For The Wild - CHRISTIAN SCHWARZ on the Sublime World of Fungi ⧸158

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00:00:22.340 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'll be speaking

00:00:27.800 to Christian Schwarz, a naturalist currently living in Santa Cruz, the land of milk caps

00:00:34.000 and honey mushrooms. Christian studied ecology and evolution at UCSC and now spends his time

00:00:41.100 photographing, teaching about, collecting, and researching macro fungi. He is co-author of

00:00:47.160 Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast. Fungi satisfy his curiosity with their seemingly endless forms,

00:00:53.460 from the grotesque to the bizarre to the sublimely beautiful.

00:00:58.340 They come in a zillion colors.

00:00:59.880 Every hue, every shade, every intensity is represented, it seems.

00:01:03.640 Just structurally, texturally, they engage all your senses if you let them.

00:01:08.760 And if you go out of your way, you can even hear some mushrooms.

00:01:12.780 Besides dabbling in mushroom taxonomy,

00:01:15.840 he loves fish, plants, nudibranchs, moths, and dragonflies.

00:01:20.920 He is passionate about citizen science, especially iNaturalist.

00:01:27.820 Oh, Christian, well, this is such a beautiful day that I get to interview you.

00:01:33.700 I remember seeing that you are teaching at the Radical Mycology Convergence, I think

00:01:38.440 it was last October, or maybe the October before that, and I wasn't able to join, but

00:01:43.300 I was reading your bio, and I actually have mushrooms of the Redwood Coast sitting with

00:01:49.000 me.

00:01:49.200 my hand is on this beautiful book. And I'm just very intrigued by your knowledge and curiosities

00:01:56.900 and thoughts around fungi and climate change. So thank you so much for joining us today. And I'm

00:02:03.240 really looking forward to diving in deep to many different threads of the fungal queendom.

00:02:10.340 So I want to start off with a pretty easy first question just to get us rolling. So here I am,

00:02:16.360 I have your book, Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast, and it's beautiful.

00:02:21.480 It's a book you co-authored with Noah Siegel, and it includes descriptions, illustrations,

00:02:27.360 and photographs of over 700 different mushroom species along what you call the Redwood Coast.

00:02:34.500 So to begin our conversation, I would like to ask how was this field guide brought into

00:02:40.800 fruition, and if you could share some of the tremendous fungal diversity that is contained

00:02:45.780 within this area? Well, the book, I always say we kind of wrote for ourselves because we had been

00:02:53.760 using the existing field guides to get to know the mushrooms that we were experiencing up and

00:02:59.200 down the California coast. And we felt that there were big gaps in what was available at that point.

00:03:05.280 We had learned a lot since the last major field guide was published, Mushrooms Demystified.

00:03:10.080 and there were new species there were new ways of recognizing species there were new

00:03:15.460 distinctions that people had become sensitive to and there was also just this revolution of

00:03:21.160 photography where it was easy to make lots and lots and lots of color photos that really

00:03:25.200 captured the essence of a species and we wanted to have all of that in one place for our own

00:03:31.040 to help us get to know the characters in the woods better and essentially we decided that

00:03:37.160 we had already taken so many photos and we'd already gotten so familiar with so many species

00:03:41.220 that it was time for us to write a book. And that took a little convincing of ourselves. You know,

00:03:45.720 we had to convince each other that we were ready. And I think in retrospect, we weren't ready,

00:03:51.120 but you don't start a project by being ready. You start a project and then by the end of it,

00:03:55.160 you did well enough. So we basically made a list of all the species we really felt were

00:04:00.340 common enough to warrant inclusion in the book, things that people would likely see,

00:04:04.180 as well as a big smattering of you know rare things and treats other species that maybe you're

00:04:09.660 unlikely to see but we want you to to be able to look them up if you do have the good luck of

00:04:14.700 finding them and then we spent six years traveling up and down the california coast

00:04:19.420 sort of really exhaustively looking through different kinds of woods that represented

00:04:25.780 different flavors of the redwood ecosystem all the way from the southern limit down in big sur

00:04:30.920 Monterey County, all the way to the northern limit in southern Oregon, and everywhere in between old

00:04:35.720 growth, second growth, recently logged, and all of the surrounding habitats as well. So it's not just

00:04:41.280 redwoods that we cover, it's the hardwood forests of Tanok Madrone, the beautiful live oak groves

00:04:46.760 that characterize the sort of warmer, drier southern climate, and even the chaparral and

00:04:51.500 the cypress, the Monterey cypress that had been relatively underexplored. And after six years,

00:04:57.120 we ended up with way more species than we could fit in the book, way more photos than the publisher

00:05:00.820 would let us print, but we were still really happy with our experience working with 10 Speed Press.

00:05:05.440 They allowed us to really pack in as much of that biodiversity in between two covers that we could

00:05:11.680 reasonably get away with. So we're really proud of how the book turned out. And it really, as far as

00:05:16.740 the biodiversity, giving you a sense of what lives on the Redwood Coast, I think we did a good job

00:05:21.580 because a lot of the diversity is in the Redwoods and especially the special diversity, the diversity

00:05:26.980 that sets California apart from the rest of the United States because redwoods are almost uniquely

00:05:31.660 a Californian phenomenon. But also the other habitats that make California special, like

00:05:36.680 Monterey Pine Forest, has its own unique assemblage of fungi. Same with the Monterey Cypress. There's

00:05:41.700 some of the most distinct and unique fungi live with Monterey Cypress. And then we tied it to

00:05:48.020 the rest of the country. There are things that occur across the Northern Hemisphere that also

00:05:52.740 are present on the Redwood Coast, and we managed to get a little bit of all of it. So I think we

00:05:56.500 we were really pleased with being able to get in as many photos and as many species as we did.

