From ... in Biology Environmental Science Climate Change — Mar 13, 2025

Living Like a Fungus

Since its creation I have supported Rupert Read’s Climate Majority Project as the answer to achieving the climate action we need. Read observes that the majority of people are concerned about climate change and to effectively combat it, that majority must act. The same is now true with our current crisis of democracy, as the majority of American voters did not support Trump in the 2024 election. Only about thirty-two percent of registered voters voted for him, and over thirty-six percent of the electorate didn’t vote at all. Protest against the Trump coup is growing, but it needs to spread and get much bigger fast.

A particular challenge for Read is so many people’s reluctance to adopt the label of “activist,” and while plenty of new people are joining the U.S. Resistance by attending rallies, signing petitions, making phone calls and emailing members of congress, this is generally where their participation ends. One of Fred Ross Senior’s Axioms for Organizers is “An organizer tries to turn each person she meets into a temporary organizer,” and it expresses what we need now: everybody who joins the movement must also build it. This especially means reaching out way beyond the choir to people who would never act on their own. We do need to change everything, and this includes practicing a method of organizing modeled after fungi.

Since gaining fame in best-selling books describing the “wood-wide web,” fungi are beginning to star in new stories of everything. Unlike the single cell that serves as the prototype for systems theory, fungi are entirely decentralized and essentially unbounded branching threads that intertwine and bond with other organisms to exchange and transmit substances as well as information across extensive underground networks. Fungi exist everywhere in the environment, constituting 20-30% of soil biomass, with 90% of all plants living in symbiosis with mycorrhizal fungi. Through photosynthesis plants extract carbon from the atmosphere to incorporate into their own bodies, from which fungi draw their own supply. In return they provide up to 80% of plants’ nitrogen and phosphorus for plant growth and further support resilience from drought and stresses as they enhance soil structure and distribute water.

Fungal threads are called hyphae, and they extend singly sometimes for meters and as masses known as mycelium, while mushrooms, their fruiting bodies, are formed by hyphae felting together. Growth occurs at hyphal tips that actively sense and respond to their surroundings principally through chemical interactions, for they disperse chemicals into the soil and air as they react to emissions from other fungi and plant partners to perform their functions of obtaining nutrients, bonding, reproducing and transmitting alerts between plants. Hyphae trade substances with plants in what appear to be supply and demand-based exchanges. One species can sense nearby objects, and a culture in one petri dish was observed to influence a second culture in a separate dish some distance from the first. Changes can pass over mycelium like waves more rapidly than chemical transmission permits, and researchers hypothesize that these are effected by electrical signals.

Fungi hold promise for resolving some of our most pressing environmental problems, as they can detoxify contamination, accelerate regeneration of devastated landscapes and sequester atmospheric carbon on a potentially very large scale. Rodale Institute’s report https://rodaleinstitute.org/education/resources/regenerative-agriculture-and-the-soil-carbon-solution/ describes how mycorrhizal fungi acting with bacteria in minimally disturbed healthy soil with a rich diversity of plants above ground can sequester enormous quantities of carbon deep in that soil for millennia. Universal adoption of their regenerative agricultural practices for soil carbon sequestration would move us significantly closer to net-zero in a short time.

Fungi transform themselves and their behaviors in response to their circumstances with hyphae at every moment appearing to make choices from among a multitude of options for action, often coordinating with each other. Scientists therefore wonder how such organisms, possessing nothing like central nervous systems, can perform functions that in animals are mediated by brains. Mycelial networks resemble the nervous systems of animals and transfer some similar and even identical chemical substances. Indeed, mycelium bear a remarkable likeness to brains.

As they study the apparent intelligence of fungi scientists hold animals’ and our own nervous systems as the standards for comparison. But what if we should be taking fungi as the model for ourselves? Maybe, instead of comparing our lives to highly bounded and internally integrated systems like cells we should see them as diffuse and distributed like fungi?

That all life is a unity is the fundamental concept of ecology, and people now recognize myriad organic relationships among individual things. This viewpoint encourages us to bring human activity into line with nature by building more ecological communities, approaching the matter in terms of systems. There has been impressive progress with this strategy, and while it advances the ideal of the ecological civilization, something more is needed to confront the present urgent crisis. We must activate everyone now and do so, in Read’s words, by meeting them where they are. This formulation of our mission compares with the hyphal action of fungi.

Worldview change is underway, with people turning especially to Indigenous and Eastern models, however I hark back to the work of early twentieth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson. His system is holistic, defining the universe as containing all things as different but not distinct in an extended Becoming. This is immediately known to us when we withdraw our attention from distinct things to the intuition of indistinct qualities in the present moment that is prolonged into the past as memory. Upholding the self-evident fact that the present is, and the present is no more, Bergson’s philosophy revolves around this conscious prolonging of the present into the past with memory which he calls “duration.”

As things in the universal Becoming aren’t distinct, neither are subjects and objects. Rather, one perceives a multitude of images, amid which is the image of their body, a center of action. That experience isn’t in the body, but rather the body is in experience is another self-evident fact. At every moment the body becomes anew as the present embodiment of its entire history whose past is preserved as particular bodily memories, and its action consists in projecting such past actions into the present. Within the universal Becoming all things are in continual flux, universally determining each other’s present action except in the case of bodies possessing free choice which admit some influences into themselves as they reflect others back onto their sources. These reflections are virtual actions that form momentary present images of the reflecting object’s potential action upon the source object. Memories are projected onto these images to produce conscious images that exhibit duration.

By this means a world of conscious images is formed that represent our potential action determined both by the nature of their objects and our intention toward them. Sometimes our virtual action passes immediately into real action, but at other times we pause to study the situation, creating a circuit from conscious images through our senses and nervous system with its myriad routes to possible actions then back to the objects as virtual actions. In this scheme the brain is merely an extremely complex network that connects images located outside the body with the rest of it that executes movements. As images aren’t in the brain, neither are memories, for they are in the past and are only projected into the present to bring images into consciousness.

Bergson’s system of philosophy is one chapter in the Western tradition in which works were written to explain the world and to provide moral direction. Science is a materialist philosophy that has never provided any satisfactory explanation for consciousness and now offers no adequate moral guidance for our historical moment. This article is a digest of Living Like a Fungus (Long Version), the two of which elaborate my worldview contained in Being Alive: A Guide for Human Action that presents a course of action and justification that serves our needs today.

In the French philosopher’s scheme images are connected to our bodies as threads, so to speak, of virtual actions that are determined by our intentions. The structure is like the hyphae of fungi reaching out and literally connecting with objects in their environments. Our images are more than options for action, for they all present opportunities.

Living like a fungus therefore means first forming the intention of preserving democracy and combating climate change. Assuming this attitude literally makes our perceptions represent potential actions directed at these goals. Our primary targets are people we can engage in the movement by simply talking to them in a way that takes seriously their situations and needs and offers particular actions they are willing to perform. Chief among these is talking to the people they know. Fungi adapt to the things around them, connect with them then connect those things with each other. As the action of fungi aims at establishing healthy ecosystems they require and promote diversity of life below and above ground. They further spread tenaciously, even burrowing into solid rock, so we must prioritize penetrating barriers to include people unlike ourselves. Like hyphae that act singly and in coordinated masses we must function individually and collectively as they do to activate the majority to protect democracy and the planet.

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