Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2003 essay collection, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, explores the natural history and science of mosses from the dual perspective of Western and Indigenous science. In this collection, Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and an environmental science professor at the State University of New York, employs a series of linked personal essays to explore the role of mosses in the natural world. As she discusses the biology of mosses, their impact on their environment, and the ways mosses have been incorporated into human activities, Kimmerer considers the lessons about life and the world that can be gleaned from understanding mosses. Her essays promote incorporating emotional and spiritual knowledge into science and suggest that thorough understanding is only achieved through respectful relationships with the subject of study. Kimmerer also suggests that Indigenous values are key to effective stewardship of the natural world. Gathering Moss, Kimmerer’s first book, won the 2005 John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing. 

This study guide refers to the 2003 paperback first edition from Oregon State University Press.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of racism, physical and emotional abuse, and sexual violence.

Summaries

Gathering Moss contains a preface and 19 brief essays. Each essay uses anecdotes from Kimmerer’s life to introduce ideas related to the study of mosses. Kimmerer links this information about mosses to larger ideas about science and the place of humans in the natural world.

In “Preface: Seeing the World Through Moss-Colored Glasses,” Kimmerer explains her purposes in writing the collection. She hopes to promote intimacy with the natural world, reassert her own Indigenous perspective on environmental science, and use this perspective to share the stories that mosses have to tell. Kimmerer believes that this is important because mosses can teach human beings important lessons about life.

“The Standing Stones” is the first essay in the collection. It shares a quasi-mystical experience in which Kimmerer is walking home along a well-known path and is surprised to see something new: a grouping of immense boulders. She investigates this formation and finds a cave. She crawls into the cave and through the rocks, emerging into a circular clearing bounded by moss-covered boulders. She loses track of time and self as she stands in the clearing contemplating her surroundings. During this experience, Kimmerer feels that the stones and moss are welcoming her into their world.

In the next essay, “Learning to See,” Kimmerer shares some of her own experiences with both seeing clearly and failing to see clearly. She uses these experiences to illustrate a process of learning how to observe mosses. It requires careful attention and an ability to filter out the distractions of the larger world. Knowing the scientific vocabulary that describes the individual differences among various mosses helps a person understand what they are looking at and develops intimacy with the mosses. From an Indigenous perspective, knowing the names of various mosses also demonstrates respect for them. This kind of relationship with mosses helps a person understand the forest itself and helps develop intimacy with the natural world in general.

“The Advantages of Being Small: Life in the Boundary Layer” begins with an anecdote about Kimmer’s niece complaining about being small. Kimmerer goes on to explain how being small can be an advantage—not just for children, but for mosses, which exploit their size to occupy a wide range of tiny habitats. They are especially suited to living in the boundary layer, where air meets land surfaces. Kimmerer makes the point that the size of mosses is their limitation, but it is also their strength.

In “Back to the Pond,” Kimmerer uses a late-night visit to a pond to hear the spring peepers as a springboard for a discussion of the reproductive strategies of mosses. She explains both sexual and asexual means of reproduction, connecting the sexual reproductive strategies of mosses to their evolutionary origins.

The following essay, “Sexual Asymmetry and the Satellite Sisters,” is also focused on sexual reproduction in mosses—this time in the Dicranum mosses, specifically. Kimmerer compares the many species of Dicranum to widely dispersed sisters. She observes that they have adapted to different ecological niches in order to avoid competition. Another effective strategy that assures the success of Dicranum mosses is their sexual asymmetry. The males are microscopic and live on host female plants, decreasing the distance sperm has to travel to fertilize eggs.

“An Affinity for Water” juxtaposes Kimmerer’s own challenges with letting go of her daughter and grandfather against factual information about the relationship between mosses and water. She observes that, although mosses have evolved their shapes and habits to hang on to as much water as possible, when the water runs out and the mosses become desiccated, they simply wait patiently for water to come again. She resolves to be more like moss and to develop a less resistant attitude toward change.

In “Binding Up the Wounds: Mosses in Ecological Succession,” Kimmerer describes a visit to a research project conducted by one of her peers, Aimee. She and Aimee investigate the mechanisms by which mosses create more hospitable conditions for other plants, allowing nature to eventually reclaim areas like the abandoned mining site where Aimee is working.

“In the Forest of the Waterbear” is an extended comparison of the ecosystem of the Amazon rainforest to the ecosystem provided by mosses. Both contain hundreds of thousands of life forms, living in stratified habitats. Both contain predators and prey species; one micro-animal that depends on the moss ecosystem is the tardigrade, or “waterbear.” This tiny creature, like mosses themselves, shrinks and enters a state of suspended animation during a drought and then, once rehydrated, swells back up and resumes its life.

