It was a perfect Spring day – crisp but delicate, bright and full of opportunity – when I found myself amongst a group of strangers getting lost in London, England’s, Hampstead Heath as part of a beginners foraging course.

Common Beech Trees towered over us as we navigated around their bark, meadows of English bluebells chimed as we brushed through them and heeded a warning against picking cow parsley due to its likeness to hemlock, the deadly plant that saw the demise of Greek philosopher Socrates.

A range of fungi – Turkey Tail, Jelly Ear Mushroom and King Alfred’s Cakes – also made an appearance. While these species are known for immune-stimulating polysaccharides, popularity in Asian cuisine, and breaking down dead wood, respectively, they are one small piece of what’s known as the “World Wide Wood” – the mycelium network. 

The mycelium network is a vast web of roots that connect plants and trees underground.

Within this are also mycorrhizal networks, referring to a specific symbiotic fungal network that connects to the roots of plants and facilitates the exchange of nutrients and signals across the ecosystem. 

Mycorrhizal fungi are present basically everywhere on land and form relationships with most plant species, demonstrating widespread inter-species cooperation in complex ecological networks – and offering inspiration for how society can operate more sustainably. 

Once you’ve been introduced to these underground networks, it’s hard not to wonder: what would human communities look like if we organized the same way?

It takes me to bioregional thinking, a concept that piqued my interest earlier this year due to its focus on organizing society by the Earth’s natural features rather than political, man-made borders.

Scientifically, a bioregion is a geographical area defined by its natural and ecological characteristics – think climate, landforms, flora, fauna, watersheds.

Philosophically, bioregions are about understanding and honoring the spirit of a place, its history, and its interrelationships across watersheds, ecosystems, and communities – akin to mycorrhizal fungi’s symbiotic and context-dependent role in ecosystems.

For example, mycorrhizal fungi share nutrients and sound the bell when an attacker is present but still remain individual. This can be mirrored in bioregions, where people no doubt bring forward different strengths, skills and perspectives but work together to see their community thrive. This increases resilience, personal bonds, and strengthens local and cultural identity. 

Back on Hampstead Heath, I was unlucky number seven within our group. Everyone else came in pairs and little dialogue was exchanged between us.

The irony wasn’t lost – a group of people trying to reconnect with nature while acting in defiance of its inherent interconnectedness. 

Society as a whole has become more isolated, especially as young people spend less time socializing. Countries such as the US and UK have long favored individualism, evident through their strong cultural focus on personal achievement, competition and independence. 

This intensified during the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher years and remains entrenched, thanks in part to late-stage capitalism, which is defined by profit- and market-driven systems.

Thatcher, while Prime Minister of the UK, famously said that there’s no such thing as society – only individual men and women. Indeed, research also suggests that socioeconomic development can drive individualism – just cast your mind to the popular idiom ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’

But, as evident from mycorrhizal fungi, there’s strength in numbers.

Like many elements of nature, these networks can inspire us to design systems – communities, governance structures, and even technologies – that are inherently collaborative, decentralized and context specific, rather than competitive and isolated. 

“It’s not just learning about nature, it’s learning from nature,” Camilo Garzón, who looks after the information platform AskNature at the Biomimicry Institute, told me. He explained that the processes and relationships that humanity borrows from nature are specific to place and context, meaning they should be place-based when we implement them, too. 

In Santander, a region of Garzón’s native Colombia, it is common to eat leaf-cutter ants as a source of protein. What does that have to do with mycorrhizal fungi networks? Well, these leaf-cutter ants create networks of fungi that they harvest.

“And the thing about mycorrhizal networks is that it acts as one organism and, at the same time, its many disparate organisms working together,” Garzón said, noting how leaf-cutter ants are intertwined with local ecology and culture in the region. 

It’s not just a metaphor: humans are fundamentally dependent creatures. In youth and old age, we rely on others to care for us.

Just like mycorrhizal fungi networks, bioregions offer a blueprint for how human communities can organize themselves – be adaptive, place-based, and collaborative in order to enhance resilience and governance.

