A recent study has mapped, for the first time on a global scale, the vast underground networks of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi: living filaments that connect with plant roots, move nutrients through the soil, receive carbon from plants, and help sustain the material life of terrestrial ecosystems.

These fungi form symbiotic relations with roughly 70% of plant species. Their networks stretch for approximately 110 quadrillion kilometers through the world’s topsoils, with a biomass several times greater than that of all living humans.

But the lesson is not simply that “nature is beautiful”, or that ecosystems are mysterious and harmonious: the living world does not exist as a collection of isolated individuals standing on passive ground. It exists through relations, exchanges, interdependencies, and hidden planetary infrastructures.

Beneath the surface of property, borders and political divisions there is an intricate world of connections. There is a vast material cooperation without which forests, crops, carbon cycles and terrestrial life itself would be unthinkable. These fungal networks are not simply part of nature. They are part of the infrastructure of life.

These fungi remind us that ecology cannot begin from the fantasy of isolated organisms, just as politics cannot begin from the fantasy of isolated individuals. Life is metabolic, relational, infrastructural. Isolation is what appears when the connections remain unseen.

What would it mean to think politics from this underground world of interdependence?

Image: SPUN / Truth & Beauty — Mycorrhizal Infrastructure Map.

On behalf of 50m to 150m direct & indirect readers around the world/ die welt with our thanks to the Ecosocialist

John Blundell

Immmediate internet, education, neurocognitive-health education & services and the immediate adoption of post post ‘Socratic-Newtonian’ mechanical object relations logic

The Sanskrit word kāla translates primarily to “Time,” which personified also means “Death” as the ultimate destroyer of all things.. I WAS THE VAPID VACUOUS DEMENTED NONSENSISER AND DESTROYER OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH FOR FALSE-EQUIVALENCY FAKE SCIENCE BUSINESS-MAN’S OPULENCE

E=mc² in 1905