Tag: fungi

The Hay Book Festival 2024: big money, mushrooms and make-or-break elections

It’s election time UK. (And in India. And in South Africa.) We’re waiting in a decision in the Trump trial. And… it’s the Hay Book Festival. A good place to get a wider perspective on events.

Two superb investigate journalists, Carole Cadwalladr and Tom Burgis, began my day. They were talking to Oliver Bullough. Burgis’s book, ‘Cuckooland’, is all about money buying access and influence, at the highest level. Burgis’s anti-hero is ‘communications entrepreneur, philanthropist and thought leader’ (as his Foundation describes him), and major Tory donor, Mohamed Amersi.

He brought a defamation case, which he lost, against former Tory MP Charlotte Leslie. She had investigated his background and he didn’t like the attention. Legal action was something he could take on without a moment’s thought, which wasn’t true for Leslie. Nor was it true of the legal action taken against Burgis himself in another case, which he won, brought by the Kazakhstan-based Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC).

Carole Cadwalladr is well-known for her role in exposing the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But in a defamation case brought by Brexit funder Arron Banks she lost and had an award of £1 million costs against her. Crowdfunding came to her rescue.

Money will buy you the service of London lawyers at £600 an hour. SLAPPS, standing for ‘strategic lawsuits against public participation’, is an acronym which neatly sums up the way lawsuits are being used by the super-rich.

A whole new breed of super-rich arose out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today it involves oil and mining executives, mega-industrialists and indeed corporate lawyers across the globe. And, as they seek, and gain, influence, in the UK they can draw on Quintessentially, the ‘concierge’ services on one Ben Elliot, which acts as a broker for their much-paraded philanthropic instincts. Johnson elevated Elliot to the position of Tory party co-chair.

Just last month I was in Malaga, and admiring, if that’s the word, three super-yachts moored in the harbour. Status unknown, maybe for sale. The one-time owner of one was the co-founder of WhatsApp. Another, even grander, had been the plaything of a now-deceased Kazakh mining magnate.

My next event was amazingly and wonderfully different. The book: ‘Entangled Life’, by Merlin Sheldrake. Compare our brief lives and absurd ambitions with the rather longer life of plants, ‘which only made it out water 500 million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi…’ If we didn’t have fungi today we’d be under piles of waste miles high. (Or piles of shit if you prefer.) The myriad species of fungi are our disposal agents. Sheldrake’s book is an award-winning bestseller and he is himself a mesmerising and fluent speaker. Seek him out. Read his book!

Thomas Halliday’s wonderful book, ‘Otherlands’, a ‘reverse’ history of the last 500 million years, had the same effect on me. Both books inculcate a sense of wonder at the longevity and complexity of life of our planet. But they also demand our humility. And remind us that, if we want to hang around for a while, we’d do better supporting our planet rather than taking it apart.

I was back in the crisis world of now for my final session, with Matthew D’Ancona talking to Sarah Churchwell, Matt Frei and Carole Calwalladr. Subject: the UK and US elections. From the Wood Wild Web (the maybe-not-always benign subterranean network by which the myriad strands of fungi link up our above-ground world of plants and trees) to the World Wide Web. To the internet. To social media. Cadwalladr highlighted the role of ‘influencers’, who are everywhere.

Frei preferred to focus on Fox News and their role in breaking down that broad consensus which has held the USA together for more than two hundred years – based around an acceptance of the constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, open to multiple interpretations but always operating through a trusted electoral system, and a Congress where both sides could talk, and on occasion work together.

Churchwell focused on a second-term Trump and how he would casually subvert this system, without remotely understanding himself what the consequences could be. Half of America believes that a Biden victory would be the end of democracy, half believes a Trump victory would be. Trump and indeed his acolytes such as Tim Scott refuse to say whether they will accept the result of the next election.

The UK election hardly got a look in. The Tories have shaken down to a rump where Grant Shapps is our defence minister. They’re easy about donations from the rich and powerful, and mercenary activities such as selling games of tennis with Boris, and dinner round at Michael Gove’s, for big sums. They’d like us to think this is the new normal.

I love the passion of Hay. We were a bunch, a mega-bunch, of serious and animated book lovers. It rained all day, but no one complained.

The beech and the oak – and the ash

So much going on out there… and a nature diary?

Yes indeed – time to walk, or if you’re so inclined, as I am, to run, out into the hills, through the woods, and the farmland. Seek out another perspective on the world.