The essay “Kickapoo” employs Kimmerer’s memory of a research project she conducted on Wisconsin’s Kickapoo River to deliver information about the competition between species of moss. Kimmerer explains how she gradually deduced why various species inhabited different strata along the rock walls of the cliffs lining the river due to variables like their ability to withstand flooding. She also introduces the idea of the intermediate disturbance hypothesis to explain why single species dominate the upper and lower margins of the habitat and a variety of species coexist in the middle of the rock face.

“Choices” describes the reproductive strategies used by Tetraphis moss. Kimmerer’s research reveals that this moss switches from asexual to sexual reproduction as conditions become more crowded. Having diverse strategies for reproduction allows Tetraphis to survive in a wider variety of conditions. Kimmerer’s research into Tetraphis teaches her that sometimes the Western scientific approach is insufficient and that there are cases where an Indigenous approach to science is more suitable.

In “A Landscape of Chance,” Kimmerer explores the gap dynamics of moss colonies. She shares her research into the differing mechanisms via which Tetraphis and Dicranum colonize gaps in larger colonies of carpet mosses and concludes that the process through which they move into new territories demonstrates how perfectly each species in an environment is fitted to the overall functioning of the whole environment.

“City Mosses” explores the types of mosses that tend to live in urban landscapes. Kimmerer defends their presence and refutes the idea that they are destructive to the built environment. She also explains that their presence can be beneficial and that they function as an important indicator of air quality.

“The Web of Reciprocity: Indigenous Uses of Moss” explains how mosses have been used by Indigenous societies of the past. Kimmerer describes learning from Onondaga herbalist Jeanne Shenandoah and shares Shenandoah’s idea that plants live where they are most needed. Kimmerer offers an argument in favor of respectful, reciprocal relationships with the natural world.

In “The Red Sneaker,” Kimmerer describes dancing barefoot on the living layer of Sphagnum moss at the top of a peat bog. The structure of the bog, in which living shoots rise upward from the deep layers of dead moss that form the bulk of each colony, makes her think of herself as a living shoot of her own Anishnaabe people. She sees the bog as a symbolic representation of the sacred Water Drum, an object that represents the connection between the material and spiritual worlds. As she dances on the bog, Kimmerer feels that she is in communion with the spirits of her ancestors.

“Portrait of Splachnum” shares Kimmerer’s amazement at the precarious conditions under which one particular moss—Splachnum ampullulaceum—grows. This moss only grows on droppings of white-tailed deer deposited in bogs. Because their habitat decays rapidly, colonies of Splachnum ampullulaceum have to reproduce quickly to avoid local extinction.

The following essay, “The Owner,” shares Kimmerer’s experience working as a consultant for a wealthy man interested in using mosses to lend an air of age to his grand, newly-created landscape and home. As Kimmerer considered the ways in which the man destroyed and recreated landscapes at his pleasure, she decided that ownership and love cannot coexist; love means respecting the wild nature of living things and not trying to dominate and control them.

In “The Forest Gives Thanks to the Mosses,” Kimmerer describes the many ways moss benefits the Oregon rainforests. She uses this as an illustration of the web of reciprocity that exists in the natural environment and expresses concern that humans no longer participate in this reciprocal relationship. She describes a visit to a clearcut site in the forest as an example of the ways humans take without effectively giving back.

“The Bystander” describes the devastating impact that commercial moss harvesting has on the environment. Kimmerer focuses on the Oregon forest, where she has seen the aftermath of such harvesting first-hand. Because mosses follow a colonization pattern that begins on young trees, mosses have a hard time getting re-established if they are removed from a mature forest. Harvesting is both unsustainable and unnecessary: it kills the mosses and the species that depend on them simply to create decorative surfaces for human-built environments.

The collection’s final essay, “Straw Into Gold,” is focused on Kimmerer’s experiences with Schistostega, a moss she finds growing in a lakeside cave near the Cranberry Lake Biological Station. She and her daughters enjoy the peculiar moss’s light-refracting qualities for many years, but eventually she finds herself visiting less and less. One day, the moss’s cave collapses, and Kimmerer regrets being distracted from its natural beauty by human concerns like hanging new curtains. She concludes that life is a precious and fleeting gift and that, in return for the gift of life, humans have an obligation to shine back the light around them like the moss does.