Of Smoky air and mushrooms

Cough, cough ….what are they burning up there? A silly question as the news tells us that these wildfires located in our friendly neighbor-to-the-north are partially a normal part of nature, partially the result of poor forest management, although how one manages huge swaths of native forest is a pretty good question … and other accidental or not accidental occurrences. The smoky and crunchy drift of wildfire particulates into our neck of the woods being the result of an unusual pattern of air movement.

How many of us remember the TV and print ads telling us “Only You can Prevent Forest Fires?”

Even as a child, watching Smokey the Bear, I wondered how I could prevent forest fires, since there were no forests in Brooklyn. There was a maple tree that grew in front of our house, the only tree on the block, but I didn’t think that counted. I did keep an eye on it, though.

We recently experienced what so many in the western part of our country have experienced – being downwind of wild fires. The difficulty breathing, watery eyes, etc. tells us that being downwind is not a good thing and it gives us some sense of what air pollution is about, however generated. It tells us what happens when we are not applying what we know about forest management, climate change, etc.

Science, as it is designed to do, reevaluates facts and data and has acknowledged that nature needs fire, a reality which native cultures recognized and accommodated as a natural part of life. We have yet to incorporate that knowledge into action. We are not only ignoring science but also pre-scientific knowledge. Cough, cough.

Speaking of nature, it has recently been noted that we humans and mushrooms are fairly close genetically. Actually, the news is that mushrooms have more DNA in common with humans than they do with plants. In the not-too-distant past, when we studied how we divide up life on earth, it was decided that there were two ways of being a living entity: plant or animal. And…mushrooms seemed to resemble plants more than they resembled humans. This is not true anymore. Here comes science again, correcting or, more appropriately, adding to knowledge.

Now I am not a botanist or zoologist, but those who are have, with some fairly decent research, divided the living world into more than plants and animals. There are now five “kingdoms:” monera, protista, fungi, plants and animals. (This information was good as of this morning, but who knows, science moves fast.) You will notice that the fungi now have their own kingdom. Why? Probably because they are everywhere. If you think that insects are ubiquitous, fungi have the insects beat by miles and miles of mycelium.

Mushrooms, in whatever form they appear, were once considered plants. They are not. Plants make their own food. Fungi do not. Fungi exist by consuming nutrition from other living and non-living organisms’

 From the mycorrhizae that support the life of the largest trees to the tiniest yeast spore, fungi are integral parts of all life on earth. When you eat bread or cheese or dink beer or wine, when you take medicines like penicillin … you are interacting with fungi. Fungi are what makes that sock that got wet and hid behind the dryer the source of horrible odor. Fungi make the green color under the constantly wet area around the garden hose, or pop up as possible edibles next to the hollyhocks. Fungi are also the cause of plant diseases. The mint that used to take up a good portion of my garden has been decimated by a fungus. Oh, and byy the way, oregano is a mint.

Fungi are always around, even when they are not sensed. After a particularly damp summer, you can watch mushrooms of all shapes and sizes enthusiastically appear in lawns and woodlands. We can expect to see changes in the appearance of fungi as the climate changes. If you take a bit and read about the structure of fungi, it exists in at least two forms – its so-called roots or main body, which mostly lives out of sunlight., and the fruiting bodies, what we see as mushrooms, which produce spores for reproduction. It’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but that’s about as much as I can vouch for.

Fungi and wildfires are pointed examples of the natural world, parts of the steady state system of life on earth, as are we. How we interact with forest management and fungi affects and is affected by that interaction between them and us for good or ill. A better term would be the interactions among us, since we are all part of the same creation and living planet.

While science and fire control and forest management ponder how best to live with the need for fire, I am looking for a few good recipes for mushrooms.