Transcript: DR. PATRICIA KAISHIAN on Queer Mycology /262
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Hello, and welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Patricia Kaishian.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian To be imaginative about solutions to conservation, I think would be to invoke these philosophical, romantic, and personable relations that we have the capacity of having with other organisms, and be shameless about them. To make the assertion that all life forms, regardless of how close they are to humans or how functional they are to us in our minds, they all are beings on this planet with us. We've all been on this multi-billion year evolutionary journey to exist in this weird snapshot of time. And it is my belief that it is our most sacred duty to allow these beings to live their lives and carry out their essential functions.
Ayana Young Dr. Patricia Kaishian is a mycologist and a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University, where she serves as a curator of the Arthur Fungarium and Kriebel Herbarium. Dr. Kaishian is a fungal taxonomist and received her Ph.D. and mycology from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse, New York in 2020. She enjoys stepping outside of more traditional science and has written on the topic of philosophy of science, feminist bioscience, ecofeminism, and queer theory.
Well, Patty, thank you so much for taking some time to come on For the Wild. I'm really excited to speak with you and just follow the rabbit hole together.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Thank you so much for having me, it's a pleasure. And I've listened to a few episodes of this podcast that have come out before and I'm very honored to be amongst some of the most impressive people I know, on this planet right now. So I'm really, really honored.
Ayana Young Thank you so much for saying that. And yeah, I feel honored to be speaking with you and so many guests. It's totally changed my life. And just happy to be able to be in deep conversation with amazing people.
Well, I want to mention that what initially drew me to your work where your articulations on mycology and queer theory, specifically an article you co-authored titled, The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline. And in this article you share, “mycology is queer at the organism level. Fungi are nonbinary, they are neither plants nor animals, but possess a mixture of qualities common to both groups, upending the prevailing binary concept of nature. It is rare for a fungus to have only two biological sexes, and some fungi, such as Schizophyllum commune, have as many as 23,000 mating types. When two compatible fungi meet, their mycelia will fuse into one body, sexually recombine, then remain somatically as one as they continue to live, grow and explore in their environment.” So to begin our conversation, I wonder if you could share the ways fungi challenges our binary notions and how you're using this recognition as a way to disrupt stagnant paradigms?
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Sure. So I think there are a lot of different ways to look at it. So I wanted, in this article, to explore both the very functional biological elements of, I would say, the queerness of fungi, but also sort of the more abstract methodological quandaries that mushrooms have put us in because of the very defiant nature of their biology. So starting with some of the more biological elements: as mentioned in that quote you read, fungi rarely have two mating types, right? So we're really familiar with this dichotomy, the binary of male and female. And it is a dichotomy that is common, although we, I think, are often led to believe that the exception to that dichotomy is rare and anomalous. But fungi show us as a kingdom that contains millions of species, that binary is actually what is rare. And I think it can help him give humans permission to let go of that ourselves. So there are it's just the kind of concept of binary sex and in mycology actually has very little footing.
Also, I think this is a little bit more subtle, but the ways in which fungi interact with other organisms also challenges our desire to put very discreet linear boxes around the definition of a species. And that has a lot of power, like rhetorical power in queer theory. Often queer theory is the project of deconstructing boxes, it's not necessarily related to just sex or human relations, but it's the idea that all relationships (whether they're sexual or not) are constructed socially. And those social constructions may or may not serve us and often they fail to fully encompass the dizzying array of potential in our beings. And I think that fungi as organisms that form symbiosis relationships between species, they form these interspecies dynamics that scientifically challenge our conception of the concept of an individual. They are kind of challenging in that way because we start to realize that many things are deeply interdependent and that notion is disruptive to the sense of individualism, which is a prevailing notion that I think a lot of us, in particular those of us coming from a culture that's influenced by Western society, that's the idea of an individual's really important to us, and really important in our constructions of heteronormativity and family structures. And so it's sort of this exercise in deconstructing that, the notion of the individual.
There are entire groups of fungi that we only know as being asexual: the phylum glomeromycota, for example, we only have evidence of existing in asexual forms, despite being extremely diverse. There are fungi that have multiple reproductive structures of different types contained within one body. We have all sorts of ways in which they're functionally challenging our idea of sex. But then again, as I said, it's also that they create these really interesting dilemmas for us as researchers, and how we sort them and organize them and create categories for them, which is very much a queer idea.
