Here speaks the mighty mycelium

A multispecies perspective on the post-capitalist economy

Making worlds is not limited to humans.
Each organism changes everyone’s world.
~ Anna Tsing

Some call humankind a plague, a disease. An egocentric species that grows without limits and destroys its own living environment. It’s an ominous fairy tale that you tell yourselves — and gives you too much credit. The crux is here: you subsequently bombard yourself as guardians, destroyers, and saviors of the earth. We say: you are none of that. The fact that you do not see this, affects the expiration date of your own species. You see capitalism as a great evil. But capitalism is in your nature, just as it is in our nature.

We are fungi

Here speaks the oldest market economy in the world: the four hundred million year old mycelium, the underground fungal network that stretches all over the earth and serves millions of producers and consumers simultaneously. We connect the roots of eighty percent of plant species via microscopically thin wires that exchange communication signals and nutrients between plants. We are masters of manipulation, creating food scarcity as a strategic leverage in an underground capitalist system for our own benefit: to get sugar from plants in exchange for nitrogen. We are intimately involved with all life on Earth. Through the microbiome, formed by tens of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi on and in your body, we also influence your immune system, mental state and even your partner choice.

You can’t blame us for that. We have no conscience, our actions are neither good nor bad. Moreover, even without a brain, we are smarter than you, because we stay in touch with the world around us and keep the communication channels open. When was the last time you exchanged information with a fungus? Really made the effort to listen to the individuals of other species with whom you share your habitat, your home, your body?

If the human species is to create a healthy society beyond the capitalist state, you must, like us, be willing to cooperate closely with both inanimate matter and the other species on this planet. Only multispecies sustainability that includes all species will keep Homo sapiens sapiens from the Red List.

Each species needs other species to survive. By caring only for the well-being of your own species, you have ignored and disrupted the complex network of interdependence with other species. Bees die, jeopardizing crop production. Your cities barely leave room for other species. Your farming methods are destroying subterranean life and your oceans contain deadly microplastics. Climate change from your oil hunger is destroying your habitats. Your species is in a constant state of crisis, entire nations on the run from the effects of climate change, hunger, war and systemic inequality. It’s not just that you don’t co-operate with other species, you don’t see them as a partner or entity in control at all, but as an object, a commodity to use. Even those of you who want to do good in the world suffer from the same tunnel vision in a different guise. Your definition of sustainability is based on the human dimension where nature is reduced to something to use or to protect. For you, sustainable development means meeting the needs of the present world population (by this you mean the humans) without depriving future generations of that same opportunity. Not a word is mentioned about the non-human generations, now or in the future.

A short prehistory of fungal alliances

Forging new alliances has proved crucial for successful survival, precisely at a turning point in Earth’s history. An unlikely partnership was on the eve of the mass colonization of the Earth by land plants. The earth’s surface was a hostile and unpredictable wasteland compared to the nutrient-rich primeval sea. For a long time, it remained a mystery exactly how the first plants (the algae) had made the step from sea to land. Scientists at Michigan State University have now shown that an alliance with fungi may have enabled the transition to land. The marine algae Nannochloropsis oceanica and the fungus Mortierella elongata form colonies together, with some algae even living in the fungal cells. Together they are stronger than alone: in times of food scarcity they prevent extinction by feeding each other. Later on, fungi and plants needed each other still. In increasingly heated competition for sunlight, some species developed woody stems and trunks that gave rise to trees and woody plants. Wood production was quite problematic, as it was non-biodegradable in the Carboniferous, 360–300 million years ago. It was residual waste, until wood rot fungi put their mycelia into the wood and were able to break down lignin in wood with a peroxide. Fungi and plants are still intimately entangled and need each other to survive, and fungi and plants of many species work together in above and below ground mega-ecosystems.

Multispecies cooperation is therefore of the utmost importance to build a better, species-inclusive economy, which puts welfare and not profit first.

You may wonder whether multispecies collaboration is necessary to achieve multispecies well-being. After all, with some rational capacity for abstraction and a well-developed capacity for empathy, humans should be perfectly capable of devising what is just and right for the entire ecosystem. Your Theory of Mind helps you to conceptualize the thoughts, views and feelings of others, including non-human others.

The mountain and the river who became persons

In 2017 New Zealand granted Mount Taranaki Maunga the same legal rights as a person. The mountain is considered an ancestor by the local Maori tribes, and they have lobbied vigorously to stop using the colonial name Mount Egmont (given by Captain Cook in 1770). The mountain now has the same rights as a human being. Eight local Maori tribes and the government share custody of the mountain and look after its interests. In the same year, the Whanganui River was granted personal rights. The river has two guardians. But despite this status and attention, the river’s ecosystem has still not recovered and continues to suffer from deforestation, dams, and the negative impact of construction projects along the river course.

Improving the ecosystem surrounding Whanganui turned out to be difficult. Truly inclusive multispecies well-being is too complex to control top-down. In systems science or cybernetics, the law of ‘required variety’ (Ashby’s Law) applies: to keep a system stable, the diversity of the control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the diversity of the system. So, with humans as the controlling unit, you would need as nuanced and varied a repertoire of possible measures as the complex ecosystems you are trying to manage. It is far too complicated even for your big brains aided by machine computer brains to see through all the complex alliances on the planet and then create a ‘Wellbeing for All’ action plan. Despite empathy and computer models, top down control will not ‘save’ your living environment. An effective economy that prioritizes the well-being of all species requires the active participation of all species.

I hear you say: HOW THEN, LOUISE?

Because it is an absurd idea for an oak tree and a minister to make joint decisions about the economy: fodder for science fiction, not for real life. Trees and bees cannot communicate their interests, let alone a river or mountain.

