I ask the pressing Questions I ask myself

By Zach Hively

​So I hear that adult-aged people have a ton of trouble finding other adult-aged people for romantic and/or sexy times. While I sympathize with the plight of the lovelorn, I think the whole can’t-find-a-date-for-Friday-night problem is overblown. Unlikely people fall in love in movies all the time. But I rarely see movies where people fall in friendship.

That’s because friends, unlike manholes, aren’t just strewn about on the street for people to trip into headfirst. At least the quest for love is filled with tried-and-true techniques, such as buying flowers, passing notes with yes and no checkboxes, and relying on established patriarchal expectations. Would-be lovers get personal ads and online dating services and local magazines running “Hot Singles” editions, all of which totally always work out.

For those of us seeking friendship, though, we’re adrift on a choppy sea, the rudder of companionship sheared off, holes torn in the hull of our confidence, with no end to this metaphor in sight.

Which is why I’m going to spotlight the most eligible friend I know—myself—in the first-ever-that-I-know-of Q&A Profile for Eligible Friends. Perhaps, by the end of this feature, you will want to be my friend!
​
Q: Tell us, Zach, why are you interested in finding long-lasting friendship?
A: Because I feel that life is like one of those popsicles with two sticks.

Q: And you want someone to share the other half of the popsicle with you?
A: No, I’ll eat the whole thing myself. I just want someone to help break it apart without expecting a foot rub in return, so I can go back to watching the Auto Manufacturer Snack Food Carbonated Beverage Sporting Event in peace.

Q: The prospective friends among our readers are all dying to know: what are your favorite activities?
A: Let me tell you, I am such an impressive potential friend that I have many favorite activities to list. These include reading, talking to my houseplants, and downing an entire bag of tortilla chips in one sitting.

Q: Those don’t sound like very friend-conducive activities.
A: I also play guitar.

Q: Excellent! That’s an activity you can share with friends. What style of guitar do you play?
A: Air guitar.

Q: Oh.
A: In the shower.

Q: Many people enjoy the great outdoors with friends. What are your favorite outdoor pursuits?
A: I enjoy yelling at chipmunks in my garden. And when they ignore me, I throw stones at them.

Q: That doesn’t sound very friendly. Why do you do that?
A: Because there are no children in my neighborhood to throw rocks at instead.

Q: Do you ski? Rock climb? Hike?
A: I ride a bike.

Q: Perfect! There are lots of avid cyclists who would love to be your friend! What do you enjoy most about bicycling?
A: I love that I can feel connected with nature, at one with the breeze through my helmet and the earth under my wheels. But my absolute favorite part is that I can go for hours and hours without having to talk to anybody.

Q: You do realize that the primary part of having friends is actually being around people, right?
A: Oh, sure.

Q: Well, is there anything at all that you enjoy doing with other people?
A: Friendships aren’t all about “doing things” with other people. I think you’ve confused me for one of those “Hot Singles.” Asking about someone’s day, striving to become a better person—that’s all mushy foreplay stuff. And it’s way easy, compared to making friends as an adult.

Q: How so?
A: Think about how you can be friends over literally anything as a kid—you both want to play with the same jump rope? Bam! Instant friendship. And that’s how we pick up on each other, too. “You like Gruyère? I like Gruyère! Let’s go on a date!” But it’s not like I, as a seemingly-grown-up individual, can walk up to another guy and say, “You drive on radial tires? I drive on radial tires! Want to hang out?” 
We are not doing this Q&A to find true love. We’re here to find friends. And unlike romantic interests who will lie about cheese preferences in hopes of ensuing kinky times, true friends will accept us as we are. I am a recluse. And it’s incredibly difficult for me, as a hermit, to put myself out there.

Q: Wow. I never stopped to consider the emotional fragility of someone like you trying to make friends.
A: Tell me about it. And I have it double tough, because on top of all that, I just don’t like people.

Q: There you have it! If you still think you want to befriend Zach, write a letter to the editor of this fine publication.
A: Or better yet, don’t. This bag of chips ain’t big enough for the both of us.

***

If you like what you see here—and even if you don’t—you can find much more like it in my forthcoming book, Call Me Zach Hively Because That Is My Name.

The Kickstarter campaign for the book is more than 180% funded, and they can’t all be suckers, right? So whether you like ebooks, or you prefer rare collectors-edition hardcovers, head on over there and find your next great bathroom read. (Plus, you can get your name ruined forever, as I will thank you personally in the book’s Acknowledgments!)
Support the movement!

By Sara WRight

Sixty years ago, scientist Suzanne Simard intuited as a child that the trees, plants, fungi, in the forests she lived in (and that she and her family lightly logged with horses) were all in intimate relationship with one another. It seemed to her that forests were complex interdependent cooperative living organisms. The forests were alive. The blood of the trees was in her bones, she often quipped.
 
As an undergraduate from UBC (University of British Columbia) her first job as a forester seemed daunting. It was up to her to determine why 20 percent or more of the tree seedlings died after the forestry industry stripped huge parcels of land compacting and scraping away the soil. The species chosen was one that would provide foresters with the fastest economical gain. No other trees were allowed to grow in these ‘plantations’ because according to the forest industry other trees and plants competed with the monoculture that had replaced what once was a forest that contained a diversity of trees, plants, mushrooms, and flowers.
 
 Suzanne suspected that there were two problems and one lay underground. She uprooted dying/dead seedlings and peered beneath the surface of the soil. She recalled her childhood when she was continuously digging up masses of colorful rootlets that seemed to be attached to complex underground webs in diverse forests where healthy seedlings flourished.
 
In newly planted strip logged sites the webs of tiny underground rootlets were missing.
 
Suzanne went back to school to become a ground- breaking scientist to prove what the child once intuited. The prestigious scientific journal Nature credited her with the discovery of the ‘Wood Wide Web’ in 1997 which posited the existence and importance of the mycelial network to forest health and regeneration, and by extension to all life.
 
The second intuition that Suzanne addressed and proved was the fact that removing all the other plants and trees like birches from a strip logged site invited in disease. All trees and plants work together to deal with pathogenic fungi, and she demonstrated through years of field work that birches, for example, protected trees if allowed to grow along with the cash crop.
 
Most important is Suzanne’s understanding that some Old Mother/Father Trees must be left in any forest that is logged to help seed future generations. If the ‘Old’ Trees are removed who will be left to pass on the wisdom of the forest?
 
 
 
Dr. Simard demonstrated through years of painstaking field research that all trees and plants are connected underground by way of these vast fungal networks. This fungal web provided seedlings with all the nutrients they needed to survive. Since her initial discoveries Suzanne’s work has been replicated by other scientists over a period of many years, although it is still considered ‘controversial’.
 
Not surprisingly the Forestry Industry did not want to learn that stripping huge tracts of land with giant machines that compacted the soil and destroyed the underlying networks might be an issue to be taken seriously.
 
After Suzanne wrote the story of her discoveries in a compelling memoir “Finding the Mother Tree” a few years ago she established the 100 Year Mother Tree Project where she and her students, many now renowned scientists themselves, continue this meticulous research, most of which is done in the field.
 
Taken directly from the Mother Tree Project’s site:
 
“The Mother Tree Project is a groundbreaking research initiative investigating forest renewal practices that aim to safeguard biodiversity, carbon storage, and forest regeneration as climate changes. The project assesses how seedlings from local, warmer, and colder climates respond to different levels of overstory tree retention, with a focus on seedling survival and growth.
 
Started in 2015 and funded by NSERC and FESBE, the Mother Tree Project is a large scientific, field - based experiment that builds on prior research with the central objective of identifying sustainable harvesting and regeneration treatments that will maintain forest resilience…”
 
Suzanne has incorporated Indigenous scientific scholars as well as well as their stories into her ongoing research.  She was as stunned as I was to learn that Indigenous peoples have known about mycelial networks for millennia. How did they learn, she asked some of her colleagues.
 
The plants told them.
 
In 2023 Professor Simard was the recipient of the prestigious KEW International Medal in recognition of her ongoing research that really is so broad in depth and scope that it’s impossible to condense.
 
I’ll end this essay reiterating key points and adding some practical information, ending with a question that perhaps some will ponder.
 
About 90 percent of all plants have underground symbiotic mycorrhizal (root fungi) relationships with other plant beings that are beneficial. These complex webs  branch and unite and are always on the move just below the surface of the earth creating a living skin that keeps trees, plants, grasses, fungi all connected to each other. Tubular networks keep plant life healthy by providing minerals, carbon, water, minerals etc. to vegetation through the rootlets. What this means practically is that overall plants cooperate with each other. (About ten percent of the fungi are pathogenic and kill trees and plants but this is not the rule).
 
If cooperation has been dominating plant relationships for 400 plus million years and continues to do so today, then how did we get the idea that Nature competes more than S/he cooperates?

By Jessica Rath

​Today, on April 19, the El Rito Library is showing the 2023 Oscar Winner for Best Documentary Feature Film, “Navalny”.* The film’s editor, Langdon Page, will be present to introduce it, because – guess what! – some of the editing happened right here, in La Madera.  The film is being shown at Northern New Mexico College, El Rito Campus, Alumni Hall.  Pot luck at 5:30, showing at 6:00PM.
​
I had watched the documentary shortly after Alexei Navalny was murdered at Polar Wolf, the maximum security corrective colony in Siberia near the Arctic Circle. To say it was gut-wrenching and  deeply moving is putting it mildly. I wanted to learn more about Langdon and his work, and he kindly agreed to talk to me.
 
Knowing very little about film making, I was curious – how does one become a movie editor? Are there college courses one has to take, or are there any special schools to attend? 

​Well, in Langdon’s case it was a very organic process. From an early age he was fascinated by movies, he had the “cinema bug”, as he told me. He’d watch films, read every book about movies that he could find, and spend every free minute learning about cinema and its many aspects. His brother had started a magazine in Chile together with some movie producers, and when he asked Langdon for help because of his obsession with  movies, that’s what happened: Langdon joined his brother in Chile, and together, they produced a few magazine issues – until the funding ran out. By that time, Langdon had established some solid connections with the small film community in Chile in the mid-90s.
 
“I started talking to some of the producers thereafter with an idea for making a little documentary about looking for dinosaur eggs in Argentina, and they thought it was a great idea”, Langdon told me. When he came back with the footage, they needed somebody to edit it, and Langdon bluffed his way  into the job. The producers had just acquired a top of the line Avid video editing system,  the first generation of digital nonlinear editing (I looked this up: while linear editing assembles a film  from beginning to end, the new technology allows the editor to work on any video frame or digital video clip, no matter where it will eventually end up). Langdon had the background and courage to figure out this completely new technology, was hired, and completed a number of projects in Chile.

A couple of years later, he moved to Los Angeles with his wife and their firstborn. For a while, he had to take any work that allowed him to support his family.

“The first place that hired me was actually a cable channel called E! Entertainment Television”, Langdon continued.  “They didn't care that I had made a series of films that had done very well in Chile, they just cared that I knew how to run an Avid –  the editing computer. So then I spent a while doing really boring television work, which kept us afloat as a family, but also taught me how to work with deadlines and within the confines of an industry that depends a lot of time on deliverables and strict formatting rules”.

“At the same time, I kept reaching out to independent producers, and ended up getting some films that were more interesting. And then people kept hiring me to edit even though I would be writing or producing or pitching ideas, but I kept getting hired as an editor. And so I ended up doing a lot of that for the last 25+ years”. 
​
I must confess that I’ve never really thought much about the editing process of a movie. When it comes to film-making, I know the names of directors and a few famous cinematographers, and that’s it – I don’t know any famous editors. That doesn’t seem fair. I’m a film buff, and the productions I enjoy most offer great acting, beautiful cinematography, and an intelligent, moving script – all seamlessly joined together into one immersive experience. Whether that’s done successfully or not depends largely on the editor, I think. Langdon’s words helped me to see this.
 
He elaborated: “When it comes to the making of a film it is often a year or more of editorial work. And that’s a lot of emotional energy, it's a lot of passion. If you're committed to it and are serious about trying to actually make cinema out of it the sensibility of the editor is inherently going to be reflected in the final film”. Yes, this makes total sense, especially in relation to “Navalny”. How did he get involved with this project, I wanted to know.

