Can you tell us a little bit about your academic background, career and sustainability journey so far?

I don’t have much of an academic background to speak of! I’d started a bachelor’s degree in psychology, 13 years ago – but I couldn’t finish it. But I’d really been enjoying academia at that time.

I’d discovered foraging at that time. It was first a personal practice, which then evolved into a career. I think that kind of trajectory is more common than we think…The way that climate impacts us is personal, and for some, it could lead into more academic work.

My journey into mushrooms, and mycology, was circuitous. I was 19 when I first started mushroom foraging – it was a fun thing to do, you know, art school vibes - who can have the most esoteric hobby?

But I started thinking of it more as a praxis, when I came across Shruthi Tharayil and her work with Forgotten Greens.

A few years ago, I did her Rewild Your Life course, which changed things for me.

Until that point, I’d been involved with Extinction Rebellion and other groups in Delhi. And – while they do a lot of good work, that activism is a labor of love – but big international groups tend to apply mainstream frameworks directly to the Indian context.

And just think about how many different axes are at play in India –cultural aspects, identity…there was no intersectional approach. Shruthi’s course was tailored to the Indian context.

The “urban” is not something we tend to associate with wildness, or with foraging – that was new to me then too, and got me thinking.

There’s a lot of information out there, a lot of community-oriented learning too.

Over the years, I started organizing workshops as well as taking them.

Now I work with The Fungi Foundation – a global nonprofit that protects, and documents, fungi and knowledge of fungi.

We’re just starting up the India chapter, and the Elders program – to document and preserve ancestral knowledge of fungi. The loss of biodiversity in our times is so directly connected to a loss of cultural meaning, spiritual meaning…this is something that’s stuck with me.

You mention the need for an intersectional approach in activism – what would that look like?

[Intersectionality refers to a framework for understanding how different social and political identities, of groups and individuals, affect them in their lives – the intersections of the different identities and experiences. ]

Sometimes the work that’s done does not take into account the many communities and identities at play – take something like landfills. In India, you would have to consider the history of manual scavenging, the current realities…

In foraging, the practice is itself so strongly associated with Adivasis, indigenous people, Dalit communities.

Mushrooms themselves are often associated with ideas of impurity, death, decay…

Even the names for mushrooms – “kukur mutta” (where dogs relieve themselves), “saap ki chatri” (hood of a snake) invoke those ideas…there’s talk about mushrooms growing on corpses too.

No action is apolitical. But foraging in particular is something so rooted in these histories – it’s an entry point to start thinking of the many different parts and identities of the climate conversation we’re having globally.

What does work look like for you on a daily basis?

It’s a lot of emails! It’s funny.

For me, apart from the environmental angle, it’s also very artistic.

It’s slow – it’s a lot of building connections, community… Trust is very important.

The ethical aspect of out work at The Fungi Foundation is something we take very seriously.

The entire field of ethnomycology as it exists today was born of trickery. The people who are credited with first bringing out this field – the Wassons – tricked Maria Sabina, a healer of the Mazatec tribe, into revealing her knowledge and then exposed it to the entire world. Maria Sabina was ostracized by her community and died in poverty, away from her people. That’s the legacy of ethnomycology that we’re up against!

So it’s very important to us that the whole process is ethical. It has to be lead by the people who are the keepers of this knowledge.

Sometimes it’s slow, you sense that you’re getting only half the information. But that’s alright, we don’t want to pressure anyone.

We’ve been documenting this knowledge in Meghalaya, and we’re starting to explore other avenues in Kerala, and also in the north…

A large part of this work is public facing. The work always comes back to the people.

Apart from this work [documentation], I’ve also been learning a lot from other people – naturalists in Delhi…There’s a niche for everything and a person for everything: a firefly guy, a frog woman, there’s moth guys – it’s really amazing.

“Mycology” is something that might be relatively unknown to many in the Indian context – something exotic sounding. What would careers in mycology look like – what spaces might students and professionals make use of?

