Fungi, Ants, and The Fire These Times
I like ants. I also like fungi. I like them a lot. When Elia asked me what living organisms came to mind when I thought about the podcast, it will be of little surprise to anyone who knows me that I answered “fungi! …and maybe ants”.
Solely in numeric terms, both ants and fungi are incredibly humbling. For every human on the planet, there are 2.5 million ants, which roughly equates to a global ant population of 20 quadrillion. Humans have named around 150,000 species of fungi, but this is estimated to be, at best, only 3-8% of fungi in existence. A single teaspoon of soil can contain up to 10km of fungal threads, called hyphae. Fungi have been around for roughly 1.4 billion years. They have survived all 5 mass extinctions, and will undoubtedly survive the 6th. Ants evolved roughly 168 millions years ago. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, a mere 200,000 years. We have a lot to learn from ants and fungi. We have lots to learn with them, for we are as much entangled in the kaleidoscope of life as they are.
I think of projects like the podcast as emergent properties of this learning-with. In order to learn-with, (rather than extract from) you must become porous. Porous in a way that queers the borders the powers-that-be are so obsessed with enforcing, be they borders between nation states, identities, stories, species, or disciplines. The podcast is the work of an individual but also of a collective; of beings and organisms and their microbial symbionts (gut bacteria et al) spanning time and space; it is the work of Elia, but also of fungi, ants, and every lifeworld in between.
Why fungi?
The mycologist Merlin Sheldrake describes the vast networks of fungal threads in the soil as “complex amplifiers of interactions.” Smells like TFTT to me. Let me explain.
Colonial capitalism values vast monocultures easily exploited for profit. Many of the cultural and literal landscapes we inhabit have been subsumed into these systems, where the pace and rate of consumption must grow ever faster, and the diversity of experience and ways of being are weeded out by algorithmic herbicides. Colonial capitalism treats soil like dirt, not as the living breathing infinitely complex web of relations that sustain all life on earth. (A teaspoon of soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet.) It values only that which can be counted, catalogued, extracted and exploited.
Fungi are decomposers, orchestrators of the elegant cycles of death and decay that enable life. They and other soil dwelling organisms compost all the shit, grief, rubbish, and beauty of organic matter (yup, you count as organic matter) and transform it into new beginnings and dyings over and over and over again. Most fungi remain hidden in the soil, emerging as mushrooms only occasionally when the time is right and cast their spores (like seeds, but fungi-style), often only for a few short hours.
I think of each podcast episode like a mushroom, quietly emerging from the chorus of decomposers below. Each episode is a small emergence of the vast networks of decomposers working, digesting, excreting and decaying the systems of oppression and vast monocultures we are all embroiled in. The spores cast by each episode are scattered far, and perhaps find fertile ground in the bodyminds of listeners, catalysing further cycles of digestion and decomposition.
Fungi serve as edge-queerers. With fungi, you never quite know where one organism ends and another begins. Their microscopic thread-like bodies form vast subterranean networks which, while probably not embodiments of utopic socialism as some might claim, are one of the oldest certainties; that life is sustained not by individuals but by the relationships between them. These relationships share information and resources in ways that enable life in all its multitudes. Rather than the survival of the fittest/richest/most powerful, it is the survival of those who muddle along together in complex and messy ways.
In more ways than one, The Fire These Times is an edge-queerer, a decomposer, an amplifier of interactions. I think the fungi would approve.
Why ants?
Like fungi, ants are also anathema to the human obsession with the individual. For ants, there are no such things as individuals, only collectives. Within an ant society there is no hierarchy. Humans have given names to the different roles within ant colonies, such as queen, worker, or drone. But none of these roles have power or authority over others. Each has a specific function within the colony, but they mean anything only in relation to the collective.
An ant colony is in many ways the living organism, the emergent expression of sometimes thousands of ants working in collective cooperation. Viewed in isolation, an individual ant appears vulnerable and powerless. Yet, collectively, these tiny creatures are able to shape entire ecosystems through geomorphic and biological processes. They disperse seeds in a symbiotic relationship with certain plant species, change the chemical composition of soil and creating microclimates with their ant hills, have numerous intricate symbiotic relationships with other organisms such as butterflies and have developed multiple sophisticated forms of agriculture thousands of years before humans (including the herding of aphids and cultivation of fungi in underground gardens, deploying species of cyanobacteria to protect their crops). All before homo sapiens were a sparkle in evolution’s eye. The origins of regenerative agriculture, mutual aid, and anarchist organising? Ants.
Some ants have been shown to make collective decisions that prioritise the minorities within their colonies: “In human and animal societies, consensus typically forms when individuals align with the majority’s choice. However, in the C. sanctus experiment, things played out differently. When the majority had access to the better nest, the ants in the minority—stuck in the worse nest—didn’t follow. Instead, the majority, despite having the superior option, chose to concede. In an unexpected “majority concession,” they abandoned the better nest to join the minority, placing colony unity above individual gain.”
In other words, ants understand the importance of voices from the periphery; they know that the conditions faced by a few will impact the whole; if not immediately, then at some point down the line. Ants know the fire these times is also the fire that time, and that the fire raging over there is also the fire raging over here. Sound familiar?
Ants have also collaborated in non-violent direct action by Indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico who are fighting for human rights, land autonomy and social justice. Instead of armed violence, when confronted with riot police or state-sanctioned death squads, members of the CIPO-RFM “throw bags of tiny ants at the horses. The ants have a vicious fiery bite and drive the horses wild, sowing confusion in police ranks and defeating attempts to suppress the organisation.” The ants are understood as comrades in the struggle against authoritarianism, extraction and exploitation.
While I’ve yet to convince Elia to have an ant as guest on the podcast, TFTT embodies the unexpected alliances and solidarities that emerge when we exercise the refusal to fight, think, tell stories, and live on the terms of neoliberal capitalism, colonialism, sectarianism, authoritarianism, and all the other -isms aflame in these times.
Each image of fungi in the logo is a species I have encountered over the past few years in and around Brighton, UK. The ants are Yellow Meadow Ants (Lasius flavus), and also neighbours who live on the chalk grassland around Brighton. I owe them and the fungi my deepest thanks.
References:
- David Hibbett, László G. Nagy, R. Henrik Nilsson. (2025). Fungal diversity, evolution, and classification, Current Biology, Volume 35, Issue 11 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.053.
- The Blindboy Podcast, Episode 467. The Magic of Mushrooms with Merlin Sheldrake, (2026).
- Schmidt, M. (2005) Fire-ants and flower: Revolutionary anarchism in Latin America and the lessons for South Africa
- Rajendran, H., Haluts, A., Gov, N. S., & Feinerman, O. (2022). Ants resort to majority concession to reach Democratic consensus in the presence of a persistent minority. Current Biology, 32(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.12.013