Design Principles to Guide the New Constellations Mycelium Fund
Design Principles to Guide the New Constellations Mycelium Fund
An experiment in transformative financial redistribution.
High-resolution mycelium network | Image: ©Loreto Oyarte Galvez
Lying just below our feet is an entire community at work, supporting above-ground life and shaping earth’s evolutionary history for more than 475 million years.
First, tiny strings of glucose and chitin begin to form from a single spore. Fibrous and microscopic, they join together to create even larger threads, known as mycelium, from which mycorrhizal fungi emerge. This fungi network interacts with 92% of all known plant families and for good reason too: they break down raw matter into usable form within the soil, enable flows of nutrients, and form symbiotic relationships with the roots of the towering Red Cedar and modest garden tomato alike.
Mycorrhizal fungi work unseen for the most part, their quiet presence strongest in fields and forested areas, like the Blue Mountains in Oregon where one such fungi network spreads over 10 square kilometres — one of the largest living organisms in the world. Underground, the web continues its growth, until one day, when the conditions are just right, it fruits. And almost overnight, a mushroom appears.
“Why has the world-building work of fungi received so little appreciation?…Until quite recently many people—perhaps especially scientists—imagined life as a matter of species-by-species reproduction. The most important interspecies interactions, in this worldview, were predator-prey relations in which interaction meant wiping each other out. Mutualistic relations were interesting anomalies, but not really necessary to understand life…This self-creation marching band drowned out the stories of the underground city. To recover those underground stories, we might reconsider the species-by-species worldview, and the new evidence that has begun to transform it."
- Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015)
I think about this invisible structure often, as I visit new cities and walk around my own. Wondering if we aren’t all just mushrooms sprouting out of some unseen matter; a hidden network of policies and technologies that shape how we show up in the world and how we show up for each other. Questioning if there wasn’t some unseen structure we’ve built and maintained for so long, that we’ve forgotten to check if it still meets its purpose, let alone whether that purpose was ever meant to serve us at all. Finding instead we’ve come to accept its presence like air: effortlessly and without a thought.
Until we’re squeezed that is.
The New Constellations Mycelium Fund is an experiment in transformative financial redistribution.
While it can be argued that most, if not all major philanthropy is a byproduct of pooling economic excess, we approached this work by asking ourselves, what needs to change in order to turn this closed loop system into an open, distributed one? The New Constellations Mycelium Fund is built on an overlooked and actively avoided approach to funding where those involved in the work make the decisions; decisions that are based on and honour their lived, learned and practised experience. By taking inspiration and guidance from ecological systems and how they store, share and value resources, we aim to guide this injection of financial resources within the New Constellations community to, bit by bit, become self-reliant through the creation of our own flywheel built from a growing network of resources and collaborators. Our view of what funding could and should be is much like how we approach our work at New Constellations: stepping in at the moment, in order to step out when we are no longer needed.
Human economic systems are many and diverse. Yet the body of theory known as biological market frameworks bears a striking resemblance to free “market capitalism”. Would it help to compare the value of economic models drawn from different cultural systems? There are many ways to attribute value. There might be other currencies that haven’t been taken into account.
-Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life (2020): footnote on Toby Kiers’ reflections on Biological Market Frameworks
When New Constellations first approached me to develop a set of principles to guide the design of the Mycelium Fund, I saw an opportunity to make the invisible visible again and create the scaffolding for a new kind of structure to emerge and grow. At the time I had been thinking about what would happen if we re-organized this hidden network a bit and took the time to prune, cut and add some nodes. How would it rebalance? What kinds of relationships would be enabled through this reconfiguration? And most interestingly, what new flows of value would we be able to see and finally account for? The fund was a chance to translate this thinking directly into experiment and practice. The ecological principles serve as the first few spores in catalyzing the transformation in how we fund people and organizations developing the alternatives we need at this time.
All too often our work is focused on dismantling current structures and systems, and while this work is necessary and important, we’re witnessing these structures breaking under their own weight and instability, collapsing on themselves before our eyes. The challenge now is one of creating and stewarding into existence something new. Our work is shifting to build the new systems for people to move on to, not because they are shiny or innovative, but simply because they work better. For all of us.
“The study showed that higher plant density and diversity leads to more energy stored, greater energy flow and higher energy-use efficiency in the entire trophic network.”