“It was right around the beginning of 2021. A producer that I had made four or five pictures with called me up and said, ‘we've got this thing, and I think you’d be great for it. It's confidential, nobody knows about it. We've got this very talented director who's got a lot of ideas; can you come and start working on it?’ The director and his crew were just starting to sort through the footage and see what they had. I often like projects to go through a phase before I come on board, so that the director can start to try out all sorts of different things and get an idea of what they want in their head, make all kinds of mistakes, whatever. And then I can come on board, and we can make a whole bunch of different mistakes. So that's how it played out: I came up from Santiago, Chile to  Santa Fe and set up the cutting room in La Madera. I was editing from there for the first six weeks”.

In La Madera? Of all the places? How did he end up in La Madera? 

Well, Langdon grew up in Denver, CO, but one of his grandmothers lived in Santa Fe, and throughout his childhood he spent much time there.  In 1994 his father, his stepmother, and some of her family bought a piece of land near La Madera, and this has been the family home ever since.  So that’s where he ended up doing much of the editing work, in secret, as he explained.
 
Obviously Langdon  needed the fastest internet he could get,  and also some gear, such as an extra screen. His father  suggested they ask the Bondys, because Brian has all this equipment. So Brian came over with a monitor and helped set everything up. Amazingly, the internet connection in La Madera, New Mexico is the fastest connection that Langdon has been able to get anywhere in the world – can you believe this!
​
“Navalny was a really fascinating project. It brought together a team of really strong voices with different perspectives, and we wanted to have all of that emotional, mental, cinematic firepower in the room together while working on this really challenging story.  It was obviously all being created in the shadow of heavy security risks. We were doing everything completely under the table, nobody even knew this project existed. At the time, Alexei was in prison, which added to the emotional pressure. We wanted to make the best film that it could be in the fastest amount of time, because we imagined and sincerely believed that the film would be in some ways a sort of life insurance policy for Alexei. The more the world and the international community and the general public were aware of Alexei’s situation, the harder it would be for Putin to have him disappear, knock him off. I think for a long time, that actually worked”.

​“The emotional stakes were incredibly high. There were lots of tears all the way through the edit. The director, Daniel Roher, had a very strong personal bond with Alexei and his family. He is  a young guy and was really emotionally distraught throughout the course of the edit. There was a time when I was working late at night, and he was asleep on the couch. And, he said, he woke up and I was just sobbing. I had just watched a part of it, and it just left me in tears. We would hug and tell each other, we’ll get through it, and then we kept on working”.

I asked Langdon whether he had met any members of Navalny’s family and inner circle.
 
“Well, I never met Alexei, because it was filmed before I came on board the project. We launched the film at Sundance Film Festival in January 2022. And it had not been announced that the film even existed. So, when we shared it secretly with the programming committee, they invited us to be a part of Sundance. But they billed it as a secret screening, which was the first time they had ever done that at Sundance. And everybody was sort of confused -- what is this secret screening?, and all this”.

“And then there was a COVID wave. It was kind of devastating for everybody because Sundance rightly decided to do another virtual Sundance that year. But there  was concern that if they announced our project, adversarial forces could undermine the streaming capability of the festival for the first weekend and actually shut down all access to all the other films. That’s why they decided  to continue to bill it as a secret screening through the first weekend. At the first weekend of the festival, all films that are premiering get at least one screening – that’s how Sundance works. And then over the course of the first week they start doing repeat screenings. So we would not announce the film until after the first weekend. They announced it on Monday morning, and tickets sold out immediately, and that evening, we did the premiere”.

By this time I was spellbound, listening to Langdon. To hear that the making of it was just as suspenseful and moving as the documentary was simply astonishing.

“That was the beginning of the next phase of the film”, he continued. “This was the whole roll-out, taking it on tour and going to different festivals. It was in the middle of a number of changes in CNN Films, the distributor, and the whole streaming landscape. So it ended up premiering on CNN in April or May of 2022. At the same time  we were going around showing it at festivals over the course of that whole year and leading up toward the Oscars. So there were a number of occasions when I spent quite a bit of time with Dasha, Alexei’s daughter, and Yulia, his widow”.

