I’m an amateur mycologist and a longtime member of the Vancouver Mycological Society
I have been wandering the forests of the Pacific Northwest for most of my adult life, basket in hand, eyes low, looking for what the trees are hiding beneath their duff. I joined the Vancouver Mycological Society years ago, mostly hoping to learn which mushrooms were safe to eat and which would kill me.
I did not expect the fungi to change everything I understood about life on Earth.
It was in conversations with the elders of that society, those quiet, deeply-knowing people who had been watching fungi for decades, that I first began to grasp the mycological internet. Nothing before or since has sparked wonder in me the way that knowledge did.
And nothing has made me more certain that if we are serious about rebuilding a regenerative culture, we must start underground.
Table of Contents
- The Forgotten Kingdom of Fungi
- The Mycological Internet: Nature’s Original Network
- The Decomposers: The Great Oversight of Modern Life
- Rewilding Fungi: The Foundation of Forest Restoration
- Working With Fungi: Collaboration as Design Principle
- Rebuilding the Soil: Carbon, Life, and the Underground Economy
- The Spore and the Elder
- Practical Steps Toward Fungal Literacy
The Forgotten Kingdom of Fungi
For centuries, Western science treated fungi as a curiosity or a nuisance. They were lumped in with plants, misunderstood, dismissed. Even today, they receive a fraction of the research funding directed at animals and plants, despite the fact that the Kingdom Fungi contains an estimated 2.2 to 3.8 million species, of which fewer than 150,000 have been formally described.
We are, in the most literal sense, almost completely ignorant of this kingdom.
Fungi are not plants. They do not photosynthesize. They are heterotrophs, which means they obtain their energy by breaking down organic matter. Their cell walls are made of chitin, the same material found in insect exoskeletons, not cellulose like plants. Genetically, they are more closely related to animals than to the plants they live alongside.
This distinction matters enormously. Fungi occupy an ecological role that no other organism fills in the same way: they are the primary decomposers of lignin, the tough structural polymer that makes up wood. Without fungi, the forests of the world would drown in their own dead matter.
The Mycological Internet: Nature’s Original Network
When the elders at the Vancouver Mycological Society first described the wood wide web to me, I thought they were speaking poetically. They were not.
Mycorrhizal fungi, a broad group that includes thousands of species, form intimate partnerships with the roots of trees and plants. The fungal threads, called hyphae, penetrate or envelop plant root cells and extend outward into the soil, sometimes for hundreds of metres in every direction. In exchange for sugars produced through the tree’s photosynthesis, the fungus delivers water, phosphorus, nitrogen, and a range of micronutrients that the tree cannot access on its own.
This is not a simple transactional relationship. It is a living network.
In a single teaspoon of healthy forest soil, there can be several kilometres of fungal hyphae. These networks connect individual trees to one another, including trees of different species, creating a system through which carbon, nitrogen, water, and chemical signals move continuously. A Douglas fir under stress from drought or insect attack can signal neighbouring trees through this network. A dying tree can transfer its remaining carbon stores to younger seedlings growing in its shade.
Suzanne Simard’s decades of research in British Columbia’s forests demonstrated that older “mother trees” actively support their seedlings through these fungal networks, preferentially routing more carbon to their own kin. The forests are not collections of competing individuals. They are communities with memory, communication, and reciprocity.
The mycological internet predates the internet by approximately 450 million years. Fungi colonized land before plants did, and it is now thought that land colonization by plants was only possible because of their partnerships with fungi. Every fern, every tree, every flowering plant on Earth traces its lineage back to an ancestor that made a deal with a fungus.
The Decomposers: The Great Oversight of Modern Life
Here is the oversight that I believe sits at the heart of our ecological crisis: modern industrial culture has built an entire civilization around production while dismantling the systems responsible for decomposition.
In a healthy ecosystem, nothing accumulates. Dead matter is broken down and returned to circulation. Nutrients flow. Carbon moves. The system regenerates itself continuously because the decomposers are present, diverse, and abundant.
Fungi are the master decomposers. Saprotrophic fungi, those that feed on dead organic matter, produce enzymes capable of breaking down cellulose, lignin, keratin, petroleum compounds, heavy metals, and even some plastics. There is no natural material on Earth that fungi cannot, given the right conditions and species, reduce back to its component molecules.
