A World Shaped By Fungi and Plastic: Histories and Presents of Extraction, Promise, and Anthropocentric Utilitarianism

• In Event: Extractive Economies from the Industrial Revolution to the Anthropocene

Abstract

Our lives are inescapably entwined in relations with the omnipresence of fungi and plastic. Though seemingly very different — living and non-living, for instance — fungi and plastic have more in common than one might assume. Both permeate our lives with their ubiquitous and often unnoticed presence. They are alchemists, transforming themselves and the world around them, and shaping new realities and possibilities throughout the history of the planet. In the 1960s, the mass production of plastic offered the world a material that would purportedly solve a lot of the world’s problems. Today, we see a similar sense of hope in the promise of fungal mycoremediation and material opportunities as we face climate disaster. Fungal appetites have been shaping the world for millions of years. In addition to their role in making life on land possible, fungi greatly slowed the formation of fossil fuels when they evolved the capacity to digest the lignin of fallen trees roughly 300 million years ago. Prior to this, dead trees would pile up endlessly. Eventually, the fallen trees would fossilize and become the fossil fuels we use in the production of plastics, among other environmentally devastating uses. Today, a hungry fungus could be a useful thing for the problem of plastic pollution as a handful of species have evolved the capacity to break down the chemically complex molecules that make up plastics. This paper considers the utilitarian and extractivist attitudes that led to the environmental problem of plastics today and how these approaches to material world manifest in our relations with the lively and agentive more-than-human worlds of fungi. Additionally, this paper seeks to speculate on what will the future look like if humans continue on the path of resourcist relational sensibility.

Author

• Morgaine Lee, Simon Fraser University