The Roots that Connect the World
Honoring Trees and Fungi on Tu B'shvat: From Myths to Reality and Symbols to Imagination
In this article, we will explore Tu B’shvat alongside the social, cultural, and ecological implications of pressing questions within landscape ecology. Tu B’shvat is the Jewish Holiday for the trees, which was celebrated this year as this article was being finalized and published. Here, we explore the connections of this holiday to modern science, centering the relational web of roots which bind plants, fungi, and soil into resilient ecosystems. This network, known affectionately as the Wood Wide Web, is a web of physical connections that interweave fungal and plant roots in a resilient fabric, holding together life and death, binding soils and nutrient cycles in order to form an ecological foundation. In exploring this concept through many lenses, I will also be reflecting on Tu B’shvat, the Jewish birthday for trees which is celebrated on the day this article was released.
Tu B’shvat: A Holiday for the Trees?
Tu B’shvat is a relic of the agricultural roots of Jewish culture — in the Torah, we are prohibited to eat the fruits of trees under three years of age. Rather than noting the actual birthday of each and every tree, the Rabbis decided that one day towards the end of the rainy season — somewhat arbitrarily selected as the 15th day of the month of Shvat — would serve as the birthday for all the trees.
What does this mean? By leaving these earliest fruits for birds and other animals, we ensure trees get a chance to spread their seeds afar. This reminds us that we have a responsibility to live in reciprocity with the wider natural world. Ecological science today must involve reassessing our relationship with trees, as well as the rest of the biosphere. We must ground this work in both ecology and in ethics, helping us construct new laws for living in harmony with our extensive natural community, our biosphere. Tu B’shvat reminds us that our ancestors have long worked to understand what is necessary for living well with other beings, with the trees, our community, all of Nature.
In Judaism, trees are often invoked as spiritual creations – throughout our texts, tree symbolism reflects holiness – at different points, people, the Torah, even the whole world are symbolized as trees. Tu B’shvat is a holiday for commemorating our living relationship to trees. We recall that indigenous peoples of all backgrounds have long established norms of relations that help people live in sustainable harmony with their environments. From ancient biblical proscriptions to the present day, we are reminded that as humans, we have a responsibility for learning to live in partnership with our ecosystems and with G-d. Like generations that have come before us, we have a responsibility to bring holiness and intention to our relationship with the natural world. Tu B’shvat asks us to embody this process, guiding us by asking: How can I honor the trees around me?
There is no single proper tradition or ritual celebration for Tu B’shvat. While the Jewish mystics who renewed this holiday in the 16th century celebrated a ritual feast and modern Jews often celebrate by planting trees, I am choosing to focus on the sacred intentions at its root — taking stock of our living relations, giving gratitude for the gifts that our ecosystems provide us. On Tu B’shvat, I, like many other Jews today, prefer to focus on all the things the trees give us, and on working to understand what we can do to give back.
An Ecology of Partnership
Throughout my academic research in ecology, I became increasingly interested in the myriad resources that plants share with their neighbors. Plants provide nectar and seeds to birds and insects, fruits to all sorts of organisms. Plants provide the oxygen that all life requires to breathe, and the organic matter necessary to build fertile soils. Each of these symbioses benefit both the plants and the animals they partner with. However, it was in learning about the mysterious world of life beneath our feet that plants began to enchant my world. For most plants, more than 70% of the energy they produce from sunlight ends up in the ground. While much of this ends up in the form of roots, a large proportion of this ends up beyond the roots: shared with the bacteria and fungi that in turn provide support for the plants, ensuring they can thrive together.
Together, along with their bacterial helpers, plants and fungi create a web through which water and nutrients flow through the soil. The fungal web that makes up this network is called the mycelium, and the connections these fungi form with plants are called mycorrhizae (my-koh-RHI-zee). Born out of mycorrhizal connections that penetrate into plant roots and exchange nutrients for sugars, this mutually-beneficial relationship (mutualism) extends well beyond the roots zone (rhizosphere), connecting fungi to many plants, and plants to many fungi. Together, they create an extensive network, binding communities through physical relationships and exchanges.
Diagram from the 2015 paper “Mycorrhizal ecology and evolution: the past, the present, and the future” showing various types of mycorrhizal fungi and their relationships with the wider plant community.
