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00:00:30.000hello and welcome to for the wild podcast i'm ayana young today i'm speaking with dr patricia
00:00:40.860kashian to be imaginative about solutions to conservation i think would be to invoke
00:00:48.180these philosophical romantic personable relations that we have the capacity of
00:00:54.260of having with other organisms and be like shameless about them to make the assertion that
00:01:00.900all life forms regardless of how close they are to humans or how functional they are to us in our
00:01:07.000minds they all are beings on this planet with us right we've all been on this multi-billion year
00:01:14.080evolutionary journey to exist in this weird snapshot of time and it is my belief that it is
00:01:23.340our like most sacred duty to allow these beings to live their lives and carry out their essential
00:01:28.900functions. Dr. Patricia Kashian is a mycologist and postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University
00:01:37.500where she serves as a curator of the Arthur Fungarium and Creebel Herbarium. Dr. Kashian
00:01:45.640is a fungal taxonomist and received her PhD in mycology from SUNY College of Environmental
00:01:51.560Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York in 2020. She enjoys stepping outside of more
00:01:58.300traditional science and has written on the topic of philosophy of science, feminist bioscience,
00:02:04.920ecofeminism, and queer theory. Well, Hattie, thank you so much for taking some time to come on
00:02:14.000for the wild i'm really excited to speak with you and just follow um follow the rabbit hole together
00:02:23.200thank you so much for having me it's a pleasure and um i've listened to a few episodes of this
00:02:30.900podcast that have that have come out before and i'm very honored to be amongst some of the most
00:02:37.460impressive people i know on this planet right now so i'm really really honored
00:02:42.140thank you so much for saying that and yeah i feel honored to be speaking with you and
00:02:49.560so many guests it's totally changed my life and um yeah just happy to be able to be in deep
00:02:57.740conversation with amazing people well i um want to mention that what initially drew me to your work
00:03:05.940were your articulations on mycology and queer theory, specifically an article you co-authored
00:03:13.200titled The Science Underground, Mycology as a Queer Discipline. And in this article, you share
00:03:20.720a quote, mycology is queer at the organismal level. Fungi are non-binary. They are neither0.94
00:03:28.640plants nor animals, but possess a mixture of qualities common to both groups, upending the
00:03:35.400prevailing binary concept of nature it is rare for a fungus to have only two biological sexes
00:03:42.260and some fungi such as oh i'm not going to pronounce this one correctly
00:03:48.720schizophilum commune thank you have as many as 23 000 mating types when two compatible fungi
00:03:59.300meet, their mycelia will fuse into one body, sexually recombine, then remain somatically
00:04:07.000as one as they continue to live, grow, and explore in their environment, end quote.
00:04:14.420So to begin our conversation, I wonder if you could share the ways fungi challenges
00:04:21.420our binary notions and how you're using this recognition as a way to disrupt stagnant
00:04:28.420paradigms? Sure. So I think there are a lot of different ways to look at it. So I wanted in
00:04:37.060this article to explore both the very functional biological elements of, I would say, the queerness
00:04:44.680of fungi, but also sort of the more abstract methodological quandaries that mushrooms have
00:04:52.100put us in because of the very defiant nature of their biology. So starting with some of the more
00:04:59.940biological elements, as mentioned in that quote you read, fungi rarely have two mating types,
00:05:08.600right? So we're really familiar with this dichotomy, the binary of male and female, and it is
00:05:14.620dichotomy that is common although we I think are often led to believe that the exception
00:05:23.640to that dichotomy is rare and anomalous but fungi show us as a kingdom that contains millions of
00:05:33.200species that that binary is actually what is rare and I think it can help give humans permission
00:05:42.220to let go of that ourselves. So this kind of concept of binary sex in mycology actually has
00:05:51.200very little footing. Also, I think this is a little bit more subtle, but the ways in which
00:05:58.540fungi interact with other organisms also challenges our desire to put very discrete
00:06:04.860linear boxes around the definition of a species and that has a lot of power like rhetorical power
00:06:13.720in queer theory in which we you know attempt to often queer theory is the project of
00:06:20.300deconstructing boxes right it's not necessarily related to just sex or human relations but it's
00:06:27.480the idea of that all relationships are whether they're sexual or not are constructed socially
00:06:34.320And those social constructions may or may not serve us. And often they fail to fully encompass like the dizzying array of potential in our beings. And I think that fungi as organisms that form symbiosis, relationships between species, they form these interspecies dynamics that scientifically challenge our conception of like the concept of an individual.
