Mycorrhizal networks through the looking glass
Why you will hear so much about mycorrhizal fungi and the inter-species relational patterns of the biological micro-worlds in a time of deep human crisis with a focus on tech and AI as potential “saviors”?
With the concepts of Anthropocene and climate crisis already over-familiarized by the beginning of 2020, to the extent of becoming nowadays almost obsolete on social web (pop) culture, and with the knowledge that it is rarely in the human capability to plan collapse, biologists, writers and artists started to look into the hidden life of mushrooms.
Titles like Sheldrake´s “Entangled Life”, “The secret life of mushrooms”(A.Whiteley) or “Healing mushrooms” (Isokauppila) are classics on the book shelves and offer a thorough insight into plants, fungi, primordial bacteria and complex, ancient ecosystem lives.
Random as it may sound, the topic of mycorrhizal underground networks becomes fascinating not in the name of a trend, but rather in the search for answers that seem to have been always there — less visible for the naked eye, but rather for the intuitive individual part of a larger collective network — answers about the human role and place within the ecosystem, about the undisturbed functionality of nutrients that nurtured this planet, and holistically, about rewilding humanity, finding the power of magic and a way to coexist with less harmful side-effects, within balance, in a flow that these networks seem to teach us.
If this sounds too utopically prophetic, I am assured that less words and rather the infinite possibilities of imagination — backed up by empirical study — can cover this emerging new field. Mycorrhizal networks are as much the story of humanity, inter-twined in the origin of species to the extent of loosing the perception of “self” as being something with a rigid identity.
Mentioning AI in this context is to spare any temptation of creating analogies. While AI and the www enhance connections, it is a total different, incomparable process to mycorrhizal activity. Firstly, because we know so little of the latter, secondly — because even assisted by an artificial intelligence — the process of relating starts from another dimension of what we see in networking.
As mycologist Sheldrake puts it:
“Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question”
A taste of the complexity of the topic can be described as a “mind-bending journey into this hidden world ranges from yeast to psychedelics, to the fungi that sprawl for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet, to those that link plants together in complex networks known as the ‘Wood Wide Web’, to those that infiltrate and manipulate insect bodies with devastating precision.”
As a tip of an iceberg, the mushrooms as merely fruiting bodies, are just the noticeable signals of a living system that is at the core of existence. To try looking deeper into it humbles the explorator and possibly brings change into how we are used to perceive the world(s).