Ayana Young So it seems like you've seen the lens of queer theory actually enhance our scientific knowledge systems.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Right. I clearly don't think that that's always going on intentionally. But I absolutely think that applying some theoretical frameworks to looking at these questions that we have in science, sometimes actually gets us to better science. That's my ultimate goal; as you know, first and foremost, I am a scientist, I'm my mycologist, by training, but I'm very passionate about intellectual rigor, regardless of where it's coming from, regardless of what discipline it's most firmly rooted in. And I definitely believe that multiple ways of interacting with organisms, or science, or with questions related to organisms and science can be enhanced by taking a step back and being creative about how to frame the question and how to see yourself framing the question. Because I think ultimately, as human beings, we're creatures of culture, we're not apart from our culture, and scientists are no exception to that. So, of course, we strive for objectivity in science. That's definitely the goal, but it is an elusive goal. So if you can accept that it's elusive, then you can start to talk about the ways in which you're affected by culture. And it's through that honesty and that transparency that you can start to make actual progress in answering certain types of questions, and certainly in making science more grounded and equitable in ways that I think sometimes scientists like to forget, unintentionally or otherwise, that we are part of this culture as well, even when we investigate seemingly very obscure, small non-human organisms.
Ayana Young Well, goodness, thank you for that. And yeah, another facet that you give attention to is the phenomenon of mycophobia, and how both scientific relevance and popular understanding of mushrooms and fungi have been heavily shaped by a certain cultural aversion to the fungal queendom. And while this is something I've heard mentioned before, I don't think many of us actually know the history or reasoning behind it. So I'd love it if you could elaborate on what has historically led us or led so many Western European cultures, and then eventually that of the so-called United States to develop such disrespect and devaluation of fungi?
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Yeah, so a lot of this has to be speculative because these are forces and cultural artifacts that have taken root over the last several 100, if not, several, 1000 years. So it has to be speculative, but there are some lines of investigation and thought that I think are very compelling. And I do think that it is true that with fungi, some are poisonous, some are absolutely associated with death and decay. But there are a lot of other things that are associated with death and decay, like every living thing dies, that's obvious on one hand, but on the other hand, I think it's like kind of funny that fungi are uniquely implicated in death, and their association with death is so noticeable to some people. Because with fungi, like I said, some are poisonous, but there are also many poisonous plants, there are poisonous animals, there are plants that you should not touch because they're extremely poisonous to the touch. Whereas there's only one known fungus that's extremely rare and only occurs in Japan that you're not able to touch but if you live in the continental, you know, the so-called United States or North America, you will never encounter a mushroom that you cannot touch.
But the fact that that's still the perception that most people instruct their children never to touch a mushroom, you grew up, even as I'm now a professor, and I'm teaching classes about nature, including mycology, and my students are always so nervous in the beginning to touch mushrooms. And part of the experience that I get to shepherd them through is becoming more intimate with these organisms that are actually usually quite safe. And again, I always tell them, “you never eat something if you don't know what it is,” but the same is true for plants. There are many poisonous plants that you should never eat but we don't kind of map that quality onto plants the way we map that quality and flatten that kind of aspect of all mushrooms into one another. And which is another element of the queerness that I was talking about before, which is that these mushrooms are seen sort of as these perverse agents of disruption that are somehow fundamentally different and not suitable for a healthy life. And those are analogous features, I think that we as members of the LGBTQ community experience.
So there are those things, but I talked about a little bit in my paper and the connections between Western European culture and the earlier development of mycophobia. I find it compelling to relate the formation of capitalism to the formation of mycophobia, because a capital logic is one that, as Anna Tsing (author and anthropologist) says, that it's stripping organisms from their lifeworlds and then commodifying them. Right, so the act of capitalism is to remove an organism or feature a structure from its life and then to trade it as an exchange as a commodity. And fungi are really difficult to strip from their lifeworlds: rarely can you... there are a few species that we can cultivate, but out of the millions that are thought to exist in a macro fungi, there are hundreds of 1000s of mushrooms that make fruiting bodies and only a handful we know how to actually cultivate, like the Agaricus bisporus, which is the portabello, oyster mushrooms, and a few others.
So I think it's very compelling that there is this relationship between this organism that cannot be controlled or dominated by the same mechanisms and logics that fueled control and domination of most other organisms, including human beings around the world, with the emergence of capitalism out of Western Europe. And then also, there's this relationship between fungi and agriculture, which is also sort of, I think compelling, in which fungi were more likely to become disruptive pathogens in the context of monoculturing (which was also a fundamental technique of capitalism) to isolate organisms, strip them from their natural ecologies and maximize their output forcibly. And in that context, in growing, for example, wheat in a monoculture, you create this absolute heaven for fungi, fungal pathogens that are specialized to grow on those particular grains, and in that moment, fungi kind of mark themselves as being the antithesis of the forward progressive symbol that agriculture kind of came to bear. And that's also an idea that is somewhat explored by Anna Tsing, the anthropologist I've mentioned, who I cite fairly frequently in my text.
So I think there's a few things going on there. But I do think that fundamentally, they were organisms that became relegated to this realm of the uncontrollable, which then also connected to associations with the underworld, and devils, and demons, and witches: they were therefore sort of seen as oppositional to, “healthy conceptions of like the family unit,” and procreation and sort of advancement of a capitalistic society. Again, it is fairly speculative but when you start to pick up those strands in the modern context, I think they're still pretty evident, people really fear what they can't control. Instead of wonderment, I think I encounter often that people feel fear; there's cultural context to that as well.