00:06:02.100 Yeah, it's a book that has been off the shelf for a few months now in my little cabin here

00:06:10.720 in the Redwoods. Almost every day when I go out and find a new friend, a new fungal friend,

00:06:18.220 I come back and I check out your book and try to figure out what I'm looking at.

00:06:22.600 The diversity of fungi is so enormous. And even the most expert of us still are, I think, baby learners in this field. And we may never truly know the complexity and just vastness that the fundal queendom holds. So it's really a wonderful resource and recommend it to anybody who wants to learn more about this region.

00:06:48.760 And I really liked hearing how you were talking about the different regions in California, these really incredible ecosystems, the hardwood forest, the redwood forest, the chaparral.

00:07:01.440 And it just reminds me that without fungi, plants may have never been able to populate the land in this way.

00:07:09.360 And thinking that nearly 90% of all plant species have mutualistic bonds with fungi.

00:07:14.320 In some cases, one plant species will have over 100 species of fungi connected to its roots.

00:07:20.820 So it's really this remarkable companionship.

00:07:24.880 And to kind of take that thought further, as you were talking about the old growth and the second growth and going into places that were just logged, I, too, really explore the forest in its different variations of human interaction and resource extraction.

00:07:42.580 And I think about the fungal diversity and ecological loss and what is being threatened

00:07:48.040 due to logging, monocropping, and forest thinning.

00:07:52.460 And so, yeah, I just want to pose that question to you in terms of fungal diversity and fungal

00:07:58.920 health.

00:07:59.580 What is being threatened when we see this massive resource extraction projects come

00:08:05.140 in and really rape a forest?

00:08:07.400 And what does the loss of old growth forest mean for macro fungi?

00:08:11.600 So it's kind of a two-part question, but I'd love you to be able to speak to both of them.

00:08:16.040 So both of those, the answer can almost not be overstated in how serious the consequences are for macrofungal communities.

00:08:25.580 And macrofungal communities are kind of just the stand-in for the whole fungal community, much of which isn't detectable to our sensorium.

00:08:33.420 You know, our senses are not really equipped to be in the world of most of the diversity

00:08:39.140 of fungi because they are microscopic or endophytic or underground or out of sight and thus out

00:08:45.120 of mind.

00:08:45.700 So really, I think of macro fungi as really the way that we can connect with this kingdom,

00:08:50.900 but it's just the tip of the diversity.

00:08:52.940 You know, it's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of who's there.

00:08:56.240 Extractive industries that clear-cut forests, and this is unfortunately still super common

00:09:01.060 in the Pacific Northwest, basically takes the fungal community from potentially thousands

00:09:06.020 of species in a very small area to not zero, but a handful or a couple tens.

00:09:12.480 So it's orders of magnitude difference.

00:09:16.000 Old growth is sort of where macro fungal communities get as diverse as they get anywhere

00:09:22.040 in the world.

00:09:22.660 Old growth forests can host, even if there's only a few trees, a few tree species, relatively

00:09:28.060 undiverse from the perspective of woody plants, they can have thousands upon thousands of

00:09:33.660 macro fungi. And like I said, that's just reflective of who knows how many more thousands

00:09:38.460 of micro fungi and endophytes and soil fungi. So old growth forest is something we should be

00:09:44.120 desperately concerned with conserving, especially in the Pacific Northwest. It is where macro fungi

00:09:49.760 are most diverse, where some of the rarest species occur, where some of the most unique

00:09:53.640 evolutionary lineages are found. And they're under threat from not only direct human-caused

00:09:59.620 impacts like logging, but there was a study that came out, I think, yesterday or just this week

00:10:05.660 by Kabir P.A. at Stanford University, who's a really well-respected, well-known macrofungal

00:10:10.480 ecologist, who did an analysis, him and his lab, about the likely impacts of climate change on the

00:10:16.280 diversity of macrofungi across North America. And they found that the West Coast is likely in for

00:10:21.480 a pretty large reduction in the diversity of macrofungal species in the next few decades

00:10:27.200 due to the projected effects of climate change. So they used modeling of the climate that we

00:10:33.140 expect to be coming and the tolerances of the fungi that live here currently. And for the West

00:10:38.540 Coast, it doesn't look good. Western North America isn't poised to gain species out of this.

00:10:43.200 It's poised to lose a lot of diversity. And is this fungal diversity loss related to

00:10:49.560 warming temperatures, droughts? What is leading him to think that the diversity will be lost?

00:10:57.320 It's not single factorial. It's like everything related to climate change,

00:11:02.120 this sort of like self-reinforcing web of feedback loops. So some trees may no longer

00:11:08.600 be able to make a living if the climate warms or if the soil dries out. And if the trees leave,

00:11:14.840 maybe the fungal species had enough flexibility in its physiological envelope to continue living

00:11:20.300 there, but its host tree is no longer able to. So there's a co-evolutionary consequence. These

00:11:26.140 species can be so closely tied that if one leaves, so does the other. But all of those things are

00:11:31.160 probably important. Sometimes it's just the temperature that rises too high on average,

00:11:36.040 and sometimes it's just a ridification of the soil. And sometimes it's a combination of the

00:11:41.120 two. And sometimes it's secondary. The other organisms with which a macro fungus interacts

00:11:47.120 may change their distribution or their physiology or their behavior. And that kind of thing adds up

00:11:52.420 and it becomes hard to tease out any one reason, but overall the picture is quite clear.

00:11:58.860 Yeah. It reminds me of what's happening with the salmon in the Pacific Northwest

00:12:04.040 and the collapse of salmon and how people are going, well, I don't know. We don't know. We

00:12:10.000 don't know why they're collapsing. And again, it's not just one issue. There's compounding

00:12:16.640 issues that are affecting their habitat and their health. And so it, to me, feels very similar to

00:12:22.860 the fungi. And yeah, I noticed last year when I was in the forest, it was, I don't want to say

00:12:30.920 bare, but it was kind of shocking how little fungi was coming up. And even speaking to people

00:12:38.620 up through the North coast, they are saying, oh, it's the worst mushroom season in 30 years.