Six weeks ago the first pale green leaves showed on the beech, now the wood is dark, and the light seeks out chinks, or clearings where the foliage is less intense. Many climb tall, planted close together. In time, many years hence, they will be harvested, fuel for our wood burners.

But, given the chance, beeches spread their trunks wide. On one, pollarded long ago, I counted ten trunks. It and its fellows mark the edge of the woodland, where it meets the big hedge-less field, where the barley now four-feet tall is growing abundantly.

Oaks are fewer where I run, but they are there. I know of none of the old, the 500-or-600-year-old, oaks. But across the Severn estuary, into the Forest of Dean, they are abundant. Felled for shipbuilding – and replanted (at Nelson’s instigation, so I read) for the same purpose. But by the time the trees had matured iron had become the main building material.

Can you mention the oak, without mentioning the ash? I often wondered about the old saw, ‘when the ash’s before the oak, there’s bound to be a soak’. When in my experience was the ash in leaf before the oak? Never. (I read that, back in the 18th century, the ash did sometimes beat the oak. But our climate has changed.)

The ash. … the ash is in crisis. They always gave a lighter cover, with their compound leaves. But now leaves are fewer, twigs and branches bare.

I used to sing the old Welsh folk song, The Ash Grove, at school.

The ash grove, how graceful, how plainly ’tis speaking;/The harp through it playing has language for me…/I lift up my eyes to the broad leafy dome…/The ash grove, the ash grove again is my home.

The lover found solace beneath the ash. And now it seems it is the ash itself we must weep for. Our only solace – there are resistant strains, we can replant.

The ash is woven not only into song but into our history – and Norse mythology. What off Yggdrasil, the great ash if Norse mythology? Must the tree of the gods also suffer dieback? (There is a symbol for our times!)

‘The ash is of all trees the biggest and the best. Its branches spread out over the world and extend across the sky. Three of the tree’s roots support it and extend very, very far. …The third … root of the ash extends to heaven, and beneath that root … [there] the gods have their court.’ (Extract from the Prose Edda, see also below.)

Tree recognition hasn’t been a strong point of mine.  How might ash differ from sycamore or oak, or lime or white poplar? I knew the shapes, sort of, but I guessed. Now I know the ash. They are in groves, and near me, lining hedges, and especially, they’re where local farmland rises to a gentle summit, prominent, lording over the land. They are thinner now, you can see through them. When they go, so will our landmarks.

(Ash and sycamore – I puzzled a day or two ago over two trees apparently growing together, their trunks conjoined – it’s called inosculation.)

At a more mundane level, we were wondering over lunch – is there a plan, a national plan, to replant? Or at least recommendations? Or guidance? None as far as we can tell. A recent report in Current Biology estimated a total cost to the nation of the loss of trees (no mention as far as I am aware of replanting – of ultimately restoring the landscape) at £15 billion.

And the ash trees that line our lanes? Are they the farmer’s responsibility? The local council? Primarily the latter, according to the report. I’m told when they’re felled in the diseased state, weakened by fungus, they shatter, and there is a mighty mess.

I’ve recently returned from the Hay Book Festival. Robert Macfarlane was there, talking about his new book, ‘Underland’. There’s a marvelous chapter that focuses on the ‘understorey’ in woodland, where fungi spread their hyphae, a network which not only consumes dying matter but also supports the living.

‘The relationship between plant and fungi is all about exchange, swapping chlorophyll for nutrients, but far more than this, ‘the fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources between one another … sugars, nitrogen and phosphorus can be shared between trees in a forest:  a dying tree might divest its resources into the network for the benefit of the community, for example, or a struggling tree might be supported with extra resources by its neighbours.’ (Underland, p98)

But the dieback fungus is at another level, a fungus which feeds only to destroy. A dead-end fungus.

So I despair to see the ash die back. And I wonder what lies ahead. But I also wonder at what lies beneath. My eyes have been opened to something extraordinary. But as town-dwellers, most of us, we take it all for granted.

We take the ash for granted.

**

(Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, 15) “The ash is of all trees the biggest and the best. Its branches spread out over the world and extend across the sky. Three of the tree’s roots support it and extend very, very far. One is among the Æsir, the second among the frost-giants, where Ginnungagap once was. The third extends over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nidhogg gnaws the bottom of the root. But under the root that reaches towards the the frost-giants, there is where Mimir’s well is, which has wisdom and intelligence contained in it, and the master of the well is called Mimir. …The third root of the ash extends to heaven, and beneath that root is a well which is very holy, called Weird’s well (Urd’s well). There the gods have their court.