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June 13 - June 19, 2021
It was hot, and the steam smelled of cedar and the fust of old books.
Fust
Many symbioses have formed in times of crisis.
Today, the wood of some three trillion trees—more than fifteen billion of which are cut down every year—accounts for about sixty percent of the total mass of every living organism on Earth, some three hundred gigatons of carbon.
Today, fungal decomposition—much of it of woody plant matter—is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, emitting about eighty-five gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. In 2018, the combustion of fossil fuels by humans emitted around ten gigatons.
No wonder coal can give off such heat: It is made from wood that hasn’t yet been burned. When we burn coal, we physically combust the material that fungi were unable to combust enzymatically. We thermally decompose what fungi were unable to decompose chemically.
The word radical derives from the Latin radix, meaning “root.” Interpreted literally, the concerns of radical mycology lie with its mycelial base, or its “grassroots.”
Fungi have persisted through Earth’s five major extinction events, each of which eliminated between seventy-five and ninety-five percent of species on the planet.
New extinction event dropping soon?
Since his influential work on psilocybin mushrooms in the 1970s, Stamets has grown into an unlikely hybrid between fungal evangelist and tycoon. His TED Talk—“Six Ways that Mushrooms Can Save the World”—has been viewed millions of times.
Want to watch
Human life hinges on many forms of external digestion using fungi, from alcohol, to soy sauce, to vaccines, to penicillin, to the citric acid used in all fizzy drinks.
The termites chew wood into a slurry that they regurgitate in fungal gardens, known as the “fungus comb,”
Like McCoy and the radical mycologists, who literally—and figuratively—spread spores around the world, Ecovative serves as a global dispersal system for a number of fungal species. The fungi are at once a “technology” and partners with humans in a new type of relationship.
Whether or not mycofabrication will draw humans into a codependent symbiosis remains to be seen, but already it’s clear that once more, a global crisis is turning into a suite of fungal opportunities.
THE FUNGI THAT share the most intimate history with humans are yeasts. Yeasts live on our skin, in our lungs, and in our gastrointestinal tract, and line our orifices. Our bodies have evolved to regulate these populations and have been doing so for long stretches of our evolutionary history.
Since 2010, more than a quarter of Nobel Prizes for Physiology or Medicine have been awarded for work on yeast.
The origins of agriculture around twelve thousand years ago—the so-called Neolithic transition—can be understood, at least in part, as a cultural response to yeast. It was either for bread or for beer that humans started to give up their nomadic lifestyles and settle into sedentary societies (the beer-before-bread hypothesis has steadily gained traction among scholars since the 1980s).
The cultural developments associated with agriculture—from fields of crops, to cities, accumulation of wealth, grain stores, new diseases—form part of our shared history with yeast. In many ways, you might argue, yeasts have domesticated us.
For just as long, they have been responsible for dissolving our senses, for wildness and ecstasy. Yeasts are both makers and breakers of human social orders.
Ancient Sumerians—who left written beer recipes dating back five thousand years—worshipped a goddess of fermentation, Ninkasi.
The yellow staining mushroom (Agaricus xanthodermus) is described in most field guides as poisonous. A keen mushroom hunter with a large mycological library once told me about an old guidebook he owned, in which the same mushroom was described as “delicious, when fried,” although the author did add as an afterthought that the mushroom “may cause a light coma in those of weak constitution.”
The dominant narrative in the United States and western Europe since the development of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century was one of conflict and competition, and it mirrored views of human social progress within an industrial capitalist system. Examples of organisms cooperating with one another to their mutual benefit “remained close to the margins of polite biological society,” in Sapp’s words. Mutualistic relationships, such as those that give rise to lichens, or plants’ relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, were curious exceptions to the rule—where they were acknowledged
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Natasha Myers—the anthropologist who introduced the word involution to describe the tendency for organisms to associate with one another—points
内卷
Why would the ability to metabolize alcohol arise so many millions of years before humans developed technologies of fermentation?
Soused monkeys
It was as if I’d been shown how to reverse, how to think backward. Now there were arrows that pointed in both directions at once. Composers make; decomposers unmake. And unless decomposers unmake, there isn’t anything that the composers can make with. It was a thought that changed the way I understood the world. And from this thought, from my fascination with the creatures that decompose, grew my interest in fungi.
