Fantastic fungi is the name of a documentary and book by Louie Schwartzberg and Paul Stamets. It’s about fungi’s magical, mysterious, and medicinal world and their power to heal, sustain, and contribute to the planet’s regeneration. I have only started to read it and am already baffled by the possibilities fungi offer. What I found particularly fascinating about fantastic fungi is that some thrive on toxins. The opportunity that we can learn to live in symbiotic relation with fungi so that they thrive on what we waste. But that’s not the end of the story.
I wonder if fungi don’t serve us - as implied above - but we serve them. Instead of being the central character in the regeneration story, we become the background character, only on-screen to help the fungi shine and be the hero. Wouldn’t a transition from the Anthropocene, the man-made epoch, to the Ecocene, the reciprocal, relational, probiotic, regenerative epoch, require us to change perspective in this way?
