Miriam Simun

"Eleven years ago, I asked a botanist: What is the value of a species? She had dedicated her career to the protection of one tiny endangered plant - a plant that most people never noticed, a plant that appeared to serve no particularly vital ecological function.

She answered my question with a question: What is the value of a person?

Eleven years ago, I wrote Ecologists have only one god: Biodiversity. I am happy to report the situation has changed. I celebrate it. Afterall, change is god, as Octavia told us.

Or - if you are not growing you are dying. This cliche but useful epitaph has downloaded directly into the tissues of my skin, at a cellular level, in my three weeks here at Providenza, during the turn from summer to fall. I am a city dweller, through and through - for generations now. It was the first time in my life I would go to a garden instead of a store, a cafe, a refrigerator, to get the vegetables that would be my lunch.

When I arrived it was a bounty of tomatoes - plump red juicy skin-stretched, sometimes bruised, red, yellow, the purple striped were the tastiest - zebra I think - tomatoes everywhere. We were so full of tomatoes we didn’t know what to do with them anymore. Cannelle suggested ice cream.

A few weeks later, and I’m searching on my hands and knees in the soil, trying to find one last juicy fruit among the rotten, battered, never-grown end-of-the-season crop. How quickly the shift - from a life so overflowing you not only take it for granted, but it even grazes nausea - to death, total emptiness.

How to celebrate death ~ and in doing so, recognize it, welcome it, or maybe simply allow for it. As one of the scientists at the Conservatoire botanique national de Corse told me, and I’m paraphrasing here, “things die, species disappear, this is life.”

Five years ago, at the university just across the water in Marseille, nineteen scientists from Aix-Marseille made “A Plea for a Socio-ecosystem-Based Approach.” They argue that the current approach to managing ecosystems - the “species approach” - is a mismanagement of the already sparse resources we have dedicated to protecting the ecological systems that sustain and are sustained by our non-human kin.

“The protection of an iconic and endearing species is obviously easier than that of tiny zooplankton species, although the latter may play a far more important role than the former in the functioning of healthy ecosystems…"species-by-species' management is unrealistic…Ecosystems are units of biological and spatial organization that include all the organisms, their interactions, the functional compartments they belong to, along with the components of the abiotic environment. The concept of the socio-ecosystem is useful insofar as it emphasizes the fact that man is part of ecosystems. Here, the authors [make a plea for] a comprehensive, socio-ecosystem-based approach in the field of environmental management.”

Man, and all other human genders, are inseparable from ecological systems - and it is the system, not its various individual parts, that needs to be protected. Sometimes individual beings or even species die, and that in itself might be just an acceptable part of life - though, the currently underway mass extinctions are a harbinger of nothing good. We do need the system to remain healthy for most of life (as we know it) to continue. And still, as one of the authors of this plea would later tell me in Marseille, “the ecosystem also has a trajectory, so it is never the same.”

I think it’s easy to spot, and certainly true, that our ecological focus on individual organisms is all tied up with a broader cultural shift over the last hundred years towards hyper-individualism - brought on by the American century, neoliberalism, the waning collapse of various long-standing social institutions. I am not nearly the first to point out just how we humans tend to take the systems we invent to govern ourselves, and then apply them to the systems we perceive to govern the natural world. In David Graeber’s fun little essay, What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? he describes Darwin borrowing the title for The Origin of the Species from an early economist of capitalism, while the Russian turn-of-the-century naturalist and revolutionary anarchist Kropotkin, pointed to the role of mutual aid in evolution.

How we can think always affects what we can see.

But coming back to the individuals vs. systems debate, I do also think it’s a cognitive thing. As humans we understand our world through stories, and stories need characters. Systems make complicated characters. It’s so much easier to animate and empathize with a whale, a polar bear - or even a plant.

It was with this paysage for a backdrop that I began my dive into the story of Centranthus trinervis. There is only one place left on earth where the endangered plant Centranthus trinervis survives uncultivated: a

single rockface on the southern edge of Corsica, a modest mountain named la Trinité: the Trinity. In Christianity the Trinity signifies one God in three persons - father, son, spirit - their interweaving represents indivisibility. I’ve heard before God talked about as the conjoining links of indivisibility between all things…

There are approximately 100 specimens of this plant left in the world. On la Trinité, the Centranthus trinervis grows on the nearly vertical rockface. One must rappel by rope, in order to get anywhere near it. As the botanist working with this plant tells me, “it’s a mess, because every time we go on site, we need some help from climbers, and it's hard to find the plants and its complicated.” It doesn’t have a smell, it doesn’t have any known human uses, and almost no (human) knows it’s there.

