Don’t miss my other post about mushrooms: “Replacing Meat with Mushrooms—In Whole or in Part.”

Also, you might be interested in Eugenia Bone’s Wall Street Journal review shown below of Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard. The most interesting passage is this:

It has long been established that plants trade some of the sugar they make for micronutrients foraged in the soil by fungi, and there had already been some research done that showed the link between fungi and trees. Ms. Simard’s study discovered that fungi in fact attach to the roots of multiple trees of different species, creating pipelines by which a forest community might share nutrients and other molecules and thereby “challenge the prevailing theory that cooperation is of lesser importance than competition in evolution and ecology.”

Notice that in ecology they are clear the trade is a form of cooperation. Guess what: trade is a form of cooperation in economics as well!

I found the TED talk the title of this post links to from this passage:

… fungi as a metaphor for the common good.

This last notion derives from predominantly 21st-century research showing that the forest is not merely a collection of trees but a community connected by fungi. The idea has captured the imagination of the public, through movies such as “Avatar,” books like Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees” and the mycologist Paul Stamets’s TED talk, “Six Ways That Mushrooms Can Save the World,” which has been viewed almost 10 million times.