Shanon, a voulnteer at Smugtown Mushrooms, holds a Reishi mushroom — 📷: Doug Bierend
What comes to mind when you hear or see the word ‘mushrooms’? Maybe it’s the red–and–white–speckled Amanita muscaria of Super Mario fame (seemingly the kingdom’s designated ambassador). Or maybe it’s the mental image of people with long hair, wearing tie-dye, open–toed sandals and a goofy grin. Perhaps it’s just the ubiquitous, anonymous white caps that dot the suburban lawnscape, unremarkable except when telling your kids not to eat them.
Mushrooms—and the fungi that produce them—carry all sorts of cultural associations around the world. What’s more, they are ubiquitous to nature throughout the planet. Fungi grow within their food and hosts, and can be found in or in partnership with plants, animals, microbes and soil in every biome and ecosystem, in roles that are symbiotic as they are parasitic or pathogenic (that is, deadly to their host). They play many roles even within our own bodies, in ‘mycobiomes’ that science is just beginning to understand. That lack of understanding has created a certain arms-length relationship between us and them, but in recent years there has been a boom of interest in their many roles in nature, potential uses for humans, and their sheer aesthetic and ecological weirdness.
Indeed, mushrooms are generating real enthusiasm even in “mycophobic” countries like the United States. Here, diverse communities have been forming around fungi in an effort to raise their recognition and status, to explore their many uses and crucial ecological roles, and even as inspiration to consider new ways of relating to nature and to one another. In 2015, I got caught up in this burgeoning fungal fascination, and since then have been traveling among a wide variety of mycological circles to learn about fungi and the fellowship that is being cultivated with them, a journey I documented in my new book, In Search of Mycotopia.
Parade preparations at the 2019 Telluride Mushroom Festival in Telluride, CO— 📷: Doug Bierend
The last fifteen years or so have seen the dawning of widespread public awareness of fungi. More people are seemingly starting to recognize mushrooms—and the mycelium from which they sprout—beyond the automatic association with poisonous or “magic” varieties (although mycophiles will often insist that all mushrooms are magic; a very small percentage are deadly). Interest is growing in their myriad medicinal and cullinary possibilities, as well as the many promises of ‘applied mycology’. Fungi are being tapped for sustainable construction materials and meat substitutes, soil enhancers and natural filters of hazardous compounds and microbes, to name just a few. In the process, communities are forming around a growing recognition of fungi as the crucial ecological agents that they are without any human intervention. Having existed throughout earth for well over a billion years, some are also asking what we might learn from how they live to ensure we stick around longer than it currently seems like we will.
Mushrooms grow in unexpected places and sizes 📷: Doug Bierend
My own interest in fungi was sparked in 2014 by a TED talk from world famous myco-evangelist Paul Stamets. As I would later learn, the 2009 lecture is a common entry point for many recently minted mycophiles. Stamets presents a grand vision of fungi as essential partners and teachers, helping us to discover new medicinal compounds; to break down hydrocarbons soaking into our landscapes; to develop natural, non-chemical pesticides; to reveal the networks visible in mycelium — the fine, cottony web underneath the mushrooms that forms the actual ‘body’ of the fungus — as an archetypical pattern reflected in brains, cities, nations, even the universe itself. Stamets is a giant in the field of popular mycology, despite (and indeed because of) not being a formally trained scientist, with numerous patents, successful businesses, and several influential books under his belt. He and his ideas have become so popular that there is even a character in the current Star Trek television series named after him.
However, it was a visit to a small-scale mushroom cultivator in Rochester, NY, that brought my spark of interest to the fuse of obsession. Walking into the unremarkable warehouse that housed Smugtown Mushrooms, I was overwhelmed by new sights and smells, along with intriguing attitudes about the fundamental role of the business. Colorful mushrooms — their strains sourced from mushrooms growing naturally in nearby parks and woods — grew out of plastic bags sat upon improvised shelving, from spent grains sourced via a nearby brewery, all tended to by a volunteer cadre of anarcho-eco-punks. Their driving mission not seemingly one of conquering an industry, so much as fostering community.
