165 pages
Published 2003
Read from June 7 to June 9
Rating: 4 out of 5
Like Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise, this book is a collection of personal essays on a series of related topics, and not so much the didactic natural history book implied in the title. Wall Kimmerer's moss-linked essays are informative and personal in equal measure, using the personal to illuminate the scientific in deft ways. At times, like when Wall Kimmerer draws a link between the resiliency of mosses and the rhythms of human life, it's brilliantly moving; at others, like when she describes the efforts of some rich asshole to rip up an Appalachian hillside to create an artificial facsimile of an Appalachian hillside, it's perfectly infuriating.
There's a certain melancholy to reading books of natural history written so long ago. Unlike many books of this time (and especially books from the 1990s and '80s), Moss doesn't end with a coda of hopefulness. There's no inspiring epilogue to rouse us to fix the ruin capitalism has wrought on our biosphere. Instead, Wall Kimmerer offers two bleak ruminations on the destruction of the Pacific Northwest rain forest, which linger in the mind even as she caps off the book with a glimpse of the strange, hidden glimmer of Goblin Gold moss, making the most of its specialization for low-light environments. It's sad to think that our imperialist impact on the environment has only worsened in the last two horrific decades. But the magic of Goblin Gold seems like a fitting coda for our bleak times, a bit of light to cling to.
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