Wrote Nina Newington on Jul 6, 2024:
As word spreads about the camp and our work to protect this area, we get an ever more interesting mix of visitors, from Antonija Livingstone, performance artist living in France, to Haeweon Yi from South Korea, PhD candidate and Climate Theatre person, to Keith Eggers, mycologist and retired professor, surveying fungi in some of the old growth forest here, to two members of the Southwest Paddlers Association and their canoes, come to check out the pristine lake they’ve heard about, to Carman Kerr, our MLA, and his constituent assistant, Evan Fairn.
For these last two we had planned a hike into the 9.2 ha stand of old growth forest that lies between camp and the lake. We always take a slightly different route in, just to see what we see.
We paid our respects to the grandmother yellow birch, along the way encountering a very large white ash, many ancient maples and ground so pit and moundy it rolls like a rough sea.
Your feet feel the history of the land and weather. Trees rising, falling, rotting, nourishing. Seedlings biding their time in the shade, waiting for a hurricane or just for an individual’s demise to open a hole in the canopy, for the sun to reach down toward the forest floor.
Meanwhile, down in the dark soil, networks of communication between fungi and roots flourish as they have for hundreds of millions of years, networks of exchange and reward, seduction and mutual benefit.
Somehow at Lichen Camp, symbiosis is always the topic. We can’t keep destroying nature for profit. Parasites that kill their hosts don’t last long.
There are ways to coexist that are mutually beneficial. Examples abound if we are willing to see them. That’s a big if for societies based on competition, control and domination. But wherever you look there are other ways of being. Like weeds growing in cracks in the asphalt, other ways survive.
And as the ‘weeds’ grow, the cracks widen.
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