External Publication

Mycology in Contemporary Social, Political, and Philosophical Practices

Paulo Pinto [Unofficial] May 22, 2026

Overview

Mycology — the scientific study of fungi — has become a generative lens for rethinking social organization, political economy, ecological ethics, and philosophical ontology. From grassroots activism to academic theory, fungi now occupy a significant place in how thinkers and practitioners imagine alternatives to hierarchical, extractive, and anthropocentric systems.

Mycelium growth — the vast underground network that has become a central metaphor in contemporary political philosophy. Source: Wikimedia Commons

1. The Fungal Turn in Thought

The early twenty-first century witnessed what scholars describe as a “fungal turn” in humanities, social sciences, and activist practice. This shift was catalyzed by a convergence of scientific discoveries — particularly around Mycorrhizal Networks and interspecies communication — and a broader cultural hunger for models of life that challenge the competitive, individualist, and growth-obsessed logics of late capitalism.

Unlike plants and animals, fungi resist easy categorization. They are neither fully individual nor fully collective; they decompose and regenerate; they form webs of mutual dependency rather than trees of hierarchy. This ontological ambiguity has made them philosophically irresistible.

Anna Tsing, _The Mushroom at the End of the World_1 (2015)

“Precarity is the condition of our time… yet life continues, even with this fragility. Matsutake mushrooms show us how.”

2. Multispecies Anthropology and Anna Tsing

Anna Tsing’s landmark work The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) repositioned the matsutake mushroom — one of the world’s most expensive fungi — as an unlikely guide through the ruins of global capitalism.

Matsutake (Tricholoma matsutake), the subject of Anna Tsing’s landmark multispecies ethnography. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Tsing’s book introduced several concepts that have since become central to Multispecies Ethnography and Political Ecology:

Precarity — not as a condition to be overcome, but as the very texture of life under capitalism and ecological disruption.
Assemblages — social formations understood not as stable structures but as contingent, patchy, and multi-species entanglements.
Capitalist ruins — landscapes degraded by industrial extraction that paradoxically become sites of unexpected vitality and community.

Tsing traces the global commodity chain of matsutake from disturbed forests in Oregon and Japan to high-end markets in Kyoto, revealing how foragers — many of them displaced Laotian, Cambodian, and Vietnamese refugees — build communities in the interstices of capitalism’s wreckage. The mushroom becomes a figure for precarious living, not a metaphor for doom, but a model for resilience.

Her framework of Polyphonic Assemblages draws explicitly from fungal biology: just as mycelial networks are decentralized, multi-species, and constituted through ongoing exchange, so too are the social worlds Tsing documents.

3. Merlin Sheldrake and Entangled Life

Biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake’s _Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures_2 (2020) brought mycological thinking to a mass audience. Sheldrake argues that fungi fundamentally challenge Western assumptions about individuality, agency, and intelligence.

Key philosophical provocations from Sheldrake’s work include:

Radical relationality — organisms are not self-contained units but are constituted through their relationships with others. Fungi dissolve the boundary between self and world.
Distributed cognition — fungi make “decisions” without a brain, challenging the anthropocentric idea that intelligence requires a center.
Chemical communication as language — fungal signal networks raise questions about meaning, interpretation, and who counts as a communicator.

Sheldrake’s work sits at the intersection of Philosophy of Mind, Ecology, and Post-Anthropocentric Philosophy, feeding into academic debates in New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology.

4. The Radical Mycology Movement

Radical Mycology3 is both a grassroots social movement and a philosophy, founded by Peter McCoy in 2006. It articulates fungi not as mere objects of scientific study, but as collaborative partners in building resilient human and ecological communities.

What Is Radical Mycology?

Radical Mycology differs from classical mycology in that it works to build relationships between humans and fungi for the benefit of larger communities and the wider world, rather than focusing solely on taxonomy and identification.