A love of mushrooms also motivated Smugtown, of course, but in conversation with Olga, the company’s founder and owner, it quickly became clear that doing business was mostly a way of connecting her neighbors and friends with locally produced food and medicine, which included an emphasis on the natural systems that fungi represent. Named for the nickname given to Rochester during its boom years as a Kodak company town, prior to its subsequent economic depression, their website explains that they were “established because there was a need for mushrooms and growing supplies, workshops, events and community based science in [the] area. … Fungi are our passion. Not just for food and medicine, but their ability to bring us back to nature.” This eschewing the centrality of profit and the illusion of infinite growth, and instead prioritizing nature, sustainability, and community, resonated deeply with me.
Oyster and Lion’s Mane mushrooms produced by Smugtown Mushrooms in Rochester, NY — 📷: Doug Bierend
These were values that I would soon hear echoed at gatherings around the country, in basement labs, warehouse cultivation chambers, and on nature forays across the country. With mushrooms as a driving inspiration, communities of people seeking to grow, teach about, and bring people into contact with fungi have been popping up from coast to coast like, well mushrooms.
In so doing, many hope to encourage a deeper appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things in nature — including us, of course. From the Radical Mycology Convergence in Oregon to the POC Fungi Community Gathering in San Diego, to MycoFest in central Pennsylvania to the New Moon Mycology Summit in the rural reaches of upstate New York, people can be found uplifting kingdom fungi — many prefer terms such as queendom, queerdom, or kindom — as a teacher we’ve all been ignoring for too long, and as a potential partner with which we might finally manage to straighten out our relationship with the planet and the neighbors, human and otherwise.
Val Nguyen and Sneha Ganguly raise the POC Fungi Community “pride flag” at the Worldbeat Cultural Center in San Diego, CA 📷: Doug Bierend
During my visit to Rochester, we went into the woods with Olga. On our walk, and with her guidance, the fungal life of the forest came into view for the first time. I had begun to ‘find my eyes’, as it is sometimes described. We saw mushrooms that I’d never heard of or imagined before, like the artist’s conk, whose belly bruises purple wherever pressed, making it possible to draw on it. Maitake, a delicious edible, grew in gray, coral-like tufts from the foot of an oak. There was lion’s mane, which gushed from a woodpecker hole in a birch tree like a white pom pom. We took it home, cooked and ate it, and suddenly the woods had come to represent a place of fungal abundance.
In the forests, fungi link trees together in symbiotic relationships which serve their hosts, as well as the animals and microbes in the soil; they rot the dead and dying and turn it into the stuff of life. In short, they quietly (and often thanklessly) keep the whole business of life on Earth humming along. Rather than extracting from their environment to its exhaustion, in myriad ways large and small they participate in and facilitate the workings of life all around them, so that their ecologies richen and deepen, often providing food to their neighbors along the way in the form of mushrooms, which are simply fungi’s reproductive organs. That’s not to say there aren’t fungi worth worrying about — they can be disastrous to crops and houses and health — but of all the fungi in the world, these represent a minority. It’s recognition of all the other ways that they matter that seems to be fueling much of the newfound interest in them. All of it starts with noticing their presence.
Olga finds mushrooms in the woods near Rochester, NY 📷: Doug Bierend
Can you imagine stepping into the forest, without seeing any of the plants? Or animals? Fungi are no less fundamental or ubiquitous than these more familiar kingdoms of life, so to suddenly have them enter one’s perception represents a significant shift indeed. Yet fungi were only recognized as a distinct kingdom of life in 1969; prior to that, they were largely considered a funky subset of plants. With the advent of sophisticated genetic sequencing techniques, biologists have come to realize that fungi are truly everywhere, living invisibly within the cells of all plants, entangled with their roots, in the guts and mouths of animals, and floating in the air as spores. Many fungi don’t produce mushrooms we can find and take back home or to the lab, so getting a picture of their real diversity and distribution throughout the landscape poses unique challenges. Estimates are that fewer than 10% of fungal species have been named.