We have built a throwaway economy in a world designed for cycles. We extract, manufacture, use once, and discard. The material does not disappear; it accumulates because we have not designed products or systems that work with the decomposers. We have, in fact, systematically destroyed the soils and forests where those decomposers live.
The most radical act of regenerative design is to ask a simple question: when this product reaches the end of its life, which organism will break it down, and have we created conditions in which that organism can thrive?
Almost nothing in our built environment has been designed with that question in mind.
Rewilding Fungi: The Foundation of Forest Restoration
There is a growing movement to re-wild forests by replanting native tree species. This is important work. But it is incomplete, and in many cases it fails, because the trees are being planted into soils stripped of their fungal partners.
A native tree seedling planted into degraded soil, soil that has been compacted, tilled, treated with synthetic fertilizers, or simply left bare for years, is like a child placed in a room with no family and no community. The tree may survive. It will not thrive.
Rewilding forests properly means rewilding the fungi first.
Mycorrhizal inoculants, preparations containing living fungal spores and hyphae, can be introduced at the time of planting. But this only works when the right species are matched to the right tree species in the right soil context. A western red cedar requires different fungal partners than a bigleaf maple. The fungi must be locally adapted. The soil chemistry must support them.
Indigenous land stewardship practices in the Pacific Northwest maintained the fungal networks of these forests for thousands of years, not by managing fungi directly, but by managing fire, harvesting practices, and forest structure in ways that preserved the underground communities. The loss of those practices has been as damaging to fungal diversity as logging itself.
Restoration ecologists are beginning to work with mycologists to assess the fungal communities in degraded sites before planting. Some projects now inoculate seedlings in nurseries with local fungal strains before transplanting. Others introduce woody debris and nurse logs, the habitat that allows saprotrophic fungi to re-establish and begin rebuilding soil organic matter.
These approaches work. They are slower than simply planting trees. They require knowledge, patience, and a willingness to work with living systems rather than managing them from the outside. That is precisely what makes them regenerative.
Working With Fungi: Collaboration as Design Principle
The mycological internet teaches us something beyond ecology. It teaches us a different way of thinking about how systems function.
The forest does not optimize for individual success. It optimizes for network resilience. A tree that monopolizes resources at the expense of its neighbours weakens the fungal networks that keep all of them alive. The most successful organisms in a healthy forest are the ones that contribute most generously to the commons.
This is the design principle that regenerative culture must absorb.
Working with fungi in practical terms means several things. In agriculture, it means transitioning away from tillage and synthetic fertilizers that destroy mycorrhizal networks, and toward practices like no-till cultivation, cover cropping, and the use of biochar that preserve and feed underground communities. It means inoculating seeds and seedlings. It means diversifying crops to support fungal diversity.
In product design and materials science, it means taking seriously the extraordinary capabilities of mycelium as a building material. Mycelium composites, grown from agricultural waste like corn husks or hemp hurds colonized by specific fungal species, can produce materials with the structural properties of foam, leather, or even structural panels. These materials are fully compostable. They sequester carbon. They are grown in days, not decades.
Companies like Ecovative Design have demonstrated that mycelium packaging can replace polystyrene, breaking down in garden compost within weeks. The MycoWorks collective has developed a mycelium-based leather substitute that luxury brands are now using in their collections. These are not marginal experiments. They are demonstrations of what is possible when we design in collaboration with fungal processes rather than in ignorance of them.
In waste remediation, fungi offer capabilities that no other technology matches. Paul Stamets and others have documented mycoremediation projects in which diesel-contaminated soil was colonized by oyster mushrooms, with hydrocarbon levels dropping by over 95 percent within months. Fungi have shown the ability to sequester heavy metals, neutralize agricultural runoff, and even reduce the radioactivity of certain contaminated sites.
The world’s most powerful decomposition technology has been living in the soil for 450 million years. We have barely begun to work with it.
Rebuilding the Soil: Carbon, Life, and the Underground Economy
Healthy soil is the most biodiverse habitat on Earth. A single gram of forest soil can contain billions of bacteria, millions of fungi, thousands of protozoa, hundreds of nematodes, and dozens of arthropods. This living community is what makes soil fertile. Mineral composition matters, but it is secondary. The life is the engine.
Mycorrhizal fungi are central to soil carbon sequestration, a fact that has enormous implications for climate. When fungi process plant sugars into hyphal biomass, they produce a substance called glomalin, a glycoprotein that is remarkably stable in soil. Glomalin can persist for decades and represents a significant pool of terrestrially sequestered carbon. Industrial agriculture, with its dependence on tillage and synthetic inputs, destroys the fungal networks that produce glomalin and releases that stored carbon back into the atmosphere.
