Navigating Precarity with Fungi During an International Wildfire Summer

By Katja Garson, Lund University

It started as a crackling, an uneasy premonition. In March and April of this year, media networks were warning of a hot summer to come. Heatwaves would scorch the earth, forests would burn, records would be broken. The sharp sting of smoke was imagined and distilled into narrative before it even arrived. For Castellón, in eastern Spain, wildfire became a reality at the end of March. Yet in many places, premonitions of the summer ahead could only be found in newspaper columns or in the crunch of unusually dry spring grass and cracked earth underfoot.

Meanwhile, I was preparing for fieldwork and holidays which would largely be spent in the company of the many entities, not least the fungi, of the Finnish boreal forest. My work is not officially about fungi, though they may come into it; I research the practice of boreal forest heritage and futures. Yet, as someone recently wrote in the Facebook group of the Finnish Mycological Society, once you have identified your first chanterelle, Cantharellus cibarius, that perfumed, golden-yellow mushroom, “there’s no going back.” What’s more, getting down on hands and knees to study and pick mushrooms is as valid a method as any of getting to know the forest. Fungi act as eye-openers, as catalysts for revelation, if you let them. As Anna Tsing writes, “it is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us - but it might open our imaginations” (2015, p.19).

This is a short account of my own and others’ recent experiences with Finnish forest fungi, and how these interactions may be interpreted as simultaneously enchanting, confusing and contradictory when placed in the context of wider environmental shifts. In particular, I reflect on precarity: in the sensitivity of fungi to local conditions, in the brief emergence of fruiting bodies, and in the disruption of the lives of thousands of people by fires and heatwaveBefore I started to search for this season’s first mushrooms, I was keeping an eye on posts in the mycology Facebook group which I have already mentioned. People were concerned: “the forest is so dry”, “no mushrooms anywhere”, “hoping for rain”. I shared similar concerns. It was difficult to separate these worries from thoughts on the wider climate emergency, especially as it was reflected in the unusually large number of fires burning across North America. The crackle transformed into a rush, a roar, as millions of hectares of forest went up in flames, and as media outlets and scientists narrated the phenomenon. By the end of June, smoke was drifting across the Atlantic. Yearning for rain to prompt mushrooms’ emergence struck me as a small matter alongside news of people being evacuated from their homes in Alberta and British Columbia. Being able to feel this kind of worry felt like a privilege. Yet it somehow also seemed important in the context of remembering what is ‘normal’ and what is not. 

So it was that I began to consider how, firstly, fungi reveal that precarity is quite normal – it is the state of our world, and has been for a long time (Tsing, 2015). After all, mushroom foragers impatiently await the emergence of mushrooms each year, and sometimes they come earlier or later than expected, and certain species do not appear at all. Yet, and secondly, the disjuncture between waiting for mushrooms and watching the news about forest fires revealed that this precarity impacts different people and landscapes in different ways, and, especially now, is tinged with loss and grief. Neither should all phenomena be passed off as normal simply because they demonstrate the precarity in the world. It was not possible to calmly accept the lack of mushrooms in early July, just as it was clear that high temperatures around the world did not fit into much longer-term historic trends.

 The rain arrived, and with it, mushrooms.

Later in the summer I was in Punkaharju, eastern Finland. I took a walk to explore the area. Maybe the fact that I was carrying a mushroom basket is what prompted Matti to say hello. Matti is a 98-year-old man who has lived in the area all his life, and who often takes a slow walk alone. This time, we walked together, and talked about mushrooms, the forest, and the beautiful scenery. Despite the recent rain it was extremely dry, and I was not expecting what we found – a hint of yellow among the bilberry leaves revealed a surprising collection of small chanterelles. We spent some time gathering them, Matti pointing with his walking stick. The main thing that struck me was how lightweight the mushrooms were. Their surfaces felt like crepe paper; not very mushroom-like. In contrast, during a trip into the forest as part of the ‘Mushroom Methods’ workshop which I attended at the University of Oulu, everything and everyone was soaked. Rain fell ceaselessly into an already-drenched forest and down my sleeves, and the mushrooms that we came across were spongy, slimy, full and firm. People could not help reaching out and stroking the mushroom caps, turning them this way and that, always handling them with great care.

Searching for and knowing fungi prompts instinctive and embodied modes of engagement. I and many of the people with whom I spent some time demonstrated moving and behaving in particular ways around fungi. Joy Harjo (2000) speaks of ‘skin thinking’, whereby the skin and the body are used to read the environment. I only noticed some pearly-fawn Cortinarius caperatus when I was crouched down in the undergrowth, scanning at mushroom-level. Someone who walked with me commented that her mother had told her that “you have to approach a mushroom from the side. Don’t look at it directly!” We touched, smelled and weighed the fungal bodies. Sometimes, we felt pain in our backs from bending down so much, and a lot of the time we felt rather damp, but that seemed a necessary part of the experience. Our interactions with mushrooms were laced with an awareness of their perishability and ephemerality, at least in terms of what we could see and touch. As Tsing (2015, p.176) puts it, “intermittent, spasmodic fruiting reminds us of the precarity of coordination - and the curious conjunctures of collaborative survival.” In this moment, precarity produced fleeting beauty which we touched with our bodies.