For that reason, much of the science around fungi deals with simply finding and documenting them. In the midst of climate change, habitat loss and sprawling development, we don’t even know what fungal species we’re losing. Not helping matters is the continued degradation of resources for institutions of science, and dwindling opportunities for young, eager mycologists to work towards the kinds of jobs that would make deep research into fungi sustainable. On the other hand, the rising interest in fungi is powering a citizen science movement that is helping to fill in gaps in knowledge, and even to advance the field, well outside the halls of ‘capital S’ science. With the advent of new technologies like portable DNA sequencers and all the platforms for knowledge exchange emerging online, it’s getting easier every day for people outside the halls of natural history museums and universities to make real contributions to the field of mycology.
In my travels, I came to realize that the science of mycology depends on people who wouldn’t normally be classified as scientists, and in fact that mycology as a formal science was borne of amateur contributions, specifically in the Victorian era of Britain, when the early scientific societies were formed by local clergy and doctors who also happened to have a naturalist bent and some free time. As it turns out, almost anyone can “do science”. Projects like the Fungi Diversity Survey and the Lost and Found Fungi Project at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are working with amateurs and enthusiasts to document their local mushrooms, and therefore build the global picture of fungal biodiversity. Apps like iNaturalist make it easy for anyone with a smartphone to document and identify fungi (as well as any other living thing) on a nature hike. Meanwhile, young mycophiles across the country are collectively promulgating a kind of unofficial ‘fungal pedagogy’, teaching classes about the basics of fungal biology, ecology, their cultivation, applications and cultural history, often entwined with the distributive, regenerative philosophy observed in their ways of life.
Left: William Padilla Brown inoculates substrate with Cordyceps in his basement lab in Mechanicsburgh, PA. Right: Craig Trester teaches a community mycology class at Biotech Without Borders in Brooklyn, NY. 📷: Doug Bierend
Alongside the growing field of citizen science, a boom in cultivation is seeing people of all stripes and in all kinds of climates growing mushrooms. That includes for themselves — often via ‘grow it yourself’ kits that just require adding water — for their communities, and for markets of various scales. In my travels, I saw people cultivating edible mushrooms in their showers, in converted trailer trucks, in former horse training facilities, whether in the desert, high altitude mountain ranges, temperate forests, or rainforest jungles.
Cultivating mushrooms offers a great deal of economic potential, especially the so-called specialty varieties. Unlike the common ‘button mushrooms’ you find on your pizza, these include less common varieties like shiitake, lion’s mane, oyster mushrooms, reishi, maitake, and others that are becoming more widespread as new cultivation techniques are developed. These mushrooms aren’t generally as shelf-stable as the cremini or portobello (which are exactly the same mushroom, believe it or not), creating markets that are best served by local producers. These dynamics — and the fact that one can grow mushrooms pretty much anywhere — are attracting local–minded cultivators who see an opportunity to grow food and medicine for their region and community.
With so much yet to be learned about fungi, there is also a lot of innovation happening. For instance, William Padilla–Brown is a 26-year-old mycologist and educator, without any formal training in science (a self described “graduate of Google Scholar), who is part of a small community of innovators that worked out how to breed and grow at scale the notorious Cordyceps militaris — one of a family of “zombie fungi” — that normally grows out of unfortunate insects, like ants, cicadas and moths. These difficult–to–cultivate mushrooms have high medicinal (and therefore market) value and millennia of traditional use in other countries. Through self-published handbooks, DIY workshops, and prolific social media activity, a domestic market for the mushrooms has emerged in the United States over the last five years, along side a growing nutritional supplement industry, a range of extracts and other product classes, and an emphasis on breeding favorable genetics that that has some people talking about Cordyceps as ‘the next cannabis’.