00:12:44.000 And so it's maybe I felt a little precursor of what is to come. And I do want to talk more about

00:12:50.100 fungi and climate change, but to get back to the resource extraction topic. Now, of course,

00:12:56.520 it makes sense that logging old growth would be completely detrimental to fungi. And I'm definitely

00:13:04.020 an advocate of ending old growth logging. And our work in the Tongass has a lot to do with that,

00:13:09.880 of course, with the roadless rule. But there's a lot of talk, especially with the fires around

00:13:15.460 thinning and how thinning can be helpful. It can reduce fire. It can, some people say it can

00:13:22.620 actually stimulate diversity because it gives more room to trees and it allows us to get to

00:13:28.180 old growth status faster if we go in and manage the forest. And I really go back and forth with

00:13:34.620 this because part of me feels that tending the land is something that we as humans have done

00:13:41.560 for a really long time. And at some point we were actually helping to support more biodiversity with

00:13:46.500 the way that we tended. Now, all industrial methods of managing land to me has a lot of

00:13:53.620 blind spots and issues. So just specifically, what are your thoughts when a forest, instead

00:14:00.300 of being clear cut, is being thinned for what people may call like an ecological purpose?

00:14:06.960 Yeah. So with the disclaimer that I live on the California coast where thinning is less often

00:14:12.440 talked about and fire is not as, I mean, it's still a concern, but it's not like it is in the

00:14:17.320 Sierra Nevada foothills. And thus I'm not intimately familiar with the various complexities of the

00:14:22.460 topic. I will say that there is no question in my mind that the forests are excessively dense due to

00:14:31.260 lack of management or mismanagement and total fire suppression in many places in California,

00:14:37.100 and we're sort of inheriting the consequences of a lot of that. I have no doubt that that is the

00:14:42.020 case. I don't know enough about the facts of how thinning occurs and whether or not it gets quickly

00:14:48.900 deranged by timber permits versus managing actively for fire without other concerns.

00:14:56.520 But I think there has to be some amount of thinning that we do in the near future because

00:15:02.300 we're inheriting far too many of the most catastrophic consequences of overcrowded

00:15:07.660 forests of thin trees or young sapling trees. There's no doubt in my mind that we do have to

00:15:13.640 do some thinning of some form. And I think we'll probably do it wrong a lot of the time. And I

00:15:18.340 think there's only space to get better at it, but to not consider it at this point doesn't seem like

00:15:24.500 a viable option to me. I can say for sure that a lot of the forests that were logged here and have

00:15:31.640 regrown without management are very crowded and are less biodiverse in terms of macro fungi than

00:15:38.880 those where occasional management occurs that opens out the forest, especially clearing out

00:15:43.560 the understory. Right now in Santa Cruz, they're doing fire-specific thinning along the edges of

00:15:51.220 one of the main thoroughfares through the mountains. And the remaining forest, I think

00:15:55.540 Cal Fire is doing most of the work, looks amazing. I'm actually quite excited for what it's going to

00:16:00.940 do for fungi in the near five to 10-year period. Now, I don't know if the best case scenario is

00:16:06.940 actually going to come true. It could just get regrown really badly with invasive weeds,

00:16:10.420 and that will depend on how the follow-up management occurs.

00:16:14.020 But from my perspective right now, it looks promising.

00:16:17.040 And that's about, you know, I'm not very sophisticated on this topic.

00:16:20.240 It's something that I think a lot of people are doing more research on

00:16:23.360 because it's just such a pressing matter for the state right now.

00:16:26.660 And I look to them and hope that they'll continue to just sort of be creative

00:16:30.860 about the ways they get better at it over the near 10, 20-year period.

00:16:35.760 Interesting perspective. Thank you for that.

00:16:37.660 It's not one that I've really thought in that way.

00:16:41.700 And I'm happy to hear that you're excited that that's uplifting.

00:16:46.960 You know, it's always mitigated excitement, but I got to find little things to hold on to.

00:16:51.980 Yeah, definitely.

00:16:54.020 Well, in terms of things to hold on to, I think a lot about just aesthetically mushroom diversity presents itself

00:17:03.600 and just incredible colors and formations that feel otherworldly. And I know people

00:17:08.800 are really drawn to the fungi for that reason. And I know you've put so much work into

00:17:15.960 really showcasing these fungi through your book with all the beautiful colored photographs and

00:17:22.560 all the time that I think what the six year period for taking these photographs. And I'm

00:17:27.560 wondering if you could speak to your aesthetic appreciation of biodiversity from the perspective

00:17:33.460 of fungi. And as a visual creature, how have you been enraptured by the diversity of macrofungi

00:17:40.320 and the gifts produced within the wisps of mycelial thread? I feel like it is of central

00:17:48.580 importance how much I respond to biodiversity aesthetically. That is really the reason that

00:17:56.240 it matters. Beyond anything else, for me, the reason that biodiversity is my sort of permanent

00:18:02.700 mental home in the universe is that I will never cease to be absolutely floored by the sheer beauty

00:18:11.620 the overwhelming beauty the intricate beauty the bizarre beauty sometimes the revulsive beauty like

00:18:17.420 I often say that mushrooms are both the most disgusting and the most beautiful things in the

00:18:22.320 woods simultaneously there's nothing quite like a rotting mushroom that's full of maggots and

00:18:27.460 sometimes if you spend enough time with it it transcends and you're like oh wow there is a

00:18:31.920 beauty in this too. So mushrooms are sort of the most extreme version of it. They were the hook

00:18:37.420 that really brought me into the world of all biodiversity. And now it's sort of gotten out

00:18:42.360 of control and I pay attention to everything as much as I can. But mushrooms got me in and they

00:18:48.520 probably will never let me go. They come in a zillion colors. Every hue, every shade, every

