Ted Audio Collective.

Audio Collective.

This is Design Matters with

This is Design Matters with Debbie Millman

from Design Observer.com.

On this program, Debbie Millman talks with artist Rachel Susman

about her new book, The oldest living things in the world,

about the concept of deep time,

and about what it was like to be abandoned without supplies or a phone in Greenland.

It was sort of a profound experience of

realizing we are almost never completely alone and

disconnected and I wasn't sure what I would do.

Here's Debbie Milman.

Antarctic moss, bristlecone pine,

well, wuchia mirabillas, brain coral,

Antarctic beach, Segole Bayob, Siberian Actino Bacteria, Quaking Aspen, stromatolites. Living examples of all these plant species were around

when Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth and in some cases millennia before that.

For the past 10 years,

Rachel Sussman has been on a mission to find

and document some of the oldest living plants on the planet.

Her new book, The Oldest Living Things in the World,

collects her photographs of these venerable organisms, and she's here today to talk about these

...