “Binding up the Wounds: Mosses in Ecological Succession” she explains lessons learned about respecting the natural world. Kimmerer offers lessons about reducing competition and respecting diversity in families (“Sexual Asymmetry and the Satellite Sisters”), the value of simplicity (“Straw Into Gold”) and the perils of human selfishness (“The Bystander” and “The Owner). She also shares what studying mosses has taught her about belonging and the value of every living thing in essays like “A Landscape of Chance” and “The Advantages of Being Small: Life in the Boundary Layer.” Gathering Moss is more than a recitation of empirically-verified facts about mosses. It is a vehicle for demonstrating the practical and ethical lessons that a close study of the land in general—and mosses in particular—can yield.
Making Room for the Nonmaterial in Science
Both the structure and content of Gathering Moss argue that it is important to make room in science for the subjective and nonmaterial alongside the objective and empirical. The collection’s structure interlaces objective information about mosses with Kimmerer’s subjective commentary, personal anecdotes, and emotional experiences. As Kimmerer notes in her Preface, “These essays intentionally give voice to both ways of knowing, letting matter and spirit walk companionably side by side” (vii).
Atypically for a scientific treatise, the language of Gathering Moss employs several techniques to increase the text’s emotional content. In essays like “Sexual Asymmetry and the Satellite Sisters” and “The Owner,” Kimmerer uses anthropomorphism and personification to create empathy for mosses. Emotional diction and vivid imagery appear throughout the collection—for instance, in “Back to the Pond,” when Kimmerer provides an image of “masses of eggs lying in the sunlight shadows […] entangled with green algae whose surface is studded with tiny bubbles of oxygen” (22) and when she speaks of “the moss mothers [who] don’t abandon their young” but instead “nurture the next generation” (26). Choosing diction like “mothers,” “young,” and “nurture” and offering images that convey the physical beauty of things like egg masses is a tactic that imports warm emotions into the often-dry world of scientific fact.
Kimmerer invites the reader to marvel with her at the remarkable series of events that leads to the establishment of a new Splachnum colony in “Portrait of Splachnum” by employing amplification as she describes the restrictive conditions under which Splachnum operates. Her use of similes and metaphors throughout the text also increases the collection’s emotional impact. In “Straw Into Gold,” the simile comparing Schistostega to glitter spilled at Christmas brings the happiness of Christmastime into her discussion of this unusual moss. Kimmerer sometimes even employs provocative and distressing similes comparing disrupted mosses to enslaved people or women experiencing sexual violence.
Gathering Moss also conveys a strong sense of Kimmerer’s spiritual values and their interrelationship with the study of mosses. The symbol of the hand lens intertwined with the medicine bag in the collection’s preface indicates how inextricably bound up these two things are in Kimmerer’s experience. “The Standing Stones,” “Learning to See,” “City Mosses,” “The Red Sneaker,” and “The Forest Gives Thanks to the Mosses” all emphasize Kimmerer’s spiritual beliefs. In “The Red Sneaker,” for instance, Kimmerer compares the bog to the sacred Water Drum of her Potawatomi people, and she explicitly says that as she dances on the bog, she is raising the spirits of her deceased ancestors. She discusses prayer in “The Forest Gives Thanks for the Mosses,” even structuring the essay itself around the idea of thanksgiving prayers the forest might give for the role mosses play in its health.
The Value of Indigenous Approaches to Environmental Stewardship
In an interview with Potawatomi.org, Kimmerer notes that “Science is a powerful tool for environmental problem solving, but it’s not the only one. Traditional ecological knowledge offers important insights as well, based on our people’s long knowledge of how to live sustainably on the land” (“Q&A with Robin Wall Kimmerer, PhD.” Potawatomi.org. 3 Nov. 2015). Gathering Moss makes this argument as well, incorporating Indigenous approaches into Kimmerer’s examination of mosses and offering an Indigenous perspective on how to live ethically with the land.
The value of storytelling is a principle common to many Indigenous cultures. Accordingly, Kimmerer weaves personal anecdotes throughout her essays, telling stories about spending time with her daughters, talking with neighbors, collaborating with colleagues, conducting research, exploring the natural environment, and so on. She also explains the value of storytelling directly, saying things like:
Our stories […] tell about the time when all beings shared a common language […] But that language has been long forgotten. So we learn each other’s stories […] by watching each other’s way of living. I want to tell the mosses’ story, since […] we have much to learn from them (vii).
Here, Kimmerer explicitly ties storytelling to one of its aspects particularly emphasized in Indigenous cultures—its value as a teaching tool. This connection sheds light on Kimmerer’s own use of storytelling in her essays—she is not simply using stories to create engagement, she is recognizing their educational value as well.
Storytelling is not the only Indigenous approach Kimmerer values; she also uses Gathering Moss to promote the Indigenous values of respect, relationship, and reciprocity. In both “The Standing Stones” and “Learning to See,” she stresses how important it is to show living beings respect by learning their names. Her respect for mosses’ ability to restore blighted landscapes is obvious in “Binding up the Wounds: Mosses in Ecological Succession,” and she promotes respect for mosses when she explains their benefits and argues against eliminating them from urban environments in “City Mosses.” By contrast, she depicts a lack of respect for mosses as an ugly, violent approach in several essays, most notably in “The Owner.”
Throughout the collection, Kimmerer advocates for entering into a close relationship with the natural world that honors the web of reciprocity that allows all beings to thrive. She decries the selfishness and alienation from nature that allow people to take from nature without giving back in essays like “The Bystander” and “The Forest Gives Thanks to the Mosses.” As an alternative, she promotes the Indigenous approach she describes in “Choices”: “In traditional Indigenous communities […] [c]hildren learn by watching, by listening, and by experience. They are expected to learn from all members of a community, human and non” (76). This intimate sense of relationship, of being in community with all living beings and the land itself, promotes understanding of the role each being plays in the web of reciprocity. As Kimmerer says in “The Web of Reciprocity: Indigenous Uses of Moss,” “Our ancient teachers tell us that the role of human beings is respect and stewardship. Our responsibility is to care for the plants and all the land in a way that honors life” (110). A primary goal of Gathering Moss is to suggest that there is a better way to live in relationship with the land—the way of traditional Indigenous communities.
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