Ayana Young Your analysis is so deep and intricate. I really appreciate it and can definitely follow the threads that you're pulling on. And tracing other threads, say around how capital S sciences shaped, I'm thinking about how within the mycological community, academic science is often pitted against community science. And I know, this is something you've articulated before, as well as your frustrations around the binary approach to academy versus community. And in previous conversations with guests, we've definitely explored some of the problems with mainstream science. But I wonder if you could add nuance to our understanding around this, as well as, perhaps share some of your own experiences with the shortcomings of navigating these spaces and being able to differentiate between scientific thought, pseudoscience, alternative ways of knowing, and the sort of standard hierarchical approach to knowledge that is just so rampant.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Sure, yeah. So there's a lot to discuss here. I think there's a lot of different angles that are really important. So starting with, like maybe the most obvious one, which is that academia has a history of being extremely exclusive, particularly on the basis of race, gender, and class. I think that that legacy is embedded in the knowledge that we have printed in texts, right? Who gets to ask the questions around scientific investigation, and of course, also, in the social sciences as well is equally problematic, where you have people coming from particular cultural lenses, who are unreflectively asking questions about the world around them, and then filtering both the question initially, but then the outcome of their investigation, and the particular construct of their investigation is all being filtered through that cultural lens. And when that cultural lens is very homogenous, particularly how it was in the early days of institutional science, you get very homogenous understandings of the world. And of course, sometimes there are people who discovered really fascinating, important things throughout the history of science - that's obviously completely true. But also, there are artifacts all around us that are just incorrect, but yet really embedded deeply in our understanding of organisms. I mean, of all things, but I can talk most easily about organisms, because I'm an organismal biologist.
But just one example of this is Linnaeus, who was a Swedish botanist and is called the “father of taxonomy,” created the binomial nomenclature system, in which we assign the genus and species names to individuals to sort them, and he did, in fact, do tremendous work around organizing the tree of life. But his treatment of fungi, in particular, was very bad in terms of how it was not good science, right? He, for example, called fungi, lower plants, which basically was indicating that they were these less evolved creatures that were not as important and not as complete, and it kind of implies that they didn't make the journey as far as plants did. And obviously, we have the benefit of now fully understanding evolution and all sorts of other tools now that we can sort these things. But he used phrases that were just purely unscientific like calling lichens, which are a fungal association symbiosis with algae, calling them “the peasants of the plants,” and things like that, which are obviously very loaded, even you could say classist, just like all this dysfunctional, plant-want-to-be-plant, basically. Which is so clearly personal; that's not an objective assessment. But yeah, I think people who are women and people who are nonbinary, and who are not white are often constantly having to assure people who do not have those identities, that they are objective, and that they are worthy of being in this space. But meanwhile, there are scientists so deeply embedded in our academy, who just could say things without as much scrutiny. I don't know, it’s just sort of funny to me that this idea that science is objective when it's carried out by human beings.
And then, of course, there are much more nefarious examples of this, like the entire concept of eugenics, which is deeply gravely serious and often employed scientific logics in its defense. And it's really, I think, important that anyone who practices science, particularly if you have an institutional affiliation, that you are able to name the ways in which science has been used for evil. Science is a tool, right? I like to define science as an equal opportunity, investigative methodological tool, which is to say that everyone, in theory, can do science. Science is not the domain of institutions or of anyone with a particular identity, regardless of class, race, religion, gender, and ability, age; being able to conduct science is irrespective of all of that. But I think that we need to grapple with the fact that it has sometimes been used at the service of very dark workings - very, very formidable, scary things.
Also, when in getting into this, I always want to be extremely careful because we do unfortunately live in a day and age where science is being met with really bad faith arguments, people attempting to discredit scientists by making baseless claims that we're all working for the government and this deep state kind of way, or taking corporate money, or all this stuff. It's like so not true most of the time, most scientists do not have connections to any deep state or big corporate power, or entity. So I never want my arguments to be used to further that. However, I think it's really the responsible thing as scientists to routinely and as part of a daily practice, reflect on your potential power as someone who's seen as an authority, whether or not that authority is true to you, it is very much that scientists are authority figures in our culture. As such, it's deeply our responsibility to be able to talk about the limits of science, the potential pitfalls of science, and make sure that everyone feels that, regardless of their technical profession, that they are invited into the conversation of global discovery, which is what science is.
But also, I'm extremely passionate advocate of community science or citizen science (as it's known as both) and I think that that's tremendous and exciting, and I'm a big fan of that. I do want to say that nothing should be put on a pedestal I guess, is that something I'm constantly kind of arriving at different areas of my life. Citizen science has some of its own pitfalls, right? Sometimes, the people who can gain the most traction in science are people who have identities that are not as marginalized. For example, some of the really amazing citizen scientists who have contributed to organismal biology and mycology over the course of the last 100 years, are people who are independently wealthy. For example, even Darwin was independently wealthy and was able to travel the world with family money. So I don't want to say that community science is just absent of all social hierarchy and structure and flaws and everything: it's full of that as well. I think that sometimes there's this unrealistic kind of glorification of citizen science that it does bear mentioning, but ideally, right in both spaces, ongoing conversations should happen in which power is reflected upon, you ask questions about yourself and the way you move through the world as you conduct your research.
