Mycorrhizal Fungi
and My Succulent
I took one plant with me to college. It’s a succulent - a haworthia if the identification charts are to be believed. Three years ago, when my friend gave it to me, she said that only sabotage would stop it from surviving. It is planted it in a plastic container that I discovered over the phone a few weeks ago was part of my mother’s juicer. Before that, it had lived at home with me in a small glass container for years before the bottom leaves started to crisp and fade to brown and pink. You can still see a little now: crumbling remnants tucked beneath dark, hearty green and, beyond that, the flush of white that marks the sudden inflation brought on by new space. There are even little pups bursting from the roots. My succulent reminds me of myself and of the rings you count within a tree trunk marking spurts of growth that come with access to time and resources and community.
Plants are more interconnected with the environment than I ever could have thought. This is especially true with trees which are literally, physically connected to each other through a vast network of mycorrhizal fungi. Mycorrhizal fungi can wrap around or penetrate tree roots to receive food and sugar in exchange for the transportation of nutrients like nitrogen. Scientists have shown that if you introduce a radioactive compound into the roots of one tree it can show up in dozens of other trees of varying distance that are the same or different species. Trees may use mycorrhizal fungi to pass along chemical signals warning the invasion of aphids and bark beetles, a mother tree may send excess nutrients to nearby offspring struggling under the shade of the canopy, and, most curious of all, when a tree dies it will spill its resources back through the fungi network so that nothing is wasted, and life starts anew.
We as humans try to implement similar principles through industrial symbiosis and circular economy. Similar to the fungi and trees, the idea is for different industries to communicate with each other so that waste products of one process are fed straight in as raw materials to another process instead of being tossed aside and polluting the environment. This may look like a paper mill using leftover wood scraps from a furniture manufacturer or the repurposing of methane from water treatment plants in biogas production.
In the end, like trees and fungi, and like my succulent, we don’t exist alone. Nature has models all around us so that we can learn how to adapt to our environment and minimize energy use like penguins, take advantage of shape in design like baleen whales, rely on readily available, safe and abundant materials to be as resilient as abalone, and make use of communication, recycling and community like mycorrhizal fungi. Biomimicry is rooted in the idea that the same principles that govern life also encompass sustainability. I am not the first to have said it (the Wright brothers modeled the first airplanes after birds), and I certainly won't be the last or most organized. There are an endless number of engineers, scientists, and organizations like the Biomimicry Institute doing amazing things to help the environment. I am just here to share my appreciation for the natural world and wonder at all there is left to discover. Thank you for reading.
