Photographie Contemporaine et Anthropocène

microhabitats or pocket forests to help people reimagine their place in nature, a “new ecology” (p. 169) without boundaries. In a special chapter on symbiotic ways of thinking, Zonca sees that fungus “cultivates” alga in a “nutritional strategy” to help it symbiotically survive (p. 174). Fungus cannot support itself, but when merged with alga as lichen, both flourish. This organism raises biological, philosophical, and political questions of individuality. In miniature, lichen supports other tiny organisms, so it’s a symbol of a forest: part consists of and contributes to the whole. Lichens, as nineteenth-century German and Russian botanists began to realize (not without controversy), represent plural entities, a form of communalism or at best mutualism. Symbiosis means two beings are cohabiting one organism without parasitism, both sharing one life externally and internally. This idea was confirmed late in the nineteenth century with the realization that fungi on plant roots were also symbiotic. In fact, many ecological theories of that time were driven by lichen studies. Following a long tradition of thinkers before, up to, and beyond Plato, Zonca continues his discussion of symbiosis with the idea that sympathetic harmony among species rests on a political foundation. By the 1870s in France, mutualism was viewed as social and biological, with voluntary association and shared assistance: Nature was not widely held to be a cooperative rather than as justifying capitalistic competition. He cites work by Lynn Margulis, who posited that on a cellular level, with the sharing of interacting genetic materials, evolution is fundamentally symbiotic. He goes on to note how symbiotic ideas from biology now touch many disciplines, from the arts to economics. None of this thinking reduces Darwin’s opinion about the struggle for existence. Links between organisms, Zonca admits, can become tentative. He suggests, therefore, that the idea of symbiosis not include shades of mutualism. A focus, rather, should be on an indefinite relationship that contains competitive cooperation epitomized in the fungus (earth)/alga (sea) lichen that’s laden with microbes so that the whole is almost void of singular identity. In nature, the secret to success is not dominance but political interdependence with a lack of separation. Symbiosis is not later acquired but integral to the formation of lichens. Thus, the concept of individuality is held in question, since what is considered a single organism is indeterminately open to other formations in potential process. This is a powerful metaphor that can shape not only ecological but also social thought. It’s not just that genes respond to the environment but that symbiotic partnering with the environment contributes to an organism’s genetic constitution, as is evident in lichens. Artists and poets capitalize on the notion of ecological fragmentation, according to Zonca. Symbiosis is about affiliating qualities and capacities to increase an organism’s “emergent” capabilities (p. 200). As elsewhere in the book, Zonca shows how artists accommodate these ideas in their works as expressions of nature and culture interacting. Zonca and the creative thinkers he adeptly assembles propose that humans, who are currently parasites to symbiotic Gaia, can enter into, per philosopher Michel Serres, a natural contract of mutual cohabitation and exchange of benefits with nature. Zonca irrefutably shows how for the sake of planetary health humans still have much to learn from these ancient organisms we call lichens.