00:07:01.340and it actually they are kind of challenging in that way because we start to realize that many
00:07:09.180things are deeply interdependent and that notion is is disruptive to the sense of individualism
00:07:17.600which is a prevailing notion that I think a lot of us in particularly those of us coming
00:07:22.900from a culture that's influenced by western society that's the idea of an individual is
00:07:30.180really important to us and really important in our constructions of heteronormativity and family
00:07:36.720structures. And so it's sort of this exercise in deconstructing that, the notion of the
00:07:42.820individual. There are entire groups of fungi that we only know as being asexual. The phylum
00:07:50.160glomeromycota, for example, we only have evidence of it existing in asexual forms despite being
00:07:55.860extremely diverse. There are fungi that have multiple reproductive structures of different
00:08:02.600types contained within one body. We have all sorts of ways in which they're functionally
00:08:09.700challenging our idea of sex. But then again, as I said, it's also that they create these really
00:08:16.600interesting dilemma for us as researchers and how we sort them and organize them and create1.00
00:08:23.180categories for them, which is very much a queer idea. So it seems like you've seen the lens of1.00
00:08:33.700queer theory actually enhance our scientific knowledge systems. Right. I don't know, clearly0.96
00:08:40.940don't think that that's always going on intentionally, but I absolutely think that
00:08:45.980applying some theoretical frameworks to looking at these questions that we have in science
00:08:53.420sometimes actually gets us to better science, which is something that that's my ultimate goal
00:08:59.540as, you know, first and foremost, I am a scientist, I'm a mycologist by training, but I'm very
00:09:05.800passionate about intellectual rigor, regardless of where it's coming from, regardless of what
00:09:10.980discipline it's most firmly rooted in. And I definitely believe that multiple ways of
00:09:17.280interacting with organisms or with science or with questions related to organisms and science
00:09:22.680can be enhanced by taking a step back and being creative about how to frame the question and how
00:09:32.080to see yourself framing the question. Because I think ultimately as human beings, we're creatures
00:09:38.780of culture. We're not apart from our culture and scientists are no exception to that. So of course
00:09:46.140we strive for objectivity in science. That's definitely the goal, but it is an elusive goal.
00:09:53.400So if you can accept that it's elusive, then you can start to talk about the ways in which you're
00:09:58.800affected by culture. And it's through that honesty and that transparency that you can start to,
00:10:05.660I think, make actual progress in answering certain types of questions and certainly in
00:10:10.660making science more grounded and equitable in ways that I think sometimes scientists like to forget
00:10:17.580intent, maybe intentionally or otherwise that, you know, we are, you know, part of this culture as
00:10:23.880well, even when we investigate seemingly very obscure, small, non-human organisms.
00:10:30.560mm-hmm well goodness thank you for that and
00:10:36.700yeah another facet that you give attention to is the phenomenon of mycophobia yeah and how both
00:10:48.320scientific relevance and popular understanding of mushrooms and fungi have been heavily shaped
00:10:53.840by a certain cultural aversion to the fungal queendom and while this is something I've heard
00:11:00.240mentioned before and I don't think many of us actually know the history or reasoning behind it
00:11:06.440so I'd love if you could elaborate on what has historically led us or led so many western
00:11:13.060European cultures and then eventually that of the so-called United States to develop such
00:11:19.260disrespect and devaluation of fungi yeah so I you know a lot of this has to be speculative because
00:11:28.700it's some these are forces and cultural artifacts that have taken root over the last several hundred
00:11:35.580if not several thousand years so it has to be for us speculative but there are some lines of
00:11:42.700investigation and thought that I think are very compelling and I do think that it is true that
00:11:50.400fungi some are poisonous some are absolutely associated with death and decay but there are a
00:12:00.760lot of other things that are associated with death and decay like every living thing dies I mean
00:12:06.500that's obvious on one hand but on the other hand I think it's like kind of funny that fungi are
00:12:11.940uniquely implicated in in death and their association with death is so noticeable to some
00:12:19.140people. Because fungi, like I said, some are poisonous, but there are also many, many poisonous
00:12:24.580plants. There are poisonous animals. There are plants that you should not touch because they're
00:12:30.080extremely poisonous to the touch. Whereas there's only one known fungus that's extremely rare and
00:12:36.520only occurs in Japan that you're not able to touch. But if you live in the continental,
00:12:42.100you know yeah so-called United States or North America you will never encounter a mushroom that
00:12:49.920you cannot touch but that you know the fact that that's still the perception that most people
00:12:55.700instruct their children never to touch a mushroom you grow up you know even as I'm a now a professor
00:13:01.500and I'm teaching classes about nature including mycology and you know my students are always so
00:13:09.020nervous in the beginning to touch mushrooms. And part of the experience that I get to shepherd
00:13:14.680them through is becoming more intimate with these organisms that are actually usually quite safe.