And still twice a year, Leo calls upon expert rock climbers to come, climb the rock, install bolt hangers, count the species, or install humidity sensors, or some other observational task, and then remove the bolt hangers so that unwitting rock climbers don’t comb and climb all over the last few survivors of this species. It’s perhaps problematic, given the limited resources afforded to habitat protection, that so much is spent on this plant.

All this effort for something most of us can’t see, can’t use, can’t smell, can’t even calculate it’s benefit. It’s such an absurd and beautiful drama. All these men deployed in protection of this tiny little plant, blooming little purple flowers every June. Hanging dozens of meters in the air in an attempt to measure, precisely, just how humid the Centranthus trinervis would like its air. I love this story.

And still, perhaps the mobilization of all these efforts and resources - perhaps it's time for a redeployment. How to redeploy not to another species or place, but to the invisible sticky thread between things? That’s for next time.

For this time, I’m interested in the specificity of the thing. The endless worlds that open up when you go deep. Over the last weeks I kept returning to snorkel in the waters around Plage de Negro, my favorite beach near Providenza. Every time I returned to put my head below the water I found myself astounded to be in a completely different place - the wind, the current, the seaweed, the visibility. The time, the return, the embeddedness, the rootedness it takes to witness change. I think only from this position can you find the way, the how, to say goodbye, or hello, or (perhaps, from the perspective of the Centranthus trinervis), to go fuck right off.

I’m interested in how goodbyes - and also celebrations - have happened on this island for centuries. The processions. The prayers. The songs. Polyphonic singing is particularly popular in Corsica; polyphony - the coming together of individual parts to form a single melody - a systems song if there ever was one. My favorite song to drive through these mountains these days has been Introitu. It is the deep sound that strikes me, but upon a little digging I learn the lyrics:

“Confundantur et revereantur, qui quaerunt animam meam.

Dum confringuntur ossa mea, exprobraverunt mihi, qui tribulant me inimici mei.

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto.

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.”

In our first week we went to a concert of four men singing at the Ghjesgia Santa Anna. Between every song, the guitarist would stand up and deliver a speech - it felt more as a lecture than a concert. Antoine, taking pity on me and mon peine existant French, whispered a live translation in my ear, the best he could. Of course much was lost in translation but also something gained - perhaps because I couldn’t grasp all the details, the main theme came through plus forte: a deep pride in Corsica and a deep anger against the French. I am interested if this pride (and anger, and even vengance) can be harnessed on behalf of this deeply - and solely - Corsican life form that is the Centranthus trinervis.

Just as the mountains produced a culture that encompass Coriscan pride - just consider the Lamentu di u Pastore, the Shepard’s Lament that is sung across valleys to convey loss, mourning, or existential loneliness - so too does culture, in a way, produce the Centranthus trinervis. This place and its culture, and this plant, are inextricably linked - a socio-ecosystem. So then, can I harness the island’s nationalism to celebrate an extinguishing flower? And if I do - which songs do we sing?

Corsican polyphonic song is almost exclusively sung by men, with two notable exceptions: the voceru, and the nanna, both of which are always sung by women. I have been thinking about the nanna - the lullaby - as an appropriate sonic vehicle with which to gently lay down our overconcentrated focus - if not our care - on the Centranthus trinervis.

But perhaps it is the voceru, sung by a polyphony of women at the funeral procession, that is most fitting. The voceru, unlike the lament which is sung by many cultures at funerals and is centered on sadness, the voceru’s focus is anger - anger at an unjust or unexpected death, often calling for revenge if the deceased has been murdered. With fewer than 120 individuals remaining, the Centranthus trinervis is one of the 50 most endangered species in the entire Mediterranean region. If this species ultimately dies due to the tiny changes in humidity levels that human-system-caused climate change brings about - is it murder?

What is love in the face of extinction? And what of vengeance?"