- Wageningen University & Research
As such, our inquiry has been focused on how a fund, how an amount of resource, could build relationships and points of connection, rather than siloed projects. Securing funding has become a competition, a necessary evil that preys on the reality that we each use different approaches and tools to achieve our goals, despite the fact that many of us are working with the same vision in mind. The current funding system asks us to leverage these differences to out-compete the other, but what if this kind of plurality is exactly what is needed to address the polycrisis we face today? The way we fund for creating deep systems change would do well to reflect and enable the need for distributed power, decision-making and collaboration in a way that honours complexity, as opposed to simplifying it.
Perhaps, by strengthening those entangled, invisible connections and illuminating our differences, we’ll discover that we’ve each been building a different piece for the same ship all along, and that it’s not too late to start assembling the pieces together.
The Ecological Principles
There’s a saying that all good design borrows from nature. Today, we see shifts from corporations to cooperatives, from centralised to decentralised technology, and it seems as if all aspects of modern life, from the social to the bits and bytes, are restructuring themselves to emphasise relations and connections, mimicking natural forms of complex organisation and providing structure without the prescriptivism that all too often hinders progress and adaptation. Maybe this shift is inevitable, after all life has had 3.7 billion years to practise and perfect, so why reinvent the wheel?
We started the research phase of the New Constellations Mycelium Fund with a literature review covering many different aspects of mycelial networks, from how these decentralised systems communicate across physical space, to the different strategies they use to form interfaces with plants. This was further supplemented with discussions with practitioners and experts in soil biology and self-organising systems, in order for us to develop a clearer picture of how this science and theory could be put into practice. As we dug deeper, we also entered other domains, learning how neurons in the brain use similar oscillatory patterns to communicate efficiently within a physical structure that has no central command centre, and how the narratives we use to describe the functioning of natural ecosystems can be switched from one of competition to cooperation and still hold true. This allowed us to pursue new metaphors (and therefore protocols) as we explored how fungi and plants trade resources in much the same way humans operated gift and credit-based economies before debt and money was first introduced.
The Ecological Principles serve as a scaffold for the New Constellations Mycelium Fund design. The emphasis here is on the guiding potential of these principles, rather than strict, prescriptive rules. The principles serve as a constellation of wayfinding points, nudges if you will, that help the New Constellations team to reorient ourselves as we build and learn together.
An interactive version of the Design Principles can be found here.
We'd welcome your comments on the collaborative version of the document here.
Mutualism Advantage
While a continuum exists in mycorrhizal fungi and plant symbiosis, ranging from parasitic to mutually beneficial, the large majority of these relationships are the latter, with both fungi and plants benefiting from each other and contributing to the health of the larger ecosystem through further entanglement. These kinds of mutualistic relationships have been seen as exceptions, rather than the default across all domains of modern day society. The concept of self-creation, also known as “autopoiesis”, has come to dominate human interactions and ways of life, and so new evidence, terminology and organisation is required. This sentiment is echoed in Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, and also brought urbanist and systems thinker, Beth Dempster to coin the term, “Sympoeisis”, meaning “collectively producing” or “making with” in response to the need to counterbalance and recover from individualistic and competition driven narratives.1
Holobionts
Holobiont Theory reframes individual organisms as a community or “holobiont”, which consists of a host and its associated communities of microorganisms. While holobionts are centred around a larger multicellular eukaryote, the term has been used to emphasize the increasing scientific evidence that supports the theory that the health and development of the macro-organism is influenced heavily or even fully integrated with the health of the microorganisms it hosts. There are many examples of holobionts that align with this current definition, mainly plant and animal holobionts, including fish, coral and human beings; the latter , taken as an atomic individual, contains roughly 20,000 genes. However, through a holonic lens, the human hologenome actually contains more than 33 million genes, most of which are contributed by the microbiota found on the skin, gut and other areas of microbe colonization. In this way, a holobiont is an organism that is collectively-producing, existing and growing as a result of many complex interactions with other living organisms and the combined gene expression of host and microbial genes.234
Networked Care