By this time of our conversation I was deeply moved, remembering Navalny’s untimely death. Dasha had lost her father. Yulia had lost her husband. But Langdon reminds us not to give in to despair:

“Yes, it is very sad. But I think we should continually return to Alexei’s message at the end of the film, which is that we can't be complacent. The force used by the authorities to try to shut down any sort of democratic movement in Russia, is an indication of how strong that movement actually is. As we know from history, the only way to break through this  is for the grassroots, the people on the frontlines to rise up. There's a lot of work being done. Most of the Anti Corruption Foundation has moved to Lithuania. They've reconstituted as a very strong force from outside Russia. When Alexei went back this was almost inconceivable, but since especially the invasion of Ukraine and the increased clamp down and censorship in Russia, a large part of the democracy movement has been forced outside of the country.  It still constitutes a very viable force. It's continuing to find innovative ways to get around sensors, and continues to expose the corruption of the Putin regime”.

I was quite shocked when I thought about the secrecy that had been necessary when working on the film. Were the people involved really in danger?

“One never knows what their actual reach is”, Langdon explained.  “Especially organizations like the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service), or the GRU (Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency). They've shown that they have the ability to assassinate or attempt to assassinate people throughout Europe. Within the United States we believe that we have a more solid firewall against some of those things, but not against all of them. In the 2016 election we witnessed significant online  infiltration by Russian forces trying to undermine our democracy, and it continues to this day. We took extraordinary security measures to keep everything encrypted and to stay as safe as we could, especially when we were editing in London, but the threat was very real. Christo Grozev (Bellingcat chief investigator) from the film has had a death warrant out for him for the last year and a half, which was not exclusively, but directly in response to his participation in this film. And Christo is basically living in the States at this point”. 

Some final words about Navalny: “Alexei’s courage and his humor, his inextinguishable spirit and faith in what he called the “beautiful Russia of the future” – this was amazing throughout his time in both prisons. He was subjected to isolation and immense torture at the first prison as well. For months and months and months they kept him in solitary confinement under horrible, horrible psychological torture conditions.  And yet, he was able to communicate with the outside world in a way that motivated people to take small actions, significant within Russia, and bigger actions, which are also significant on the global stage. We have to just take courage and inspiration from his indomitable spirit”.

Here is my final question: do you have a new project you're working on?
 
“Yes –  I've been working on a technology platform, to connect movies that have a strong call to action around an issue with direct actions that viewers can take after they watch that kind of movie. And this has been a fascinating and entirely different type of creative endeavor for me. So that's what I’m doing at the moment”.

Langdon closed our interview with these words: “It's a pivotal time for democracy in this country and worldwide. But, if you study history, it's always been a pivotal time. Democracy is an ongoing experiment. It's important not  to succumb to apathy. We have actually more tools now to strengthen our democracy and move it in a direction which is more sustainable than we've ever had before. So it's just about being inspired and having the courage to stay active”.
​
“Navalny” most certainly is inspiring. I want to thank Langdon for his important part in it, and for taking the time for this interview.

Backyard Diversity is a series of educational articles brought to you in partnership with In Light of Nature, the Carol Petrie Foundation, the Los Alamos Reporter and Chama Peak Land Alliance.  By highlighting the unique and special nature of our area, and in the hopes that a small drop in the water will send out waves of opportunity, we hope that each of us can and will improve our backyard with biodiversity. Photo by Ed MacKerrow

BY ED MACKERROW
In Light With Nature
​

Photo by Ed MacKerrow
​
Pocket gophers are a constant threat to my orchard. They eat tree roots, starving the trees of water and nutrients. Setting gopher traps takes way too much of my time, and eventually, the gophers win the battle. The gophers are most active at night. They spend most of their time underground, only briefly coming above ground in the dark to move excavated soil from their tunnels. There must be a better way to find an ecological balance where the trees and gophers coexist.

