One day, the brilliant and very green horticulturist Denis Lebreton guided me to read the book the hidden world by Merlin Sheldrake. A large brick on the extraordinary place occupied by fungi and lichens in the biosphere.
It is this major reading that gave me the desire to “chronicle” today on the Wood Wide Web that some scientists find far-fetched. The concept was popularized in 1997 by British mycologist David Read. But it owes much to the work of Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard.
What is it about ? By analogy to our internet, the forest web is represented by the underground network of mycelial filaments that connects plants. If the strength of our internet is measured in megabits, that of the mycelial web is expressed in the mass of carbon traveling in the hyphae of fungi which can extend over very long distances.
Thus, in 1998, a fungus was found in Oregon, the filaments of which extend over 880 hectares of forest. More than just individuals, the trees sharing this web form a real community.
Is there a biomimetic relationship between human and fungal networks? No ! The role of mushrooms in the birth of our internet may lie elsewhere, says Michael Pollan. In Journey to the edge of the mindPollan evokes a probable causal link between the discovery of psilocybin and LSD by the counter-culture of the 1960s and the genesis of the Internet computer network.
The relationship may not be direct, he says, but one can certainly find a link between the arrival of fungal-derived psychedelic drugs and the technology boom that would occur 20 years later in Silicon Valley.
I quote: “To what extent does the concept of cyberspace, this immaterial place where one can build a new identity and join a community of other virtual subjects, owe it to an imagination under acid? And virtual reality? The very notion of cybernetics, that is, the idea that material reality can be translated into bits of information, may also owe something to the LSD experience and the ability of this substance to transform matter into spirit. »
That said, the Earth being a plant planet that rests on fungal and bacterial foundations, the forest web is much more essential to the biosphere than the one that gave birth to our social networks. The vast majority of plants have fungal partners in the soil that provide them with ingredients and water.
To honor this association of mutual interests, plants must share the sugars they produce with them. Some plants thus return up to a third of the products of their photosynthesis to these workers in the shade. Specialists have also discovered that symbiotic fungi improve the resistance of plants to stress and parasitic attacks.
More than just cables for transmitting information, says Sheldrake, they can even favor their loyal partners and cut off the food of those less generous towards them.
Does this extraordinary world interest you? I recommend you to read Mycorrhizae: the rise of the new green revolution. This book published by Jean André Fortin, Christian Plenchette and Yves Piché profoundly changed my view of plant life and the place of the fungal network in living things.
At the end of the 1990s, the Canadian expert in forest ecology, Suzanne Simard, discovered, in the natural environment, sharing of “food” between birches and firs via this fungal network. By giving marked carbon to birches, Simard noticed a little later that they had given it to fir trees. Paper birch and Douglas fir, two very different species, shared food resources via the fungal web.
Even more touching, the scientist will discover that it was young fir trees disadvantaged by their location in shaded areas that had benefited from the “largesse” of birches. In the spring, when the bare birches were unable to photosynthesize, they received resources from the fir trees.
In the middle of summer, when overhung by the foliage of tall trees, the young fir trees struggled to find the sun, it was the birches that returned the lift. The flow of sharing was therefore two-way.
Thanks to Wood Wide Web, in a forest, says Sheldrake, surpluses can pass from areas of abundance to areas of scarcity. The author also reports stories that would have made my late mother cry, for whom sharing and helping each other were at the center of her life.
We have already observed, he says, transfers of resources from dying plants to neighboring healthy plants. A kind of pre-mortem testamentary execution. What about healthy plants that come to the aid of a strain that still has a chance of reappearing?
The trees that come out of their dormancy in this beginning of spring are perhaps the models to be copied for a sustainable coexistence with the biosphere. If capitalism celebrates only competitiveness, flowering plants are a little more inclined towards the sharing economy.
More than giving us sugaring off via the network of pipes that run through the maple groves in this sugaring off season, they have things to teach us to improve our problematic relationship with the biosphere.