Heather and I met Trevor Goward in the late 1970s. It was a time when we were on the West Coast of Newfoundland (Gros Morne National Park) or in Ottawa at the National Herbarium. I was part of the Rare Plants team headed by George Argus. George was a Salix taxonomist. Other taxonomists, at the Museum, included Irwin Brodo (lichens), and Bob Ireland (mosses).
Fast forward to 2022, I am reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life.
’Goward, curator of lichens at UBC, is foremost a lichen obsessive (he has contributed around thirty thousand lichens to the university collection) and is no less a lichen taxonomist (he has named three genera and described thirty-six new lichen species).’ p.79.
He lives on the edge of a large wilderness in British Columbia (Wells Gray Provincial Park) and runs a website, Ways of Enlichenment.
The book ’Ways of Enlichenment’ is about forest lichens of northwest North America
’We believe that books on lichens need to answer two questions. The first question is, how does one learn to identify lichens. The second question is, why should one bother? It is this second question, not so much the first which is comparatively easy, that has preoccupied us for the past dozen years.’
From twelve readings on the lichen thallus.
”Lichens, he argues, have relevance far beyond their interest as objects of scientific inquiry. Lichens exist as a doorway, a portal. Look out this doorway in one direction and what you see is an ecosystem – a collection of unrelated species, fungi and alga and bacteria. But look out the same doorway in the other direction, and what you see now is an organism, in a sense no different from any other macroscopic organism.”
“The double status of lichens as organism and ecosystem make them the ideal model entities through which to contemplate a new scientific philosophic and artistic paradigm, now in the process of emerging.”
”In recent years, Trevor has reconfigured his 4 ha. home property, Edgewood Blue, into a not-for-profit place for learning, for naturalists and others committed to a closer relationship with the living world”.
Acknowledgements
Heather first discovered the Entangled Web. This, in turn, led us to the Ways of Enlichenment website. Edward added the graphics. Trevor responded to my email.
References
Merlin Sheldrake, 2020, Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures, Random House.
Trevor Goward and his team. Ways of Enlichenment web site waysofenlichenment.net
Postscript
If you find yourself in British Columbia, make the trip to Wells Gray Provincial Park. It is well worth the detour.
Ernest Blair Experiment 
2 thoughts on “Enlightenment”