00:13:22.780And again, I don't, you know, I always tell them, you know, never eat something if you don't know
00:13:26.880what it is, but the same is true for plants. There's many poisonous plants that you should
00:13:30.920never eat, but we don't kind of map that quality onto plants the way we map that quality and
00:13:37.100flattened that kind of aspect of all mushrooms into one another. And which is another element
00:13:42.920of the queerness that I was talking about before, which is that there are these mushrooms are seen
00:13:47.920sort of as these perverse agents of disruption that are somehow fundamentally different and not
00:13:54.540suitable for a healthy life, right? And those are analogous features, I think, that we as members of
00:14:01.020the LGBTQ community experience. So there are those things. But I talk about a little bit in my paper
00:14:06.800and the connections between Western European culture
00:14:12.520and the earlier development of mycophobia.
00:14:17.380And I find it compelling to relate the formation of capitalism0.64
00:27:35.580coming home back to a place we've known back to the way we've been a thousand times
00:27:57.800you know i'm also thinking along this line about the frustrations that are so often felt around
00:28:03.860a scientific approach to the wild in terms of being devoid of emotion, reverence, attachment,
00:28:11.980and even urgency. And in the article previously mentioned, The Science Underground, you share,
00:28:19.200quote, mycologists use sensing, intuition, experience, and storytelling with experts
00:28:26.460operating outside of institutional affiliation more often than with other organismal fields.
00:28:33.080For many mycologists, our relationship with fungi stir powerful emotions tied deeply to our core.
00:28:39.840We sometimes cry or burst into song when we find these special and beautiful beings, end quote.
00:28:46.960Oh, I definitely have burst into tears or song or just elation.
00:28:53.260But, you know, I'd like to dive further into the myth of pure objectivity with you
00:28:59.000and how it's actually being resisted by folks like you or in the field of mycology at large.
00:29:07.100Yeah. So I really love the articulation of this idea by Robin Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass.
00:29:16.700I had the distinct privilege of going to SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
00:29:22.380where she was a professor. And she also served on my committee for my PhD, which was an
00:29:28.960honor and pleasure. But in reading, I recently, for the current class I'm teaching, I assigned
00:29:36.020the book to my students and had also the pleasure of discussing the book with students reading it
00:29:43.180for the first time. And she talks a lot about how her interest in botany was kind of stimulated
00:29:51.800in large part by this fascination with beauty and beauty being particularly in the ways in which
00:29:59.320asters the flower and goldenrod looked next to each other the asters being this brilliant purple
00:30:06.000and the goldenrod being this beautiful golden color and the ways in which they often grow near
00:30:11.920each other and they looked so stunningly beautiful and she was interested in investigating why does
00:30:18.540that look so beautiful? And when she approached her professor about that question as an undergraduate
00:30:24.100student, he rebuffed that saying, that's not a scientific question. Like if you're interested
00:30:28.980in beauty, go study art. And she goes on to talk about how there is actually a very fascinating
00:30:35.620scientific explanation as to why they grow next to each other and look so beautiful. And it has
00:30:41.700to do with the fact that when those two colors, gold and purple grow next to one another, each
00:30:48.100become more visible because of the ways in which in color theory they're like opposite and I'm not
00:30:54.280very good at explaining the color theory but it makes them more visible to insects which then
00:31:00.180increases their pollination and increases their fitness so there's this it's I just find that
00:31:09.040story like extremely compelling because it resonates deeply with with my own kind of
00:31:15.960interest in becoming a scientist, which was absolutely driven by a romanticism, not necessarily
00:31:22.220beauty, actually kind of, in fact, the opposite for me. It was a deep level of kinship that I felt
00:31:28.840with organisms that were kind of considered to be on the margins of what was acceptable. So
00:31:35.400that includes fungi, but actually like some of my earliest loves were reptiles and amphibians. So
00:31:42.360particularly snakes and frogs and snapping turtles and organisms that dwell in the swamps
00:31:50.880and swamps in general as being this sort of site for me as this like non-prescriptive freedom as
