The Golden Age of America Begins Right Now

Just not the one they're talking about.

(Photo: © Michael Wood)

The view from a blasted heath in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles County might seem pretty bleak today. But that’s because we’re looking at it from a surface level perspective. As we’ve all been trained to do. Mostly so we don’t bump into each other.

But if we were to look into the vast biosphere beneath our feet, we’d see a whole other story. We’d see the spores of organisms like Pyronema omphalodes just beginning to take root. If you’re not familiar with that species of fungus, there’s a clue to its value in its name. It’s a so-called “fire-loving” fungus that likes nothing more than to take root after a wildfire and start getting things organizized. It’s among the first organisisms to colonize burned areas, so it gets a lot of room to work. Its immediate function is stabilizing soil with its dense mycelial networks and preventing erosion. But then it also kick-starts nutrient cycling in the fragile ecosystem by breaking down charred organic matter and creating the right conditions for plants, microbes, and other fungi to return.

If we come back to this same blasted heath a few weeks, maybe a few months, from now, we’ll see something magical. We’ll see the blackened wreckage of the Palisades interlaced with bright orange to golden-orange patches. Small, velvety smooth, flattened disks—optimizized for spore dispersal and propagation— growing from the dark soil. These are the visible signs of Pyronema omphalodes’ reign as apex organism. Though, its true kingdom will exist beneath our feet, unseen but outstretched in all directions. A net of connective tissue encompassing and embracing the very earth. It’ll be a short reign. Once it’s done its job, it will diminish. Other plants and fungi will grow up around it. But it will never not be part of the forest. It will always be there, cycling nutrients, doing its part so the forest can thrive and adapt to change as needed. And when the next disaster comes, its heat-activated spores will come to life and get busy cleaning up the mess.

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Is there a lesson for us in all this? Doubtful. Lessons are for nerds, anyway. But there might be a parable. I do know this one very old parable from somewhere. It’s fairly common in Buddhist and Vedantic storytelling. So, I probably know it from a YouTube video. It goes something like this:

A man spends his entire life sitting on a simple wooden box. It’s probably a very comfortable box. We can maybe assume there’s a cushion involved. Sometimes, he takes the cushion off and uses it as a table. Maybe sometimes a place to build models. Not, like, model airplanes, because this is probably before airplanes existed. But maybe model boats? Not important. What is important is, though, is that the one thing he never does with the box is open it. That would fuck up his nice box. And then where would he put his cushion?

One day, a passing traveler sees the man sitting comfortably on his box and stops to asks him, “Hey, what’s inside the box?”

The man, ignoring the rudeness of the question, replies, “Nothing, it’s just an old box. I’ve had it forever. If there was anything useful in it, I’d know.”

The traveler is curious, though. He suggests, “Why don’t you open it and see?” Essentially calling the man an idiot to his face. To his face. Can you believe the cheek on travelers these days?

Anyway, the man chases the traveler off with a stick and, once his rage has had time to subside, he gets up and goes to borrow a crowbar from a guy a few boxes over. When he finally does pry it open, he discovers the box is filled with gold! And he feels like the biggest asshole in the world for so many reasons! Not the least of which is that he had all this wealth all that time. He could have been pampering himself with the most comfortable cushions in all the land. He wasted his life.

The end.

I don’t remember the moral to that parable. I think it has something to do with keeping travelers out of our land. But it does make me thimk.

Like, about all that gold taking root just beneath our feet, just asking for our patience to allow it to rise up and make itself seen. Everything looks so bad right now, but maybe things have to get bad now and then so we have opportunities to focus on regrowth. Maybe disasters—devastating and heartbreaking as they are—can somehow be useful for an ecosystem’s longterm health. Maybe they’re opportunities to pull focus away from the canopy of the trees up in the sky and back down to the roots that hold the forest in place. Maybe those roots deserve some attention for a while. Maybe, just maybe, if we take full advantage of this golden opportunity, this point in time right now can be remembered as the beginning of a golden age.

Actually golden. Not gilded.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a scene from Taxi Driver that pops into my head at the weirdest times: