Global mycorrhizal networks: How industrial agriculture disrupts Earth’s subterranean symbiotic systems
Original framing: “Global map reveals the vast scale of underground fungal networks” — New Scientist
Fungal networks have thrived for 450 million years, coevolving with plants during the Devonian period, but industrial agriculture has disrupted these systems within a century. The Dust Bowl (1930s) revealed the collapse of fungal networks under monoculture plowing, yet agribusiness doubled down on synthetic inputs. Colonial land enclosures (e.g., Enclosure Acts, 18th century) severed Indigenous soil stewardship, replacing it with privatized, chemical-dependent systems that fragment symbiotic relationships.
The 'discovery' of fungal networks by Western science is a latecomer to millennia-old Indigenous knowledge, yet the narrative frames them as a 'breakthrough' for industrial optimization, obscuring the structural violence of agribusiness, colonial land tenure, and synthetic inputs that fragment these symbiotic systems.
Indigenous fire ecology, polycultures, and sacred groves (e.g., Māori *rongoā*, Andean *chakra*) demonstrate scalable models for network resilience, yet are erased by corporate-funded science and policy. Legal personhood for fungi (e.g., Te Urewera) and decolonized soil science offer pathways to dismantle extractive frameworks, while regenerative agriculture and Indigenous co-management can restore networks within decades—if agribusiness accountability and subsidy reform are enforced. The trickster’s laughter reveals the absurdity of 'sustainable' agriculture that still patents life and poisons the Earth, while the future hinges on centering Indigenous sovereignty as the foundation of ecological repair.