An ode to cryptobiotic soil crusts. 

Indulging in an innate human desire to project onto the natural world, this syllabus uses cryptobiotic soil crusts as a framework for seeking larger truths about time, maintenance, art, care, resilience, and climate futurity. The selected materials respond to the ongoing existence and endurance of biocrusts with the distinct intention of not anthropomorphizing; rather, this syllabus seeks to learn through the microbiome without relying on symbolism. Below are three units curated in reaction to but not explicitly about this week’s Muse—cryptobiotic soil crusts.

CRYPTOBIOTIC SOIL CRUSTS

In much of the American Southwest and Great Plains, cryptobiotic soil crusts are landscapes of “hidden [crypto-], life [-biotic].” 

Made of fungi, algae, cyanobacteria, lichens, and mosses fused to soil particles, biocrusts appear as dark, spongy layers on the surface of the earth. As they mature, the microbiomes form inch-sized structures that resemble Gaudi’s porous chapels. The fungal architectures grow slowly over time through cyanobacteria (one of the oldest known lifeforms on earth) emitting a sticky residue that binds the organic matter together. Many living biocrusts are thousands of years old. 

Biocrusts fill critical roles in their ecosystems by protecting loose soil against erosive forces and contributing to water retention, soil fertility, and carbon supply. They endure many extreme conditions, and are commonly found in exceptionally arid and hot environments. Without access to water, the living organisms can dry out and suspend respiration for long periods of time until their metabolic functions are restarted by moisture. Repairs soon begin where damage does occur, no matter how gradually. Cryptobiotic soil crusts relentlessly “Hold the Place in Place” (a phrase borrowed by Soil Ecologist Jayne Belnap). 

I first encountered cryptobiotic soil crusts while hiking in Glen Canyon, NM. I was warned to watch where I stepped because a miscalculation would undo centuries of development. As impressively resilient as soil crusts are, they are vulnerable to touch. Not only was I in front of the oldest living matter I had encountered, but I was completely capable of interference. A wrong step or wrong doing would cause a lesion that would take four times my lifespan to heal. Cryptobiotic soil crusts let me measure myself against a time-scale that is somewhere between anthropologic and geologic. Their continuous cycles of steady growth and repair imply an order of maintenance that we, as humans, could stand to channel.

Read Jayne Belnap’s homonymous U.S. Geological Survey of cryptobiotic soil crusts
Watch New Mexico adventure bikers cinematically ride a Cryptobiotic Crust Wonderland
Read the Biological Soil Crust Wikipedia, and if you feel emboldened, check out WikiProject Soil and WikiProject Fungi.

UNIT I DEEPER CLOCKS

In recent years many have thought about what we can learn about deep time (or the billions of years since the Big Bang) from rocks, mountains, crystals, and stones. Older than us but younger than geology, cryptobiotic soil and fungi prompt similar questions about continuous lives deeper than our own. This unit strings together resources for conceiving of new, deeper clocks:

Read Marcia Bjørnerud’s Timefulness (2022) to conceive of enormous planetary timescales and embody what Bjørnerud calls “timefulness” with intent.

Visit Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton at MoMA PS1 to move “through panchanaka (manifold spacetimes) that traverse the constraints of Ecclesiastical doctrine and state law.” 

Watch Deborah Stratman’s Last Things (50 minutes; 2023) for a thoughtful investigation into the disregarded lives of stones past, present, future & imaginary. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.

Read Roger Caillois’ The Writings of Stones (1970). “I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.” 

Listen to Five Minutes of Pink Oyster Mushroom Playing Modular Synthesizer for your fungal soundscape needs: vibrations from another species!

UNIT II THE MAINTENANCE INSTINCT

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit (Everything changes, nothing perishes). — OVID, METAMORPHOSES, AD 8

The National Park Service (U.S.) repeatedly refers to biological soil crusts as “continuously living crusts” in their articles about the microbiomes. The phrase brings to mind the ship of Theseus and what it means for biocrusts to be in constant renewal and repair with no certainty of final death. In her Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969), Mierle Laderman Ukeles defines the Life Instinct (predicated on maintenance) as “unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium.” Without prescribing too much meaning to the life cycles of cryptobiotic soil crusts, I look to them as cherished models of maintenance. The microbiomes keep their steady healing in the wake of increasingly extreme conditions, employing processes that are invisible to the human eye—a quiet labor of continuation, from where we stand at least. The curated materials in this unit are all artworks which advocate for supporting systems of care over time, and lifting the cloaks of disregard and invisibility that so often veil them:

Read Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969)

“Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.” 

Look and listen to On Kawara’s One Million Years (1993/1999…etc.) to “listen to the hum of living” and feel the “feeling of being alive, breath to breath” (Ukeles on On Kawara as a critical maintenance artist in a 2009 Art in America interview). 

Watch Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger’s Side by Side (2006) and read Maren and Me (2009) for notes on maintaining friendship in collaboration and collaboration in friendship.

Watch Joiri Minaya’s Siboney (10 minutes; 2016) for looping channels of steady growth and immediate disruption.

UNIT III CLIMATE FUTURITY, CRUST FUTURITY

Emerging from a locus of deep time and resilience, a serious consideration of cryptobiotic soil crusts might level our constructions of climate futurity. Its life cycles complicate the popular binary that nature is either all-healing or that human interference has doomed the planet beyond all hope. While the microbiomes can be characterized by relentless self-repair, this repair is slow, fragile, and conditional. The lifespans of biocrusts directly contradict sensational narratives of Nature’s radical ability to return to normalcy in the absence of intervention (a popular and telling example is the virality of dolphins returning to the Venice canals days into the Covid-19 pandemic). Simultaneously, biocrusts beam signals of hope that the natural world will continue to heal itself even in the most extreme conditions; their resilience seems to promise recovery, even if it will be long after our departure. 

A careful study of most things going on in nature will yield similar conclusions on the complicated realities of climate futurity. This unit compiles resources which advocate for the mobilization of natural processes, art, and lessons from other species as powerful tools for conceiving climate futurity.

Read Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (2013) to grasp that which occupies such vast spatial and temporal dimensions that they evade thing-ness (i.e. climate change, oil, nuclear waste…etc.). 

See the subsequent exhibition Hyperobjects and Dave Hickey’s essay Earthscapes, Landworks and Oz (1971) to consider art and natural processes as mediatory tools for knowing the unknowable through concentrated entities.

See the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Land Use Database!!!!

Read Charles Bowden’s “The Wisdom of Rats” from Contested Ground (2009) for an essay broaching constructed History, deep time, and what will outlast us all.

See Rebecca Belmore, “Wave Sound” (2017). It’s the body and the ability to listen—to listen well, and experience not what we think is the ‘quiet,’ but what is the world outside of our bodies. Moreover, it’s about listening to the water and the land and all the other beings that live out there, too.