00:18:53.380 intensity is represented, it seems, just structurally, texturally. They engage all your

00:18:59.340 senses if you let them. And if you go out of your way, you can even hear some mushrooms. I think

00:19:04.020 people don't listen to mushrooms enough, but you can knock on their stems and you can hear the

00:19:08.720 different textures that reflect what their cells are woven like. And you can wave a cup fungus in

00:19:14.660 the air. And if it's been still enough, it'll eject all its spores really quickly. And you can

00:19:18.920 hear it hiss. Sometimes you can hear the faint hum of fungus gnats as they try and lay their eggs in

00:19:25.500 the gills of the mushroom. So they are really there for all your senses, probably even some

00:19:29.960 senses that we don't have names for if you engage them in other ways. I think the primary benefit

00:19:36.020 for me, mental health-wise, of biodiversity is the aesthetic pleasure, the home for my attention.

00:19:43.800 You know, all you get to spend, your only currency in the universe is your attention. That's what you

00:19:49.740 get to do for a hundred years if you're lucky tops spend your attention somehow and biodiversity for

00:19:55.900 me is that's the mountain i want to climb that's the well i want to fill i just want to spend my

00:20:01.980 attention on biodiversity and its aesthetic value oh that was lovely i would be a very lucky person

00:20:09.140 to spend the majority of my attention currency on biodiversity i'm completely enraptured by it

00:20:16.240 And I think it's something that the beauty and the mystery and the intrigue and curiosity are ways that pull us into loving the earth more deeply and be willing to protect what we love and are enraptured by.

00:20:34.320 And so I think that aesthetic pull actually somehow it's more important than just the surface level of something capturing our visual attention.

00:21:04.320 The colored lights now flying faster

00:21:24.520 And flashing in a vast array

00:21:28.460 The rain is flowing toward the gutter

00:21:32.860 I want to now speak to how you are an advocate of citizen and community science and turning

00:21:49.680 into the topic of recognition of fungi's nature.

00:21:53.960 And I'm thinking about how contributors of macrofungal citizen and community science

00:21:59.140 are really delighted to a slower process of observation and an understanding of multi-species

00:22:06.240 ecology that might not otherwise be so obvious. And mushroom hunting or mushroom sightings,

00:22:13.920 they require a kind of slow wandering. And so I'm wondering if you could speak to how you see

00:22:19.780 citizen science as an opportunity to allow practitioners to observe slowly and what are

00:22:25.000 the benefits of these types of observations? One thing is that so far we've kind of overlooked

00:22:31.660 or not even spoken about mushroom picking, mushroom gathering, mushroom eating. And that

00:22:38.320 sort of low level person and forest community and forest interaction is not trivial. And in my

00:22:46.980 estimation is actually like probably more important and more accessible than anything

00:22:52.100 that we could call citizen science or community science. And it's not something I do a lot of

00:22:55.820 personally, but I actually think that it is the way that a majority of people probably first get

00:23:01.020 into loving healthy forest is through their stomachs and through their taste buds is loving

00:23:08.000 the feeling of picking wild food and being able to eat it and share it with their friends and

00:23:12.340 perhaps even picking with their friends. So I think that's really important and might even be

00:23:17.380 better for inspiring love, although not necessarily slowness. People tend to get a frenzy with

00:23:23.000 mushroom picking sometimes. And I think that's where community science and citizen science

00:23:27.200 really comes in. It asks you or allows you or sometimes even pushes you to look at the other

00:23:33.640 organisms that aren't useful from a gastronomic perspective or don't delight you with their

00:23:39.160 flavors or their utility in any concrete way. It allows for people like me whose aesthetic alignment

00:23:46.120 is the strongest driving force to have a space to talk to each other and make that central to

00:23:51.600 what we're doing out in the woods is documenting and sharing the various beauties, the various

00:23:56.040 multiple species, ecologies that we encounter. But just like anything, it can be done badly or

00:24:01.300 thoughtlessly or quickly and so fast that you're not really getting what I think is the biggest

00:24:06.440 value of being in the woods, which is to slow down and to pour deeper attention in to your

00:24:12.380 surroundings. So community science, for a long time, I said citizen science, and I'm starting

00:24:17.700 to change over to community science because citizen for a lot of people brought up sort of

00:24:23.420 weird ideas that you needed to be validated for entry into the community. It harkens back to all

00:24:29.780 of our language about borders and permission. And its most effective form is when barriers to

00:24:37.380 entry barriers to participation are lowered down to the absolute minimum so that you are trying

00:24:43.160 as hard as possible not to exclude anyone from being able to participate if they choose to.

00:24:49.560 And what that does is it harnesses and takes advantage of and revels in all of the diversity

00:24:55.900 of human brains, all the ways that people want to interact with nature. They have a place in this

00:25:02.100 community of people who are sharing what they're seeing with each other so by taking that barrier

00:25:07.820 to entry that barrier to participation to sharing what you're seeing down to almost nothing it means

00:25:12.300 that the people who are only interested in slime molds and nothing else can be there it means that

00:25:16.760 people who are only interested in one tiny group of fungi can be there it means that people who

00:25:21.860 only ever want to participate once or twice in their entire lives can be there there's no rules

00:25:27.080 There's no onus of responsibility. There is simply an acceptance that if you want to share what you're seeing in the woods with us, we're here to see it and we're here to revel in it with you.

00:25:38.260 So it's sort of a somewhat structured, a minimally structured space for play that really gets us data that we were never able to get before.

00:25:48.040 So to bring it back to something more practical or more science-like with a capital S, the end result of all of these people at play with no rules or minimal rules and minimal structure are these massive, very fine-grained data sets of where people are wandering over the landscape and what they're turning their eyes towards, what they're turning their ears towards, what they're turning their touch towards.