William Padilla-Brown shows the fruits (or fruiting bodies) of his basement Cordyceps cultivation operation in Mechanicsburgh, PA 📷: Doug Bierend
Another area of great excitement is about fungi’s potential roles in environmental remediation, as endlessly inventive chemists that produce countless novel chemical compounds to digest their food and fend off competitors. Thanks to these ‘exudates’, and sometimes also their naturally mesh-like structure, certain fungi can clean waterways of bacteria, immobilize heavy metals so they don’t stay in soil or get into crops, and even break down hydrocarbons in oil.
These are just a few examples of the growing field of ‘mycoremediation’, which many hope will hold the promise for a more sustainable future. Projects testing these possibilities are emerging around the country and the world, such as the Coalition for the Upper South Platte (CUSP), on the edge of the Rockies just south of Denver. There, forest fires have devastated the landscape in crown fires that seem to grow larger and more intense every year, leaving blackened, lifeless landscapes in their wake. In addition to logging in a manner that will produce less homogenous distributions of trees, and hopefully prevent the spread of such fires, CUSP has been working with native strains of wood-rotting fungi to accelerate the breakdown of the decay process. Test beds show that the fungi start turning the woodchips into compost, which then plays host to all kinds of microorganisms, which kicks off cycles of nutrient exchange and therefore life. It even produces mushrooms, which draw animals (including humans) to further interact with the environment and spread their spores.
Jeff Ravage of CUSP unveils oyster mushrooms growing from a woodchip test plot in the mountains near Conifer, CO 📷: Doug Bierend
But beyond their many possible applications, and of greatest interest to me, fungi are inspiring people to come together in new ways, to center issues and voices that — perhaps a bit like the fungi themselves — have long been marginalized. Several of the gatherings I visited demonstrated that BIPOC, queer and nonbinary folks are finding mushrooms a potent symbol, ally, and inspiration for gathering on their communities’ own terms. When talking about mycoremediation at the POC Fungi Community Gathering, for example, it was in the context of environmental racism, which sees communities of color disproportionately effected by pollution, contamination and waste.
The growing enthusiasm for therapeutic use of psilocybin for depression, PTSD and other mental health issues, looks forward to a future where treatment centers are opened across the country, and the fungal compounds that are currently scheduled as top tier narcotics, can fulfill their traditional roles as medicine. But at the POC Fungi Community Gathering, I heard frequently about worries that this medicine — to which many of those in attendance felt strong ancestral connection — will remain unavailable due to cost and other factors that already put obstacles between marginalized communities and social resources. In light of that common (many would say colonial) dynamic, these communities see an opportunity to come together according to their own values and priorities, to share in their common narratives rather than entering spaces that, in mycology as in most other areas of life, can often be dominated by white, straight men.
Perhaps, then, fungi might also help us to remediate our relationships as much as our shared landscapes, and to reinforce our communal bonds in the process. That’s what I hope for, at least, and it is in this that I see the greatest promise of fungi, the real potential to “save the world”. Not by offering us a solution—a mushroom to plug into every problems. Rather, the aspects of fungi that excite me most lie in the ways they are inspiring people to connect and collaborate around values of inclusion, equity, reciprocity, and a humble, grateful relationship to nature.
Fungi are bringing people into awareness of and engagement with the natural world in new and deeper ways. They’re offering all kinds of new opportunities to provide and build businesses and community around medicine, food, citizen science, environmental remediation, and more. But I think they are also leading us to ask better questions about what we can and should do in pursuit of a just and sustainable world, as ridiculous as that might sound. To me, this is what ‘mycotopia’ represents, and is the most meaningful version of ‘saving the world’. After all, who are we saving it for? If we’re only saving it for ourselves, then we’re doomed, because as the fungi teach us in various ways, we all need one another, human and otherwise. That’s the message that I hope we take from the mushrooms.
Prints and patches at the POC Fungi Community Gathering of 2020, in San Diego, CA 📷: Doug Bierend