00:31:58.000a child and particularly as a child that was experiencing very acute gender dysphoria and a
00:32:04.560sense of like lack of belonging. So that was, I guess, like this space for me to feel both like
00:32:12.520liberated and unseen in this way where I did not want to be seen, but I could be seen by these
00:32:19.280other organisms. I could, you know, I felt safe in their company in the way that I did not feel
00:32:25.300in the presence of like society. And that relationship has 100% continued through my
00:32:34.880trajectory of becoming a professional scientist. Although I didn't necessarily know at the time,
00:32:42.520like I did not know as a child that I wanted to be a field biologist or mycologist. I didn't even
00:32:47.640really know what that path looked like, but it kept revealing itself to me over the course of
00:32:52.440my education and what is fundamentally part of why I'm a scientist and I can't imagine that I
00:33:00.860would ever have been a scientist without for that very personal very subjective and sort of sad even
00:33:08.700you could say on some levels object like pretty sad but also like beautiful you know like many
00:33:14.120things right it was many things but it the least of which was objectivity and I just think that
00:33:21.860once it gets you there to pretend it therefore has no more like space or footing in the realm
00:33:27.280of science is just sort of, I think that's, that doesn't make any sense to me. I think whatever is
00:33:32.880like motivating you should have space. And of course, like, it's not going to peep up in every
00:33:38.720single, like, you know, I've written a number of scientific papers that are as objective as I could
00:33:43.380possibly measure. Right. But like to, to say that as a scientist, it's not part of my practice to
00:33:50.980be like in love with the species that I study, that would be false. And then of course, it
00:33:57.080absolutely motivated this work of the theory paper that we keep, I call it like the theory paper,
00:34:02.300but it's a theoretical paper, interdisciplinary paper that scientists and humanities people and
00:34:09.520lay people to discuss the role of science in our lives and the role of our relationship to fungi
00:34:17.580I in a capitalist society, all of these things. So I think for me, the writing this piece came
00:34:23.480out of the acute awareness that scientists need to remain in touch with what we consider to be
00:34:30.340these subjective elements of our work. Beautifully said. Thank you. Yeah. I think
00:34:40.420Many of us are challenged by the recognition that something like science doesn't have to be purely oppressive or hierarchical endeavor.
00:34:54.440However, it seems that there are a few examples to indicate otherwise.
00:34:59.620And you had mentioned wanting to discuss the ethical and moral obligations of scientists.
00:35:04.980And what I immediately think of is how scientific integrity has really withered under a capitalist system in terms of funding and lobbying, etc.
00:35:16.200But yeah, I wonder if you could speak to how you'd frame these ethical and moral obligations for scientists, both in terms of challenging paradigms and remodeling the system itself,
00:35:29.160as well as the shifting obligations we have to the earth
00:35:33.020as the climate changes and habitats are continually degraded.
00:35:39.360Yeah, I think the last part of what you're saying
00:35:42.280is kind of the crux of, I think, the urgency of my argument.
00:35:48.460Capitalism has harmed science in that, as you mentioned,
00:35:53.140it it's um attaches incentives to um inquiry or or institutions that you know conduct science
00:36:04.140these incentives can draw people away from integrity so i guess what's interesting though
00:36:10.880is i still want to like remain when that happens then it's not science i think that's one thing
00:36:17.520that's i mean it's called science and so so like i try to distinguish between like institutional
00:36:23.660capital s science in the article and then like but science as a tool science is like that universal
00:36:29.320tool as i described earlier because institutional capital s science science as a as a body
00:36:35.880is flawed deeply and innumerably um and i think most harmfully when it's attached to capitalistic
00:36:47.360incentives but it's important to to mention though that like when you are conducting a project
00:36:54.940that lacks integrity you are no longer conducting science you are conducting a project that lacks
00:37:02.360integrity that gives you a particular answer based on a particular desired outcome that you
00:37:08.140know might be tied to your funding so that's that's a moral issue that is very serious um and
00:37:14.840I care a lot about, but I think it's kind of useful to separate that from science itself.
