Mycology Quotes

“At Mayflower-Plymouth, we are trying to mimic the intelligence of fungi and mycelium to add value in service to businesses.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.”
― Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

“Anthropomorphism is usually thought of as an illusion that arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened. There are good reasons for this: when we humanise the world, we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms. But are there things this stance might lead us to pass over – or forget to notice?”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

“At Mayflower-Plymouth, we approach Asset Management from a network and systems perspective as opposed to from just an entity perspective. We learn from nature and we look at how the mycorrhiza network is a manager of Capital and an allocator of Capital, both a means and a method - and we try to operate in the same way.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Fungi are decentralized intelligence networks. They send information multi-directionally, they constantly evolve and adapt based on feedback from their environment, they invent new molecules to collaborate... And they form a decentralized consensus on how to utilize resources, when to reproduce and what strategies to employ. This is how businesses and business ecosystems should be.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“One could speculate that lichens would be among the last inhabitants to succumb on a dying earth at some distant point in the future.”
― Steven L. Stephenson, The Kingdom Fungi: The Biology of Mushrooms, Molds, and Lichens

“There is a low mist in the woods—
It is a good day to study lichens.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851

“The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like patches of dirty paint daubed on the stone.”
― Edward Abbey, The Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time

“Potter journal entry:

"It is odious to a shy person to be snubbed as conceited, especially when the shy person happened to be right, and under the temptation of sauciness.”
― Linda Lear, Beatrix Potter and the Natural World

“It has been well established that trees talk to each other through underground chains of fungus called Common Mycorrhizal Networks (CMNs). Affectionately called the Wood Wide Web, these networks allow networks of trees to locally communicate and organize the transfer of water, carbon, nitrogen, local gossip, and political pamphlets. Previous research suggested that these fungal networks only operated at a community level. Nutrient-transfer-back translation has shown this assumption is no longer valid. In the woods of Germany, England, Wyoming, and many more locations, accelerationist, international communist propaganda has been discovered in Douglas Firs, and a growing prevalence has been seen in Birch populations. This paper will discuss the methodology, results, and dangerous consequences of the dictatorship of a central, democratically elected, tree-based anarcho-communist syndicate of Fir collectives in your backyard and how the international communist organization has spread its radical message to the world’s forests.”
― B. McGraw, Et al: Because not all research deserves a Nobel Prize

“There have been so many questions, so few answers - and this feels exciting.”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures