On Becoming Moss

The below interview is part of Ecologies of Entanglement, a collaborative series between Are.na Editorial and Dark Properties.

If our world was organized by the principles that characterize moss, how might it feel? How might we feel? Collectively, I think we’d feel a whole lot better.

Here’s why: As a species, moss is inspirationally non-hierarchical. It is unhurried; it lives communally; it seems to universally thrive across topographies, climates, and timescales. It is also shaggily sensuous, physically resilient, and able to reproduce with or without sex. In this way, it offers ample provocation for reimagining our social order, for reorienting our attunement to our environments, and—with today’s interview in mind—for understanding how our access to information can systematically limit our thinking.

In the new web-based project Thinking With Moss, bryophytes (aka moss) serve as both subject and inspiration. Created by a transdisciplinary cohort of collaborators led by Elaine Ayers, Ahmed Ansari, and Tega Brain, the site assembles a sprawling range of mossy contributions including essays, historical prose, diaries, lesson plans, and more. Fittingly, the site requires patience and perseverance to browse. It literally changes with the weather, and by choosing to peruse the content as a “root, tree, or moss,” visitors can rearrange (or fully collapse) the site’s informational hierarchy—smartly pointing to how stratified organizing structures govern our world, and our access to all that it contains.

As Thinking With Moss explains, the site invites visitors to “explore new models for how we think, design and develop digital collections and archives that speak to the invisible or under-attended histories of the natural sciences.” In a sense, the project aims to take moss’ “ambiguous, downtrodden” nature as a provocation to point out (and fix!) some of the ways that our [primarily Western] institutions use their artifact and specimen collections to hoard power, wealth, and access to education.

In today’s interview, Elaine Ayers—one of the site’s principal investigators, as well as a Yale professor—shares how she’s leveraged her privileged position inside of these elite, longstanding institutions to work towards collection repatriation, reparations, and (perhaps even) complete institutional dismantling.

I am inspired by Elaine’s commitment to speaking her ethics despite the fact that she could easily become unemployable for doing so. It reminds me that we could all be a little more bossy—or, a little more mossy—with our employers, and do more to dismantle their outdated operational models and business practices from the inside out.

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Willa Köerner: To start, I like to ask everyone what they’re growing. Is there anything especially green in your life right now?

Elaine Ayers: I have a household full of plants, many of which have traveled around the country with me for years. Living an academic life means moving constantly—I've actually moved 30 times in the last 10 years—so most of my plants date back to an individual apartment and period in time. Each one tells a story of a past life. [Laughs]

Willa: In your bio, you describe yourself as “working on the entangled histories of natural history, colonial violence, and collecting.” How do these fields intersect for you?

Elaine: A central thesis of my work is that the history of collecting at wealthy institutions—natural history museums and botanical gardens in particular—is a story of profound loss. Loss of human lives, loss of animal and plant lives, and loss of mineral lives, all of which now sit in museums in a state of unnatural preservation.

We tend to think of “preservation” as a net good, but not only does this supersede questions of repatriation—it also results in us not letting animals or plants go through their own natural systems of decay. Overall, preservation for human-centric accumulation—i.e. institutional collecting—has a very violent and sad history.

Willa: To ask a devil's-advocate question: If historical artifacts aren't preserved in institutional collections, how would we go about studying them?

Elaine: I don't think we need to study them, necessarily. The argument that preserving things in museum collections allows us to study them, therefore making it a net good, begs the question: “Who is it good for?” Institutional collections are good for Western scientists, but certainly not for the communities that they came from.

Humans studied plants and animals in many ways before museums ever existed. There are plenty of ways of telling stories, crafting narratives, and understanding histories that don’t involve cataloging unnaturally preserved specimens into collapsible storage and putting Latin names on them—names which have nothing to do with the names they originally had. I think it's profoundly selfish of us to constantly seek preservation for our own purposes.

Willa: You’re speaking in a way that feels very anti-institutional, and yet you currently work at Yale, and have worked for many museums. How can you work inside of elite institutions while maintaining this perspective?

Elaine: I just had this conversation with my students. A lot of them are grappling with the ethics of benefiting from the same institutions that I’ve certainly benefited from. The question I come back to is, “Can we start to do better within these institutions, or would it be better to dismantle them?” While I’d actually argue that we should dismantle places like Yale—even if I lose my job—the more diplomatic answer is that sometimes, the only way to institute any change is to work from inside of the system. As a Yale professor, I try to use the immense privilege of my background and position to critique what it means to have this kind of education.