That’s what bioregional thinking aims to do, researchers Glenn Page and Juliana Bohórquez told me. When we spoke in September, the pair were in the middle of field work as part of Page’s organisation Cobalt, which supports bioregional work and is building a dedicated information and knowledge-sharing platform.

A core part of this school of thought is to be as self-sufficient as possible.

This makes sense environmentally, given how destructive globalization and industrialized food production have been, but it might not be realistic due to things like a bioregion’s climate and topography. 

The climate crisis is inherently intersectional and must be considered alongside health, meaning trade may be necessary.

Here, we can look back to mycorrhizal fungi, which can redirect nutrients from healthy plants to seedlings in need. The key to inter-bioregion trade is making sure bioregions aren’t dependent on one another, which would risk perpetuating existing societal injustices. 

Instead, linking economic activity with ecological regeneration could strengthen regional culture through greater community collaboration and autonomy.

People who interact with their environment frequently will likely want to see it thrive. This offers a powerful antidote to social fragmentation, which is currently worsened by mistrust in public institutions, concern for freedom of speech, and a crackdown on the right to protest, while faltering climate leadership has seen legislation rolled back or watered-down. 

While mycorrhizal fungi are, by definition, codependent, they reveal how more equitable trades can work. They exchange nutrients for carbon from plants. It’s a give-and-take relationship, rather than one based on exploitation. 

Bioregions would require a rethink of existing markets and governance structures with that in mind.

“It’s not just a barter society,” Page said. Instead, communities would be rooted in regeneration, prioritizing social well-being and long-term resilience over profit. While that can include bartering, it could also include fix-it days where members with skills in fixing electronics, household items, bikes, etc., share those skills.

Such practices would be a first step in prioritizing non-monetary forms of capital, such as social, ecological and spiritual. 

That’s because, when people participate in non-monetary exchanges, relationships are built on mutual aid, learning, and shared purpose, Page and Bohòrquez said. That’s in contrast to today's transactional dynamics and, often, a search for power. 

For Bohòrquez, digital currencies offer a way to trade while keeping money flowing to local, grassroots projects – whether that’s in your bioregion or not. There are already some examples of virtual currencies being used this way, she noted, as well as an ecosystem of tools popping up to facilitate it in what’s been dubbed “biofi” (bioregion finance). 

Such projects are typically built on decentralized technology.

Decentralization, in general, promises greater responsiveness and agility, meaning communities can respond to what's happening on the ground when needed – a far cry away from the centralized systems that govern today but another example of the way mycorrhizal fungi can inspire modern life, given they share warnings of disease and pests across their network.

Place-based organizing means work is grounded in local ecosystems, cultures and realities, rather than being imposed by external authorities – something that’s particularly important to someone like Bohòrquez, who has spent much of her career working towards peace in Colombia.

She emphasized how that affects inclusion: it means Indigenous wisdom, in her case, is blended with Western perspectives to ensure different types of knowledge are honored and nuanced solutions are introduced. 

Communities live and interact with their environment on a daily basis and, as a result, benefit from seeing tangible change from their actions.

Whether it's an uplift from poverty due to sharing culture, less food waste and therefore emissions, or access to renewable energy, bioregional decision-making has the potential to help improve lives and inspire further action.

To get involved in bioregion action, Page recommends moving “at the speed of trust”, meaning to start small and build up involvement over time.

Community projects often grow organically when nurtured, which could then inspire larger regional collaboration. 

The secret lies in many of the ideas discussed in this piece – the prioritization of cooperation and shared learning, shopping local and independent, exchanging skills and non-monetary value, participating in community forums, and, ultimately, listening.

In early fall, I finally tried to put my new foraging skills to the test (a small refusal to accept summer was over, I’ll admit). The blackberries along my favorite running route had perished, and I feared that I’d missed the moment.

Foraging is radical in itself; it is certainly an act that aligns with bioregional principles.

For me, it is the first step in reconnecting to the Earth’s biological systems that successfully operate in the background – and, of course, all year-round.

I needn’t have despaired, as mushrooms are now in season.