Three days after that rainy trip, new wildfires broke out in Greece.

How can we understand such moments in combination with “ungraspable hyperobjects - entities such as climate and evolution…that cannot be directly seen or touched” (Morton, 2014, p.207)? Extreme weather events and their lived impacts are not themselves ‘climate’, and cannot encapsulate all of what ‘climate’ means. Humans can only access ‘climate’ through prediction and imagination, but even then, the scales in question are beyond true understanding (Tyszczuk, 2016). In contrast, with fungi we start with a material entity rather than a concept. Yet, there is an element of the hidden and ungraspable here, too. Fleeting fungal ‘fruits’ do not always tell us the bigger, deeper stories that we think they should be able to tell us. It’s as if we mobilise our imaginations to ty to touch and feel ‘climate’, whilst asking individual mushrooms to narrate the entire climate emergency.

Fast forward to early September, and in the Facebook group, no-one is complaining. It’s an excellent mushroom year. Yet foragers take nothing for granted. There is relief in inhaling the odour of a basketful of Boletus which you were not sure you would find, and in admiring the striking Arched Wood Wax, Hygrophorus camarophyllus, after wondering why this familiar patch was not producing mushrooms. Whilst an absence of mushrooms can seem more obviously disconcerting, each one that I found also prompted complicated feelings of joy and anxiety. The mushrooms were like works of art. But there was also the reminder that these are the transient results of processes which may have been disrupted in ways we cannot understand. Walking in unfamiliar forests made it all the more difficult for me to sense whether things were ‘as they should be’.

Other stories might be told, depending on who, when and where you ask. Mushroom foragers and hikers returning to the same places may see long-term patterns. Perhaps the milkcaps, typically late-season mushrooms, are coming even later, or earlier. Perhaps the yellow chanterelles become dry and shrivelled season after season. The impact of forest management practices should also not be forgotten. In Oulu, we commented that the forest did not seem very old. Ever-larger swathes of Finland (and other parts of the world) are being cleared and planted with single-species monocultures. For those now dealing with the aftermath of scorching heat, the focus is on rebuilding devastated communities. In Hawai’i alone, structural damage is in the billions of dollars, and at least 98 lives were lost in the Lahaina fires of early August (CDP, 2023). People are likely thinking more about the pain in their own lives rather than the loss of fungal communities, even if the two are interconnected. The stories depend on which fungi you involve, too. The false morel, Gyromitra esculenta, and the matsutake, Tricholoma matsutake (the focus of Tsing’s 2015 book), thrive on dry, disturbed land. Others dislike upheaval and have the potential to spread as mycelium for tens to thousands of years (Bierend, 2021; Sipos et al., 2018). Reading fungal reactions to a changing climate is therefore not straightforward, and the conclusions we draw will be shaped by who we are and what we think we know.

Absorbing this summer’s media coverage of wildfires and heatwaves alongside the embodied experience of waiting for and finding mushrooms has been a lesson in discomfort, disjuncture and hope. In themselves, these are symptoms of precarity. The apparent mismatch between international climate narratives and daily experiences may be especially instructive in making sense of situated moments and one’s own positionality. Following fungi and fungal-folk opens ways of thinking about precarity as ever-present and necessary on the one hand, since it provides opportunity for change and renewal. Yet on the other hand, precarity is also on a spectrum and varies through time and space. Accepting certain kinds of precarity is difficult. Fungi force us to appreciate and protect short-lived flourishing, whilst being reminded of our personal positions in the world, and the privileges and challenges which those bring.

References

Bierend, D. (2021) In search of mycotopia: citizen science, fungi fanatics, and the untapped potential of mushrooms. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Center for Disaster Philanthropy (CDP) (2023) 2023 North American Wildfires. Available at: https://disasterphilanthropy.org/disasters/2023-north-american-wildfires/ (Accessed 20 October 2023).

 Harjo, J. (2000) We Can See It With Our Eyes Closed, in: A map to the next world: poems and tales, W.W.Norton: New York. p.101.

Morton, T. (2014) Pandora’s Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought, in: Canavan, G. and Robinson, K.S. eds. (2014) Green planets: Ecology and science fiction. Wesleyan University Press: Middletown. pp.206-225.

Sipos, G., Anderson, J.B. and Nagy, L.G. (2018) Armillaria. Current Biology, 28(7), pp.R297-R298.

Tsing, A.L. (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.

Tyszczuk, R.A. (2016) Anthropocene Unconformities: On the Aporias of Geological Space and Time. Space and Culture.