For the longest time, mycology has only been taught as plant pathology. For a country like ours, one of the biggest reasons to study mycology has been to protect agricultural land from fungi.

But there’s a lot of mycologists doing amazing work studying other aspects of fungi.

Dr. Kamath, in Goa, is studying Termitomyces – it’s a mushroom species that termites (Macrotermes) cultivate. There’s such a unique triangular relationship there [between the termites, their gut microbes, and the mushroom]. These shrooms are commonly eaten across India, they’re a real delicacy in Goa. There’s a huge market for selling it – they’re called olmi.

You can always pursue the research side of things.

Now, there’s also a booming industry for mushroom-derived supplements, functional mushrooms, medicinal extracts…[an excellent example is Namma Bengaluru’s own Nuvedo.]

And another really cool space is mycomaterials. They’re biodegradable alternative materials made from mycelium, a really cool space for young people to get into if you want to build a career. [Internationally, companies like Ecovative are already at sales stage with mycomaterial packaging and products. And also, “vegan meat”/ alt proteins.]

To me, mycology is such a bottom-up discipline, because so much of it is created by citizen science, by enthusiasts and self-taught community members – not mycologists or any big names…so many techniques, for cultivation [mushroom cultivation for consumption] are created by people in their homes…

And yet another area is ecosystem management. The more we understand about fungi, the better we can understand, preserve and restore ecosystems. [Fungal and mycorrhizal networks – in association with plant roots – make up an integral part of below-ground networks in ecosystems like grasslands, forests.]

There’s also a global group – the Society for Protection of Underground Networks – that map mycorrhizal networks for ecosystem preservation and so on. Another initiative is the More Than Human Life Project (MOTH Rights) – it’s an NYU School of Law initiative. They support indigenous communities, and their ways of law and philosophies – they consider forests as living beings, with their own rights. So drilling, fracking, in those forests would be against their rights – MOTH provides legal aid to protect the rights of other than human creatures.

That’s a wonderful concept…are there any Indian parallels – considering “other than human” beings?

In our field work in Meghalaya, we encounter the concept of the “sacred forest” in the Khasi Hills - the forest is considered a being, with certain powers. No one can pick and take away anything from those forests – not one leaf, one twig…

There’s a different governance structure as well: the Hima system, with 16 different Himas – like kingdoms – which are autonomous, not under the Indian government.

They have a different structure and were never incorporated into the Indian government. And the interesting thing is, the “kings” for the Himas are elected.  There’s a whole tradition of animacy for all these – forests, rivers, mountains – in indigenous communities across the world.

What tips would you have for students looking to work in your field? What skills should they learn?

I’d say that soft skills are the most important. The thing about climate action is that all of our solutions already exist. There’s nothing yet to be discovered.

It’s now about developing community resilience to take action. None of these solutions can be implemented individually.

So – join the WhatsApp groups, nature walks…Just show up – that’s 50% of the work done. Just get out of your house and go somewhere. Meet people [who are doing the work].

Once you’re there, people will give you something to do. Just getting there is the hardest part.

Our world can be so isolating, and the scale of the climate catastrophe can seem immense.

But just go to one thing. One event, one talk, one walk…It’s really the smallest action that can snowball into sustainable practice.

Another thing – is not to get too caught up with the academic side of it. Academia is a really useful tool and it gives you a lot of pathways – but there’s a lot of space now for community action.

In the mycophile community, barely anyone is from an academic background of mycology. At the Fungi Foundation, we’ve put into motion such immense tangible change – getting species on the IUCN Red List, changing “flora and fauna” to “flora, fauna and fungi” – we have a lot of people from philosophy, from psychology, so many from tech – they’ve applied their skills to mapping fungal species, for example…

Whatever your skills are, academically, apply those to climate action. Don’t try to make climate action the focus of your academics. So much of our work is logistical backend work - any one team needs a wide variety of skillsets.

M conducts workshops, walks, and many other fun things in Bangalore, Delhi and beyond. Follow them on Instagram and take their stellar advice to get out there and join a community!