There are moments in moist love when heaven is jealous of what we on earth can do. —HAFIZ
Fungi are everywhere but they are easy to miss. They are inside you and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years. They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel, and behave. Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.
Fungi make up one of life’s kingdoms—as broad and busy a category as “animals” or “plants.” Microscopic yeasts are fungi, as are the sprawling networks of honey fungi, or Armillaria, which are among the largest organisms in the world. The current record holder, in Oregon, weighs hundreds of tons, spills across ten square kilometers, and is somewhere between two thousand and eight thousand years
Some roots smell sharp and nutty and others woody and bitter, but the roots of my tree had a spicy resinous kick when I scratched them with a fingernail. For several hours I inched along the ground, scratching and sniffing every few centimeters to make sure I hadn’t lost the thread.
As the day went on, more filaments sprang out from the root I’d uncovered and I chose a few of them to follow all the way to the tips, where they burrowed into fragments of rotting leaf or twig. I dipped the ends in a vial of water to wash off the mud and looked at them through a loupe. The rootlets branched like a small tree and their surface was covered with a filmy layer that appeared fresh and sticky. It was these delicate structures I wanted to examine.
From these roots, a fungal network laced out into the soil and around the roots of nearby trees. Without this fungal web my tree would not exist. Without similar fungal webs no plant would exist anywhere. All life on land, including my own, depended on these networks. I tugged lightly on my root and felt the ground move.