Ayana Young I'm also thinking along this line about the frustrations that are so often felt around a scientific approach to “the wild” in terms of being devoid of emotion, reverence, attachment, and even urgency. And in the article previously mentioned, The Science Underground, you share, “mycologists use sensing, intuition, experience, and storytelling, with experts operating outside of institutional affiliation more often than with other organismal fields. For many mycologists our relationship with fungi are powerful emotions tied deeply to our core, we sometimes cry or burst into song when we find these special and beautiful beings.”
I definitely have burst into tears, or song, or just elation. But I'd like to dive further into the myth of pure objectivity with you, and how it's actually being resisted by folks like you, or in the field of mycology at large.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Yeah, so I really love the articulation of this idea by Robin Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, I had the distinct privilege of going to SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where she was a professor, and she also served on my committee for my Ph.D., which was an honor and pleasure. Recently, for my current classroom I’m teaching, I assigned the book to my students and had the pleasure of discussing the book with students reading it for the first time. And she talks a lot about how her interest in botany was kind of stimulated in large part by this fascination with beauty, and beauty being particularly in the ways in which asters, the flower, and goldenrod, looked next to each other - the asters being this brilliant purple and the goldenrod being this beautiful golden color - and the ways in which they often grow near each other, and they looked so stunningly beautiful. She was interested in investigating, “why does that look so beautiful?” and when she approached her professor about that question, as an undergraduate student, he rebuffed that saying, “that's not a scientific question, if you're interested in beauty go study art.” And she goes on to talk about how there is actually a very fascinating scientific explanation as to why they grow next to each other and look so beautiful. It has to do with the fact that when those two colors, gold and purple, grow next to one another, each becomes more visible because of the ways in which, in color theory, they're opposites. I'm not very good at explaining the color theory but it makes them more visible to insects, which then increases their pollination and increases their fitness.
I just find that story extremely compelling, because it resonates deeply with my own kind of interest in becoming a scientist, which was absolutely driven by a romanticism, not necessarily beauty, actually, kind of, in fact, the opposite for me. It was a deep level of kinship that I felt with organisms that were kind of considered to be on the margins of what was acceptable. So that includes fungi but, but actually, some of my earliest loves were reptiles and amphibians, particularly snakes, and frogs, and snapping turtles, and organisms that dwell in the swamps - and swamps in general, as being this sort of site, for me as this non-prescriptive freedom as a child, and particularly as a child that was experiencing very acute gender dysphoria and a sense of lack of belonging. So that was this space for me to feel both liberated and unseen in this way, or I did not want to be seen, but I could be seen by these other organisms. I felt safe in their company in the way that I did not feel in the presence of society.
And that relationship has 100% continued through my trajectory of becoming a professional scientist. Although I didn't necessarily know at the time, like I did not know that as a child that I wanted to be a field biologist or mycologist, I didn't even really know what that path looked like. But it kept revealing itself to me over the course of my education and is fundamentally part of why I'm a scientist. I can't imagine that I would ever have been a scientist without, for that very personal, very subjective and sort of sad, even, you could say on some levels even sad, but also beautiful - like many things, right? It was many things, but the least of which was objectivity. And I just think that once it gets you there, to pretend it therefore has no more space or footing in the realm of science, is just sort of… that doesn't make any sense to me. I think whatever is motivating you should have space.
Of course, it's not going to pop up in every single... I've written a number of scientific papers that are as objective as I could possibly measure, right? But to say that, as a scientist, it's not part of my practice to be in love with the species that I studied... that would be false. And then, of course, that absolutely motivated this work of the theory paper that we keep (I call it the theory paper but it's a theoretical paper); an interdisciplinary paper that scientists, humanities people, and laypeople can use to discuss the role of science in our lives, and the role of our relationship to fungi in a capitalist society, all of these things. So I think for me, writing this piece came out of the acute awareness that scientists need to remain in touch with what we consider to be the subjective elements of our work.
Ayana Young Beautifully said. I think many of us are challenged by the recognition that something like science doesn't have to be purely oppressive or a hierarchical endeavor. However, it seems that there are a few examples to indicate otherwise. You had mentioned wanting to discuss the ethical and moral obligations of scientists, and what I immediately think of is how scientific integrity has really withered under a capitalist system in terms of funding and lobbying, etc. But I wonder if you could speak to how you'd frame these ethical and moral obligations for a scientist, both in terms of challenging paradigms and remodeling the system itself, as well as the shifting obligations we have to the earth as the climate changes and habitats are continually degraded.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Yeah, I think the last part of what you're saying is kind of the crux of, I think, the urgency of my argument. Capitalism has harmed science in that, as you mentioned, it attaches incentives to inquiry or institutions that conduct science. These incentives can draw people away from integrity. So I guess what's interesting, though, is I still want to remain... when that happens, then it's not science. I think that's one thing. It's called science, and so I try to distinguish between institutional capitalist science in the article and science as a tool, science as like that universal tool as I described earlier, because institutional capitalist science, science as a body is flawed deeply and innumerably - I think most harmfully when it's attached to capitalistic incentives.