Based on changing conditions, Mycorrhizal fungi networks re-distribute resources to areas based on greatest need and in oscillating, bidirectional, tide-like fluxes. The network works to balance out gradients of inequality, responding to high variations in resources across the network by (1) increasing the total amount of phosphorus distributed to host roots, (2) decreasing allocation to storage, and (3) moving resources within the network from resource rich to poor patches. During these nutrient exchanges or “trades”, the fungi will over-contribute in the trade with the plant, accepting less in return, in resource-poor areas, while in resource-rich areas, will under-contribute in the trade with plants, accepting more in return. The fungi network also facilitates the same mutualistic trade dynamics between plants by acting as a messenger and transport route. Paper birch trees will seasonally send carbon (food) to nearby Douglas-fir trees and their seedlings to aid their growth and survival when they are shaded by taller plants. This trade is made without asking for anything in returns at the time, however in the Spring and Fall, as the Paper Birch lose their leaves and therefore cannot photosynthesize, the Douglas Firs will return the favour by sending nutrients through the network. Before modern day currency, gift economies were dominant in societies that maintained enough internal trust to sustain them. These economies also mimicked these mycelial trade processes that are made with the knowledge that supporting another’s health would also protect our own and through non-linear trades, with asks or needs being met without expectation of the favour being returned immediately, but at some point in a future time of need.567
Oscillatory Communication
In the absence of centralised control, there is evidence that mycelium networks use oscillatory rhythms to coordinate behaviour in heterogeneous environments to propagate information and efficiently transmit nutrients. While constant, open communication and nutrient transport throughout the network may be energy intensive, frequent and repetitive activity can be a good substitute to check in on the health and needs of the network. This system of communication and action is also seen in other distributed systems such as slime and in particular, neural communication within the brain. Neurons are assembled to create assemblages with distinct specialisations; in order to communicate and connect these assemblages, the central nervous system groups and synchronises neural activity in bursts of oscillations within and between these assemblies to prevent having to control each neuron separately. Each neuron is aware of its state and the state of the neurons around it to which it then responds in kind to, allowing signals to propagate throughout the network. This process is recognized as a precise and efficient mechanism for long-range communication between different groups.89
Probe, Sense & Adapt Growth Strategy
Mycelium networks grow by releasing enzymes that act as catalysts for breakdown and acquiring nutrients as well as playing a key role in mycelium growth and reproduction as once a network is strong enough, the mycelium will fruit into spore-carrying mushrooms. Depending on the needs of the network and the type and quantity of nutrients that result from enzymes breaking down nearby organic and non-organic matter, the mycelium will choose whether to produce more enzymes and proliferate in this area to expand the network. While the network explores many initially, the ones which yield the best nutrient results for the network's current needs will have more energy placed in them through enzyme release and biomass accumulation, until the process starts again as the network expands into other unfamiliar areas. A sensemaking strategy for finding the most fertile ways forward in unfamiliar environments.10
Minimum Diversity Thresholds
Research into grassland ecologies has shown that a minimum threshold in diversity must be met in order for collaboration and efficient resource use to occur between plants, otherwise competition will occur. The benefits of diversity begin to take effect as the number of species planted together increases, and also given that there are at least 4 different functional groups (groups of plant species). This triggered a change in the behaviour of the fungal network towards mutualism rather than competition or parasitism. A 2006 study also showed that 8 different radish species grown separately in monocultures during a drought year, all failed or grew poorly, while in plots where these species were grown together, as a polyculture, they were able to grow well despite the harsh environmental conditions. The results have been replicated with other plant species across the world and indicate that resources begin to be used much more efficiently in polycultures despite there being “more mouths to feed”. Moreover, functional group richness (main type) and species richness (sub-type) were found to each independently contribute to plant biomass and carbon sequestration.111213
Microbe Sharing
The rhizosphere, also known as the “plant-root interface” is the area inhabited by a unique group of microbes that are influenced by chemicals secreted by plant roots. When plants are in range, each is able to access and recruit nearby microbes from another’s microbiome. This sharing of microbes is what helps plants without drought tolerant characteristics to become drought tolerant themselves due to gene activation triggered by ‘borrowed’ microbes ingested from the surrounding plants. As environmental conditions change and these drought protection genes are no longer necessary, the plant switches these genes off again by expelling the microbe.1415
