Fungi Umwelt

Fungi has awakened an ecological awareness of the fundamental role organisms have in our ecosystem.

I walk in the forest every day in every season. There is so much to learn, it humbles me to think I'll never possibly comprehend how nature and the cosmos have an interconnectivity surrounding me from under my feet to the air I am breathing to the planets in the sky. It's a wonder that fungi, dead logs, leaves, plants, and trees have so much to do with our ability to live on this planet and even more so to teach us. I want to begin my essay by talking about my experience with mushrooms, ecology, and the relationship to soil while also focusing on how they are imperative to the health of humans and the condition of the planet. Another essential point I want to express is that learning about our own entangled interspecies relationship to organisms is only the beginning of a healthy perspective. In other words, a holistic perspective on our entangled species relationships focuses on the multiple ways in which disease brings into sharp focus the intimate

Fig 1.

Images by Maria Whiteman.

relationships humans share with other species. The idea of health for human beings and also for the planet requires a critical environmental analysis of the dynamic production of life that results from such imbricated human and nonhuman interactions through the arc of time.

My interest in fungi has taken me on a journey to the Northwest Cascades to join mycologist Ja Schindler, who leads fungi workshops on his farm four times a year with a group called Fungi for the People (FFTP). The course immerses in fungi: foraging, cuisine, cultivating, lab work, inoculating, making substrates, sterilizing, pasteurizing, composting, farming, and harvesting. I've worked with FFTP three times and will go back for one more workshop to finalize my work on bioremediation or myco-remediation. The pleasure at the end of each workshop is learning about the medicinal qualities of Lion's Mane, Reishi, Cordyceps, Turkey Tails, Chaga, and many other fungi. We sat around a fire and tasted a dozen medicinal mushroom teas, discussing, discovering, and describing what our taste buds were experiencing. The calm and euphoria were so delightful that we were all producing our own mycelia network with each other in the barn that day. Overcome by this world, I had gone "fungal" (Sheldrake 2020). It was one of the most life-altering experiences. One memory that really stands out for me is no one ever asks "what do you do" but rather "how did you get

Fig 2.

Images by Maria Whiteman.

here" and "when did mushrooms come into your life?" Mushrooms seem to attract the most interesting people from all over the world, drawing an energy and playfulness by building mycelia bonds. We were learning about all the sweetness of the earth by touch, sound, taste, and sight. FFTP is held on a certified organic farm—it's everything mushrooms exploding all your senses. The fungi world is illuminating and took me by surprise. I felt as though I had been given a secret about the universe, an inside look to an intelligence that's been around millions of years, and as a matter of fact, it has. In a scientific article a friend sent to me about "deep ancient fungi," Henrik Drake et al. (2021) give us a glimpse of how far back in time fungi can be discovered:

The findings suggest that fungi may be widespread decomposers of organic matter and overlooked symbiotic partners to other, more primitive, microorganisms, thereby capable of enhancing the production of greenhouse gases in the vast rock-hosted deep biosphere. Radioisotopic dating of tiny calcite crystals formed following microbial methane formation revealed an age of the fungi fossils to around 39 million years ago, more than 300 million years after the meteorite impact.

(34)

The science reveals interesting facts about fungi organisms that ecologist Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree, 2021) published recently on her...