The Squelch and Why School Should be More Like a Fungus

It’s been wet this August and last week was topped off by a cracker of a thunderstorm storm that dropped torrential rain and knocked out the power for a few hours.

The routine stroll around the lake at Innisfree Garden was more of a squelch. Many paths were waterlogged and  you could hear the roar of the waterfall from across the lake.

The rains have sharpened all the greens and everything – the grass, the tree bark, the roots – all seemed shown in heightened relief. There was none of the dusty sandiness that often characterizes the color palette of late August.

The frogs were out and the cypress knees were in their element – looking for all the world like a family of gnomes knee-deep in water.

And the fungus! A banner season for mushrooms like I’ve never seen and in such a range of color shape and size: Tiny orange caps, black trumpets, milky white moons the size of dinner plates, a stack of brown pancakes.

There’s something magical and other worldly about the mysterious suddenness of mushrooms. One morning after rains there they are from out of nowhere and in all their potent glory. They heave themselves into the light shoving stones and pushing aside the bark, the moss and the undergrowth. They bloom on stumps and layer themselves on the trunks of trees. Sylvia Plath captures this beautifully in her poem Mushrooms – see below. Are they coming to get us? Are they taking over the world with sinister intent?

Live Like a Mushroom, Lead like a Toadstool

The little I know about how mushrooms function in the forest suggests there’s a rich metaphor for social organizations like schools. A healthy forest, for example, is completely interconnected thanks to the vegetative part of the fungus – the mycelium. This spiderweb-like thread allows trees to expand the range of their root systems and share nutrients. Mycelium has the capacity to decompose rocks to release their minerals and the mycelium network allows stronger trees to share carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous with weaker or younger trees throughout the forest.

Biologically we are more closely related to fungi than to plants. They too breathe oxygen and exhale carbon monoxide and digest nutrients using enzymes. They are survivors and found on every continent including Antarctica. 

Mushrooms are edible, toxic, mind-altering, sacramental, delicious, unpalatable, ubiquitous, poisonous, nutritious, antibiotic, antiviral, carcinogenic and bioluminescent. 

They are essential in our ecosystem and feature in medicine, mythology folklore, cooking and religion. Expanding the metaphor of schools as fungus and playing out the parallels as a moral imperative and structural example could be a lot of fun.

“Our schools (companies, organizations) should be more like mushrooms”

“Why Your School Should be More Like Like a Fungus”

“The Five Leadership Lessons of the Forest”

“Teach like a Toadstool” and etc.

Mycologist Paul Stamets has already written the book:

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World 

In Mycelium Running (Ten Speed Press 2005), Stamets explores the use and applications of fungi in bioremediation—a practice called mycoremediation. Stamets details methods of termite and ant control using nontoxic mycelia, and describes how certain fungi may be able to neutralize anthrax, nerve gas, and smallpox. He includes the following with regard to the mycelium:

Is this the largest organism in the world? This 2,400-acre (9.7 km2) site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it. Estimated at 1,665 football fields in size and 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees. Mushroom-forming forest fungi are unique in that their mycelial mats can achieve such massive proportions.

Sylvia Plath captures some of the otherworldly and even sinister quality of the mushroom in her poem  first published in “The Colossus and Other Poems” in 1960. Are they coming to take over the world?

Mushrooms
by Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on

Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.

So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers

In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.