The Mushroom Is a Metaphor

The mushroom cloud began as a fireball, then rose into a vertical column of heat that metastasized into a turbulent, billowing cap. William Laurence, then the U.S. War Department’s bomb press spokesman, favoured metaphors for the nuclear explosion that Peggy Rosenthal describes as “cosmically procreational.” The cloud was, Laurence wrote, a “living thing,” a new species of being, seething in a white fury. It has since become the unchallenged symbol of the nuclear age.

Why were explosions imagined and sold as inevitable, even liberatory, called a “mushroom”? Before “mushroom cloud” took hold, writers and observers experimented with other terms, including “geyser,” “cauliflower,” “parasol,” “dome-shaped column,” and, courtesy of scientists, even “the rose.” Everyone settled on “mushroom,” historian Spencer Weart speculates, because of a collective consciousness that regards mushrooms as a universal symbol of transformation.

If we follow the image downward, past the cloud and into the ground, we find another symbol, not entirely dissimilar. The mycelium network points to a vision of survival as inherently communal, never solitary, with underground filaments of fungi sustaining entire ecosystems by moving water, nutrients, and warning signals across stretches of soil. What we associate with annihilation in the sky becomes, in the earth, a system of regeneration.

This world was built in thrall to the image of the mushroom cloud. The mycelium’s alacrity for community is antithetical to the idea of a total, annihilating, self-consuming self. We may have chosen the wrong mushroom to live by.

According to botanist Merlin Sheldrake, fungi have been around far longer than us, older by at least forty million years. In Entangled Life, he writes that the mycelium is the “most common of fungal habits.” To become mycelium, hyphae – threads of fungi – branch and then fuse. This two-step process is known as “anastomosis,” from the Greek word for “to provide with a mouth.” For fungi, neighbourliness is a necessity for survival, with hyphae constantly in search of other hyphae to flourish. It is nearly impossible for fungi to burgeon without their full capacity for branching and fusing. Courtesy of this mycelium’s robust network, a plant taxed by shade or infection can still thrive if a neighbouring tree is willing to part with some of its resources. And often, they are.

This world was built in thrall to the image of the mushroom cloud. The mycelium’s alacrity for community is antithetical to the idea of a total, annihilating, self-consuming self. We may have chosen the wrong mushroom to live by.

The assumption that competition is nature’s default has come to govern not just science but culture, lending a kind of borrowed authority to the claim that aggression and rivalry are fundamental to existence. What the study of fungi unsettles, and at times overturns, is this picture. The identity constructs of the animal world – victim and oppressor, self and other, winner and loser – hold far less purchase for fungi. Sheldrake notes, somewhat cryptically, that their “selves can shade off into otherness gradually.” We tend to assume such a condition is unavailable to us.

Without words, the very thing that lets me be me and you be you and us be us, mycelium asserts its selfhood only through what it does. Its existence depends on negotiating loyalties across species, filtering toxins introduced by hostile factions, and finding sustenance in conditions that yield none.

Authorities of the Enlightenment movement, which prided itself on a wilful separation of man from nature, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were botanists before philosophers. For Locke, the way plants exist offered a model for how we exist; for Rousseau, the study of botany was a “salutary” science, its virtue comparable to the study of what might make the soul “good.” Even the cynical Friedrich Nietzsche urges us to look to plants for inspiration: “[Plants] climb and wind and finally gain some light and a patch of soil, thus creating for themselves their share of joy on inhospitable ground.” For all these thinkers, failing to account for plant life in how we think of ourselves is not only remiss but gullible.

And yet, our intellectual lineage has long treated vegetal life as philosophically barren. The prerogative of productive thought, the quality meant to distinguish humans from animals, was imagined to be impossible outside the fences of the city. When questioned by Phaedrus about his unfamiliarity with the countryside, Socrates famously quipped that he was “a lover of knowledge,” and that the men of the city, not “the trees or the country,” were his teachers. Plants could provide food, but not food for thought. “In a sense, this represents the essential problem of philosophy as traditionally understood,” notes Michael Marder. From the very beginning, we have vaunted ourselves as the sovereign beings of the world. This anthropocentrism, he argues in Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, is not just a human affliction but an impasse to imagining the common good.

It would seem we did as “traditional” philosophy asked. Our entanglement with plant life tends to ask what it can do for us materially – the way fungi proffer salubrious penicillin – not what it is in itself. Little surprise, then, that mushrooms are enjoying their moment as the “it-food,” earning the title of “ingredient of the year” from The New York Times in 2022. India was projected to become a “mushroom superpower.” In Kenya, a company is turning the fungus’s root-like network into wall panels for sustainable, affordable housing, while others are growing leather-like materials from it. Through “mycoremediation,” this underground web, capable of decomposing organic waste and restoring soil health, is being enlisted for ecological restoration, our utilitarian expectations only multiplying.