Observable Parts
Self-regulation becomes possible when an organism has mechanisms in place to observe its current state and needs, as well as that of its environment. In the mycorrhizal network, signals are often sent and received through waves of communication and touch points for direct communication within and around plant roots in order to create a coordinated response. With each part of the network aware of the state of surrounding parts, signals can be propagated through the network through awareness and observation of nearby parts. Energy and time can be conserved if each part observes the state of nearby others to facilitate efficient communication.16
Nutrient Recycling
As with other holobionts and sympoietic organisms, such as coral and lichen, biomass recycling is an important process for mycelium networks survival and growth. Aged mycelium is recycled by the network as much as possible and the nutrients from it broken down and redistributed. Fungi are generally known to be some of the world’s most prolific decomposers, using enzymes to breakdown dead matter and materials into nutrients. Nutrient cycling, consisting of breakdown, absorption and reabsorption, becomes a necessary and cyclical process, creating a more efficient flow of nutrients. These nutrients are then exchanged at what is akin to a plant-fungi marketplace where each deposits and trades what they need at a price that corresponds to a pay-what-you-can or sliding scale price scenario.17
Connection Strategies
There are two main types of mycorrhizal fungi that form relationships with trees: arbuscular mycorrhizae (AM) and ectomycorrhizal fungi (EcM), which both employ different nutrient acquisition strategies and establish different forms of contact their host plants. Arbuscular mycorrhizae penetrate the outer cells of a plant's roots and facilitate nutrient exchange within the cell membrane space. Nutrients released by saprotrophic microbes are scavenged and acquired by the network. In comparison, ectomycorrhizal fungi grow to surround a plant’s root cells for nutrient transfer through the cell walls. Nutrients are acquired by directly breaking down matter in the environment. Research indicates that these nutrient acquisition strategies also contribute to the different growth and resource distribution patterns in AM and EcM dominant ecosystems. In resource rich situations, such as in high CO2 conditions, AM fungi will contribute more to plant growth, while EcM fungi will contribute more to mycorrhizal fungal growth. AM fungi also promote the growth of a diverse range of plant species (low host specificity), while EcM largely support fewer, more specific species (high host specificity) resulting in less diverse ecosystems. AM fungi are also more efficient at nutrient cycling and reuptake, keeping nutrient loss within the network low compared to EcM fungi. These connection, nutrient uptake, and growth strategies result in encouraging very different kinds of ecosystems, each with pros and cons: AM fungi dominant ecosystems are much more diverse, however due to the lower contact surface area and within-plant root cell integration, they are also more likely to introduce pathogens to the network which can be detrimental to their host plants. EcM fungi form more monoculture ecosystems, but due to the enveloping, high surface area contact with root cells through a mycelial sheath, there is more of a protective barrier which generally promotes pathogen-free ecosystems. Generally most ecosystems contain both AM and EcM fungi networks.1819
Reproduction
Asexual reproduction occurs either with vegetative spores or through mycelial fragmentation. In the former, a mycelial network fruits mushrooms which contain spores inside their gills. The spores are then spread and germinate to create a dense network of fungal threads known as hyphae, which then assemble into much more complex structures to form mycelium. In turn, the mycelium join together to create a mycorrhizal network. In mycelial fragmentation, the mycelium separates into pieces and each piece then grows into a separate mycelium.
Mother Trees
Older trees connected through a mycelium network have been shown to move nutrients into the mycelial network to help nourish younger trees in the network as they struggle to establish themselves. Dying trees connected to a common mycorrhizal network are also known to distribute their resources stores back into the network to nourish other plants in the ecosystem, even species other than its own. As such, older, more mature trees act as anchors within the ecosystem and “keep watch” over newly forming life, while also allowing turnover and power redistribution to occur within the ecosystem to sustain new life that is emerging.20
Critical Connections vs. Critical Mass
(Inspired by Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy principles.)
A mushroom is the fruit of a mycelium network. Mushrooms only form once this underground network is established enough and the conditions are right. With an increased number of connections, the mycelium network can depend on different plant individuals and species for food and in turn, more plants can communicate and send different resources to one another in times of need or danger. While developing a well connected mycelial network may take some time, having multiple and alternate transport and communication connections increases the resilience of the entire system. Putting in energy and resources into a few strong connections may be more beneficial than into multiple smaller ones and vice versa at various stages of the network development.21