00:37:19.640I mean, maybe that is just the semantics, but I actually kind of think it's more than
00:37:24.120that because I think it's helpful to definitionally understand that it becomes, you know, pseudoscience
00:37:31.000becomes something that's claiming to be science, but is actually knowingly and intentionally
00:37:36.320manipulative, which is what I consider pseudoscience.
00:37:41.040And I think it's also useful to separate pseudoscience from different or alternative ways of knowing. For example, traditional ecological knowledge, as it's commonly called, is like knowledge that predates colonialism held by groups all around the world.
00:37:57.260This can include people native to Europe, but it's particularly talked about in the cultures that were forcibly erased or attempts to erase them have been made.
00:38:11.200And it's the knowledge that they possess that may or may not be always scientific, although many cultures around the world have conducted science in terms of like asking a question, gathering data, interpreting that data and sharing that data.
00:38:25.400that's you know that's what science is but traditional ecological knowledge sometimes
00:38:30.560departs from a very like replicable structure right if you can't repeat it because it's so
00:38:37.340culturally embedded does that mean it's not true no it means it's true but it might not be science
00:38:44.640and that's okay not everything that you believe in that is true in your context has to be
00:38:51.540scientific. So I think it's really important to differentiate. Like it's okay if you believe in
00:38:58.140things that are not scientific and you believe in science, like those things can coexist. You can
00:39:03.900have beliefs in spiritual realms. You can believe in tarot readings and you can believe there's
00:39:11.200life after death and you can believe all of those things and be a scientist. So there's
00:39:15.900Pseudoscience is this attempt to mask an investigation that is not with integrity, often in the pursuit of money or to the pursuit of duping someone, but sometimes takes on the hallmarks of science.
00:39:30.600Like, oh, they said they did this formal study in a lab and whatever, but then they just messed around with the data on their computer afterwards and fudged the numbers.
00:39:40.320So I think those are three different things, right?
00:39:42.880We have science, which is done with an attempt at objectivity that can be then successfully
00:39:47.580communicated to other people, and they could replicate that investigative pursuit.
00:39:53.440And then you have traditional ways of knowing or alternative ways of knowing in which there's
00:39:57.740no claim of conducting science, and it's a claim that has other nuanced roots and meaning
00:40:12.880And then kind of circling back to what you were saying about climate, I think this is a particularly good space for people's emotions, scientific emotions, or the emotions of scientists, I should say, to enter the conversation in the renouncement of capitalism, the renouncement of the destruction of the earth, because it's just wrong and damaging and bad.
00:40:37.200And it's okay as scientists to have an opinion that is in defense of a value system that is not super clear or clean or objective.
00:40:50.860Like I think scientists themselves, we need to reject that you can only hold opinions that are like extremely cautious and extremely like always just following the data, because I think that's how we end up destroying the earth and doing so without protest.
00:41:09.820and that extends to conservation of fungi so i think it's really interesting and this really
00:41:15.820i think is the material outcome of a lot of what otherwise can be somewhat abstract you know the
00:41:20.640conversations i'm having in that paper it's like the material outcome of fungi being completely
00:41:26.720understudied unfunded feared revolt reviled and etc is that we actually have very little
00:41:32.420information about them and therefore we're not in a good place to conserve them because we haven't
00:41:38.780built this like case based on quantified data about how they're being affected by climate change.
00:41:45.160But my point that I try to make is that we don't have time. I think mycologists, if we had all the
00:41:52.160time in the world, we would come up with really great, really smart, interesting systems of
00:41:56.260monitoring fungi and, you know, like understanding how they're being affected. But we just absolutely
00:42:01.760do not have that kind of time so i think in in the case of conservation um it's okay to make
00:42:09.660emotional arguments around why this land should not be destroyed like i think it's sort of
00:42:14.620embarrassing even and kind of pathetic to be like um you know toiling around within your lab being
00:42:21.720like well like maybe in 20 years i can demonstrate that this one species of fungus is objectively0.85
00:42:27.440being harmed by degradation of habitat again like I admire the the attempt to get that information
00:42:33.940but simultaneously it I'm of the opinion that it's perfectly okay for us as scientists to say
00:42:39.780like no more development and no more destruction of old growth forests we need like we should just
00:42:46.980conserve as much land as possible we need to stop burning fossil fuel you know I mean obviously some
00:42:53.180of those things are attached to scientific data, but not specifically in all cases. But I yet I
00:42:59.340think that that is still deeply important. And I'm fairly unapologetic about that at this point.
