Bio mimicry, learning from the fungi, an idea to hopefully spark discussion about a tangible ways in which we change to a more symbiotic system.

Let me first start by saying I have no real clue how we accomplish real change but I have been working on an analogy that may help us begin to frame our discussions in a meaningful way.

If we start by agreeing on the premise that humanity is in rough shape and how we are operating is not benefiting us as a species.

Right now I have not heard of any plausible ways that we can actually change anything for the better. What we have been doing is not working.

That being said, nature may hold the key to our problems. In particular the fungal kingdom. The reason for this is two fold, they have been surviving on the planet for longer than any other species besides plants. Secondly, they behave and evolve in similar ways to us.

Fungi are nothing more than thousands/millions of individual cells called hyphae. They can arrange themselves in any manner they choose, freely share resources among themselves and other species. They create little highways, can arrange into the fruiting bodies(the mushrooms you eat), and they seek out to find and mine resources in the soil and elsewhere.

Now fungi can either be parasitic and symbiotic in nature. The parasitic type, disregards the health of the host for its own benefit, and typically has a short life span. The other, the symbiotic, always seeks explicit consent of its host and can be very long lived.

One fungi that is particularly interesting is a species called, GlomeroMycoda. It never fruits and may have existed for millennia. It is strictly a symbiotic fungus and trades among everything in the soil. It may be the oldest known fungi on the planet some estimates over 600 million years. We could likely learn a lot about how this fungus organizes and interact with other species.

We could look to nature to mimic how complex organisms organize themselves. Fungi to me are very similar to how we operate. They can rapidly adapt to any situation due to them having two nuclei, I believe we have similar abilities since we have a nucleus of written/oral knowledge and a genetic nucleus.

Now this leads me to how we treat each other and our planet, which is our host, I believe we must begin to become symbiotic in all our relationships. This means explicit consent or a voluntary approach and energy systems that are cyclical.

Now this does not related to mimicry but is anther piece of the puzzle that I believe we need to address. From what I understand about economics, land, labor and capital are the basic building blocks of the means of production. Well we have never had free access to land, it has always been a barrier to entry monopoly. So to begin to restructure ourselves we must start with the basic concept of stewardship of land an easy place to start may be with our farming practices, since most of our farmers are aging and looking to retire soon. By some estimates two thirds of our farmland in the US will change hands. Almost none of the potential young farmers have the ability to utilize this land due to the way we transfer the ownership and the costs.

To tie this all together, if we can develop a way for communities to help the transition of land to young farmers by creating organizations that allow low or at cost lease payments. Then take the low cost lease payments from these young farmers and put that into a system that will be used to purchase more land that will then be leased. Eventually these small scale distributed organizations will be able to take these lease payments and put them toward solar or water or fixing roads and so forth. We can in essence re-organize ourselves in a way that benefits the whole. Basically removing interest payments (which seem to be parasitic in nature) and covert that into keeping our productivity in the system. To me this system may be closer to how the fungi treats its environment and perhaps just one piece of this puzzle.

Does this make any sense to anyone, any ideas and thoughts?