00:26:10.060 And I can't imagine explaining these data sets that you get from something like iNaturalist

00:26:15.180 to a professor who was working in ecology 30 or 40 years ago.

00:26:19.680 It would sound like some sort of magic, some sort of unbelievable end goal.

00:26:25.840 And yet here we are.

00:26:26.680 We now have these data sets and it's sort of up to scientists now to figure out what

00:26:31.420 to do with them, to figure out how to clean them up, analyze them, use that massive body

00:26:38.780 of sensation and distill narratives out of it, distill findings out of it, distill discovery

00:26:43.360 out of it.

00:26:44.380 And many of the advances that have revolutionized science have come in this way, which is not

00:26:49.520 that they were built for a purpose or to solve a problem, but were built for a function that

00:26:57.460 suddenly allowed a whole new world of sensation to be used as data, a whole new kind of evidence

00:27:03.960 to come into the fold of what science could work on and think about.

00:27:08.780 And I really think that's what citizen science platforms like iNaturalist have done, is they've created new ways of talking to one another that may not be new in any qualitative way,

00:27:20.520 but allow us to do it at a scale and in real time and at a level of sort of depth and granularity that makes it feel like something very new, very different that didn't exist in the world before.

00:27:32.700 So that's why I'm so excited and such an advocate for community science or citizen science.

00:27:37.040 I do want to speak more to that. But at the beginning of your response, you touched on mushroom hunting. And I do want to dive into that a little bit more. Now, I was reading that the global market for mushrooms is estimated to be worth $42 billion a year.

00:27:57.640 but even separate from this global exchange we've seen the growth of mushroom foraging on a smaller

00:28:03.660 scale as well through social media and i don't want to say pop culture but more than just fringe

00:28:11.840 at this point so for instance i'm wondering if you can share what the ramifications of this craze are

00:28:18.080 to the forest ecosystems the first part is to say that you're not wrong there was i think it was

00:28:23.760 a car commercial from one of the major U.S. manufacturers recently that advertised their

00:28:29.120 SUV by showing it driving out into the woods and the driver getting up and picking a morel.

00:28:35.580 There was a full close-up shot of morel being cut out of moss. It's not the same as it was 10

00:28:42.360 years ago. People like this in a different way in the United States now. It has reached

00:28:46.260 some sort of new peak of cultural consciousness, which is, I just mean awareness perhaps.

00:28:52.360 consciousness probably implies too much thought going into it so there is real reason for concern

00:28:57.860 but the reason for concern in my view is not about the act itself of mushroom picking it's about the

00:29:06.060 volume and the structure around it so the biggest problem here is simply how many of us there are

00:29:12.740 at any one time potentially doing it i think any one person picking mushrooms or any small

00:29:18.040 community picking mushrooms is great it's wonderful it's like one of the lowest impact

00:29:23.960 ways that people can viscerally extractively engage with the woods which is what all of

00:29:29.220 human prehistory was was eating off the landscape living in the landscape exchanging nutrients and

00:29:36.280 time with the landscape being very closely physically in touch with the living world

00:29:41.820 And what little remnants of that we can still hold on to, I think, is worthwhile, really worthwhile, deeply worthwhile, to have our hands in the dirt, to be eating wild mushrooms, to care about a forest that can produce the things that we look forward to.

00:29:57.280 That said, when you scale it up to people who have SUVs, and when you scale that up to 300 million people across the United States, and you have social media that directs people's attention to what's happening right now and where it's happening in really efficient ways, and I don't use the word efficient positively there.

00:30:16.760 I think the biggest problem here is the efficiency. It allows people to get in and extract or get into the forest and pick mushrooms or compete to pick mushrooms in ways that are too good. They're too good at it. The slowness, the inefficiency, the wandering, the failing to find mushrooms gets sort of parsed out. And I don't like it when people get too efficient at anything good because it tends to get corrupted really fast.

00:30:40.620 the biggest impacts that mushroom hunters pose to the forest are pretty obvious there's the easy

00:30:46.680 ones like littering mushroom hunters definitely have not always been responsible in keeping the

00:30:51.800 forest clean behind them and then there's simply the impact of hundreds of people going to the

00:30:56.560 same places over and over throughout the mushroom season and trampling down duff and trampling down

00:31:01.620 soil and compacting the air spaces between soil granules that don't allow for water to penetrate

00:31:07.300 in the same way, or don't allow for air to circulate in the same way, don't allow for

00:31:10.520 plant roots to survive. And that is all compounded by the legislative structures around mushroom

00:31:16.960 picking. So when you only have a few parks in coastal California where mushroom picking is

00:31:21.500 legal, you concentrate a lot of foraging activity into those parks, and all the negative consequences

00:31:27.140 are amplified rather than reduced. So the ways that we bureaucratize people's access to the woods

00:31:34.120 have actually contributed to greater impact rather than less impact. In my ideal way that

00:31:41.500 this would work, there has to be some balance between a free-for-all where people are just

00:31:45.420 allowed to pick and harvest mushrooms everywhere and the current situation, which is basically

00:31:51.040 a prohibition, at least on the coast. In my mind's eye, a permit system where you, I don't know,

00:31:57.060 do some volunteer work, do some trail work, remove invasive species for X amount of hours

00:32:00.820 during the summer. And during the winter, you get, in exchange, a permit to pick some amount

00:32:06.000 of mushrooms. Now, obviously, commercial picking throws a further complication into this that

00:32:10.720 people need to manage intelligently, as well as you don't want this to be regressive. You don't

00:32:14.980 want it to be something you can just pay for, like a fishing license, which is, in many cases,

00:32:19.480 expensive. So for some people, it's prohibitively expensive. I don't want that to be the structure

00:32:24.160 that mushrooms embody. I would like it to be either volunteer-based, if you can't afford to

00:32:28.160 pay for the permit outright, but some way of allowing access in a dispersed way across the

