Rooting new imaginaries
Going beyond the surface to uncover the lessons of fungi.
by Chiara Pedrocchi
What happens when people or things cling to one another? Their lines intertwine, and they must bind together in such a way that the tension that would tend to separate them actually unites them more firmly. Nothing can endure unless a line is produced, and unless that line intertwines with others.
-Tim Ingold
We know very little about fungi—or mycetes. Divided into more than 700,000 species and long grouped within the plant kingdom, only recently—by Nees in 1817 and by Whittaker in 1968—have they been classified as a kingdom in their own right. In reality, fungi are much more similar to animals than to plants, although the difference lies in the fact that animals ingest nourishment into their bodies, whereas fungi introduce their bodies into nourishment. Nevertheless, in biology there exists a super-kingdom of eukaryotic organisms known as Opisthokonta, which includes both animals and fungi.
We also know very little about everything that lies at the margins, as well as about all forms of invisible connections.
How deeply do we know how to dig in order to search for what unites us, rather than what divides us? How accustomed are we to intertwinings, to networks, to relationships?
Accustomed as we are to thinking on a grand scale, we often miss the importance of taking the time to analyze the microscopic level as well. If we were to return to doing so, we would discover worlds and information we cannot even imagine—worlds that directly concern our identity.
We would discover, for example, that we cannot define ourselves as individuals in the way our social, cultural, and economic systems have trained us to think. Rather, we would at least have to recognize ourselves as what anthropologist Francesco Remotti has called a condividuo.
Our own organism is inhabited by an infinity of microbes, meaning that our body is nothing but an ecosystem; moreover, it is difficult to isolate the individual from their network of social relationships, which are fundamental to their development.
In both senses—both to understand our proximity to and coexistence with other beings, and to take fungi as a model for how we inhabit interpersonal relationships, with other human beings and beyond—it is useful to draw closer to the world of fungi.
Weaving and being networks
It seems that with every step we take in any healthy forest, we tread on approximately 480 kilometers of mycelium. Mycologist Merlin Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures that “In the fungal world, individual identity matters, but it is not always binary. The ‘I’ can gradually blur into the other.”
Most fungi are made up of hyphae, filamentous cells that branch out to form a network called mycelium. Network is also the word used by anthropologist Tim Ingold—whose father was a mycologist—in Being Alive (published in Italian as Siamo linee) to speak about human sociality in relation to other creatures, human and non-human alike. For Ingold, every living being is a bundle of lines, in opposition to the idea that we live in a world of bubbles. Life, he argues, begins when lines start to emerge and escape the monopoly of bubbles, affirming the principle of deterritorialization (which we might also translate as the deconstruction of the individual) as opposed to territorialization, thus forming networks of knotted lines.
The perception of relationships as intertwinings is also central to the work of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. Visiting her exhibition The Soul Trembles means walking through rooms dense with red threads that intersect, knot, and overlap, producing an image that—at a time when we are pushed toward atomization, alienation, and isolation—could almost be described as utopian.
Living in symbiosis
“The fact that we don’t have linguistic abilities to communicate with nature does not call into question that nature is intelligent. It means that we are inadequate at communicating,”
says mycologist Paul Stamets in the documentary Fantastic Fungi.
One of the many reasons fungi can unsettle us, Sheldrake writes, is their ability to make us doubt our own intelligence as defined by anthropocentric standards. That is: thanks to their ability to solve problems without having a brain, fungi force us to question the idea of humans as the measure of all living species. We human beings belonging to cultures of the Global North—excluding some scientists, who have understood the qualities of fungi and rely on them even to solve human problems—habitually operate within a logic that assumes domination as the only possible relationship with nature. But if we were to deconstruct this paradigm and develop new toolkits, we would discover others that do not involve violence, but rather a form of mutual domestication that generates healthy interdependence.
One area in which many fungi are better than us, for instance, is in creating symbioses.
While some fungi are saprotrophs, feeding on non-living organic matter, and others are parasites that kill other beings to feed on them, a third group has a mycelium that forms bonds with plants, generating mutual benefit. The plant becomes more efficient at absorbing mineral substances from the soil, while the fungus receives organic matter from the plant for nourishment.
This means radically going beyond one’s own reference bubble and daring to rely on other species. Today, more than 90% of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi—that is, fungi that live in symbiotic relationships with them.
Through mycelium, substances can also be exchanged between plants. In this way, what is affectionately known as the Wood Wide Web is formed: the vast underground network of mycorrhizal fungi connecting the roots of trees and plants.
Adapting to the environment, not the other way around
Anyone who thinks fungi exist only in mountainous areas at specific altitudes is sorely mistaken. Fungi are found from sea level up to glaciers, and their spores spread via birds, by clinging to the soles of our shoes, through the wind—and some have even been found in clouds, demonstrating a role in meteorological phenomena. A German study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) also suggests that the air is effectively full of fungi, and that we inhale between one and ten fungal spores with every breath.
In addition to having metabolic traits that allow certain fungi to grow in extreme environments, many have also developed adaptogenic actions to regulate stress in living organisms, as well as strategies such as biosorption for pollutants and heavy metals. The latter has also proven useful for humans: by analyzing the quantity of heavy metals present in certain fungi, it is possible to identify the degree of pollution in the soil from which the fungus was collected.
Fungi are also perfectly capable of exploring all possible directions at once. In this sense, they are masters of lateral thinking—that is, problem-solving through unconventional solutions. This is an exercise we humans should practice far more often, so as to make choices that lead us in a certain direction while continually questioning them, cultivating our ability to change course when necessary, and adapting to what happens around us rather than forcing the environment—understood as everything that surrounds us—to adapt to us.
At the end and the beginning of everything: rebuilding on ruins
1.3 billion years ago, fungi were the first organisms to colonize land, hundreds of millions of years before the first plants.
After the atomic explosion in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the first form of life to reappear among the ruins was the matsutake mushroom.
One of the most important characteristics of fungi is that they are both the end and the beginning of everything: they decompose what is dead and extract all its nutrients in order to return them to circulation.
As anthropologist Anna Tsing writes in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins: “Staying alive requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die. (…) Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. To survive, we need help, and help is always provided by others, whether or not they intend to do so.” What more do we need to convince ourselves of our status as dividuals?
Ingold writes that the philosopher and writer Ramon Llull, who lived in the 13th century, defined humans as animal omificans—where to omify does not mean to humanize the world, but to forge one’s existence within a shared life.
Since we are in a constant state of becoming, we are still in time to choose our course—even if it were too late to change or resolve certain problems, or to undo major past mistakes.
So let us not waste time: let us omify ourselves immediately, with awareness and respect; let us network ourselves and change course. As the matsutake teaches us, let us rebuild on the ruins of the system that brought us here—one that is fiercely individualistic, competitive, and capitalist—and attempt to stretch the line of our lives in a collective direction. To build a reality, as essayist Elias Canetti writes, in which “anyone who says ‘I’ immediately sinks into the ground.” And so, let the I dissolve into the mesh of the we.
Leggi anche