It's important to mention, though, that when you are conducting a project that lacks integrity, you are no longer conducting science, you are conducting a project that lacks integrity, that gives you a particular answer based on a particular desired outcome that might be tied to your funding. So that's a moral issue that is very serious, and that I care a lot about, but I think it's kind of useful to separate that from science itself. I mean, maybe that is just the semantics. But I actually kind of think it's more than that because I think it's helpful to definitionally understand that it becomes pseudoscience: becomes something that's claiming to be science, but is actually knowingly and intentionally manipulative, which is what I consider to be pseudoscience.
And I think it's also useful to separate pseudoscience from different or alternative ways of knowing. For example, traditional ecological knowledge, as it's commonly called, is knowledge that predates colonialism, held by groups all around the world. This can include people native to Europe but it's particularly talked about in the cultures that were forcibly erased, or attempts to erase them have been made. It's the knowledge that they possess that may or may not be always scientific, although many cultures around the world have conducted science in terms of asking a question, gathering data, interpreting that data, and sharing that data - that's what science is. But traditional ecological knowledge sometimes departs from a very replicable structure, right? If you can't repeat it because it's so culturally embedded, does that mean it's not true? No, it's true, but it might not be science. And that's okay. Not everything that you believe in, that is true in your context, has to be scientific. So I think it's really important to differentiate - like it's okay if you believe in things that are not scientific and you believe in science, those things can coexist. You can have beliefs in spiritual realms, you can believe in tarot readings, and you can believe there's life after death, and you can believe all of those things and be a scientist.
Pseudoscience is this attempt to mask an investigation that is not with integrity, often in the pursuit of money, or to the pursuit of duping someone, but it sometimes takes on the hallmarks of science like “oh, they said they did this formal study in a lab” and whatever, but then they just messed around with the data on their computer afterward and fudged the numbers. So I think those are three different things right? We have science, which is done with an attempt to add objectivity that can be then successfully communicated to other people, and they could replicate that investigative pursuit. And then you have traditional ways of knowing or alternative ways of knowing in which there's no claim of conducting science, and it's claim that has other nuanced roots and meaning and value. And then you have pseudoscience. So I'd like to make sure everyone [knows] in conversation that those things are not used interchangeably.
And then it's kind of circling back to what you were saying about climate. I think this is a particularly good space for people's emotions, or the emotions of scientists, to enter the conversation in the renouncement of capitalism, the renouncement of the destruction of the earth because it's just wrong, and damaging, and bad. And it's okay, as scientists, to have an opinion that is in defense of a value system that is not super clear or clean, or objective. I think scientists themselves, we need to reject that you can only hold opinions that are extremely cautious and always just following the data. Because I think that's how we end up destroying the earth and doing so without protest. And that extends to conservation of fungi.
So, I think it’s really interesting. And this really the material outcome of a lot of what otherwise can be somewhat abstract, the conversations I'm having in that paper; the material outcome of fungi being completely understudied, unfunded, fear of revolt, reviled and, etc, is that we actually have very little information about them, and therefore, we're not in a good place to conserve them, because we haven't built this case based on quantified data about how they're being affected by climate change. But my point that I tried to make is that we don't have time. I think mycologists if we had all the time in the world, we would come up with really great, really smart, interesting systems of monitoring fungi and understanding how they're being affected, but we just absolutely do not have that kind of time. So I think in the case of conservation, it's okay to make emotional arguments around why this land should not be destroyed. Like I think it's sort of embarrassing, even and kind of pathetic, to be toiling around within your lab being like “maybe in 20 years I can demonstrate that this one species of fungus is objectively being harmed by degradation of habitat.” Again, I admire the attempt to get that information but simultaneously I'm of the opinion that it's perfectly okay for us as scientists to say “no more development” and “no more destruction of old-growth forests.” We should just conserve as much land as possible. We need to stop burning fossil fuels… I mean, obviously, some of those things are attached to scientific data, but not specifically in all cases. But I think that that is still deeply important, and I'm fairly unapologetic about that at this point
Ayana Young Now, I'd like to orient our conversation back to the role of fungi. But as someone based in the Pacific Northwest, I can't help but think about range expansion and how fungi will roam across the country due to changing rainfall patterns, and warming temperatures, and an increase in wildfires, and whether or not this will mean a significant decrease in once mushroom abundant areas. And knowing that 90% of all terrestrial plant species form connections with fungi in the soil. What do changing climates mean for fungi and their surrounding ecosystems? How will fungi migrate?