Owls, hawks, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, and snakes all prey on gophers. Since gophers and owls are most active at night, I pursued leveraging owls to help manage the gopher populations in the farming community of Nambe, New Mexico, where I live. We installed barn owl boxes on 12-foot-high poles in orchards and agricultural fields as a community. I would see and hear Great Horned Owls regularly and observe Barn Owls very infrequently. In the Central Valley of California, barn owl boxes populated many orchards, vineyards, and farms. I wanted to give them a try in Northern New Mexico.  

After a few years of not seeing or hearing any Barn Owls in my community, I finally listened to their “kleek-kleek” call (which sounds like a rusty bike chain) one night. On top of a barn owl box, I saw the tell-tale silhouette of a barn owl. In just a few weeks, fresh mounds of dirt from gophers disappeared. Barn owls are shy and will not come outside their box until darkness falls. I watched them through binoculars in the early evening, amazed at how many trips they made to the box with gophers in their bills. I set up a trail camera to look at their owl box and measured an average of over 11 gophers and nine mice per night delivered to the box over a month. Soon, neighboring farmers were wondering why they were not seeing gophers anymore.
​
The barn owls motivated me to build and distribute more owl boxes around the area. Eventually, I installed 26 barn owl boxes on many farms. The owls would use different boxes each year, and we would rarely see or hear the owls since they are so reclusive. Barn owls are “flight hunters,” searching for prey by flowing low over the fields. With a bit of moonlight, I would sometimes watch them fly silently like a giant moth. Great-horned owls are “perch hunters,” using a sit-and-wait strategy to listen for prey. Owls have incredible stereoscopic hearing, which allows them to hear the faintest sounds of prey in underground tunnels or under deep snow. 

The owls continue to help me manage gophers, mice, and rats. The Great-Horned Owls have a constant presence, whereas the Barn Owl population fluctuates. An ongoing challenge is that everyone in my neighborhood needs to refrain from using rodenticides (rat and mouse poison). When a mouse eats rodenticide, the anticoagulant poison causes a slow death from internal bleeding. The poisoned mouse wanders for water to quench the deadly thirst from the poison, making them easy prey for owls. The owl and other predators and pets succumb to secondary poisoning and also die a slow death of internal bleeding.

It takes cooperation and patience for a community to utilize owls for rodent control. Mice can become a nuisance in rural areas. I encourage neighbors to supplement our owl-based pest control with non-poisonous rat and mouse traps. If one person in the area resorts to unsafe rodenticides, then the efficient hunting owls end up dying from secondary poisoning.  
The success of barn owl rodent control in the agriculturally rich Central Valley of California gives me hope that, in the long run, owls will be our primary method of rodent control. Education and patience will help that happen.

Ed MacKerrow of In Light of Nature, is a nature photographer, scientist, and conservationist. He has a Ph.D. in Physics and specializes in studying complex adaptive social systems. He has provided scientific expertise to the US Government on various subjects, including forest ecology and wildlife conservation. Ed is the President of the Friends of the Nambe Badlands, dedicated to protecting sensitive BLM land in Northern New Mexico, a Board member of Katmai Conservancy for Katmai National Park in Alaska, and served as the Vice President of the Friends of the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Ed is dedicated to environmental conservation and ethical practices in nature photography. He maintains a blog called “In Light of Nature,” which explores wildlife, conservation, and nature photography.

For the Love of Books

By Zach Hively

This was a challenge I did not expect: Tell me what you’re good at.

A friend recently asked me this—to list ten of my top skills or abilities. That’s it. Just ten things. The hard part should have been limiting myself to ten. Limiting myself to ten is most definitely not one of my top skills. But I learned one of my top skills is also not remembering all, or any, of the very many things I’m good at.

So I asked my friend for a clue: What is something I can do well?
​
“Well,” my friend said, “you’re very tidy.”

This was not the sort of glowing clue I had anticipated. But I accepted it graciously—there, that’s one of my top skills, accepting underwhelming compliments with grace—even if it was wrong, because it is impossible for me to be tidy. After all, I love books. One human being contains multitudes, but one cannot contain both tidiness and book-love.

And I do mean LOVE books. One can HAVE books and demonstrate immaculately tidiness, in that Scandinavian showroom or Japanese spa sort of way. Each book, neatly dusted, right where it belongs. Shelved, more than likely, by color and height or some other preposterous aesthetic.

