Lichens will outlast a human civilization undone by its own barrenness

Evidence

For millennia, these lichens have held the responsibility of building up life and in an eyeblink of earth’s history we have set about undermining their work to usher in a time of great environmental stress, a barrenness of our own making. I suspect that lichens will endure. We could, too, if we listen to their teachings. If not, I imagine Umbilicaria will cover the rocky ruins of our time long after our delusions of separateness have relegated us to the fossil record, a ruffled green skin adorning the crumbling halls of power. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1012

Categorization

• SEED: Elegiac essay angle: the lichen as nature’s monument-builder that will ‘adorn the crumbling halls of power’—a concrete ecological image for anthropocene-vanishing-earth essays.
• STORYSTEM: Speculative fiction seed: a post-human world narrated from the perspective of lichen recolonizing the ruins of concrete power-structures.
• XREF: connects to: Civilizations collapse when they lose the will to defend themselves

Broader Connections

• Civilizations collapse when they lose the will to defend themselves #complicates (0.80)