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Yeah, it's really definitely disconcerting because we don't really know. You know, in some ways fungi are extremely adaptable and resilient. But in other ways, they're very particular, and different species have different levels of specificity for their habitat and their needs. Some fungi are very generalist, like the oyster mushroom is sort of like the infamous fungal generalist: it can digest fossil fuels or it can grow on a dead elm tree, it can do a lot, and it's versatile and, and dynamic. But other species are very, very specific to their needs. They depend on a number of other different species in their habitat to be existing in a particular way. And we believe that maybe those species will not tolerate dramatic changes to their landscape and habitat. So it does very much depend on the species... But overall, there's a lot of concern, because, again, as I was saying before, we really don't know.
We have relatively little knowledge of the ecological reality of most fungi, and even mushrooms and species of fungi that we know well, most of them are shrouded in some sort of mystery. Like exactly what are the factors that govern their fruiting body production? We still sort of are trying to eliminate those intricacies. So when you add on top of that shifting climate, both in terms of warmth, in terms of drought, in terms of more rain, in certain places, or just different seasonal patterns, it just makes the picture even more complicated. There are some fungi that seem to have started to roam the world. Amanita phalloides is one species of mushroom, it's actually one most deadly to consume, but it's traveled. It's considered a non-native species throughout a lot of the United States, and the patterns of that are being investigated but are not fully understood. Whereas the other species seem to be, like I said, very site-specific and very rarely encountered. But we don't necessarily know that they aren't in the soil, just because if, for example, it's a fungus that forms a large fruiting body, it lives for most of its life in a mycelial state, which is like the fibrous network of cells that lives in the substrate. It's where it's not really analogous to the root of a plant, it's more complicated than that. That’s where sex occurs, that’s where extracellular digestion occurs, and it can travel and seek out more nutrients, and the fungus might not grow in the same spot every year.
So when a fruiting body is not apparent, it is probably living in the substrate just below the surface, and you just can't see it. But what governs the production of fruiting bodies, and which then leads to spore production and dispersal, that's important. So if it's in soil or in substrate, it might still be there, but the conditions that would make it fruit matter. It's this weird kind of thing where we know it's probably always there. But if it can only produce fruit every 10 years instead of every year, that likely would have a negative impact on its population. But we just don't really know these things. So it's just a little complicated to assess. But unfortunately, I will say that the prognosis is not great. Just because fungi are rarely listed as endangered or threatened, that's just the outcome of not having a lot of data. But we don't believe that they're somehow sort of magically escaping the terrors of habitat destruction. So, I mean, there definitely are going to be fungi that can shift, and adapt and move, and migrate north or migrate in higher altitude, or move west or east, but we just have so little data.
Ayana Young Yeah. Well, thanks for responding in the ways that you can about that. We began our conversation by discussing the sort of historic repulsion to fungi. But comparatively, social media has really bolstered the popularity of mushrooms, particularly in terms of harvesting often overshadowing conversations on land stewardship for fungal diversity, which is incredibly important in context, the importance of fungi in our ecosystems, the role of fungi and ecosystem recovery. And just thinking about urban habitats that are significantly lacking mycorrhizal fungi. So, yeah, I wonder if you could speak to whichever tendril here sticks out for you in terms of the reality that capitalism prevents us from developing an ethics of care at the ecosystem level when it comes to fungi.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Yeah, okay, I'm really glad you're asking me about this. So it's funny, like, I've been studying fungi for over 10 years. So certainly when I began, no one studied... there were mycologists and then there was everyone else. And I was met with a lot of confusion and hesitancy when I was telling people, I wanted to study mycology. And it was very much a marginalized interest in many ways. And I would say that probably starting about two years ago, I would say, a little bit before the pandemic, but then seemingly accelerated, perhaps by the pandemic, there has been a boom in the popularity of fungi and mushrooms, and particularly mushrooms that are edible, and mushrooms that are beautiful. And unfortunately, I do see a widening chasm between people who engage with mushrooms and people who carry with an ethics of care, which is sort of like my nightmare, because it taps directly into some of these ideas I was talking about in the paper, which, when I started writing this paper, it was before this change in social relationships with mushrooms, and then it came out just as it was starting to shift. So I maybe would have spent more time discussing this in the paper, if I had kind of anticipated this change in perspective.
But it is a form of extractive commodification that I'm seeing a lot of like, “I will engage with the land insofar as I can put something in my mouth, and then put it on social media as well,” which is deeply linked to consumerism in a capitalist culture. And it scares me because we have so little information about these organisms, and what they really need to thrive. So like with plants, for example, we can say, like, “do not harvest this, this is threatened or endangered.” And for the most part, people will respect that. But if I go online, which I've made the mistake of doing a few times, and try to convince people to harvest less, they get very reactive. I've had people try to explain to me fungal biology, which is challenging, because I don't have the concrete scientific evidence that that fungus is endangered. But I know that habitats are endangered and habitats are threatened. And I also know that as a mycologist, we just don't quite know the impact of large-scale foraging; we just don't have that data. So in that context, I think it's best to be very respectful and have as little of an impact as possible.