Yet we say: if you as a human species want to build a healthy society that includes the well-being of everyone, you must set up a close collaboration with other species and listen to their voices.

An economy built on traditional ecological knowledge systems

Your economy is closely linked to the ecosystem. A healthy ecosystem is the basis for a healthy living environment and food supply. The highly diverse, ever-changing and inextricably linked needs of the ecosystem can only be met through an adaptive, self-regulating system. Such a system requires respect for the interests and autonomy of other species and continuous renegotiation of the complex interests of those species. Such systems are not new. The traditional ecological knowledge systems (TEK) of indigenous peoples, such as the Skolt Sami from Finland, are based on these principles. The Sami collect and document environmental indicators, such as changes in the abundance of the salmon they fish for and adapt their behavior. They also actively work on restoring spawning grounds, and might temporarily hunt more for pike, which hunts the young salmon, when salmon counts are low.

Multispecies well-being is achieved by using different ways of looking at and anticipating the future. Because humans, salmon and fungi use different modes of communication, translation is needed to bring these different ways together and interact with other species. People use their cognitive capacities, language, technology and self-reflection for this. Unique properties, but also limited when compared to the anticipatory abilities of other species.

Pollinating insects such as bees are indispensable to human society. In 2006, the then French research institute on agriculture and food supply INRA valued insect pollination services at the equivalent of 153 billion euros per year. But these services are actually priceless: you wouldn’t be able to do it yourself. The neglect of this important labor force in the food chain now pays for itself: years of using pesticides, destruction of the living environment and, on top of that, climate change, threatens the lives of many pollinating and non-pollinating insects. Insects are not seen as autonomous workers in the food chain, nor are they treated as such. At the same time, you can learn a lot from these insects. For example, the migration of heat-loving leaf blade beetles from more southerly areas to Finland gives the Sami insight into shifting climate boundaries and uses that information to adapt their lifestyle. By working together, humans can use their unique abilities to jointly build a planetary system that takes the well-being of all species into account, together with other species with other unique abilities.

This way of working together is being experimented with within Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, a cultural center with a focus on architecture, design and digital culture. Since April 22, 2022, Het Nieuwe Instituut has been a zoöp (short for zooöperation), a new type of cooperative legal association, one in which humans and multispecies ecological communities work together. For example, Het Nieuwe Instituut has a representative of non-human life on its board, who not only thinks about the impact of the institute’s projects on other species, but also how fungi, plants and animals should be involved in design issues.

Another example are the tea estates of Pinglin, as described by anthropologist Szu-Yu Liu. The plantation of tea farmer Chen Lu-He, known in Taiwan as the frog king for his commitment to the local environment and the species living there, produces a special honey-flavoured tea. The special smell of the tea is the result of being eaten by the microscopic leafhopper Jacobiasca Formosana. The eaten tea leaf produces a chemical that attracts spiders (which hunt locusts) and a substance that repairs the leaf: the latter gives the tea its characteristic taste. Too many leafhoppers and the harvest fails (other tea farmers use pesticides for that reason), too little and the tea lacks the special taste. In addition, the feeding damage should be neither too much nor too little, and applied to the right leaves of the right age. Producing the special tea is a delicate interplay between humans, leafhoppers, spiders and tea bushes. Although this process can also be controlled top-down (and is, elsewhere in Taiwan) on Chen’s tea plantations, maximizing profit is not the goal, but rather a common concern for the environment with an eye for all human and non-human employees.

The pilots of spaceship Earth

We’ve now convincingly demonstrated that you as a species are not going to make it on your own. Collaboration with other species is necessary to survive and to build more sustainable societies with well-being for all. It is important that this is a genuine cooperation based on mutual respect for interests, control and autonomy of non-human species and ecosystems. Even with your cognitive abilities, you alone cannot see the big picture and make decisions for all others. Existing traditional ecological knowledge systems offer starting points for developing a system that takes the well-being of all into account. In short, if you want to create a healthy society beyond the capitalist state, deploy your cognitive and anticipatory abilities alongside those of other species.

The big question, of course, is whether you as a species are able to give up your role as imaginary pilot of spaceship Earth for an uncertain place in the ecosystem web where you must fully face your dependence on other species and ultimately your own vulnerability. We from the underground will live to see it all. We were here long before you were, and will be here long after. Unlike you, we are patient and will continue to build our own cooperative states undisturbed.

References

Drucker, Peter F. (1993). Post Capitalist Society .

Du, Zhi-Yan et al. (2019). Algal-fungal symbiosis leads to photosynthetic mycelium . eLife 8.

Franklin, Oskar et al. (2014) Forests trapped in nitrogen limitation — an ecological market perspective on ectomycorrhizal symbiosis. New Phytologist

Gallai, Nicola et al. (2009). Economic valuation of the vulnerability of world agriculture confronted with pollinator decline. Ecological Economics, 68, 3, p810–821.

Pecl, Gretta T. et al. (2017). Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Science 355 (6332).

Kiers, Toby (2019). Lessons from fungi on markets and economics. TED talk

Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in the Capitalist Ruins.

Rupprecht, Christoph D.D. et al. (2020). Multispecies sustainability. Global Sustainability 3, e34, 1–12.

Schulz, Kathrin (2018). Living in a Multispecies Pluriverse in Capitalist Ruins — The Encounter between Sue and Nelida. Master Thesis at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

Sheldrake, Merlin (2021). Entangled Life.

Marjolein Pijnappels is a researcher-storyteller. She uses science, (future) speculation and design to create mirrors to society — immersive narratives that kickstart dialogues and creative solutions. Check out more and reach out on wondermash.eu