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stance made from used diapers, reduc-
ing their weight and volume by eighty
per cent. (And the mushrooms were
safe to eat.) Mycelium is even capable
of filtering E. coli or heavy metals from
polluted water. Sheldrake describes a
company in Finland that has adopted
these mycofiltration techniques to re-
claim gold from electronic waste. The
firm Ecovative Designs has developed
mycelium-based packaging that re-
sembles Styrofoam but biodegrades
within thirty days. It also helped de-
vise a mycelium-based alternative to
leather, which was used in a prototype
of a Stella McCartney handbag.
Stamets’s ardent advocacy inspired a
man named Peter McCoy to help start
an organization called Radical Mycol-
ogy. McCoy, who is also an anarchist
and a hip-hop artist, has devoted his
life to a radically decentered, fungus-
inspired method of sharing information.
He founded an online mycology school
and preaches “Liberation Mycology.”
“Where one Radical Mycologist trains
ten,” McCoy says, “those ten can train
a hundred, and from them a thousand—
so it is that mycelium spreads.”
F
or Wasson, fungus was related to
the transcendent, the realm of wor-
ship, of reverence; for Stamets, fungus
was an instrument for environmental
resilience and restoration. But can fun-
gus, finally, provide a political vision?
What might we learn, Sheldrake asks,
from the “mutualism” and coöperation
of a seemingly brainless organism?
Sheldrake notes that the hyphal tips
of mycelium seem to communicate with
one another, making decisions without
a real center. He describes an experi-
ment conducted a couple of years ago
by a British computer scientist, An-
drew Adamatzky, who detected waves
of electrical activity in oyster mush-
rooms, which spiked sharply when the
mushrooms were exposed to a flame.
Adamatzky posited that the mushroom
might be a kind of “living circuit board.”
The point isn’t that mushrooms would
replace silicon chips. But if fungi al-
ready function as sensors, processing
and transmitting information through
their networks, then what could they
potentially tell (or warn) us about the
state of our ecosystem, were we able to
interpret their signals?
Sheldrake also tells us about Toby
Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who was
taken with Thomas Piketty’s “Capital
in the Twenty-First Century” and its
insights on inequality. She wondered
how mycorrhizal networks, the symbi-
otic intertwining of plant systems and
mycelium, deal with their own, natural
encounters with inequity. Kiers exposed
a single fungus to an unequally distrib-
uted supply of phosphorus. Somehow
the fungus “coordinated its trading be-
havior across the network,”
Sheldrake writes, essen-
tially shuttling phosphorus
to parts of the mycelial
network for trade with the
plant system according to a
“buy low, sell high” logic.
The anthropologist Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing has ex-
plored the story of global
capitalism through mush-
rooms. In 2015, she pub-
lished “The Mushroom at the End of
the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins,” which followed the
trade in the prized matsutake mushroom
from a community of Southeast Asian
refugees who are among the top forag-
ers in the Pacific Northwest to the auc-
tion markets of Japan, where matsutake
fetch a thousand dollars a kilogram, and
on to chefs and discriminating diners in
the world’s most cosmopolitan cities.
There’s a double meaning to Tsing’s
title. The mushroom is at the end of the
known world because it’s hard to find,
a secret tucked deep in the forest. But
she’s also hinting at the end of the world
as we know it, given our instinct for ex-
tracting as much from the earth as we
can. Humanity has never seemed so finely
calibrated and rationalized: the seam-
less journey of a very expensive mush-
room from nature to a dinner plate tells
this story. But things have never seemed
so precarious, either. During the current
pandemic, images have circulated which
suggest that the earth is better off with
many of us staying at home. There have
been fantastical stories of dolphins in
the canals of Venice, penguins saunter-
ing through an empty aquarium. And,
as industry idled and vehicles went un-
driven, there was the rare sight of clear
skies in Beijing and Los Angeles. Fol-
lowing the nuclear blast at Chernobyl,
the industrious, resilient fungi were
among the earliest living things to ap-
pear. They seemed to grow on the reac-
tor walls, attracted to radioactive “hot”
particles. In fact, they appeared capable
of harnessing radiation as a source of
energy, as plants do with sunlight. The
first thing to grow from the soil after
the atomic bomb decimated Hiroshima
was, reportedly, a matsutake mushroom.
Scientists still don’t understand how
fungi coördinate, control, and learn from
such behaviors, just that they do. “How
best to think about shared
mycorrhizal networks?”
Sheldrake wonders. “Are
we dealing with a super-
organism? A metropolis?
A living Internet? Nursery
school for trees? Socialism
in the soil? Deregulated
markets of late capitalism,
with fungi jostling on the
trading floor of a forest
stock exchange? Or maybe
it’s fungal feudalism, with mycorrhizal
overlords presiding over the lives of
their plant laborers for their own ulti-
mate benefit.” None of these attempts
to fit fungi into the logic of our world
are entirely persuasive. Perhaps it’s the
other way around, and we’re the ones
who should try to fit into the fungus’s
model. A truffle’s funky aroma evolved
to attract insects and small rodents,
which feast on the spores, then spread
them throughout the forest via their
fecal matter. For many, the pleasure of
psilocybin is in giving oneself up to the
weft of a connected world, and making
peace with one’s smallness.
Maybe the vision that unites our my-
cophiles, from Wasson to Stamets and
Sheldrake, isn’t so freakish, after all. The
divine secret is the magic of the mun-
dane, and one needn’t fly too high to
witness it. The composer John Cage
was an avid forager who supplemented
his income by selling prized mushrooms
to upscale restaurants. He once per-
suaded administrators at the New School
to allow him to teach a course on my-
cology alongside his music classes.
“Often I go in the woods thinking after
all these years I ought finally to be bored
with fungi,” Cage confided in his dia-
ries. But his sense of revelatory delight
never faltered. “Supreme good fortune,”
he wrote, as he held a fine specimen in
his hand. “We’re both alive!”