I do think foraging, in general, is a great thing, and I have derived tremendous joy from foraging. And I'm not trying to gate-keep, but I don't think that asking for hesitancy or care and at just an ethics of care, as you said, I think that that should be a prerequisite for these types of interactions. But I mean, I also am not in the position of enforcing that. And I don't think anyone should be, it should be something that kind of comes from within. So I try to have these conversations with people but it's very much embedded in a lot of these other logics of sort of commodification, like proximity to something that you don't actually have responsibility for, or you don't think you have responsibility for, is something that extending that courtesy to nonhuman life forms, I think, is really essential. Like you have to consciously separate yourself from the same logics that are responsible for the cannibalization of the earth. And you can do these things in particular ways. I mean, that's my belief system, right? I guess what I'm saying (I'm kind of stammering here) because this is a new thing for me. It's a new thing for me to be a mycologist in an age of mushrooms being very exciting. So I'm still kind of formulating my thoughts around it. And actually, I deeply fear coming off as being elitist. So I apologize for being a little bit not super direct or clear about this. So I'm grateful for the space just actually to try to explore these thoughts.
Ayana Young Yeah, I'm happy that you're just able to stream-of-consciousness a little bit with us. Yeah, it's good. And I have a question about the International Congress of Armenian mycologists, which you're a founding member of. And if you could speak to the intersections you're seeking to explore amongst mycological science and Armenian liberation, and really the importance of coalescing our understanding of ecological and social welfare.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Great, thank you so much for bringing that up. This is something that's really important to me. So I am Armenian. I'm also part Irish. But Kaishian, my last name, is Armenian. And there are very few Armenians in the world, tragically, in large part because of the Armenian Genocide, which was perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire. And Turkey is kind of now the modern continuation of that political structure. And it's a genocide that's gone very under-recognized and explicitly denied, particularly by the state of Turkey and its allies. So it's very much even though it's a genocide that happened about 100 years ago, it is something that Armenians have long sought closure over because the land loss colonization of particularly of Western Armenia, and then the ongoing denial of the genocide, in which the US was for a very long time complicit in. So only a few 100,000 Armenians survived the genocide, and actually, now there are more Armenians living in diaspora around the world and there are actually living in the country of Armenia. So my Armenian identity for those reasons is very dear to me because of that history.
So there was unfortunately a flare-up of ethnic cleansing in and around Armenia, carried out by Azerbaijan, Armenia's neighboring state, which is allied to Turkey and is a very fascist country that stokes a lot of ethnic hatred towards Armenians very actively. And there was a war that broke out over a piece of disputed land in what was Indigenously Armenian for 1000s of years and the majority of the population there is Armenian. But Armenia was also briefly colonized by the Soviet Union, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, it created state borders that did not reflect the Indigenous populations. And there is this piece of land called Artsakh, which was also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, which is an area that's now colonized by Azerbaijan, and that there have been struggles over that land for the last few decades. And most recently, in 2020, Azerbaijan launched a very vicious war to reclaim that land, despite the majority [being] ethnically Armenian. So that war was really brutal: 1000s of younger median men died in battle, hundreds were captured as prisoners of war. And there were sporadic acts of violence all around the world, targeted at Armenian civilians, like in the US and different places in Europe. So it was actually very upsetting, the period of time, particularly it was in September and October of 2020. And that time, it was, I guess, traumatizing for us because they're of the genocidal trauma that all of us harbor in our bodies from intergenerational trauma. It's resurfaced, I mean, something that was only skin deep anyway, but it was very upsetting to a lot of Armenians because it was this existential threat to our homeland, which Azerbaijan seeks to fully eradicate. They have stated, states people have stated, that they seek to completely destroy the entire country of Armenia. So it's very scary and sad for us. And also because there are so few Armenians, we're just generally sort of not very well understood people, particularly in the US or outside of the Middle East.
So, I mean, amazingly, I have several friends who are mycologists, and who are of Armenian descent. And we started talking because we wanted to leverage our capacity as scientists and to assist our brothers and sisters in Armenia. But obviously we can't join the war effort as scientists, but we can try to do long-term capacity building to help generate scientific inquiry in Armenia, and bolster the scientific resources that they have. And we want to do so in a way that's very explicit about the relationship between biodiversity and conservation, to Indigenous sovereignty and like a thriving human community. That we want it to be explicitly political in this pursuit. We want to explicitly link... there's a lot of evidence that empirically has been gathered that shows that Indigenous peoples are the best caregivers and stewards of their own land and that biodiversity declines with colonialism. And so to that end, we want to leverage biodiversity reverence and link that to Armenian sovereignty. For example, Azerbaijan used white phosphorus to just decimate the forests around Artsakh. Armenians are also a people that are very connected to the land and to biodiversity, and we have a saying called, “we are mountains.” So there's a very deep ethic of land care embedded in Armenian culture. And it was just so obvious that the nation-state of Azerbaijan, that's only a few decades old, is claiming this piece of land that's been Indigenously Armenian for 1000s of years. And to prove that it's theirs, they're willing to decimate the forest with white phosphorus. And to me and to a lot of my colleagues and friends and fellow Armenians, it's just like, clearly, you do not love this land, you're willing to let it burn, as opposed to letting us live here peacefully.