McCoy’s 2016 book Radical Mycology: A Treatise on Seeing and Working With Fungi (Chthaeus Press) synthesizes Permaculture, grassroots education, Mycoremediation, and social justice. In 2014, the Radical Mycology Collective toured North America, sharing mycological knowledge with over 40 artist and activist groups, demonstrating how fungi can support self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, and ecological repair.

The movement draws on and contributes to:

Anarchism and horizontal organizing
Permaculture design principles
Food Sovereignty and community resilience
Environmental Justice through affordable land remediation

McCoy later founded MYCOLOGOS (2017), an educational platform bringing mycology’s arts and sciences to broader communities.

5. Mycorrhizal Networks as Political Metaphor

The discovery — and subsequent popularization — of Mycorrhizal Networks (the so-called wood wide web) has generated intense interest as a model for non-hierarchical social organization and Mutual Aid.

Research published in academic contexts such as Mapping Alternative Futures through Fungi: The Usefulness of Mycorrhizal Networks as a Metaphor for Mutual Aid explores how the mycorrhizal model resonates with activist traditions of mutual support, resource sharing without central authority, and reciprocal care.

Critical Note

Some mycologists and science critics have cautioned against collapsing complex, emergent fungal science into simplified political narratives. Our understanding of the wood wide web is still developing, and the metaphorical uses of fungal networks can sometimes outpace the science. The tension between scientific rigor and political imagination is itself a productive site of inquiry.

Nonetheless, the mycorrhizal metaphor has proven generative across activist contexts: from Anarchist Mutual Aid Networks to Platform Cooperativism, thinkers draw on the image of interconnected nodes sustaining one another without a center.

6. Mycoremediation and Environmental Justice

Mycoremediation * — the use of fungi to break down, transform, or accumulate environmental pollutants — has become a significant site where mycology intersects with Environmental Justice and community activism.

Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), possessing powerful enzymes that break down toxic compounds, at the center of community-led mycoremediation projects. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Fungi such as Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom) possess non-specific ligninolytic enzymes capable of breaking down oil, heavy metals, pesticides, and synthetic dyes. This positions mycoremediation as not only an ecological technology but a political tool for communities living in polluted, sacrifice zones.

Key dimensions of mycoremediation activism include:

Accessibility — mycoremediation is 50–90% cheaper than conventional “dig and dump” remediation and can be carried out with resources accessible to low-income communities.
Workforce development — community-led projects provide local jobs and ecological literacy.
Post-disaster response — following the 2017 Sonoma County wildfires (California), an activist coalition placed over 40 miles of oyster mushroom-inoculated wattles around contaminated sites, demonstrating community-scale mycoremediation.
Post-industrial healing — fungi are being explored for cleanup in former mining zones, industrial brownfields, and agricultural wastelands.

This work connects to broader conversations in Political Ecology, Decolonial Ecology, and Grassroots Environmentalism.

7. Psychedelics, Consciousness, and Decolonization

The intersection of fungal mycology with psychedelic mushrooms — particularly Psilocybe species — has opened another domain where mycology meets political philosophy: the decolonization of consciousness and knowledge.

Psilocybe cubensis — whose active compound psilocybin is at the center of debates over indigenous knowledge, pharmacological colonialism, and epistemological sovereignty. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used in Mesoamerican and other indigenous cultures for over 10,000 years, embedded in sophisticated ritual, cosmological, and healing practices. The contemporary “Psychedelic Renaissance” — the resurgence of clinical and commercial interest in psilocybin — has reignited debates about:

Colonial extractivism — Western pharmaceutical companies and researchers profiting from indigenous pharmacological knowledge without benefit-sharing or recognition.
Epistemological sovereignty — psychedelic experiences offer alternative ways of knowing that challenge the dominance of rationalist, reductionist epistemologies.
The criminalization of consciousness — the War on Drugs is analyzed as a form of political and cognitive suppression targeting indigenous, Black, and working-class communities.

Scholars such as those writing in _Anthropology of Consciousness_4 and the Philosophy and Psychedelics Exeter Research Group have called for a genuinely decolonized approach that centers indigenous knowledge systems rather than merely extracting compounds for Western biomedical frameworks.