00:43:23.180And on that winding road, the home that I passed through, the land is you, the land is you.
00:44:04.740Now, I'd like to orient our conversation back to the role of fungi, but as someone based in
00:44:12.960the Pacific Northwest, I can't help but think about range expansion and how fungi will roam
00:44:20.060across the country due to changing rainfall patterns and warming temperatures and an increase
00:44:25.580in wildfires, and whether or not this will mean a significant decrease in once mushroom-abundant
00:44:32.860areas. And knowing that 90% of all terrestrial plant species form connections with fungi
00:44:38.340in the soil, what do changing climates mean for fungi and their surrounding ecosystems?
00:44:45.940How will fungi migrate? Yeah, it's really definitely disconcerting because we don't
00:44:52.840really know. In some ways, fungi are extremely adaptable and resilient, but in other ways,
00:44:59.900they're very particular and different species have different levels of specificity for their
00:45:06.960habitat and their needs. Some fungi are very generalist, like the oyster mushroom is sort
00:45:13.060of like the infamous fungal generalist. It can grow, it can digest fossil fuels or it can grow
00:45:18.920on a dead elm tree. It can do a lot and it's versatile and dynamic. But other species are
00:45:27.160very, very specific to their needs. They depend on a number of other different species in their
00:45:34.680habitat to be existing in a particular way. And we believe that maybe those species will not
00:45:42.200tolerate dramatic changes to their landscape and habitat. So it does very much depend on the
00:45:49.500species, but overall there's a lot of concern because again, as I was saying before, we really
00:45:56.160don't know even like we have very like relatively little knowledge of the ecological reality of most
00:46:04.000fungi even mushrooms and species of fungi that we know well we still most of them are shrouded in
00:46:11.280some sort of mystery like exactly what are the factors that govern govern their fruiting body
00:46:17.280production and we still sort of are trying to eliminate those intricacies so when you add on
00:46:24.600top of that, a shifting climate, both in terms of warmth, in terms of drought, in terms of more rain
00:46:30.180in certain places, or just different seasonal patterns. It just makes the picture even more
00:46:38.540complicated. There are some fungi that seem to have started to roam the world. Amanita phalloides
00:46:45.080is one species of mushroom. It's actually one of the most deadly to consume, but it's traveled.
00:46:52.980it's considered sort of like a non-native species throughout a lot of the United States.
00:46:57.480And the patterns of that are being investigated, but are not fully understood. Whereas other
00:47:02.680species seem to be like, like I said, very site specific and very rarely encountered,
00:47:08.640but we don't necessarily know that they aren't in the soil just because if, for example,
00:47:13.540if it's a fungus that forms a large fruiting body, it lives for most of its life in a mycelial state,
00:47:19.600which is like the fibrous network of, um, cells that lives in the substrate. And it's where
00:47:26.620it's not really analogous to the root of a plant. It's more complicated than that. It's
00:47:32.140like where sex occurs. It's that's where, um, extracellular digestion occurs and it can travel
00:47:39.640and seek out more nutrients. Um, and the fungus might not grow in the same spot, um, every year.