But loving books implies a particular comfy disarray. From where I sit, I see four stacks of books dislodged from any of the major bookshelves in my home: one stack on a stool stepping in as an end table; one by the front door; one by an armchair; and one on a kitchen counter, perilously close to where I do the dishes when a friend is coming over and I want to appear tidy.

Then there are the bookshelves themselves: fairly neat, by design, books stood in rows of colorful spines. But they exude a certain chaos, too—unalphabetized, for starters, though with a catalogue system I understand intuitively yet inarticulably. More than this, though, the books lurk rather airily: some leering, some lounging; a few might as well be heckling me to read them. They are like the crows that fill a leafless cottonwood tree, in full cahoots—and I keep bring more home. (Books, that is, not crows, though I am not opposed.)

The tidy thing to do would be to go digital, put every title I ever wanted on a device, linked to my account. But I do not want to be tidy. I want to be terrible at such tidiness—and terribly happy, here in the best little hoardhouse this side of Texas, surrounded by so many things I don’t yet know, so many things I might just yet get good at.

***Speaking of books: the Kickstarter campaign for Call Me Zach Hively Because That Is My Name is in full swing. We have stretch goals—possibilities for an audiobook and collectible book editions among them.

This is also your first chance to get the ebook (if you’re that kind of tidy) and your only chance to get a hardcover (if you’re that kind of bibliophile).
​
Become a backer
But the most important thing is that the campaign has succeeded. We’re beyond 180% of our goal, which means that this book is getting published no matter what. Thank you all who have pledged support so far to make this collection a reality.

By Sara Wright

​Last night I feasted on button mushrooms just after finishing this article which didn’t have a title. Suddenly an ancient memory surfaced… I was about three when my great grandmother and I used to play a game with the above name.
 
I have had an intuitive sense that most mushrooms have similar medicinal values because they are all part of the underground fungal network even if they are grown on trees, grasslands or deserts. I decided to do a little research on the common button mushroom to support or refute my intuition.
 
 As I suspected button mushrooms do have most of the health benefits of those harvested in the wild. There are some differences but overall, they are minimal. If you are looking for a particular supplement it’s sensible to do your own research to find the mushroom you think has more of the benefits you need.

 Agaricus biporus is one of the fungal kingdom’s edible mushrooms that can be harvested at different stages of growth. When the fruiting fungi are young and white, we call these mushrooms buttons. At midpoint they become tannish cremini. At maturity the button becomes a portobello. All stages have the same medicinal/nutritional benefits.

These fungi are grown on a composted substrate that is traditionally made from wheat, straw, poultry manure, and gypsum. Of course, these substrates are attached to mycelial network underground.

My buttons thrive on compost heaps which are a blend of straw, and many other plant left overs. I don’t use any aged manure, but that’s because I don’t happen to have any. My  button mushrooms efficiently break down the organic matter as all good saprophytes do.

Unlike some people, I have no problem using any kind of manure as part of my substrate, because during composting microorganisms break down the matter producing a fiber rich, carbon containing humus with inorganic nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Scattering my compost is a new experiment I am presently engaging in, so I never know who is going to appear where.

According to mycologist Merlin Sheldrake less than five percent of fruiting fungi have been studied and almost nothing is known of the underlying mycelial networks that support the (roughly) 20,000 mushrooms that appear above ground that we know about. Yet some mushroom species are already on the IUCN Red List.
 
One of the ways mushroom spores function to support forest ecology is to rise into the atmosphere and bind with water molecules to create rain (Merlin Sheldrake).
 
 According to the New Scientist mushroom spores are also full of DNA that bind, re-combine, and mutate to produce genetic material that is diverse and adapted for changing climates. Other than these examples little is known about how mushrooms effect the ecology of the forests, grasslands, deserts they grow in. In deserts most mushrooms grow underground to avoid drought.
 
 With 33 million people in the US and the loss of a staggering number of forests, it seems prudent to forage in the wild with care. Please do not take more fungi than you need and allow some spores to seed woods and sky. Many small animals and insects love mushrooms, so I am assuming that removing too many fungi might also be a problem for wildlife.
 
