Hyphal Extensions

Flourishing engineering

Renee Davis — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:54:12 GMT

I want to share a little bit about a project I’ve been engaged in for a few years, and how the concepts of flourishing can interface with engineering.

This is a great time to be thinking about flourishing and how we actualize this concept. A lot of our former systems aren’t working. We’re feeling the systems-strain, and everything just feels so dried out…

Research is real magic

Renee Davis — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 02:22:08 GMT

Research is real magic. It’s going into the mystery and the unknown, casting a system (doing an experiment), and hearing the response (collecting data). It’s translating secrets and findings born in a hidden language (data analysis). This is working a liminal space, at the border of human knowledge.

There’s a primordial void of the not-yet-known. The di…

Lichens, pace harmony, and slow growth as design advantage

Renee Davis — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 01:13:56 GMT

Things are moving fast, aren’t they. Quickening.

Speed of growth is optimized in many settings, including in biology and engineering. In the bioindustry, fast growing organisms are selected and sought after over slower growing ones. This is rational in the context of biological timelines in production: faster growth means a shorter time to completion fo…

Hydrogels, microbes, and music at Mushroom Church

Renee Davis — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 04:55:35 GMT

Soils as outer space

Renee Davis — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 02:05:36 GMT

Imagine the underground as a cosmos. Soils and outer space both are vast, largely unmapped, and essential to life. Yet they are perceived radically differently.

I was able to witness the early phases of the mycological renaissance in the West, where a previously complex, opaque part of ecology (fungi) started to entice the public imagination. I'm seeing …

Cascadia enjoying itself

Renee Davis — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 01:02:41 GMT

Every year we practice letting go:

Big leaf maple relinquishes their leaves.

Lobster fungi mycelium prunes its networks.

Bacillus bacteria perish and nurture soil life-

release of bonds, order, shape; tissues become molecules.

A gathering on flourishing

Renee Davis — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 01:03:50 GMT

I love meeting new people who are signposts and wayshowers. Lighthouses and lantern-bearers; beacons and pathfinders. This group met recently at the Aspen Institute to talk about flourishing - what it is, how we assess it, and what it looks like to begin building a field of Flourishing Studies. I am so grateful to the incredible team at the Aspen Instit…

Fungal organizations: a mycological approach to human systems

Renee Davis — Wed, 14 May 2025 01:27:11 GMT

By Renee Davis & Jay Standish

Renee Davis is a mycologist, engineer, and systems designer based in Seattle, WA. Her work focuses on developing regenerative ecotechnologies based on fungal networks, weaving ecological intelligence into innovations that heal soils, systems, and societies. Jay Standish is a company builder and operator based in Oakland, CA.…

How I work

Renee Davis — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 01:41:48 GMT

I really love “How I Work” posts. I’ve always been fascinated by how people design their knowledge systems, creative processes, and personal archives. There’s something psychologically intimate about it, like you’re being invited into the backstage of someone’s mind. It always brings me closer to the person and their work.

I’ve been journaling since 2001…

Painting as process / The world is being created

Renee Davis — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 17:04:56 GMT

In 2022 I began a painting of ghost pipe, but it refused to become a portrait. It asked instead to be a field—a map of unseen relationships, of decay and emergence simultaneously. As I painted, I found myself not just documenting a plant, or even designing a new research program, but participating in the re-creation of the world.

First steps on a foreste…

Life is a guide—fungi are wayshowers to biophilic activism

Renee Davis — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 21:49:10 GMT

biophilia (noun): love of living things and nature, which some people believe humans are born with.

We are living through a time of vast, aching, open questions, as Ryan McGranaghan recently put it. Many of us are searching for leadership and direction, yet our political and cultural leadership structures often fail to connect, inspire, or build effectiv…

Beyond extraction: mycoheterotrophs as generative ecotechnology

Renee Davis — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 23:17:56 GMT

I started the Ghost Pipe Project in 2022. I had written two blog posts in 2015 and 2016 (now archived) about the plant and its developing conservation case. This plant can't be cultivated, is only found in the wild (yet another "non-timber forest product"), and has no baseline population studies or monitoring efforts in place. The data behind its secure…

Mycelial leadership

Renee Davis — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 04:18:10 GMT

Over the last 15 years, I've researched and learned from mycelium, hyphal connections, and how they work to improve production and cultivation at a mushroom company—what substrates produce better growth, what compounds are important to measure, etc. All the things mycelium can do. How fungi completely reshape environments. I was also curious about the d…

What if AI could think like a fungus?

Renee Davis — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 16:21:18 GMT

Something I’ve been thinking about lately are the parallels and contrasts between fungal and artificial neural networks. How do they relate, how are they different, and how can they inform one another?

Artificial neural networks are flourishing at a time where fungi are also enjoying a renaissance in the West. As people make sense of these fields, there…

Fungal infections and the mycological posthuman

Renee Davis — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 01:25:52 GMT

Over the last few years, as I’ve watched people become enamored by fungi, I wonder the extent of alteration and whether we have the capacity to fundamentally change ourselves through fungi.

Fungi are entering human bodies, consciousness, and culture at unprecedented scales and instigating significant changes in our systems. Pathogenic fungi with pandemic…