If I were to ask you about “human-fungi relations”, you might answer that they’re something we eat, cure with, or avoid in damp corners (or on our body, for that matter!). And you’d be right. But there’s another relevant dimension to them: in recent years, fungi have been proving themselves as a source of building materials.
As a child, I was often in charge of preparing the mayonnaise. I remember pouring with care (and faith) olive oil, raw egg, and lemon juice, hoping to have come up with the right amount of each so that the sauce would set - it did most of the time! In a bit more complex way, the energy transition seems to require some sort of cosmic alignment as well — every ingredient needs to fall into place: governance, technology, policy.
These days, buying groceries feels a bit like an act of financial harakiri. It doesn’t help - no more than our somewhat messed-up geopolitical situation right now- that we’ve already blown past the 1.5°C global warming limit— affecting harvests and food markets.
While some say they “wouldn’t hurt a fly”, others - in Kenya for example - put them to work! Meet the Black Soldier Fly (BSF), a tiny insect with a big mission. Its larvae are nature’s little recyclers, devouring organic waste and turning it into valuable byproducts supporting sustainable food and agricultural cycles.
Coal still powers around one third of the world’s electricity and sustains millions of jobs. Yet, with the Paris Agreement in mind, ‘coal’ and ‘goal’ don’t go together well. For a net-zero transition, this fossil fuel shoul be phased out well before 2050. But practical experiences of ‘just transitions’—ensuring that workers and communities aren’t left behind—remain rare. Every promising case, however imperfect, becomes thus a precious source for lessons.