Rebuilding soil carbon means rebuilding fungal communities. There is no shortcut. The soil food web is a genuinely complex adaptive system, and it cannot be replaced by any combination of synthetic inputs. It can only be restored by removing the disturbances that damaged it and creating conditions in which life can return.
This takes time. A degraded agricultural field can begin showing signs of mycorrhizal recovery within a single season if tillage stops and diverse cover crops are planted. Full recovery of a complex fungal community, including the slower-growing species that anchor mature forest soils, takes decades. In old-growth forest, the fungal communities represent ecological processes that have been developing for thousands of years, which is why old-growth loss is effectively irreversible on any human timescale.
The Spore and the Elder
I think often about those early conversations in the Vancouver Mycological Society, crouched over a dissecting scope with someone who had spent forty years learning to read the forest through its fungi.
What struck me then, and strikes me still, is how differently those elders understood time. They were not thinking in seasons or years. They were thinking in decades and centuries. They had watched forests change over lifetimes. They had watched the fungi respond. They knew that the mushroom you see above ground is only the fruiting body, the temporary reproductive structure, and that the organism itself, the mycelium, spreads invisibly through the soil in networks that can persist and grow for hundreds of years.
The largest known organism on Earth is a single honey fungus, Armillaria ostoyae, growing in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon. It covers approximately 8.9 square kilometres and is estimated to be between 2,000 and 8,000 years old. It is a single individual.
A culture that wants to be regenerative needs that kind of time horizon. It needs to ask not only what we are building, but what we are handing to the network. What are we contributing to the commons that will outlast us? What are we tending that does not need us to survive, but benefits from our care?
The fungi have been doing this longer than we have been asking the question.
Practical Steps Toward Fungal Literacy
Becoming a regenerative culture does not require everyone to become a mycologist. It requires enough people to understand what fungi do, why they matter, and how human choices affect them.
At the individual scale, this means learning to identify a few key species, not to harvest, but to recognize. It means composting with attention to fungal health. It means choosing garden practices that avoid fungicide and tillage. It means buying food from farms that take soil biology seriously.
At the community scale, it means advocating for mycological assessment as a standard part of ecological restoration projects. It means supporting Indigenous land stewardship initiatives that have maintained fungal diversity for generations. It means funding the mycological surveys that remain desperately incomplete, particularly in tropical soils where the majority of undescribed fungal species likely live.
At the design and policy scale, it means requiring that new materials and products demonstrate end-of-life pathways that work with biological decomposition systems. It means incentivizing regenerative agriculture practices that rebuild mycorrhizal networks. It means protecting old-growth forests not as aesthetic amenities but as irreplaceable fungal heritage.
The Kingdom Fungi is not a niche interest for foragers and eccentrics. It is the foundation upon which terrestrial life on Earth depends. Recognizing that is not a radical position. It is simply accurate.
We did not build this world alone. We inherited a living system built by billions of years of collaboration between organisms we are only beginning to understand. The fungi were here before us, and if we make the right choices, they will be here long after us, quietly breaking down whatever we leave behind, returning it to the network, making it available again for life.
That is what regeneration means. Not restoration to some fixed past, but continuous return to the cycle. Decompose, transform, renew. Learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Key Terms
Mycelium: The vegetative body of a fungus, composed of branching, thread-like hyphae that spread through soil, wood, or other substrates. The mushroom is only the fruiting body; the mycelium is the organism itself.
Mycorrhizae: Symbiotic associations between fungi and plant roots. The term comes from the Greek for fungus-root. Approximately 90 percent of all land plant species form mycorrhizal partnerships.
Saprotrophic fungi: Fungi that obtain nutrition by decomposing dead organic matter. They are the primary decomposers of wood and the main agents recycling nutrients in forest ecosystems.
Glomalin: A stable glycoprotein produced by mycorrhizal fungi that binds soil particles together, creates soil structure, and represents a significant pool of sequestered soil carbon.
Mycoremediation: The use of fungi to break down or remove environmental contaminants, including petroleum products, heavy metals, agricultural runoff, and certain persistent organic pollutants.
Wood wide web: The colloquial term for the underground fungal networks that connect trees and facilitate the movement of carbon, water, nutrients, and chemical signals between plants in a forest community.
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