For years now, Stamets has been talking about the vast web of mycelia in the soil as “Earth’s natural Internet”—a redundant, complexly branched, self-repairing, and scalable communications network linking many species over tremendous distances. (The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.) Stamets contends that these mycelial networks are in some sense “conscious”: aware of their environment and able to respond to challenges accordingly.