 Most wild mushrooms including Oyster, Turkey Tail, Reishi, Shitake, Lions Mane and others can be grown quite easily. Many companies offer mushroom spawn and substrates for home growing as an alternative to foraging in the wild.
 
Watching mushrooms develop is not only fun but educational. The first oysters I grew a bunch of years ago were so astonishing that I chopped and sauteed them reluctantly. I’ve grown other mushrooms including Lions Mane a particularly beautiful mushroom that looks to me like a frozen waterfall. I love the process of growing fungi at home and am never disappointed by the edible results. In the forest I do not forage focusing instead on the relationships between the fungi and the kind of forest that they live in. Each species has its own niche. I eat some of my button mushrooms at home but leave many for the rest of nature to feast upon.
 
 Until recently serious research hadn’t been done on Agaricus b. because the fungal fruits were so ‘common’. Yet I came across a surprising array of articles that discussed the similarity of the substances in button mushrooms to other wild fruiting fungi.
 
 Scientists at Penn state recently identified a new compound in button mushrooms that probably benefits gut health in ways we didn’t know about. Mushrooms as a group including buttons aid in digestive health as prebiotics. Prebiotics and postbiotics are less well-known but equally important for gastrointestinal and systemic health.
 
Like wild fungi button mushrooms contain several different anti-inflammatory and antioxidant compounds that may help improve heart health. They are an important supplement for anyone that suffers from heart disease, one reason that I am delighted that my dogs love them. My Lucy has an enlarged heart.
 
Button mushrooms boost immune systems naturally. They also have anti- tumor and anti-cancer properties.
 
Buttons also have a number of other nutrients that benefit anyone who eats them. A breakdown of these fungi reveals that in a one cup serving, Aagaricus bisporus contains just as much potassium as a banana and can deliver between up to 30 percent of the daily recommended intake of B 1& 2 vitamins that are essential for human health.
Regular consumptions of white button mushrooms may even improve mood by regulating hormones that also keep the brain healthy.

White button mushrooms are also rich in both vitamin C and selenium, so they contribute to immune function.

These mushrooms are one of the only plant foods that contain a natural source of vitamin D.
Perhaps one of the surprising health benefits of button mushrooms is that they are a good source of plant protein. About one and a half cups of button mushrooms equals eating one egg.
Recent studies have found that button mushrooms are particularly high in glutathione, an important antioxidant that helps combat free radicals. Free radicals attack important macromolecules leading to cell damage and homeostatic disruption. 

Other studies suggest that button mushrooms can improve immune function by increasing the production of antiviral proteins.  

Another benefit is that compounds found in button mushrooms called flavonoids have the potential to act as both antioxidants and pro-oxidants. Cells have a natural life and death cycle. We are constantly getting rid of old cells and creating new ones simultaneously. When cells refuse to die, they typically become cancer and tumor cells. The flavonoids work in two ways: when they are antioxidants, they help improve healthy cell survival, and when they act as pro-oxidants, they help encourage apoptosis, which is the natural cell death that helps prevent tumor growth.

All nine amino acids are found in button mushrooms.

Although this is hardly a comprehensive list of Agaricus’s virtues, it gives the reader a chance to reconsider wild foraging until we know more about forest ecology. And for those of you who are gardeners why not grow buttons on one of your compost heaps?

The main threats to wild mushroom collecting are loss of habitat, water, air, and soil pollution that create toxic conditions for collecting that are not obvious even to experienced foragers. Fungi are adapted to specific geographic locations as anyone who spends time in a particular biome already knows. Change that ecology and the mushrooms are gone. Many thrive on specific trees, animals, or soil. If the hosts go extinct, the fungi go extinct too. Of course, a wildly erratic warming climate is another primal threat with droughts discouraging fruiting. Extended periods of rain and wet weather create a feast for fungal plant pathogens since the latter are dependent upon moisture for spore dispersal and plant infection.
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I’ll end this essay reminding folks that harvesting wild fungi for food and commercial use is a major factor affecting species survival. Please, let’s give the mycologists a chance to study mushrooms in the wild before we strip these places bare.