and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But
it’s also true that this man’s life—his brain!—has been utterly taken over
by fungi; he has dedicated himself to their cause, speaking for the
mushrooms in the same way that Dr. Seuss’s Lorax speaks for the trees.
He disseminates fungal spores far and wide, helping them, whether by
mail order or sheer dint of his enthusiasm, to vastly expand their range
and spread their message.
• • •
I DON’T THINK I’m saying anything about Paul Stamets to which he would
object. He writes in his book that mycelia—the vast, cobwebby whitish net
of single-celled filaments, called hyphae, with which fungi weave their
way through the soil—are intelligent, forming “a sentient membrane” and
“the neurological network of nature.” The title of his book Mycelium
Running can be read in two ways. The mycelium is indeed always
running through the ground, where it plays a critical role in forming soils,
keeping plants and animals in good health, and knitting together the
forest. But the mycelium are also, in Stamets’s view, running the show—
that of nature in general and, like a neural software program, the minds
of certain creatures, including, he would be the first to tell you, Paul
Stamets himself. “Mushrooms are bringing us a message from nature,” he
likes to say. “This is a call I’m hearing.”
Yet even some of Stamets’s airier notions turn out to have a scientific
foundation beneath them. 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. When I first heard these ideas, I thought they were, at best,
fanciful metaphors. Yet in the years since, I’ve watched as a growing body
of scientific research has emerged to suggest they are much more than
metaphors. Experiments with slime molds have demonstrated these