Enlichenment
Lichens are a weird entity that confound the categories of biology. A symbiont organism combining the two separate kingdoms of plant and fungi, lichen has established a global dominance covering as much as 8 percent of the surface of the planet. Crustose lichens in particular are geo-engineers, radically changing the geologic surface of the planet over the eons, breaking up rock substrate in the process of mining them for minerals. By tunneling or growing into the rock, the mycelial hyphae of lichen will secret inorganic acids that dissolve the rock into component parts, allowing the lichen to consume the minerals, and converting the rock into the stuff of life. The biomass of dead lichens will often form the basis for any initial soil column thus allowing these base minerals to travel upwards into the ecosystem. If Freud described the death-drive as the wish of the living to return to the inert state of the inanimate (the wish to be a rock) then we might view these lichen’s essential task as the opposite: this is life-drive degree zero: retrieving inanimate material and putting it into the service of life. The minerals integral to your body were likely passed out of rocks through the life cycle of lichens. This is an example of what has been described as natura naturans, or nature naturing; the creative force of life, life-as-process; the billion year fungal extraction of what lies dreaming in rocks.
