Markets Under the Forest

Beneath a forest floor, tree roots are wrapped in fungal threads — mycorrhizae — that trade minerals for sugar. The network connects trees to one another, and isotope-tracing experiments show carbon genuinely moves between trees through it.

What that means is contested. The popular 'wood wide web' story — mother trees nurturing kin, forests as cooperatives — outruns the evidence, and several of its foundational studies have weathered serious critique. The honest version is stranger than the myth: a market, not a family, where fungi may be the ones setting prices. Forests are less sentimental and more economically sophisticated than we wanted them to be.

Photo: James St. John, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).