Last summer in the last week of our service as Interim Ministers of Faith Formation at First Congregational United Church of Christ of Bellingham, we participated in a summer day camp that we called “Creation Care Camp.” The program was instituted the year before as a kind of replacement for a traditional Vacation Bible School. After a couple of years without formal summer programming for children during the Pandemic other than the delivery of home lessons and projects for families to use, it was good to return to face to face programming during the summer of 2022. Because our church was still participating in masking in all indoor spaces it made sense for us to plan outdoor programming so that the children could maintain separation while learning together. Although the mask mandate has been dropped by the summer of 2023, we continued with outdoor programming. It is a natural fit for children’s summer programming. There is a wonderful park with lots of open space within easy walking distance of the church which allowed us to plan programs without the added complexity of having to transport children in vehicles.

Part of the outdoor programming was led by a retired forester and his wife who was a retired teacher. The pair had come up with a variety of hands-on experiences for the children. We had a few slices of tree trunks that allowed the children to count rings, estimate the age of the tree, and see different rates of growth in years with different weather patterns. The slices had come from a tree that had to be removed from the church yard, so it had a real connection to the place where we met.

Another part of the presentation involved the forester using a trowel to dig in the duff at the base of one of the trees in the park. Just below the surface of the earth, he pointed out a fine, white, furry structure that looked like a mass of branching and intertwined fibers about the thickness of sewing thread. The slender strands were entangled and when he pulled on them it was obvious that they were connected to many more underneath ground that had not been dug up. The strands are called hyphae and they are part of a larger structure called mycelium and they are fungus, parts of a large network of fungus that branches throughout the soil.

This presentation was new to me. I had spent most of my life prior to moving to the Pacific Northwest in dry areas. It would be much harder to find fungus when digging in the dry soil at the base of trees in the Black Hills of South Dakota. There is fungus there and there are mycelium under the ground in the pine forest, but here it is much easier to find and locate just beneath the surface. The forests here store a lot of moisture and the undergrowth is mostly moss and ferns. The dirt is soft and easy to dig. It is quite a contrast with where we have lived for most of our life.

I knew a bit about hyphae and mycelium from some of the reading I have done since retiring. I had time to read several books by Peter Wohlleben including “the Hidden Life of Trees,” “The Secret Wisdom of Nature,” and “the Inner Life of Animals.” We had heard him speak at an event hosted by a local bookstore to announce the publication of his book, “The Power of Trees.” Wohlleben is a German forester who has written extensively on ecological themes and makes a strong case that plants are sentient lifeforms that a communicate effectively with one another. His work has been corroborated by other plant scientists including Susan Simard whose book “Finding the Mother Tree” details her work in the coastal forests of British Columbia very near to our home.

Nutrients flow from one tree to another through hyphae. If a tree is in need of more moisture or of more nitrogen, a nearby tree can share water, nitrogen, and other essential nutrients with the tree in need. Scientists have done extensive research about how this network of trees and fungi are all interconnected in a healthy forest. The lesson our forester friend was teaching the children is that soil, that appears to be filled with decaying plants is in reality a living and essential part of the overall culture of the forest. It is a new way of thinking for an old guy like myself. I tend to think of soil in terms of compost - decaying plants that release nutrients essential for the growth of other plants. There are a couple of different composting operations on our son’s farm and we contribute all of our kitchen scraps and the plant waste from our lawn and garden to one of the compost piles. In tern we dig compost that we spread on our garden beds each year to encourage growth of our flowers and vegetables. I understand that the soil is alive, but I hadn’t thought of fungus as much more than the mushrooms that appear in my lawn. The fungal network is much more extensive than the few blossoms that appear above the surface. Understanding the fine strains as channels of communication and sharing gives me a whole new way of understanding the soil beneath my feet.

I try to imagine the fungal network as being full of busy communications between all of the plants of the forest. They’ll need a lot of communication this week as we make the transition from an atmospheric river which has now passed over our heads leaving a lot of rain behind. That system has moved east and is currently dropping a lot of rain on the Cascade mountains. Today we’ll begin to experience the edge of a heat dome that is currently south of us, but expanding north. Today’s high temperature is forecast to be twenty degrees higher than yesterday. These swings from one extreme to another are part of the process of climate change that is already occurring throughout the world.

Not only are these changes causing conversation between we human inhabitants of this planet. I imagine that there is a lot of communication between the plants buzzing over the hyphae network beneath our feet. And, like our forester friend, I suspect that there is much we can learn from the plants.