00:32:33.900 landscape in a bigger way that just makes this something that families can do together, that

00:32:38.420 parents pass on to their children, that grandparents do. It's multi-generational. It's

00:32:42.600 community strengthening and community organizing rather than sort of what we've got now, which is

00:32:47.880 a matter of evading park rangers who've become de facto law enforcement. And that's not a good

00:32:53.400 feeling for the woods for anyone, much less someone who comes from a background where the

00:32:57.580 police or law enforcement is already an inimical force that you experience in your community when

00:33:03.400 you're not out in the woods. So I think we're basically inheriting the worst case scenario of

00:33:08.340 bureaucratizing access to mushrooms on the California coast. But that is not to say that

00:33:13.520 I think the solution is complete and total free for all that everyone should pick as many mushrooms

00:33:18.420 as they want all the time, because there are definitely downsides to trampling, to littering

00:33:24.520 when there are this many people involved and who like it and can do it this often.

00:33:54.520 I don't know

00:33:57.900 What do we think

00:34:04.860 Is on the tower

00:34:08.280 Looks like

00:34:13.080 In shame

00:34:16.860 In the chains of shame

00:34:24.500 I don't know

00:34:28.280 What do we mean

00:34:35.640 Sometimes I'll walk

00:34:39.780 This life

00:34:44.200 In shame

00:34:47.380 I don't know

00:34:51.380 I do believe

00:34:58.200 Sometimes I know

00:35:03.800 This life

00:35:06.800 And shame

00:35:10.140 Well, let's say that there is some type of

00:35:18.280 better boundaries around mushroom hunting

00:35:20.660 and maybe if we're not taking as many mushrooms from the forest commercially then that leaves

00:35:26.820 this gap of like well how are we filling this need for mushrooms whether it's in medicine or

00:35:31.960 for edibles and i know that a lot of people have turned to growing mushrooms similar with the

00:35:38.000 herbal market like with the united plant savers a lot of what they say is like cultivate these

00:35:43.620 plants like don't go out into the woods and strip the last golden seal plants grow them and so then

00:35:50.140 I think, okay, well, let's think about growing mushrooms for medicinal and edible purposes. But

00:35:54.640 I know a lot of the ways that mushrooms are grown are in basements or indoors and they're

00:36:02.440 growing on straw, whether that's organic or not, or coffee grounds. And it seems in a way I like

00:36:07.980 that, but then in a way I think, wow, what are we losing when we're using these mushrooms for

00:36:13.360 medicine or for food when they're grown without soil, without the symbiotic relationships of the

00:36:19.240 forest and without natural light. And I just wanted to kind of hear your take on that. I

00:36:23.980 haven't heard people really speak to what is lost when we're consuming indoor mushrooms rather than

00:36:31.240 wild mushrooms. Yeah. So I will start by saying that this is a little bit out of my wheelhouse

00:36:36.220 because I'm not a huge cultivator and I don't know very much about medicinal mushrooms, but I do have

00:36:42.380 some insight into this. And I guess I could boil it down to saying, yes, and there is no reason to

00:36:48.320 do only one or the other, or to even think that one is more preferable, there's certainly mushrooms

00:36:53.540 that from a gourmet perspective, like how do they taste? What is the texture like? They appear to be

00:37:00.220 totally cultivatable at huge scales without losing almost anything. The saprobic fungi,

00:37:06.140 so a lot of the oyster mushrooms, the king oysters, the agaricus that are cultivated out

00:37:10.460 of the wild are easily brought into a human setting without apparently losing much at all.

00:37:15.640 and for those you should cultivate them then there are those that are not cultivatable you can't

00:37:20.740 really cultivate a king bully you can never cultivate a chanterelle without growing a

00:37:25.340 forest for it to live in these are inherently dependent on ecosystem context and for those

00:37:31.640 not only is it not an option i just don't think that that's what people are looking for especially

00:37:35.940 with medicinals there is some spiritual non-material difficult to describe aspect of

00:37:45.040 the forest being imbued in the potency of that fungus, to which I can't really speak. It is not

00:37:50.500 something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, but I don't think those people would accept

00:37:54.440 the equivalency between all medicinal mushrooms being cultivated versus all medicinal mushrooms

00:38:01.200 being harvested from the wild. I think there's probably room for a middle ground. And another

00:38:05.640 important thing to remember is that when harvesting mushrooms, they are not like harvesting a golden

00:38:11.020 seal. They're just the sexual reproductive of the life cycle. And in many cases, they're quite

00:38:18.020 sustainably harvestable without impacting the longevity or the population dynamics of the

00:38:23.560 species or the population in that spot. So they are much more tolerant, more robust than plants

00:38:29.880 are of that kind of extraction, but that doesn't mean they're bulletproof. That doesn't mean

00:38:33.740 they're impervious. And we still have to think about and especially build cultural accountability

00:38:39.920 between, you know, people who harvest mushrooms for medicinal purposes or people who harvest

00:38:44.640 mushrooms in larger quantities for commercial purposes? How do you hold each other accountable

00:38:49.120 without invoking bureaucracy wherever possible or law enforcement, God forbid?

00:38:56.240 I'm now wanting to move on to another topic, this debate between invasive versus native fungi,

00:39:03.600 or I can say non-native versus native fungi and the implications of certain

00:39:08.420 restoration projects where fungi that are not native to the area are rapidly introduced to a

00:39:14.140 forest ecosystem. And that could be different types of mycorrhizal fungi that's added to soil

00:39:21.760 mixtures to help trees grow faster, stronger. But many of these times they're not native. They're

00:39:27.680 not from that forest that they're going back into. So I'm wondering what threat does the

00:39:33.500 imposition of invasive or non-native fungi have on ecosystems across various geographic ranges?

00:39:40.580 And maybe you could speak more specifically to, does it matter that these are introduced

00:39:45.320 into these forest ecosystems? For starters, I'll say that I can't point to specific examples

00:39:51.960 because I think the long-term consequences of using soil amendments, including mycorrhizal

00:39:57.440 fungi that are not native to a forest, are relatively unstudied. Or if they are well-studied,

00:40:01.980 I have not seen a lot of that research, and that's probably more a reflection of my ignorance.

00:40:06.560 But I cannot imagine that it doesn't matter.

00:40:10.260 If you manage to successfully introduce large volumes of a non-native mycorrhizal fungus to an ecosystem,

00:40:18.500 you are going to experience consequences because the soil community is complexly interdependent

00:40:24.400 and fund our major structures of what lives there, what can live there,

00:40:28.900 what the trajectory of that soil, you know, succession looks like. So I would be extremely

00:40:35.260 wary of doing anything at scale that involves non-native introductions, especially if you're

00:40:42.220 using native trees that are sort of hyper-local natives. There are very small-scale co-evolutionary

00:40:49.880 relationships that occur. There can be individual genotypes that are more well-adapted to their

00:40:55.780 ecosystem than something from 500 miles away. There is actually research about that. Now,

00:41:02.840 I don't know if the differences are enough to worry about. If your biggest priority is

00:41:06.960 reforestation, perhaps the cost benefit there from an ecological perspective is such that you

00:41:13.700 should use whatever you can to get the forest to regrow, whether it's strictly native or not

00:41:18.580 strictly native. So it's not something that I can talk deeply about, but it's something that I think

00:41:23.920 should be talked deeply about by the people who are doing it and probably should be researched

00:41:28.320 more extensively before it gets widely implemented. I absolutely agree with that. And

00:41:34.820 in proximity to this conversation on invasive or non-native fungi, I'd like to ask about the

00:41:42.140 recent increase in fungal diseases, specifically how is climate change contributing to the rise

00:41:47.920 of fungal pathogens that, say, target crops? Or which fungal diseases pose the greatest threat

00:41:54.660 to global or local ecosystems? Oh boy, that is probably a question for someone who's a

00:42:00.940 plant pathologist or a climate change ecologist. So I can't talk a lot about the direct links

00:42:07.220 between climate change and the recent increase in fungal pathogens just because I'm not even

00:42:11.740 close to keeping on top of the situation enough. But something that strikes me as just an example

00:42:17.520 of this that is very illustrative of what we're going to have to deal with is the amount of

00:42:23.240 aflatoxins. So this is a fungus called Aspergillus flavus that produces these strongly carcinogenic

00:42:29.160 patotoxic compounds called aflatoxins that infects stored grain. So like corn in a silo or peanuts,

00:42:37.360 both of these are staple crops for millions of people, hundreds of millions of people around

00:42:41.360 the world. So it causes these cumulative liver toxic effects, including, you know, strongly

00:42:48.300 carcinogenic effects at very low concentrations. And it's already a problem. It is something that

00:42:53.840 government bureaucracies monitor to make sure that the amount of toxin in the public food supply

00:43:01.000 stays below a certain level. But as climate warms, the amount of, or the number of places in the

00:43:08.840 world where conditions will be favorable for the growth of these fungi is increasing. Hundreds of

00:43:14.540 millions of more people per year will probably be exposed to higher concentrations of aflatoxin

00:43:20.160 as climate warms and becomes more humid in certain parts of the world. So I think a study came out

00:43:25.620 recently specifically focused on Europe and just how much more of Western Europe and Northern Europe

00:43:32.440 that currently doesn't have a high incidence of these aflatoxin concentrations, they're going to

00:43:37.480 have to deal with that in the next 50 years so more people will be exposed to these toxins it's

00:43:43.120 already a big problem in the developing world where peanuts are a major staple food source so

00:43:49.300 these are things that humans are bad at getting their priorities right about because they're

00:43:54.240 diffuse effects and cumulative long-term effects they're not acute they're not on our doorstep

00:44:00.180 they are hard to get the right level of response to without using a lot of sort of disciplined

00:44:06.080 and proactive, preemptive thinking. So I worry a lot about things like that.

00:44:12.860 Yeah, rightfully so. And I don't think it's even possible for us to fully imagine,

00:44:19.560 even with our models, what kind of impacts climate change are going to really have in so

00:44:26.440 many ways. I think we can make some good guesses, but it's huge. And I was reading a recent article

00:44:35.140 of yours titled, As Temperatures Change, What Organisms Move North to California?

00:44:39.740 And so I'd like to turn towards the topic of biogeographic shifts and what can we learn

00:44:45.880 about climate change in California by looking at, for example, changing and migrating mushroom

00:44:50.740 patterns. And I'm wondering how do changes in fungal distribution affect ecosystem functions

00:44:56.680 at large? So I would say we are in kind of our infancy about understanding mushroom biogeography,

00:45:03.400 which unfortunately means that a lot of the effects of climate change on macrofungal

00:45:08.260 biogeography, much less microfungal biogeography, are going to be obscured by the fact that we lost

00:45:13.280 our baseline data. We didn't develop robust enough data sets before the major effects of

00:45:20.340 climate change, anthropogenic climate change, had already gotten well underway. So we're kind of

00:45:25.000 catching it while it's happening. And it's only going to keep changing more dramatically, so

00:45:29.060 there's no point in not starting now i wouldn't suggest that we throw our hands up in defeat

00:45:33.980 but we've already missed a lot of what's changed and much of it was not climate change directly

00:45:39.620 but habitat destruction but compounded together we see there are fungi showing up in california that

00:45:46.760 thanks to the efforts of community scientists or citizen scientists or simply people sharing what

00:45:53.200 they see i don't think it would have been detected in real time or as close to real time as they are

00:45:58.900 now, things like Amanita tirzii, this saprophytic Amanita from the eastern United States, appears

00:46:06.240 to have made a massive jump into California just last year.