See also: Terence McKenna, Mazatec Healing Traditions, Psychedelic Justice, Robin Wall Kimmerer.

8. Fungal Imaginaries in Art and Culture

The artistic dimension of the mycological turn is substantial and growing. Fungi have become central materials and metaphors in BioArt, design, and critical cultural practice.

Notable examples include:

Anselm Kiefer — the German neo-expressionist placed giant mushrooms at center stage in his installation Über Deutschland , using fungi as symbols of decadence, destruction, and regeneration in post-war German identity.
Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi (Somerset House, London, 2020) — a landmark exhibition exploring fungi as material, metaphor, and philosophical provocation, featuring artists and designers rethinking futurity through the fungal lens.
BioArt practices — contemporary artists working with living fungal matter explore themes of transformation, decay, temporality, and multispecies kinship.
Maymana Arefin’s fungi.futures — research-practice work at UCL exploring the futures imagined through fungal metaphors and practices in urban contexts5.

The fungal aesthetic operates as a counter-imagination to modernist ideals of clarity, solidity, and permanence — embracing rot, interdependence, and the generative power of decomposition. This connects to broader currents in Solarpunk, Degrowth Aesthetics, and Multispecies Design.

9. Philosophical Frameworks

9.1 The Rhizome: Deleuze and Guattari

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome — introduced in _A Thousand Plateaus_6 (1980) — pre-dates the explicit mycological turn but is profoundly resonant with it. The rhizome is a model of thought that has “neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.” Unlike tree-thinking (hierarchical, rooted, branching), rhizomatic thought is horizontal, multiple, and resistant to centralization.

Contemporary thinkers have retroactively identified the rhizome with mycorrhizal networks, reading Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy as anticipating the fungal ontology that science would later confirm. This convergence has been productive for Post-Structuralist Political Theory, Anarchist Theory, and New Materialism.

9.2 Posthumanism and More-than-Human Worlds

Posthumanism and More-than-Human geographies draw extensively on mycological thinking to challenge the category of “the human” as the privileged unit of ethical and political consideration. Fungi are invoked to argue:

that agency, intelligence, and sociality are not exclusively human properties;
that care and interdependence — not competition and autonomy — are the fundamental conditions of life;
that ecological crisis requires abandoning human exceptionalism.

Key figures in this tradition include Donna Haraway (_Staying with the Trouble_7, 2016), Tim Ingold, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

9.3 Ontological Pluralism and Cosmopolitics

The mycological turn also feeds into debates in Ontological Pluralism and Cosmopolitics (following Isabelle Stengers): if fungi challenge our categories of individual, organism, and life itself, then mycological knowledge becomes a site where different ontologies — scientific, indigenous, artistic — must negotiate rather than compete. This connects to Amerindian Perspectivism and decolonial epistemologies.

External Links

The Mushroom at the End of the World — Princeton University Press
Entangled Life — Merlin Sheldrake’s official site
Radical Mycology — Chthaeus Press
MYCOLOGOS — Peter McCoy’s educational platform
Mapping Alternative Futures through Fungi (ResearchGate)
Mycorrhizae, Mutual Aid and Radical Mycology — a-n Artists
Indigenous Philosophies and the Psychedelic Renaissance — Wiley
Decolonizing the Philosophy and Anthropology of Psychedelics — University of Exeter
The Artists Building a Future out of Mushrooms — Frieze
Thinking with Fungus — Borderlore
Category: Fungi — Wikimedia Commons

References

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press. ↩︎
Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. Random House. ↩︎
McCoy, P. (2016). Radical Mycology: A Treatise on Seeing and Working With Fungi. Chthaeus Press. ↩︎
Williams, B. et al. (2022). Indigenous Philosophies and the “Psychedelic Renaissance.” Anthropology of Consciousness, 33(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/anoc.12161 ↩︎
Arefin, M. (n.d.). fungi.futures. University College London. https://maymanaarefin.com/@fungi-futures ↩︎
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press (trans. 1987). ↩︎
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. ↩︎