00:47:45.920so when a fruiting body is not apparent we it is probably living in the substrate just below the
00:47:54.080surface and we just can't see it but what governs the production of fruiting bodies and which then
00:48:00.300leads to spore production and dispersal that's like important so we sometimes you know if it's
00:48:06.080in soil or in substrate it might still be there but the conditions that would make it fruit
00:48:11.420matter. So it's this weird kind of thing where we know it's probably always there, but if it can
00:48:17.840only produce fruit every 10 years instead of every year, that likely would have a negative impact on
00:48:24.320its population. But we just don't really know these things. So it's just a little complicated
00:48:29.500to assess, but unfortunately I will say that the prognosis is not great. Just because fungi
00:48:37.980are rarely listed as like endangered or threatened that's just the outcome of not having a lot of
00:48:44.240data but not we don't believe that they're somehow sort of magically escaping the terrors of you know
00:48:51.160habitat destruction so i mean there definitely are going to be a fungi that can shift and adapt
00:48:57.260and move and migrate north or migrate you know in higher in altitude or move west or east but we just
00:49:04.660have so little data yeah oh well thanks for for responding in the ways that you can about that and
00:49:18.500we began our conversation discussing the sort of historic repulsion to fungi but comparatively
00:49:27.240social media has really bolstered the popularity of mushrooms particularly in terms of harvesting
00:49:34.040You know, often overshadowing conversations on land stewardship for fungal diversity, which is incredibly important in context to the importance of fungi in our ecosystems, the role of fungi in ecosystem recovery, and, you know, just thinking about urban habitats that are significantly lacking mycorrhizal fungi.
00:49:54.780so yeah i wonder if you could speak to whichever tendril here sticks out for you in terms of
00:50:02.660the reality that capitalism prevents us from developing
00:50:06.240in ethics of care at the ecosystem level when it comes to fungi yeah okay i'm really glad you're
00:50:15.440asking me about this so it's funny like i've been studying fungi for over 10 years so certainly when
00:50:21.740I began labor no one studied like you know there are the people there are mycologists and then
00:50:26.940there were people then there was everyone else and there was very there's I was met with a lot
00:50:32.320of confusion and hesitancy when I was telling people I wanted to study mycology and it was
00:50:37.700very much a marginalized like interest in many ways and I would say that probably starting about
00:50:45.340two years ago a little I would say a little bit before the pandemic but then seemingly
00:50:49.140accelerated perhaps by the pandemic there has been a boom in the popularity of fungi and mushrooms
00:50:55.220and particularly mushrooms that are edible and mushrooms that are beautiful and unfortunately
00:51:02.920I do see a widening chasm between people who engage with mushrooms and people who carry with
00:51:12.120them in ethics of care, which is sort of like my nightmare, because it taps directly into some of
00:51:19.840these ideas I was talking about in the paper, which, you know, when I started writing this paper,
00:51:24.000it was before this change in kind of social relationship with mushrooms. And then it came
00:51:30.460out just as it was starting to shift. So I maybe would have spent more time discussing this in the
00:51:34.760paper if I had kind of anticipated this change in perspective. But it is a form of extractive
00:51:42.600commodification that I'm seeing a lot of. So I will engage with the land insofar as I can put
00:51:48.800something in my mouth and then put it on social media as well, which is deeply linked to consumerism
00:51:56.520in a capitalist culture. And it scares me because we have so little information about these organisms
00:52:03.540and what they really need to thrive so like with plants for example we can say like do not harvest
00:52:09.120this this is threatened or endangered and for the most part people will respect that but if I go on
00:52:14.740online which I've made the mistake of doing a few times and trying to convince people like to
00:52:19.380harvest less they get very reactive I've had people try to explain to me like fungal biology
00:52:26.240which is challenging because I don't have the concrete scientific evidence that that fungus
00:52:33.620is endangered but I know that habitats are endangered and habitats are threatened and I
00:52:38.440also know that as a mycologist we just don't quite know the impact of large-scale foraging we just
00:52:45.560don't have that data so in that context I think it's best to be like very respectful and and have
00:52:53.640as little of an impact as possible. I do think foraging in general is like a great thing and
00:52:58.620I have derived tremendous joy from foraging and I'm not trying to gatekeep, but I don't think that
00:53:06.460asking for like hesitancy or care and just an ethics of care, as you said, I think that that
00:53:14.120should be, you know, a prerequisite for these types of interactions. But I mean, I also am not
00:53:21.000in the position of enforcing that. Um, and I don't think anyone should be, it should be something
00:53:25.360that kind of comes from within. So I try to have these conversations with people, but it just,
