A Love Affair With Fungi!
It’s their season to fruit, and humans (at least those we hang out with a lot here at Flete Field Lab) are taking to the woods to see their extraordinary range of forms. But a lot never show themselves in this way and live entirely out of sight, supporting the lungs of our world, plants and trees, to thrive and in some cases to survive. Scientists have discovered that these mycelium partners will head to younger trees or those that need extra support prioritising the share of resources to those trees that most need them. A wonderful book to find out more about this is Suzanne Simmards ‘Finding the Mother Tree’ – well worth a cosy read as the days shorten.
There’s currently a huge amount of interest in this once-called Kingdom of Fungi but let’s rename their clan as a Queerdom. I say that because our human lens doesn’t come close to allowing us to see their wholeness, their ways of living, their interspecies connections and their ways of mating, so let’s reframe this all by really attempting to open our minds and hearts to their ways.
For example, I learnt recently at a Sam Lee workshop during the All Things Fungi Festival (our workshop was a great success – picture above), that there is a split gill fungi that has over 23,000 potential genders. These types of facts can help us ‘see’ them more closely, but why should we bother to do that?
Because they are the elders of our world and because they might help us restore not only our water but our soil. And in doing so, they might even shift the way we think about our place in the world, our vital entanglement with other species, landscapes, the natural world in general. And in our opinion this shift is the most urgent human-based endeavour of our times – times that can only turn in a positive direction if we make changes in ourselves.
We are also getting some strong results in from our student/fungi collaborations with dissertations on dairy waste water and fresh water treatment through the quite wonderful Oyster Fungi.
There is a bit of a love-in going on with this fungi – they’ve been our stalwart partner in many different settings, eating up and metabolising E.Coli and other coliforms, lipids, nitrogen and phosphates and probably a host of other pollutants we don’t want to keep sloshing about causing havoc in our world. We’ve found papers that suggest this fungi also reduces Neonicotinoids and can enjoy a supper of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons.
So the Myco-Team here at Flete Field Lab have been wondering: how do we enter a reciprocal relationship with this fungi? Maybe it sounds far-fetched, but we often hear people talking about how we can ‘use’ fungi, or how they might clean up our mess if we ‘harness’ their potential.
I’m not sure this is the right language to use – if we truly learn from them, then we have to question the language we (and I mean we in the Global North) use to describe our relationship with them. Otherwise we’ve learnt nothing – and if we’re not constantly learning then we’re stuck in a way of living, working and interacting with the world that has brought us to a very harmful place in terms of the climate, ecological and social crises we’re seeing now.
So, let’s celebrate the potential for learning from Fungi – get out and connect with them and the wider ecologies they inhabit (pretty much everywhere on Earth) and enjoy the wonder they can bring and the space they provide on Earth for us to enter a whole new universe.