Also, I don’t think Yale is going anywhere anytime soon. So the question becomes, “What can we do?” I’m heartened by universities like MIT giving free tuition to students from families who make under $200,000 a year. That’s a step in the right direction. And, there are centers within universities that are actively pushing the necessary conversations. The Gilder Lehrman Center for Slavery at Yale is doing incredible work, for example. We are hosting a panel on repatriation and the legacies of scientific racism in museums, using Yale as a case study, coming up in February. So there are really good people at these institutions who are actively trying to do better.

In terms of consulting within museums, that’s its own set of questions. But similarly, I tend to work with museums as a way to critique them from the inside. We have to be consistently critiquing institutions from all levels for anything to change.

Willa: As someone who used to work for a museum myself, I’m excited that you seem to be getting hired by museums, despite your critical approach. Do you feel like museums are trying to make real amends with their repatriation efforts—or is it more about PR?

Elaine: Some institutions are actually interested in repatriation, and others are simply freaking out because they see change coming, so they want to get ahead of it. I’m currently working at a small institution with a staff that does believe in the politics of repatriation. Even there, it’s easier to convince them to take action by saying, “People are going to figure out that you have human bodies in the coffers of your museum, and it’s going to be a much better look if you start the process of repatriation now.” It’s kind of a gross way of doing that work, but it has been the most effective argument.

That’s partially because NAGPRA, a law passed in 1990, is finally being upheld—after 35 years of little to no institutional movement. Even though it’s an incredibly limited law that only applies to federally recognized Native American remains and funerary objects, that’s an area where work is really happening. Deb Haaland—our first Native American Secretary of the Interior—gave this law a deadline of 2029, marking the first time that it would be enforced across the nation. But, I’m not holding my breath now that we have a new Republican secretary coming in under Trump, which is incredibly disappointing.

Willa: What does the actual process of repatriation look like?

Elaine: Repatriation is a really slow process. Even when an effort is made to repatriate something, it doesn’t always happen. The only thing NAGPRA requires of an institution is to make remains and funerary objects available for repatriation. There are tribal officers who deal in this work for most federally recognized tribes within the US. Some tribes have been proactive about repatriation, while some have their priorities in other places. If a tribe chooses to pursue repatriation, the actual act of burial is completely governed by the tribe, and they each have, of course, very different customs for what that looks like.

Willa: If the primary goal is to get the remains back into the hands of their community of origin, does this change at all with cultural artifacts, or with plant specimens?

Elaine: While I don’t believe that there should be a hierarchy around repatriation, it’s much easier to convince people that repatriation is necessary if it’s a human body versus a plant or mineral body—even though plants and minerals were also collected in immensely violent ways that had real impacts on people’s bodies.

One thing I’ve been gunning for with botanical repatriation, which is less of an obvious process, is that the specimens simply go back to botanical gardens or natural history museums within their home nation.

Right now, Western institutions are continuing to profit off of colonial violence in ways that are not always obvious. It’s easy to say, “Sure, the New York Botanic Garden had a colonial history, but now it’s done.” Quite frankly, though, it’s still enacting colonial violence by restricting access to its collection, by underpaying its employees, by holding type specimens collected during colonial missions, and in many other ways. The wealth consolidation at these institutions is a major problem, and there’s a really good case to be made not just for repatriation, but for some form of reparations as well.

Willa: Let’s shift gears to talking about moss, and specifically about your project, Thinking With Moss. What does it mean to “think like moss?”

Elaine: Moss teaches us to pay attention in a very different way from how we’re accustomed to seeing things in the attention economy. It inspires us to be more attuned to the systems that are larger than us, which we’re a part of, and to think in terms of reciprocal relationships that extend across timescales. For example: What would it mean to see myself as part of a community extending into the generations that came before me, and that will come after me?

Moss lives collectively—there is no “individual” moss, which I find so anti-capitalist. It is home and host to many other communities of organisms and microbes. Also, moss is anti-death. Not only is it its own preservative agent, but you can bring dried moss back to life with a drop of water, hundreds of years after it’s supposed death, as long as fruiting bodies are present.

It also reproduces both sexually and asexually, offering a queer lens through which we can see sexuality and reproduction in expansive, category-defying ways. Moss just doesn’t work very well within the boxes that we force it into, which is true of a lot of plants and fungi. Thinking outside of forced categorization can be a really helpful model for us, both in scholarly ways and in how we live with one another.

Willa: I love how on the site, visitors must choose to browse as moss, as a tree, or as a root. How do the navigation methods differ?

Elaine: Choosing “moss” puts everything out there, with the content sort of dancing around the page in constant movement. Choosing “root” will cause things to be unveiled through a taxonomy-based architecture. We tagged every post with questions and themes, so navigating as a root lays bare all of that structured thinking. Then “tree” is the most simple way to browse, as it just gives you all of the entries lined up.

