Mycorrizal Fungi

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More Poetry From Buchenwald on the Mediterranean

It’s a vast, living web beneath our feet – an impossibly tangled underground network of microscopic tubes weaving through the soil, pulsating with nutrients, plugging the roots of trees and other plants into networks that extend over square kilometers.

Mycorrhizal fungi they’re called. Most plants rely on them entirely. In exchange for plant root sugars, mycorrhizal fungi provide plants with phosphorus and nitrogen.

But, arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal fungi do more than just feed plants. They cycle carbon from atmosphere to soil, and back again, regulating Earth’s climate. Their carbon storage capacity is vast.

Here’s what fluid flow inside the tubular structure (hyphae) of mycorrizal fungi looks like. Thanks to Rachel Cargill and Loreto Oyarte Galvez for this astonishing video.

Subterranean mycorrizal fungi face a host of threats from above. Soil scientists have come together to protect them, and are calling on citizens to do the same.

No one knows more about underground fungal networks than Toby Kiers, a professor in the Faculty of Science, Ecology & Evolution at the Free University of Amsterdam, and the founder of a group called SPUN – the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks.

Listen to our conversation with Toby Kiers. Click on the podcast play button on top of this story, or go here.

Listen to our conversation here:

In Gaza today – seemingly uninhabitable after a thousand days of joint US-Israeli genocide – young women and men are writing poetry – and publishing their work!

In Warsaw, Krakow and Lodz ghettos, under Nazi occupation, in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, and the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor, Jewish poets wrote poetry too.

Inside Apartheid Israel’s Buchenwald on the Mediterranean, poets are organizing themselves. Coastal Lines Press, their poetry collective is called. Thirty-eight writers belong to it, at this moment. Their goal: to turn words into life-saving supplies for their families. Noor Abu Mariam (Noor Arif) is one of them. Here’s Noor reading two of her poems, ‘Waiting for the Butterfly’ and ‘Fear Came to me Like a Monster’, sent to us by WhatsApp.

Listen to our complete conversation with Noor: