Sensing Lichens

Abstract

Bioindication is a process whereby organisms signal environmental events such as air pollution, and that occurs across multiple organisms as they are affected by, sense and even transform their environments. Lichens are particularly sensitive bioindicator organisms that sense and accumulate environmental pollution. Also used to detect air pollution levels, lichens can be used to monitor environments in ways that are more indicative or qualitative in comparison to technical instruments. Bioindication could then be considered to be expressive not just of other ways of doing environmental sensing, but also as productive of other engagements with environmental politics that attend to the lived effects of pollution as experienced by nonhuman organisms. In this register of reworking environmental conflict and environmental sensing through pollution, I ask how lichens, as fungal-vegetal vectors for sensing environments, might go beyond representational modes of politics to generate more ecological and speculative encounters with environmental politics and worlds in the making. Using a speculative bioindicator garden as one method for encountering environments from a lichen point of view, I develop propositional ecological relations that might, through sensing environments in other registers, also realise more expansive environmental political engagements with conflicts such as pollution.

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