Ways of Enlichenment: The Book

So it begins: ways of enlichenment, nine years in the making.

The first thing to know about our upcoming book Ways of Enlichenment is that it’s about the lichens of northwest North America.

And the first thing to know about lichens is that they are composite. Even the simplest lichen is composed of at least two unrelated organisms: a fungus and an alga. Already this raises an intriguing question: Should lichens be thought of as ecosystems or do they more closely resemble organisms? In fact lichens are ecosystems and organisms at one and the same time. It all depends on how you think about them.

How, then, do lichenologists think about lichen? We live in reductionist times, so it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that most lichenologists think about lichens primarily in terms of their component parts, that is, as fungi and algae. We don’t say that most lichenologists will necessarily agree with this assessment; but we do believe that that this is more or less how it is.

Evidence? Consider the astonishing fact that lichenologists have not yet found it convenient to give lichens scientific names. True, lichenologists have been very busy naming the component parts of lichens – the fungus and the alga – but this only serves to underscore our point.

So there you have it: more than 13,000 kinds of lichens exist on planet Earth, yet not a single one of them has a scientific name. Whenever a lichenologist wants to refer to a whole lichen, the best she can do is apply the name of its fungal partner, as in Vulpicida canadensis, illustrated above. But in the long run this approach is misleading, and certainly it can create more problems than it solves. Like how to reconcile the way lichens look and behave in the field with the way molecular markers tell us their respective fungal partners are related. A problem indeed.

Obviously we don’t mean to suggest there is something inherently wrong with focusing on the parts of the lichen consortium. What we wish to suggest, rather, is that the time has come to dedicate equal time to thinking about the lichen thallus itself: to take what science has taught us about the behind-the-scenes functioning of the lichen thallus, and apply it to the difficult exercise of seeing lichens whole. Not from the microscale perspective of how well a lichen functions at a given site at a given time (that’s what lichen ecophysiologists do), but rather from the macroscale perspective of where lichens actually grow, how abundant they are, and how and under what conditions they get established. We call this approach Lichen Distributional Ecology.

Learning about Lichen Distributional Ecology is what our upcoming book Ways of Enlichenment is all about. We say “book” but actually we mean “books,” since Ways of Enlichenment will ultimately consist of four volumes. Volume 1 treats foliose macrolichens, Volume 2 fruticose macrolichens, Volume 3 mesolichens, and Volume 4 crustose lichens.

Each volume of Ways will provide illustrated keys to all lichen species known to occur in northwest North America, and will offer detailed species accounts for all of the common species and most of the rare ones. Volume 1, for example, will treat about 400 foliose species. Also provided are notes on lichen theory: what lichens really are, how lichens function, and how they can be used to deepen our collective understanding of natural ecosystems. We also provide original distribution maps, as well as up-to-date notes on global occurrence. Finally we offer literally hundreds of stunning images by Anna Roberts and Tim Wheeler. Here’s a small sampling.

We expect the first volume of Ways to come off the press some time in late 2011. If you’d like to stay informed, please email us.