Research on this topic has taken off over the past decade. With popular science describing this network through the metaphor of the “World Wide Web”, people now often refer to this phenomenon as the “Wood Wide Web”. By taking this symbolic leap – from considering the physical network of the internet to researching mycorrhizal webs — exciting ecological questions arise: How large are these networks? How interconnected are they? What information moves along these pathways? Are there networks of roots that span continents?
While individual fungal mycelia have been found to span hundreds of acres, it is unclear how large interwoven networks (fungi connected to plants connected to fungi and so on) can actually be. While ecological barriers (rivers, mountains, oceans) tend to separate plant-fungal associations from one another, is it too great a leap to imagine an extensive interwoven network spans across entire regions? Across the world?
Mycelial Symbolism
It takes more than the growing body of research on mycelial networks — in its beautiful complexity and collaborative spirit — to explain the recent rise in the popularity of mushrooms and the “Wood Wide Web.” In this time of climatic chaos and collective upheaval, the mycelium is a symbol of interdependent thriving and interconnectedness — a reality which for so long has been relegated to the subterranean tendencies of our wider cosmopolitan culture.
From the perspective of our mutual belonging to the biosphere – this extensive community – the question as to whether a single physical mycelium connects the world begins to become superfluous. There is a greater point that people are waking up to: we are all genuinely entangled with the whole of life, here and there; past, present, and future. Each of us is like a plant, and the relational network that connects each of us to the vast web of interconnected life — the sociophysical fabric that links us all across difference, in real relations of connection, exchange, and dialogue — is like a mycelium.
The “mycelial” roots which connect the world extend from each organism through every environment, connecting us to all others, across space and time. This fractal-like network binds communities in real relations, and helps us realize the potential power that every single person has in shaping their wider context.
Our place embedded in this web, in the tendency of our communities towards mutualistic relations, and the ever-present role of these in shaping us through the decomposition and reconstitution of life again and again, can help us understand the necessity of our existence in coexistence with our wider contexts. This “mycelium” extends across space and time, a web of reciprocal cause and effect, of life and death – bringing each life into being through the creative dissolution and reconstruction of what came before. Coming to perceive this web, when we understand it as a whole – a web in which we are but one node of trillions stretching across space and time, yet almost paradoxically, we are at its center, bound to all creation: this is one way of approaching God. By recognizing that each of us is intertwined, each of us located in personal communities yet always connected to the single extensive community in which we are always already a part, we can see our responsibility for the Earth in stark terms: thou shalt not destroy the necessities of life. Each of us has a role to play in the marvelous dance of life. Each of us are a part of this extensive community — this web of relation, this “mycelium” — and each of us have a responsibility to maintain the health of our home together.
“The processes by which death and decay become life and renewal are divine mysteries”
- Rabbi Jill Hammer, Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams, 2022
It is this community — this web of life — that Tu B’shvat asks us to bind ourselves to, orienting ourselves to the wider ecological and spiritual world. In affirming the place of trees as part of a web of living coexistence, as part of our home, we commit ourselves to acting mutualistically as a part of the biosphere. The roots that connect us all are deep, stretching out wide from where we stand, beyond the limits of our comprehension. Yet, each of us is connected to each other through relationships and knowledge, from past into the present and from the present into the future. Each of us are wholly dependent on the sources of nourishment and sustenance the natural world provides us. From the air we breathe to the Earth we stand on, we could never flourish without our natural home, our biosphere. And so, every year, we take stock of the living neighbors we rely on — human and otherwise — and give gratitude for our collective life. Tu B’shvat reminds us of our interdependence, and in gratitude, we honor the web of life together.
Thank you for joining me on the journey through Jewish Ecology. Whether you just found your way here, or have been here since the beginning, I am so glad you have taken the time to engage in this creative spiritual dialogue. Regardless, I would love to hear your thoughts on our journey — both what your experience has been, and what you’d like to see. Please consider taking the survey below.
This blog aims to build a participatory dialogue in which important ideas at the intersection of Judaism and ecology can help us root ourselves in the World. This blog is not just for Jews; I aim for these articles to be accessible and impactful for anyone that is interested in building up an understanding of the role that spirituality, philosophy, and ethics play in bringing about a more peaceful, ecological, and sustainable future for all People and the World. If you can think of someone who might enjoy these articles, please consider sharing this blog!