Mycelial Change: What Fungi Can Teach Us About How Transformation Happens

Perhaps the future is already growing beneath our feet: distributed, relational and largely unseen.

Picture by artist Anna Stead from a Journal Cover published by Flametree Publishing.

This week I bought a new journal covered in illustrations of mushrooms.

Some of them, I suspect, are magical in the sense that they may never have existed anywhere other than inside the imagination of the artist, rather than because they are hallucinogenic. Either way, the cover captured me.

Fungi often do.

There is something extraordinary about this kingdom of life that spends so much of its existence beyond our ordinary field of vision. We notice the mushroom because it appears above ground, but the mushroom is only the visible fruiting body of something much larger.

And lately I have found myself wondering whether change in our human world may be happening in much the same way.

Because beneath the rather frightening story being told above ground, I can see another one.

Less spectacular, much harder to measure, but one that gives me more hope than I sometimes dare to feel.

Living in the visible story

There are days when the visible world feels almost impossible to comprehend.

Climate disruption. War. Increasing inequality. Political polarisation. Ecological loss. Institutions struggling to respond to conditions they were never designed for.

Sometimes it feels as though we have stumbled into the opening scenes of a dystopian novel and then discovered, rather inconveniently, that nobody has written the ending.

When I first wrote a version of this essay, I had been particularly enraged by a newspaper headline attempting to blame rewilding for wildfires.

I am not especially prone to rage, but I could feel something ignite in me.

There is something profoundly disorientating about watching the consequences of damaged systems unfold while simultaneously seeing attempts to repair those systems presented as the problem.

And yet I don't want my attention to become entirely captured by what is breaking.

Because something else is happening too.

To see it, however, we may have to learn to look differently.

Beneath our feet

Mycelium is the fine network of fungal threads, or hyphae, that grows through soil, wood and other organic matter.

Some fungi form intimate partnerships with plants through their roots. These mycorrhizal relationships help plants access nutrients and water while the fungi receive carbon compounds created by the plants.

Other fungi are extraordinary decomposers, breaking down dead material and helping return its nutrients to living systems.

We still do not understand much about what happens beneath the soil. The popular idea of a vast “wood-wide web” through which trees deliberately communicate and care for one another has sometimes gone beyond what the science can confidently tell us.

But that doesn't make the reality any less remarkable.

Beneath our feet lies a world of exchange, transformation, decomposition, relationship and renewal.

And most of it is invisible to us.

Until, under the right conditions, something fruits.

A mushroom appears.

We see the mushroom.

We do not see everything that made the mushroom possible.

That distinction has been staying with me.

What if social change is mycelial?

Across the world, thousands upon thousands of people are defiantly building different ways of doing things.

Community food networks.

Repair cafés.

Mutual-aid groups.

Community-owned energy.

Local currencies.

Seed libraries.

Birth support networks.

Community farms.

Restoration projects.

Neighbourhood organisations.

Citizen assemblies.

Co-operatives.

People creating commons, sharing resources, restoring land, caring for elders, supporting mothers, teaching skills, growing food, protecting rivers and inventing ways of meeting human needs that do not begin with extraction.

Most will never make the national news and few will appear on the front page of a newspaper.

A handful of people, some folding chairs, a WhatsApp group, and somebody who remembered to bring biscuits and cake hold many together.

And individually, very few of them appear capable of changing the world.

I see examples all around me.

Here in Glastonbury there are initiatives that redistribute food which might otherwise be wasted. There are women organising practical support for mothers after birth. There are people restoring habitats, exchanging skills, creating community, sharing knowledge and trying to make life a little more liveable.

Elsewhere, I recently came across a Bristol initiative collecting household food waste, composting it and returning that fertility to members for their gardens.

One composting scheme will not transform an economic system.

One meal train will not redesign maternity care.

One food pantry will not resolve structural inequality.

But perhaps that is the wrong scale at which to look.

Mycelial change

I have begun thinking of this as mycelial change.

By mycelial change, I mean change that is distributed rather than centrally controlled; relational rather than purely institutional; often small and local in its expression, while sharing patterns, values and knowledge across a much wider ecosystem.

No single project has to contain the whole answer.

No individual needs to devise the blueprint for the future.

Different groups can respond to different conditions in different places.

One restores soil.

Another redistributes food.

Another creates places of belonging.

Another experiments with governance.

Another protects water.

Another helps people through birth or death.

Another keeps an ancient skill alive.

Another creates an entirely new one.

What connects them is not necessarily an organisation, a manifesto or even conscious collaboration.

It may simply be a shared orientation.

A movement towards life.

Towards reciprocity.

Towards sufficiency.

Towards relationship.

Towards the conditions in which people, communities and the living world can flourish.

Perhaps that orientation itself forms a kind of connective tissue.

The importance of invisible infrastructure

We are accustomed to recognising change when it becomes visible.

A new government.

A piece of legislation.

A large institution.

A charismatic leader.

