"I’m bored by the continual discovery that the world around us really lives. At this rate, we’ll be on the brink of extinction as a species, and the final ten humans huddled over a fire will observe nearby crows using bottle caps to sled down the windshield of the last, moss-covered car in the village, and wonder whether they’re playing or not...

... By this point, most everyone has heard of and fallen in love with the Wood-Wide Web. People will often quote “facts” about it to me... PhD student Suzanne Simard writes a dissertation about plants signaling to one another using the fungi that connect their roots in the ’90s... The public has taken the concept of the Wood-Wide Web and run with it as a metaphor for the connectivity and potential for cooperation of all living things...

The only problem with the Wood-Wide Web is that, well, it’s unproven. Even that moniker is suspect in its tree-centricity, treating mycorrhizal fungi as a mere phone line for tree communication... Furthermore, in a paper entitled “Positive Citation Bias and Overinterpreted Results Lead to Misinformation on Common Mycorrhizal Networks in Forests,” mycologists Justine Karst, Melanie D. Jones, and Jason D. Hoeksema examine the ways in which research into widespread common mycorrhizal networks (CMNs, composed of fungi linked to multiple plants) is ongoing, requires further substantiation, and has become dangerously distorted... [It] is now being transmitted to [everyone from children's to forest management education].

So, what are fungi actually doing with plants? Well, they do filter the spoils of photosynthesis from trees to myco-heterotrophic plants, like ghost pipes, that can’t photosynthesize on their own and thus need fungi to live—which is sort of an incredible, inscrutable relationship in itself. More generally, as an article based on an interview with Karst explains, “the fungi draw nutrients and water from the soil and pass those to the trees, and also protect the roots from pathogens. And by using and storing carbon from the trees, the fungi also benefit the forest.”10 She adds, “Mycorrhizal fungi are essential for the growth and survival of trees, and have an important role in forest management and conservation practices, even if trees are not talking to each other through CMNs.” It is also possible that some of the broader claims made about fungi-tree relationships will be borne out with further study; we just have to wait for those studies to be conducted in better conditions. And we have to accept that what we hear might not be universally applicable.

[... believe it or not, I still enjoyed receiving this slew of messages from friends, acquaintances, former employers, and family. I was moved by how this outpouring spoke to broad engagement on a topic so obscure. The communication that I was most wowed by in this instance was not those fifty “words,” but the fungal charisma (as in: study me!) that prompted the study that prompted the conversations we were having about the study’s validity. But many stalwarts in the mycological community responded to the wave of media with simple dismissal. “Utter nonsense,” said one oldhead on Facebook.

Perhaps it’s because I’m not a scientist and perhaps it’s because I’m not weighed down by a lifetime of fielding “utter nonsense,” but something valuable gets lost, I think, in that simple dismissal. No matter what got the crowds there, it was energizing to see so many people from diverse corners of my contact list speculating about communities of life that pulse in soil and bits of dead wood around the world.] (Pulled from an earlier section of the book in response to the same research)"

— Maria Pinto: Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless

i am thrilled that this chapter also covers the often misunderstood notion of how the "wood wide web" actually works and the tension held by both being grateful more people have become interested in fungi and the less than favorable anthropo-centric narratives that have been spread from it.