Mycologists, though, warn against metaphors that attribute human-like traits to fungi. Ecologist Martin Spray notes that it would be considered almost “heretical” in scientific prose to suggest plants truly feel joy or suffer pain. Much of our botanical vocabulary, he points out, is borrowed from animal metaphors, the hazard of “discussing plants in words and meanings that have been developed for discussing animals.” For scientists, the possibility of mythic metaphors overriding empirical evidence is a source of chagrin. For literary critics, rejecting such language borders on an affront to writing.

Our propensity to treat wilderness as a distant “exotic Other” risks flouting the ecology around us. As William Cronon liturgically writes in “The Trouble with Wilderness,” “We need to honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away.” Science writing that drifts into the spiritual or mystical, seeking generosity and compassion in plants, obscures the line between inspiration and misinformation.

In his essay “The Problem of Nature Writing,” novelist Jonathan Franzen explains that a wild animal or fungus “simply doesn’t have the particularity of self on which good storytelling depends.” Since these existences possess only what we consider “basic” drives – an instinct for survival, an inclination for reproduction – a dramatic arc obliges the addition of a human character or, as is often the case in much scientific writing today, anthropomorphisation.

But in the rooms eschewing utilitarian uses of nature, this is precisely what has begun to happen, mycelium now a recurring presence at global design fairs, turning up in high-profile installations across the West. “Can mushrooms save the world?” an article in Metropolis asks, not without irony. Mushlooms, an interactive light installation by Dutch designers Wes Nijssen and Bram van Wichelen, uses a “mycelium-like network of threads” that light up in response to air pollution. MycoMuseum, a Venice Biennale project by Indian designers Bhakti Loonawat and Suyash Sawant, seeks to “address the urgent need to rethink how we design built environments” by leveraging mycelium as a circular building material to “harmonise human activity with nature.” In the words of these artists, a frenzied heap of metaphors swells, projecting onto mycelium everything we collectively wish the world could offer.

Eugenia Bone, a nature writer, reminds us that not all fungi form the collective networks we narrativize them for, and that even when they do, their exchanges follow payoff and preference, not open-handed sharing. According to Bone, the popular vision of mycelium as a benevolent woodland internet took hold in the 1990s, when Nature amplified early studies of tree-fungus exchanges into a sweeping tale of forest harmony, a turn that left many scientists in a tizzy. In an article in the review journal Trends in Plant Science, thirty-two international plant and forest researchers examined two bestselling forest books and found that aggrandising predilections within metaphorical scientific writing had slipped into method, turning tentative findings into claims they could not carry. “Warn[ing] against anthropomorphizing” plants, the researchers note that claims of trees feeling pain, sharing resources, or “keeping each other alive” lack rigorous evidence. The notion of a “mother tree” funneling nutrients through fungi, presumably mycelium, is declared “untenable,” since any carbon transfer is “so small that it is physiologically completely irrelevant.” If political decisions such as forest management are “based on pleasant-sounding but false messages” instead of scientific fact, adds David G. Robinson, the scientist who led the review, the result could be “fatal consequences.”

The attribution of human virtues to fungi is a kind of fictionalizing of nature. As Bone notes, the endeavour to find cooperative models in mycelia gives away a real hankering for what is misplaced in our society. This anthropocentric impulse, in practice, relegates plants and fungi far behind humans. In a world so preoccupied with individuality, such tendencies in science writing point to an individuality crisis bruising culture.

Perhaps the way to view mycelium, then, is to be resolutely literal. Its functioning shows that the point is survival.

When writers rely on metaphors or human analogies to translate ecology into a form that feels relevant, their task of getting us to care about the environment remains largely unaccomplished, for the plant stays an "other." Since this language keeps circling back to us rather than moving toward the organisms themselves, we cannot see what is perhaps not ours to see, and cannot recognise forms of life that do not echo us uncritically.

Perhaps the way to view mycelium, then, is to be resolutely literal. Its functioning shows that the point is survival. What we have romanticised as sharing and community are, in plainer terms, the mechanisms by which it sustains itself. It is the condition of possibility for other life, not through generosity but through its nature. In its persistence, other life, too, can find its terms.

Marder gestures toward this when he asks, “What if we think about ourselves as political plants?” The outcome, he suggests, would be “an anarchic proliferation of multiplicities, of branches and twigs that retain their semi-independence while participating in the overall growth of plant-society,” a politics that would “encourage the flourishing of all within a mutually supportive environment,” where there is neither conflict nor a clear-cut division between the individual and the collective.

We named our most catastrophic invention after something that has sustained life for hundreds of millions of years, and perhaps that was never accidental. Every metaphor is a confession. In reaching for the image of the mushroom to describe what we had made, we revealed, without intending to, what we had lost, the unglamorous, unromantic, utterly indifferent will to persist, and, in persisting, to make persistence possible for others. The cloud rises and razes. The mycelium just goes on.

Design: Hitesh Sonar For The Swaddle