Mushrooms are having a moment.
There is a documentary about mushroom coffee and mushrooms. There are start-ups developing alternatives using fungal filaments. leather When plasticAnd there are scientists who want to create an atlas of all the underground fungal networks under our feet around the world. increase.
That’s what I heard a few months ago from Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist based in Amsterdam. It was a daring idea to explore this vast world that is invisible but beneath our feet. I like to be bold I said yes to her invitation to a research trip.
I met Kears and her team in the forests of southern Chile, under the line of sight of a volcano on the edge of the Pacific. I wrote about her research here.
What I learned melted my heart a little.
Because their view of the forest was different from the view of the forest I had seen before. They didn’t see trees as just trees, they didn’t see fungi as fungi. They saw a relationship in the woods. They saw organisms intertwined in each other’s beings, sometimes symbiotically, often for self-interest.
Fungi were agents of entanglement.
“When I see a tree, I don’t remember its name,” said Giuliana Furci, director of the Fungi Foundation, a Santiago-based group. “What I see is a symbiote.”
On the first day of the expedition, I had a wilted face from Fulci. I thought mushrooms were plants. I also called those stalks stems.
Fulci was tolerant. I asked her a lot of silly questions and told her it was a danger to her job.
Dear readers, fungi are definitely not plants.
Like animals and plants, fungi are their own kingdom of life. They contain tiny yeasts, big mushrooms, and some are psychedelic. they are in the bread. they are in medicine. They clean up oil spills. Only a small fraction of fungal species have been identified.
Fungi sew things together.
Some varieties literally string life and death together. They decompose dead things – leaves, twigs, huge trunks of ancient trees – and turn them into soil so that more trees, twigs and leaves can grow. I began to think of myself as an agent.
Other types of fungi, such as mycorrhizal fungi, which Kiers is studying, hold soil together. They attach themselves to plant roots and spread underground. In doing so, they also involve trees in the network. We came to think of that underground fungal network as the secret Silk Road beneath our feet. Nutrients travel up the path to the tree. Carbon moves through the soil. Without fungi, soil cannot sequester carbon.
Some fungal species seem to do it quite well. Kiers wants to find these extreme secluders, decipher their genes, and ensure the land they are in is protected.
Biologist and author Merlin Sheldrake, who also participated in this expedition, said something that made me pause. said. Fungi have helped trees adapt to numerous environmental shocks, with man-made climate shocks being the latest. “A crisis is a crucible of new relationships,” said Sheldrake.
Inevitably, I thought of this in human terms. I think about my own relationships, especially in the crisis of the last few years, with the pandemic exacerbating the global challenges of rising authoritarianism, inequality and the dangers of climate change. I thought. I thought about the relationships that had nurtured me in my shock and the relationships that I could no longer take. I thought about symbiotic relationships and extractive relationships.
I often write in this newsletter about innovations and policies to cope with life on a hotter planet. Learning about fungi made me think more deeply about the relationships needed to cope with life on a hotter planet.
Maybe this helps explain why Fungi is having a moment. Fungi may embody the entanglement we crave.
In his book Life Entwined: How Fungi Shape the World, Change Minds, and Shape the Future, Sheldrake explains how learning about fungi has changed him. “These creatures challenge our categories,” he writes.
It certainly did the same for me.
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thank you for reading. I will be back on Friday.
Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward.
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