Though the Portland I grew up in was little more than a pitstop between Seattle and San Francisco in the late nineties, it was known globally as a hub for zines: self-published texts that are often assembled by hand and limited in circulation. With shops and symposia dedicated to these self-published texts, zines were seemingly everywhere then. Like standard props for the underground scenes I was a part of, there were titles for anything – personal reflections, political rantings, sketchbook scans, or just ideas that didn’t simply fit anywhere else.
My friends and I traded zines and built collections of them. And we even made a few of our own from photos and drawings. These weren’t anything special. But what they signified – independence, anonymity, unmediated expression – stirred something within me that school and television had never hinted at: a spirit of DIY self-expression as means to create the world you want to experience.
While living in New York City at the age of twenty, I found a denser, East Coast version of this ethos and its zine-feuled undercurrents in the form of big city activism. On tables in the back of meeting rooms and music venues, I met diverse minds offering stacks of these sliding-scale publications, many of which came to dramatically reshape my worldview on social issues and environmental causes. This issues become so important for me that when I started college in Olympia, Washington, I devoted my time to documentary film production, coordinating a political arts group, and curating an independent library of zines, books, and documentaries.
Olympia is also where I met the first people who not only shared my creative interests and concerns for the world, but who also appreciated mycology, a topic I had, up until that point, spent years enjoying as a solo pursuit. With this newfound community, I dove deep into world of fungi. If I wasn’t creating, I was cultivating; if I wasn’t organizing, I was foraging. All the while, Olympia’s vibrant community-building approach to activism inspired me to share my passion for fungi wherever I could.
I often thought how I could merge my various interests to share mycology through media, while tying science to the social and environmental causes I increasingly promoted. Such interdisciplinary ideas had first stirred in me while living in New York. But, at that time, they gained little traction as none of my peers there were familiar with fungi. It was in the City that I first recognized the large gap between mycology and most realms of study and action – a cultural blind spot that was most striking in the environmental protection advocates I knew who were unaware of how important fungi were for the trees they defended. A spore was beginning to germinate: the sense that this profound mycological blindspot was causing countless missed opportunities for creating positive change in the world. So I began to critically look for where fungi were absent and to seek better ways of bringing them to the fore.
In Olympia, I initially developed these ideas into a model I termed “Radical Mycology,” and which I first tackled in 2007 though a short, experimental documentary entitled On the Liberation of Spores. Later that year, I spent many months traveling across the Western Hemisphere by bus, car, and thumb, spending long hours reflecting on Radical Mycology’s potential for reshaping the world as I knew it.
Ideas that I came back to often drew parallels between mycelial growth and the structure of society, and I saw many ways that humans would be better off if only we acted more like fungi: connected, resilient, and self-determined. I also saw the development of a mushroom and its release of spores as an inspiring metaphor for sharing ideas that could transform the world. Fungi were and are teachers for me, and so I strived to communicate some their greatest lessons on being in good relation with your environment.
