Mushrooms Teach Us 4 Lessons About Climate Action
What do these discreet, ever patient ancients have to say about our climate crisis?
When you look at a mushroom, you may think, we look nothing alike. Did you know that we share 50% of our DNA with fungi? Fungi is more closely related to humans than they are to plants. What’s more, fungi has been around for a billion years. More than providing us with a delicious meal, medicinal tinctures, or spiritual awakening, perhaps they can teach us a thing or three about how to live more harmoniously with Mother Earth. After all, they’re our elders, ancients that once ruled, and still rule, the land.
Lesson 1: Interconnected Well-Being
What do bees and trees have in common? They both have relationships with fungi that benefit their health and survival!
Honey bee populations all over the world are suffering from a myriad of challenges — from pesticides and mono-culture on commercial farms to reduced natural habitats to increased rates of diseases and predation due to climate change. Mycologists, scientists, and mushroom lovers have found bees foraging on polypore mushroom mycelia (mycelium is the “root system” of mushrooms) and bringing it back to the hive. These wonderful polypore mushrooms — amadou (Fomes sp.) and reishi or lingzhi (Ganoderma sp.) — have anti-microbial chemicals that provide honey bees with medicine to make them just a little stronger against deformed wing virus (DWV) and Lake Sinai virus (LSV), two highly infectious and hive-destroying viruses.
As majestic as a tree’s crown and branches may seem, their roots are even more impressive. Below ground, where we cannot see, trees extend their reach to surrounding saplings, elders, and neighbours. Mother Trees can “talk” to younger saplings and seedlings 20 metres away, shuttling nutrients to them or warning them of an imminent beetle attack or fungal disease, and more. This all happens because mycorrhizal fungi’s mycelia connect everyone underground in a “wood-wide web”. The mycelium of Rhizopogon, brown truffle-looking balls that fruitt under the humus of the forest floor, connects Douglas-firs to one another in this tangled life, helping them survive in harsh conditions and changing seasons. Wilcoxina, round flaps with hairy brown edges, do the same for birch, oak, and pine trees.
Looking at these examples with a human lens, we may call these mushrooms selfless and altruistic, intertwining communities of entirely different species and assisting in their survival and thriving. Supporting another species didn’t only hamper their own well-being, but enhanced it, as all lives are intricately dependent on one another to live well. We, as humans, need to start viewing our own well-being as inseparable to other non-human beings’ well-being, too.
“When Mother Trees — the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience — die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do…The scientific evidence is impossible to ignore: the forest is wired for wisdom, sentience, and healing.”
- Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
Lesson 2: Regeneration, Reciprocity, Mutualism
If you remember anything from high school biology, you may remember lichen, a living unit that’s actually three distinct organisms—fungi, alga, and another fungi, yeast! Fungi cannot make food from sunlight, or photosynthesise, like plants, and alga cannot break down rocks to release their minerals for use. Yeast, a recently uncovered third partner in this relationship, produces an acid to help defend the triad against microbial invasions. Cohabiting, exchanging, gifting one another with things the others lack, the lichen not only thrives as a unit in difficult, stressful conditions, but also enables other species to do the same. Breaking down rocks, generating organic material, trapping dust, building soil, and slowly taking over undisturbed surfaces, lichens build habitable micro-environments from seemingly desolate landscapes. Re-establishing life, regenerating.
I can’t say it better than Robin Wall Kimmerer when it comes to how we can be more like lichens:
“Producers and decomposers, the light and the darkness, the givers and receivers wrapped in each other’s arms, the warp and the weft of the same blanket so closely woven that it’s impossible to discern the giving from the taking…These ancients carry teachings in the ways that they live. They remind us of the enduring power that arises from mutualism, from the sharing of the gifts carried by each species. Balanced reciprocity has enabled them to flourish under the most stressful of conditions.”
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Lesson 3: Nothing is Trash / Everything Can Be Used
You may have heard about mushrooms that feed on food waste, dying or rotting trees, and even poop. Fungi that break down oil spills, fungi that clean up toxic chemical contamination, fungi that digest plastic. Their mastery and artistry of breaking down the most unthinkable substances — from life to death, and back to life — free up much needed nutrients and minerals for plants, animals, and insects — they also clean up all our anthropogenic mess.
But before we rush to extract mushroom’s mastery to mitigate our destruction (and guilt!), let us take a moment to appreciate their innate gift of seeing everything as useful, turning everything into something beautiful, and injecting everything with life.
Here are some thoughts on how we can be more mushroom (yes, even the coprophilous ones!). We can start by relabeling “things that don’t work anymore” as “things that may have another use” or “things that can be fixed”. We can give the gift of composting, nurturing plants and nature, helping our neighbours, building our communities — both in the soil, the bio-region, and the cul-de-sac. For the more adventurous among us, let’s not let our precious gift to Mother Nature — our poop — go to waste! Many people have found great, safe, and convenient ways to compost humanure.
Lesson 4: Helping Others to Be Resilient
Living in the roots of plants, there’s a special fungus that helps plants better absorb minerals and nutrients in the soil, improve their immune system, fight disease-causing microbes, and grow more roots. Our hero belongs to the genus of fungus called Trichoderma. Naturally occurring in the soil, certain Trichoderma species are a friend to plant roots. They detoxify the soil from toxic chemicals, accelerate organic material decomposition, and control pathogenic fungi and agents.
With climate change, plants now face more and more unprecedented stresses than ever before. Like trees that form close, lifelong relationships with our mycorrhizal friends, plants that form a relationship with Trichoderma fare better in these stressful environments, such as droughts, blights, soil that’s too acidic, too alkali, etc. And they’re not the only ones… there is an estimated 1 million endophytic fungi that exist in the world!
Fungi seem to know a lot that we don’t. For one, they have successfully spread their genes and reach across our beautiful planet without destroying it. Humanity couldn’t have thrived for so long without community, reciprocity, resourcefulness, and love for all life. Let mushrooms be a reminder for us to remember what we may have forgotten. What’s your favourite fungi lesson?
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