So there is no choice to be apolitical in this space. That choice is one that's been taken away from us. But we can, as scientists help develop capacity thereby collaborating with our really amazing colleagues who are excellent scientists but do not have the benefit of being well funded, and have the disadvantage of living in a country that's constantly just trying to protect itself to exist and doesn't have the ability to divert a lot of money to infrastructure for science. So it's something I care very deeply about. And I'm also extremely grateful to have this platform to just talk about it a little bit because it is a very central piece of my scientific career at this time. So thank you, thank you for asking. And to the listeners, I'm very grateful for you to listen.
Ayana Young Yeah, thank you for sharing. It feels just important to learn about and doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. So thank you so much for diving into that a little bit with us.
Now, as we come to a close of this really beautiful conversation. I'd like to ask you about your work as a taxonomist as it relates to conservation practices. The Science Underground article shares how very few species of fungi have been placed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, with around 40 fungi species being listed in comparison to over 25,000 plants and 68,000 animals. However, you clarify that this isn't because fungi are not susceptible to extinction. Rather, it shared, “holding fungi to biological determinations of more normative groups, say trees or birds, is to deny their basic biology which puts them at risk for extinction. The solution is not to find out how to force fungi into the normative box.” I'd like to just sit with this for a moment and have us think about how when we deny things as they are and confine them within very limited categories of understandings, we are assisting an extinction. So with this failure in mind, I wonder if you could speak to what sort of imaginative conservation practices are needed at this particular moment.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Thank you for asking that, and I think the way you phrased it just there was really brilliant, like being flexible in the way we encounter these creatures and organisms, we are assisting in their extinction. Yeah, wow. I'm really impressed with that. I'm definitely going to think about that after this interview.
Yeah, I think what I really wanted to close that essay with was that this material reality, right, that there are material outcomes to the ways in which we practice science. And yes, most species by far most species of fungi have not been named. And for me taxonomy, which is the naming and describing species and sorting them in the tree of life, to me that's always been somewhat of a philosophical and romantic pursuit - which is to call something by its name, to call someone by its name. And to give names to organisms, for me is not a possessive act. It's not putting a stamp on something. It's putting it into the discourse, right? It’s giving space for the organism to be a being, and a being that you can refer to by names as a sign of respect. That's always been why I've wanted to be a taxonomist specifically was to, I mean, sure, I love being outside and looking for new organisms in these biodiverse and gorgeous places around the world, which is something I have the privilege of doing. But the naming part is for me an act of respect. And when you name something, when you know something by name, someone by name, you are far less likely to be okay with committing harm against that being, if that being has a face, or has a name that you can that you've said with your lips.
I think that that act is, yes, there's a lot of science that goes into taxonomy but I think that part is equally important. And it's hard to advocate for the nameless organisms that perish, possibly every day the rate of extinction is extremely high. I will say that it's that that's always true in evolutionary time, extinctions are ongoing and constant. But there’s a lot of evidence to suggest it's been greatly accelerated by destructive human behaviors, particularly in the framework of capitalism. So I think to be imaginative about solutions to conservation would be to invoke these philosophical, romantic, personable relations that we have the capacity of having with other organisms, and be shameless about them: to make the assertion that all life forms regardless of how close they are to humans, or how functional they are to us in our minds, they all are beings on this planet with us, right where we've all been on this multi-billion year evolutionary journey to exist in this weird snapshot of time. And it is my belief that it is our most sacred duty to allow these beings to live their lives and carry out their essential functions. I mean that to me is what I believe deeply. And I would like that to be invoked in conservation metrics, that we have a sacred connection as beings, just as we would want to have our ecological rights as humans maintained, right? Our right to forage, and our right to reproduce, our right to love and kind of cohabitate as we please, and just carry out like the functions that have been embedded deeply in our DNA - I think that those rights should be extended to nonhuman organisms as well.
Ayana Young I'm so there with you. I absolutely agree with that. And thank you for speaking so lovingly and passionately about our more than human kin. It's inspiring and I think helps reorient us to how to be in right relationship. So wow, Patty, thank you so much for this conversation. I've truly enjoyed all the rabbit holes we've crawled through together. So it's been wonderful.
Dr. Patricia Kaishian Thank you so much, Ayana. Yeah. It's been really, really nice to talk with you. I really appreciate your approach to this subject. It felt very considerate, and I'm really grateful to be able to explore these ideas in a somewhat freeform way and have that be something that you're engaging with. So thank you.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by The Musicteller, Madelyn Ilana, and Kendra Swanson. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, Francesca Glaspell, Julia Jackson, and Priya Subberwal.