Offering three ways to browse felt like a playful, experimental way of designing a site, but it’s also turned out to be great for accommodating neurodivergence. I was showing the site to my students, many of whom have ADHD, and they loved the chaotic “moss” model. Personally, I prefer the “root” model, as I like to see the architecture of what’s there. It’s been interesting to see the way that people’s brains navigate differently, and to think about how we might design websites in the future to accommodate various learning styles. It makes me wonder, “Why don’t we get to choose the way that information is presented to us, and how we consume it?” The thing is, it wouldn’t be hard to offer that option.

Willa: I think about that all the time with Instagram, wishing I had the ability to control which parts of the app were shown to me. If I could, I would immediately turn off ads and most of the algorithmically driven stuff—which would make the experience so much less harmful. But, of course, offering that kind of experience would completely erode their business model.

Similarly, I love how the Thinking With Moss site is unslick and obtuse. Friction can be such an important tool in website design, and it is weirdly provocative to require visitors to actually think before getting funneled through a website.

Elaine: Right. Moss teaches us that friction and moving slowly are good—and that they’re a necessary part of living, surviving, and thriving in the world. Part of the point of the site is that it forces you to perform some labor in working with it.

My former grad advisor, D. Graham Burnett, is part of the Matthew Strother School of Attention, which offers workshops that force us to think about where our attention has gone, and how to thoughtfully reclaim it. We live in a world where you can scroll and scroll and waste your time for hours without consuming or retaining any real information. We know that this has profoundly horrible effects on kids; to ask my students to resist the urge to scroll is literally impossible.

Even from when I started teaching, which was not that long ago, I’ve seen my students’ attention spans decline. The pandemic had a lot to do with it. Now, I can’t even assign my students a book anymore because they literally can’t read one. When I tried to assign a book in previous classes, I ended up explaining the book for the entire three-hour class, resulting in no meaningful discussion. And the students got really pissed off, saying I was being “too hard and unreasonable.”

I don’t want to sound as though I’m complaining about my students. I don’t blame them for not being able to read books. It takes me longer to read things than it used to, because our brains are so warped by “micro” content, like, “Let’s sum up this entire amazing book in three Instagram slides.” However, it’s not all bad. I do get students who are much more politically involved now—especially around climate activism. Many of my students have grown up talking about climate change in a way that, quite frankly, our generation just didn’t.

Willa: When I was in college in the late aughts, I don’t think “climate change” was a thing yet.

Elaine: I remember when we started talking about it, it felt like some sort of depersonalized, distant-future problem related to the ozone layer. Now that things are so urgent, I see my students taking action in pretty inspiring ways. I had one really good class that consisted of almost all women of color—and I don’t think that is coincidental. They’re pissed at these institutions. They’re pissed at their parents. They’re pissed at corporations. Coming back after the election was honestly, in some ways, kind of amazing—just seeing how upset they were. I mean, that sounds horrible, but they really care, and really wanted to talk about what happened in a way that completely defies apathy.

Willa: As a last question, what does the process of working on a book about moss feel like? I’m just curious how you’re approaching the task of thinking with moss.

Elaine: The book idea emerged as I was working on moss as just one of the plants for my dissertation. The moss chapter became so big and so unbound—which is very mossy—that I realized it needed to be its own thing.

I’ve now been thinking about moss across hundreds of years, and across every continent. As a subject, it is completely tentacular in a way that most other plants just aren’t. I eventually realized that I could tell the entire history of the colonial world through moss.

It’s funny, when people ask me what the book is about, I’m like, “It’s about violence, and shipping, and porn… and all these other things that don’t seem to go together.” Moss is rooted through and entangled with everything. So writing the book has, in some ways, felt really hard, because moss exists in every direction. And in other ways, this made writing the book really easy, because everything comes back to moss.

Willa: Do you feel like you’re becoming moss? [Laughs]

Elaine: I’ve been studying this one moss guy—Richard Spruce, a colonial British bryologist—since grad school. He’s probably my favorite historical figure. He was a moss specialist who traveled through the Amazon for 15 years, who also had an undiagnosed chronic illness. One of the reasons he left England for the Amazon was for the tropical weather. But by the end of his life, his body was literally falling apart—his teeth were falling out, he was losing his eyesight, he was bleeding out of his orifices. I mean, really horrible stuff. But, he joked to a friend that he was becoming one of his mosses, like, “I only have this many teeth left, which is what this species of moss has.”

When you’re doing that careful work with such a small thing for so many years, it does start to feel like a part of you. The study becomes embodied. One of my favorite parts of archival work is getting home after a long day and noticing that I have tiny scraps of paper on my clothes from all these letters, or dust specks from 19th-century bryophytes. I love realizing this was Darwin’s specimen, and now pieces of it are on my jeans.

Thanks to my friend Frances Cathryn for recommending I chat with Elaine!