00:46:09.720 A mushroom called the greengill mushroom that was widely distributed in the American

00:46:13.900 southeast and in the tropics is creeping northwards in California and actually appears to have

00:46:18.680 reached Canada already.

00:46:20.400 And every year it becomes more common.

00:46:22.320 Every year a new county gets a record that didn't have it before.

00:46:25.860 What we can learn from this I don't think is at all surprising.

00:46:28.460 And I don't think it necessarily helps us respond to climate change.

00:46:32.320 It's just further icing on the cake.

00:46:34.440 We already know that organisms are going to move over the landscape as their environment

00:46:40.220 changes.

00:46:41.320 They simply, I think, add to the urgency of doing what we already know we need to do,

00:46:46.400 which is cut emissions wherever possible and really radically get a handle on our ideas

00:46:52.380 about what sustainability means.

00:46:54.220 So it's not anything counterintuitive.

00:46:55.980 It's not anything surprising.

00:46:58.460 Although individual cases may be interesting sort of academically or from a biogeographer's narrow standpoint, but as far as their practical lesson or their moral, we already know climate change is deeply impactful on communities of both fungi and their associated plants.

00:47:13.540 So as fungi move, they may bring their host plants with them, or they may facilitate the growth of plants in areas where they previously didn't have a compatible partner, or vice versa.

00:47:25.360 As plants move, fungi may be extirpated if they can no longer find a plant that's got suitable environmental conditions for its growth.

00:47:33.900 Both of these directions will occur.

00:47:35.460 You know, we'll get new fungi, we'll get new plants, and we'll also lose fungi.

00:47:38.680 We'll lose plants.

00:47:41.660 Well, along the threads of the fungi and global environmental change,

00:47:46.680 I'm wondering if there are instances where fungi can actually provide landscapes with increased tolerance to, say, drought or salinity.

00:47:53.800 and how are we seeing mycorrhizae acting as agents of support where plants experience

00:48:00.240 an increase in environmental stressors? Fungi have always helped plants live in places they

00:48:08.340 could not otherwise live, probably since the beginning of fungi. For plants to have access

00:48:14.140 to nutrients, soil nutrients they otherwise wouldn't be able to absorb efficiently enough

00:48:18.560 to maintain, you know, growth and robust populations. They allow for plants to get

00:48:24.280 water. They wouldn't be able to efficiently accumulate enough to stay alive in drought

00:48:29.640 environments. And then there are endophytic fungi that act as kind of an extended immune system.

00:48:34.820 They're not mycorrhizal, but they live inside plant cells and may prevent the incursion of

00:48:40.480 other pathogens because that cell is sort of already occupied by a microorganism that is

00:48:44.800 beneficial to its host. There are studies that show that fungi help mitigate the toxic effects

00:48:51.720 of salinity on plants. So all of these things happen. There's really no ecosystem in the world

00:48:56.700 where fungi are not a major part of how plants make their living. I think the frequently estimated

00:49:02.640 statistic is that 90% of all land plants have some sort of mycorrhizal association. And pretty

00:49:08.680 much all of those cases, it's an important one. It means they can live where they're living and

00:49:13.200 they can thrive to the degree they're thriving.

00:49:15.360 There's nowhere where it's trivial.

00:49:43.200 Feel it all around my neck

00:49:49.980 Died as it's old

00:49:56.460 When love grows

00:50:03.780 What more I'll do

00:50:15.140 I will see my scars

00:50:23.000 Well, thank you, Christian, for taking this time with us today and weaving through the world of

00:50:50.540 fungi. And if there's anything that you want to end this conversation on, anything that we didn't

00:50:56.000 get to touch on, I'm sure we didn't get to touch on a lot because there's so much to say in regards

00:51:01.440 to fungi. But I just want to give you the space to close out this conversation with whatever feels

00:51:05.880 best. Sure. I just want to explicitly state that I encourage everyone to download iNaturalist onto

00:51:13.060 their phones if that's something you have and use. And if you've got the bandwidth for and explore

00:51:17.200 it because it is a place where I really found sort of a community of like-minded, aesthetically

00:51:23.000 sensitive, responsive individuals who love biodiversity in and of itself, whether or

00:51:27.240 not it's edible or practically useful in any way.

00:51:29.980 It's just a community of people who like that we're surrounded by this teeming multitude

00:51:35.060 of organisms here on planet Earth.

00:51:36.640 So please join INAT if you feel like it and come meet the rest of us.

00:51:41.700 And for those of you who don't feel like that's the way into biodiversity or the way

00:51:46.000 into fungi for you, I would stress the value of finding a community of people. It is in the long

00:51:51.900 run where I've found eventually, it took me a long time to realize this, the real value is getting

00:51:58.480 other people to help you deepen your connection to these organisms and to find each other to

00:52:04.740 build communities because those communities end up being useful for things that have nothing to do

00:52:09.080 with what they were originally organized for. They become your social network in times of

00:52:13.640 distress and trouble and illness and community organizing towards other causes. So find your

00:52:18.460 nucleus, whatever it is, whether it's fungi or some other group of organisms, and keep those

00:52:23.320 ties strong for when they're needed in other regards. Well, thank you, Christian, for your

00:52:28.440 time. And yeah, for those of you who want to dive in more to the mushrooms of the Redwood Coast,

00:52:34.520 pick up Christian's book. It's definitely worth it. Thanks so much, Ayanna.

00:52:38.760 thank you for listening to another episode of a for the wild podcast i'm ayana young the music

00:52:49.920 you heard today was grant earl lavali and dimples i'd like to thank our podcast production team

00:52:57.180 aiden mccray andrew stores carter lou mcelroy francesca glassbell hannah wilton aaron wise

00:53:06.240 Vera Lummi, Erica Ekrem, and Melanie Younger.

For The Wild - February 12, 2020

CHRISTIAN SCHWARZ on the Sublime World of Fungi ⧸158

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