A mass protest.

A technological breakthrough.

A company worth billions.

These are the mushrooms of our human systems: the things appearing above the surface that are easy to photograph, count and name.

But perhaps transformation begins much earlier.

It begins in conversations.

Relationships.

Experiments.

Friendships.

Small acts of refusal.

Small acts of creation.

Knowledge moving between people.

Someone trying something in one town and somebody else adapting it somewhere else.

A person discovering that a problem they believed was individual is actually shared.

People remembering that they are capable of meeting some of their needs together.

People learning to trust one another again.

These things are difficult to measure.

Yet they may be the infrastructure from which more visible change eventually emerges.

This matters because we can easily become discouraged when we compare the scale of an individual action with the scale of the crises surrounding us.

Of course a community compost scheme cannot stop climate change.

Neither can you.

Neither can I.

The expectation that every action must be capable of solving the entire problem is one of the strangest ideas our culture has produced.

Ecosystems do not work that way.

Life builds through relationship.

Decomposition is part of regeneration

There is another part of fungal life that particularly interests me.

Fungi do not only support what is growing.

They also help dismantle what has died.

Decomposition is not an unfortunate interruption to life.

It is part of the process through which life continues.

That feels particularly relevant now.

Much of our conversation about the future concentrates on what we need to build.

But perhaps we should also be asking:

What has already died but is still occupying space?

Which institutions?

Which assumptions?

Which economic stories?

Which definitions of success?

Which ideas about leadership?

Which ways of relating to one another and the Earth?

There are systems around us that continue to consume enormous quantities of human energy simply because we have not yet imagined what might replace them.

Fungi offer another possibility.

Nothing needs to be wasted.

What has finished can become material for what comes next.

Perhaps part of our work in this strange threshold time is not to rescue everything that is collapsing; perhaps some of it needs composting.

The field of mushrooms

I carry a particular image of what might happen next.

One morning, metaphorically at least, we wake to a field of mushrooms.

All those projects that have been working quietly underground begin appearing at once.

What looked isolated reveals itself as pattern.

What looked marginal begins to look normal.

What appeared too small to matter turns out to have been part of an extraordinary period of experimentation.

We see community-owned energy here.

Food systems there.

New ways of caring, governing, sharing, producing, restoring and belonging emerging everywhere.

And suddenly it becomes possible to see that the old system is not the only system.

That moment matters.

Because systems survive partly because we can't imagine life without them.

The alternative does not necessarily defeat the existing system in a dramatic confrontation.

Sometimes the alternative simply becomes more useful.

More resilient.

More attractive.

More alive.

And people begin to move towards it.

This is perhaps one reason I have become increasingly interested in the conditions for flourishing rather than only in the mechanics of fixing what is broken.

Flourishing asks a different question.

Not merely:

How do we stop collapse?

But:

What conditions allow life to generate more life?

That question leads us towards relationships, belonging, agency, ecological health, creativity, meaning and the ability of communities to respond to the places in which they live.

It leads us underground.

Small does not necessarily mean insignificant

There is an understandable hunger for scale in the world of social and environmental change.

How do we scale this?

How many people can we reach?

How quickly can it grow?

What would happen if everyone did it?

These can be useful questions.

But ecosystems offer other measures of importance.

Density.

Diversity.

Connection.

Adaptation.

Redundancy.

Reciprocity.

Resilience.

Perhaps we do not need one enormous solution.

Perhaps we need millions of relationships through which resources, imagination, knowledge and care can move.

Perhaps our task is not always to become bigger.

Perhaps sometimes it is to become more connected.

And perhaps this is why the small work matters.

The conversation that changes somebody's understanding.

The garden being restored.

The neighbour who begins organising.

The local project nobody outside the town has heard of.

The group of six people trying something slightly differently.

The person who refuses to accept that the way things are is the only way things can be.

None of these things looks like a revolution.

But perhaps we have been trained to look for revolutions in the wrong places.

Mushroom magic

I still do not know whether the mushrooms on the cover of my journal exist.

But, there should always be room in the world for things that have not yet existed.

That may be one of the most important human capacities we possess: the ability to imagine something before there is evidence of it.

So I will continue doing the small things.

Writing.

Listening.

Connecting people.

Asking questions.

Supporting experiments.

Paying attention to what is trying to emerge.

Not because I imagine any one of these things will change the world.

But because none of us can see the whole network.

Somewhere else, somebody may be working on another small piece.

And somewhere between us, perhaps something is forming.

Something distributed.

Something relational.

Something much more alive than the systems whose collapse currently dominates our attention.

For now, much of it may remain beneath the surface.

But every so often, something fruits.

A mushroom appears.

And I wonder whether one day we will look around and realise that the future was not absent after all.

It had been growing beneath our feet.

Patiently.

Mycelially.

Perhaps, collectively, we really are making mushroom magic.

And that just might be how worlds change.

This essay first appeared in a shorter form in my Substack dated August 16th 2026