Slime moulds and mycelia at All Things Fungi festival
Do you like slime moulds?
Barry Webb (background); slime mould (foreground)
I’d never had the courage or occasion to shout “Do you like slime moulds?” to passing strangers before, but then I’d never been to All Things Fungi before either.
I had just set up my stall (exploiting the environment in true mycelial style by setting up my friend’s gazebo frame, finding a tarp for a cover and some boards for posters, and borrowing a table from the guys at the Bristol Fungarium) when a group of people walked past. They were wearing sensible boots and woodland greens; I saw my chance.
“It’s all he’s thought about for the last five years,” replied a lady introducing Barry Webb, an award-winning slime mould photographer and member of the Bucks Fungus Group. Curiously enough his slime hunting ground is the woodland five minutes from my childhood home, where I walked my dog as a child. My plasmodial explorations were bearing fruit - or rather spores....
Hyphae were spreading out, just minutes after arriving. Perhaps they were there already, waiting to be noticed.
Close-up and post-plasmodial
Slime moulds, like mycelia, are excellent models for how to run an NGO, and I brought some along with RAIN to All Things Fungi these incredible networkers are an inspiration and model for how to do land restoration projects in Brazil: community-led, non-hierarchical, respecting the autonomy of partner communities, sharing what they learn across our networks to be replicated in different contexts.
Slime moulds are also astonishingly beautiful, fascinating creatures, and we saw them close-up on Barry’s walk in the woods. Another highlight was the work of Symcyto, a pair of artists who share their apartment with millions of amoeba colonizing different landscapes from sculptured heads to beach scenes, and more recently experimenting with cymatics to record how different sound frequencies impact their growth patterns. I gave them a prized sclerotium from my own collection to see what their collaboration would grow into.
With the Symcyto two
Or fungi?
Slime moulds are incredible, but perhaps fungi are a better model for RAIN because they connect together a web of species in the forest, bringing distant and disparate elements into a kind of unity. All Things Fungi was teeming with talented artists taking their own enigmatic angles on the subject, like Emma Cole’s collective poster, Sophie Bresnahan’s children’s book presenting the majesty of the fungal kingdom, and Jack and Emily overseeing a collaborative ceramic mushroom. Speakers included Dr. Sam Gandy on mushrooms and nature connection, Kai Cartwright exploring fungi that break down plastics, and Darren Le Barron growing his community in at least two kingdoms, and there were adaptogens everywhere - growing ostentatiously at the Bristol Fungarium stall, tinctured into herbalist Laz’s bottles and in a super tasty chocolate bar from Lucid. I also had an enlightening chat with a crew from Kew about how nature’s networks solve problems more efficiently than our most complex mathematical models, and heard from the young mycologists about the positive impacts on students and the local community at outdoor learning hub Grow.
Mycelia, like mycologists, network promiscuously. Slime moulds, by contrast, are in it for themselves. They support the ecosystem to some degree by decomposing dead wood, but they keep their own company and busy themselves developing their own community exclusively.
Stepping aside to view the world differently
And yet, there is something to learn in the waves of slime mould plasmodium. RAIN is a mutual aid network, so of course we want to help others, and it is great news that companies are under pressure to develop corporate social responsibility programs and ecological interventions. We are also deeply aware that we must protect and regenerate the forests that clean our air, create rain, reduce flooding, feed us, and provide cures to a multitude of diseases. But is it wise - or kind - to view anything or anyone merely in terms of their usefulness?
It feels a little sinister to look at nature in terms of “ecosystem services” (as it is called in the business). The emerging green economy puts a price tag on trees with marketisation, monetary valuation, privatisation and financialisation, and that seems like a step up from simply valuing the timber - or the real estate once those pesky trees are out of the way. But it also implies that nature is there to serve something else - ultimately us humans positioned at the centre of the universe, like the medieval astronomers whose human-centric cosmology placed the Earth at the centre of the solar system and the cosmos.
The other implication is that nature is somehow separated from the human, when nature is in fact seeping through every pore of our bodies and pulsing in every heartbeat. We are, and are of, nature.
There have always been less anthropocentric perspectives regarding our place in the cosmos. In the fourth century BCE, Aristarchus the Greek proposed that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way around. Around the same time, Taoist sage Chiang-tzu was extolling the virtues of uselessness:
Nan Po Tzu Chi, wandering amongst the mountains of Shang, came upon a great and unusual tree, under which could shelter a thousand chariots, and they would all be covered. Tzu Chi said, ‘What kind of a tree is this? It is surely a most wondrous piece of timber!’ However, when he looked up, he could see that the smaller branches were so twisted and gnarled that they could not be made into rafters and beams; and looking down at the trunk he saw it was warped and distorted and would not make good coffins. He licked one of its leaves and his mouth felt scraped and sore. He sniffed it and it nearly drove him mad, as if he had been drunk for three days.
‘This tree is certainly good for nothing,’ said Tzu Chi.
‘This is why it has grown so large. Ah-ha! This is the sort of uselessness that sages live by.
- The Book of Chuang Tzu (Palmer M. translation)
It is inevitable, even natural, that we might apply our values to nature, even though assessing nature according our currencies denatures ourselves. But it is also natural to mature into less anthropocentric ways of viewing the world. The mycologists and enthusiasts at All Things Fungi were approaching the world with the curiosity of a hypha voyaging the deep dark unknown of the subterranean, relentlessly pushing towards discovery; they delight in intelligences so far removed from our own cosmovisions. At academic conferences the questions rarely penetrate as deeply as those I was asked on my stall, and the gasps of excitement when someone emerged from the forest with a Tupperware were a delight to hear.
Arcyria slime mould (foreground) and Jack Alexandroff (background). He made the animation on our website
Something of a Copernican revolution is afoot in events like All Things Fungi, nudging humans from the centre of the cosmos. Perhaps we are finally emerging from the squalls of humanity's adolescence into a social maturity that values the diverse, the useless, the untamed alongside the product or the profit. Perhaps a collective and networked response, one based on inclusivity, mutuality and respect, rather than marginalisation and elitism, is emerging as we consider other ways of being intelligent.
All Things Fungi, to you we raise our (metasporical) hats.
More about slime mould and NGO work? - check out the images and video below.