00:53:31.160it's, it's very much embedded in a lot of these other logics of sort of commodification, like
00:53:36.660proximity to something that you don't actually have responsibility for, or you don't think you
00:53:42.880have responsibility for, um, is something that extending that courtesy to non-human life forms,
00:53:49.080I think is really essential. Like you have to consciously separate yourself from the same0.99
00:53:54.620logics that are responsible for the cannibalization of the earth. And you can do these things in
00:54:00.740particular ways. I mean, that's my belief system, right? I think that I guess what I'm saying,
00:54:05.620I'm kind of stammering here because it's actually a new, this is a new thing for me. It's a new
00:54:10.000thing for me to be mycologist in an age of mushrooms being very exciting. So I'm still
00:54:14.620kind of formulating my thoughts around it. And actually I deeply fear coming off as being elitist
00:54:18.880so i i apologize for being a little bit not you know super direct or clear about this
00:54:24.940um so i'm grateful for the space just actually to try to explore these thoughts
00:54:28.980yeah yeah i'm happy that you're just able to stream of consciousness a little bit with us
00:54:37.180yeah it's it's good and i i have a question about the international congress of armenian
00:54:44.380mycologist, which you're a founding member of. And if you could speak to the intersections you're
00:54:50.500seeking to explore amongst mycological science and Armenian liberation and really the importance
00:54:57.940of coalescing our understanding of ecological and social welfare. Great. Thank you so much
00:55:04.380for bringing that up. This is something that's really important to me. So I am Armenian. I'm
00:55:10.460also part Irish, but Keishan, my last name is Armenian. And there are very few Armenians in
00:55:16.480the world, tragically, in large part because of the Armenian genocide, which was perpetrated by
00:55:23.600the Ottoman Empire. And Turkey is kind of now the modern continuation of that political structure.0.51
00:55:32.420And it's a genocide that's gone very under-recognized and explicitly denied,
00:55:37.160particularly by the state of Turkey and its allies. So it's very much, even though it's a
00:55:42.020genocide that happened about 100 years ago, it is something that Armenians have long sought closure
00:55:48.780over because the land loss colonization of particularly of Western Armenia, and then the
00:55:56.620ongoing denial of the genocide in which the US was for a very long time complicit in. So only a few
00:56:03.120hundred thousand armenians survived the genocide um and actually now most armenians there are more
00:56:09.600armenians living in diaspora around the world than there are actually living in the country of
00:56:15.120armenia so my armenian identity for those reasons is very dear to me because you know of that of
00:56:21.340that history so there was unfortunately a flare-up of ethnic cleansing in and around armenia
00:56:29.440carried out by Azerbaijan Armenia's neighboring state which is allied to Turkey and is a country
00:56:36.880a very fascist country that stokes a lot of ethnic hatred towards Armenians very actively
00:56:42.000and there was a war that broke out over a piece of disputed land in what was indigenously Armenian
00:56:51.580for thousands of years and it's the majority of the population there is Armenian but Armenia was
00:56:57.240also briefly colonized by the Soviet Union. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, it created state
00:57:05.960borders that did not reflect the indigenous populations. And there is this piece of land
00:57:11.500called Artsakh, which was also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, which is an area that's now
00:57:18.380colonized by Azerbaijan. And there has been struggles over that land for the last few decades.
00:57:24.140And most recently in 2020, Azerbaijan launched a very vicious war to reclaim that land, despite it being majority ethnically Armenian.
00:57:36.360so that war was really brutal thousands of young Armenian men died in battle hundreds were captured
00:57:45.160as prisoners of war and there were sporadic acts of violence all around the world targeted at
00:57:51.800Armenian civilians like in in the U.S. and in different places in Europe so it was actually a
00:57:59.120very upsetting period of time particularly it was in September and October of 20200.73
00:58:05.000and that time um it was I guess traumatizing for us because there of the genocidal trauma that all
00:58:14.260of us harbor like in our bodies um from intergenerational trauma it's resurfaced I mean
00:58:21.120something that was only skin deep anyway but like it was it was very upsetting to a lot of0.99
00:58:26.640Armenians because it was this existential threat to our our homeland which Azerbaijan seeks to
00:58:33.060fully eradicate they have they have stated states people have stated that they like seek to
00:58:39.000completely destroy the entire country of Armenia so it's very um scary and sad for us and we're
00:58:46.180also like because there's so few Armenians we're just generally sort of a you know not very well1.00
00:58:51.120understood people in particularly in the U.S. or outside of um the Middle East so I mean amazingly
00:58:59.360I have several friends who are mycologists and who are of Armenian descent, and we started
00:59:05.160talking because we wanted to leverage our capacity as scientists and to assist our brothers