WEB-LIKE CONNECTIVITY is one of our most persistent and promising metaphors.  The benign transformation of human consciousness at all levels involves a new emphasis on relationship, plurality, networks, and connectivity. 

Images of this kind lurked in many archaic and indigenous worldspaces, but they are now becoming a rallying cry for the planetary, intergenerational and transdisciplinary movement that has emerged in response to what we call the “Metacrisis."

Perhaps the nature and significance of today's entangled existential threats is only truly visible in the degree to which we have developed an instinct for web-like patterns.  These forms of networked organization are needed in order to make sense of our digital technologies, social patterns, and nervous system.  They are even basic to certain new forms of physics that view Space and Time as emergent from network effects.  One of the most central examples of this consciousness is found in the behavior of the fungal organisms the underwrite successful ecologies. 

London-born Giuliana Furci has become one of the world's leading mycological activists with an emphasis on the sociological internalization of mycelium.  This is the belief that the positive transformation of noospheric systems can be accelerated through the psychological, social, technological and institutional assimilation of fungal patterns.

Giuliana founded the Chilean NGO Fungi Foundation with the explicit goal of promoting the linguistic, legal and cultural promotion of mycelial patterns.  The first step was to get international organizations such as National Geographic and the United Nations to add the category fungi to their wording around the preservation of flora & fauna. 

The second step is broad public education about the structure and function of mycelial organisms within terrestrial ecosystems. 

And the third is a campaign of planetary lobbying and education to make fungi into an explicitly affirmed part of conversation legislation, park creation, and other large scale attempts at biospheric protection.  This latter began with the movement to include fungi in Chilean ecological legislation and is now spreading worldwide.

Fungi are a key leverage point in terms of biodiverity and ecological thriving.  Many attempts to preserve plants and animals without protecting the fungal internets that stabilize, circulate and coordinate between them at microscopic scales, may prove ultimately useless. 
Conversely, the preservation of rich fungal connection zone may automatically secure large, biodiverse functional regions of the environment. 

However, the tactical use of mycelial protection to preverse ecosystems is only the tip of the iceberg.  Our metacrisis problem is not merely an objective situation.  It is simultaneously an external, internal & cultural condition that apparently cannot be solved uising the dominant problem-solving logic of Game A and Modernity. 

Thus any viable solution has to go beyond objective practicalitiy to include some form of social & personal metanoia at its heart.  It also sidestep the strategic assumptions of modern progress without losing the critical gains of efficiency, progress and rationality.  And our options for doing this must be straightfoward, salient and sensible.

Mycelial organisms have enormous potential in this regard.  The more we learn about their structure and function, the more we shift our internal assumptions about how to intervene in living systems.  Our baseline human instincts about stabilizing and enriching living systems seem to evolve and grow as we internalize the logic of organic, web-like, connectivity-oriented and mutually thriving networks.   

An unknown but significant amount of civilizational change is downstream of becoming more psychologically fluent with the role that fungi play in complex living systems.  And this occurs interpersonally as our educational systems, legislative frameworks and shared language are modified around the facts and functions of fungi. 

There are theorists who argue that mycelial organisms have essentially generative and cultivated the terrestrial biosphere for billions of years.  That may be slightly exaggerated but we should not understimate the role that mycelial consciousness might play in organizing this planet's dominant civilization toward a more mutual, effective and self-stabilizing mode.

Perhaps survival of the fittest is slowly being replaced by the thrival of the most deeply connected?



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The Planet Wild project and the Ecosia search engine recently partnered with Giuliana's Fungi Foundation.  You can check out their work here.