I went back [to western Oregon] last fall, wanting to understand the same thing Christian did: what a changing climate means for mushrooms. What might we learn from the exuberant cindercap and all of their kin? How does one lie dormant for an eternity and then thrive amid what appears, to some, as disaster? Because it seemed to me that disaster was unfolding all around. Climate catastrophes were increasing exponentially, and American rancor was at an epic level, and an election was right around the bend. How could I use fungi, and all that we know—and don’t know—about them, as a lens through which I might find greater understanding? What lessons might they offer us about when to hide and when to burst forth? About how to recognize the tethers we have with the world around us and to nurture them so we might all grow stronger?
What might fungi have to say about waiting for devastation—transformation—to come and then knowing that the only response is to launch your body skyward, make more of yourselves, gather every friend and family member you can find and rise together? To be exuberant, even as the winds rekindle the fires burning in every direction, sparks flying.
When it comes to perceiving the extent of the fungal kingdom, our senses are wholly inadequate. Most fungi that humans tend to notice are the ephemeral sexual fruiting bodies we hunger for—for food, for medicine, for beauty, for blowing our minds. Homo sapiens’ sense of smell atrophied long ago; if we even want to find underground truffles, we need dogs and pigs. In the limited and delineated ways of human thinking—“animal, plant, or mineral?”—fungi defy categorization as we usually conceive of it. Long lumped in with plants, fungi were only recognized as their own kingdom in 1969.
They are neither plant nor animal, but a wild conglomeration of things, existing in ways that are so central to ecosystems that what we have learned about them forces the breakdown of traditional taxonomy. Large-scale DNA-sequencing datasets are expanding daily, but identifying a double helix doesn’t tell you how an organism exists in relationship with everything around it. And even with what we have learned, scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew estimate that as many as 95 percent of the planet’s fungal species have not yet been identified.
For the species we do know about, the vast majority are mycorrhizal, living in close relationship with a photosynthetic partner, exchanging resources so both can survive and thrive. Plants give their carbon-laced sugars to the fungi, and the fungi exponentially increase the plant’s uptake of nutrients and water in exchange. This partnership allows plants to better tolerate stresses, from droughts to pests to pathogens, and helps trees like Douglas firs and redwoods reach their towering heights. Author Merlin Sheldrake describes mycelium, which makes up the mycorrhizal network, as the “ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation.”
No one offered me psychedelics while at the Yachats Mushroom Festival, but I was handed an eggnog spiked with whiskey infused with a sweet-tasting fungi known as candy cap mushroom—it was delicious. I also went on official and unofficial mushroom walks—“This place is fungally devoid!” exclaimed Joe at the dearth of mushrooms—and heard Christian Schwarz deliver the keynote talk as a crowd of hundreds nibbled on chanterelle pasta and puff pastries filled with spinach, artichoke, and chanterelles, also delicious.
When I asked people about the phrase “disaster mycology,” most hadn’t heard of it. Or they wanted to focus on the positive aspects of the fungi world. It was a festival, after all. It seems more popular to turn fungi into a kind of panacea. News articles keep popping up about researchers finding new ways to turn fungi into saviors to fix our broken world and bodies. Fungi to consume plastics. Fungi to replace plastics. Fungi to clean up oil spills. Psilocybins to fix undesirable thought patterns. Fungi inoculations to transform agricultural production. It is fungi that gave us penicillin and the drugs to allow organ transplant recipients to live. If we humans ingest them, they can nourish us, make us puke, or take us to the stars. Sometimes all at once. Can they fix everything?
Maybe that’s the wrong question.
As I read more, I was beginning to feel that the right question might be to ask them for a lesson on how to exist in the world in the first place. With water and air warming, considering the world from the vantage of fungi could be illuminating. They’ve had the ability to sustain and persevere for hundreds of millions of years, after all. I decided I needed to reach out to one of the authors of the disaster mycology paper, Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Arturo Casadevall. He, along with a colleague, had coined the term that was haunting me.