Lichen

This note is part of a series written from Quisquiza, in the high-Andean cloud forest of Colombia, where ecological restoration and research now unfold side by side. It reflects on how living and working within this terrain gradually reshapes the way I think about memory, information, and the infrastructures built to sustain them. Check all the notes in this section's index.

As everywhere else, lichens grow slowly up here in Quisquiza, attaching themselves to bark and stone with patient precision.

From a distance, they look almost like stains. Up close, however, they are architectures.

They spread across exposed surfaces in pale crusts, powdery films, branching miniatures, or soft green-grey-orange-white folds that curl slightly when dry and swell again with (the neverending) moisture. Some cling so tightly to stone that they seem painted onto it. Others hang from branches in thin filaments that move with the fog-laden wind of the mountain.

I still remember learning about them in my Ecology 101 class, many years ago, when I became a biologist. "Primary succession," we were told: the first colonizers of bare rock. The first organisms capable of remaining where almost nothing else can.

Lichens settle on surfaces exposed to cold, radiation, wind, and scarcity. Volcanic material. Dead wood. Roof tiles (like my house's...) They tolerate conditions that would desiccate or destabilize less specialized forms of life. Not because they dominate those environments, but because they operate differently within them.

What we call a lichen is not a single organism in the conventional sense. It is a long-term biological arrangement: a fungus living together with photosynthetic partners, usually algae or cyanobacteria, and often entire associated microbial communities that complicate the picture even further.

(Even biology resists simplifying them.)

The fungal component provides structure, protection, water regulation. The photosynthetic partner produces energy. Neither dissolves entirely into the other. They remain distinct organisms participating in a shared architecture. And not always peacefully. Lichen symbiosis is not a fairy tale of perfect cooperation. It is conditional coexistence maintained over time under environmental pressure. An arrangement stable enough to persist, but dynamic enough to survive exposure.

Lichens do not merely occupy surfaces. They alter them. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, they trap dust and organic particles. They retain moisture a little longer than bare stone would. Some produce weak acids capable of chemically weathering rock itself, contributing over long periods to the formation of the first thin mineral soils.

These are tiny intervention with geological and biological consequences. In recovering ecosystems, these processes matter enormously. Before shrubs arrive, before roots stabilize slopes, before forests accumulate depth and shadow, lichens begin modifying the substrate at microscopic scale. They prepare conditions. They reduce exposure. They create the possibility for later complexity.

Not dramatically. Not visibly, unless one kneels down and pays attention.

The mountain is full of processes like that.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about lichens if one insists on thinking in our usually rigid categories.

They destabilize many of the neat conceptual boundaries we tend to rely on: individual organism, collaboration, competition, surface, structure, even the distinction between autonomy and dependence. Biology itself has spent decades arguing over how exactly to classify them. Symbiosis. Mutualism. Controlled parasitism. Composite organism. Miniature ecosystem.

The closer one looks, the less stable the categories become. And yet the lichen persists.

Not through purity. Not through internal uniformity. Certainly not through isolation. It persists because different organisms, performing different functions, remain capable of maintaining a shared structure under exposure long enough for stability to emerge from it.

Up here, surrounded by fog, wet bark, exposed rock, and slowly recovering soil, that old ecological lesson feels considerably less theoretical than it once did in university classrooms.

Makes me think about information systems, and about how they often behave as if coherence depended primarily on simplification. Standardized metadata schemas. Harmonized ontologies. Controlled vocabularies. Institutional pressure toward normalization and interoperability. The assumption underneath is usually straightforward enough: stable systems emerge when ambiguity and difference are progressively reduced.

But many knowledge environments resemble exposed mountain surfaces far more than stable laboratory conditions.

Archives accumulate incompatible memories. Libraries contain conflicting classification traditions layered over one another across centuries. Oral knowledge resists documentary logic. Local naming systems survive beneath official taxonomies. Colonial structures remain embedded inside supposedly neutral infrastructures.

Under those conditions, enforced uniformity may produce administrative clarity, but it can also reduce resilience. Systems become cleaner, more legible, easier to scale — and simultaneously less capable of sustaining complexity under real environmental pressure.

Lichens suggest another possibility.

Not the elimination of difference, but the construction of structures capable of holding difference together long enough for more complex forms of continuity to emerge afterward.