About two dozen members of The Blue Ridge Mycological Society follow a dirt path in rural Schuyler among towering trees and abundant plant life during early March, looking for an entry point to the kingdom of fungi.
The group, founded in 2017 by Pat Mitchell, comprises outdoors enthusiasts engaged in better understanding how fungi proliferates in the Commonwealth and identifying unique species. It’s a social club with a unique quirk — and a taste for mushrooms.
The nonprofit organization was recently referenced in legislation sponsored by first-term Democratic Del. Charlie Schmidt that aimed to create the Virginia Fungi Task Force — a panel of scientists, environmentalists and state officials examining “the economic potential of fungi” in the state.
Gabrielle Cerberville, an educator based in Waynesboro, last year published “Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life,” an exploration of wild edibles and their place in our changing appetites. Mushrooms are among that fare — though fungi can also be used to make fabric, furniture, building materials and, in some instances, a film that can replace plastic.
Cerberville isn’t dubious about the industrial or health and medical applications of mushrooms, but said claims need to be properly researched and vetted.
“Fungal medicine does hold a lot of promise, if we can get people to stop making sensationalized claims about things before we've gone through actual clinical trials,” she said on the trail in Schuyler. “Pretty much any mushroom supplement in the grocery store, it's going to make a bunch of wild claims about what it can do for your brain, what it can do for your energy, what it can do for your digestion. And none of those things have actually been properly studied … which is why these things live in the realm of supplements. But many of our daily medicines — we wouldn't have antibiotics without fungi.”
Mushrooms can also help clean up some types of environmental pollution and affect the health of the watershed.
Jay Ford, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s policy manager, spoke in favor of Schmidt’s mushroom task force bill in February, though the proposal was later continued until next year’s General Assembly session — meaning it could be revived and passed at a later date.
“This would be our first step towards getting our arms around what should be here, what we're losing through impacts of climate change, what those impacts are to our forests and soils,” Ford said. “And potentially what some economic development opportunities are, as we are currently sending a lot of raw materials to other states to grow mushrooms that we could be using here.”
Schmidt’s proposal would have required the task force to file regular reports to the state beginning in December 2027; reports then would have followed every 5 years. A fiscal impact statement paired with the proposal also directed the creation of a staff mycologist role that would have cost about $200,000 a year. Other states, like Pennsylvania, have a similar position.
Schmidt, who plans to pursue the legislation again next year, said ignoring fungi while making state policy is akin to not having oversight of plants or animals.
“We have boards that look at agricultural issues and water, and (the) Chesapeake Bay and fish, and all these other areas of both natural resources and the environment,” he said. “It should be the same for something as important as mushrooms.”
Thousands of fungal species have been identified in Virginia, and it’s possible that more exist but haven’t yet been cataloged — a task BRMS takes seriously. The group recently contributed to “The Claudius Project: Poisonous Mushrooms in Virginia,” a University of Virginia project indexing poisonous mushrooms found in the state.
Among those are mushrooms containing psilocybin, a hallucinogenic substance in more than 100 species, which have been used for recreational and medicinal purposes. It’s Schedule 1 substance at the federal level, though some localities — like Oregon and Washington D.C. — have created local guidelines.
A pair of separate proposals in Virginia this year would direct the state’s Board of Pharmacy to reschedule psilocybin, if and when the substance is reassessed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The bills have each been approved by the House and Senate, and can be acted upon by Gov. Abigail Spanberger until April 13.
Rytas Vilgalys, a Duke University biology professor, began researching mushrooms at the Mountain Lake Biological Station in Giles County when he was an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech. He still teaches at Mountain Lake in the summer and said the area is one of the more pristine places he’s done field work.
“The Blue Ridge area always has been sort of a famous hotspot for biodiversity — whether you're talking about salamanders or plants or fungi. Since people have started cataloging (fungal) species, it's always been known,” he said. “There's a long history there, but when you layer on top of all that history, the last 20 to 30 years this realization that there's even more diversity that we haven't been able to really put our finger on yet.”
There’s a potentially unstudied pool of fungi in the region at risk because of climate change and development. And that’s partially why the Blue Ridge Mycological Society exists.
“There's a lot that we don't know about how fungi play a role in the ecosystem. There's a lot of learning that needs to happen,” said Mitchell, BRMS president. “Right now, our big role is just cataloging and documenting. We hope to get more involved in understanding some of the roles that these fungi play.”
Cerberville, the educator and author, explained her interest in the fungal world while standing under a tree canopy. She described its underground machinations — sometimes called the “wood wide web” — and the reciprocal relationship mushrooms have with surrounding trees and plant life.
“They are sort of the hinge between life and death — the thing that makes life after death possible,” she said. “Because so many fungi are decomposers, they are what we rely on to decompose things — to decompose dead stuff, dead trees, to make soil, to create connections within forest systems. Trees can select fungal partners, based on how cooperative they are. You don't have forests without fungi.”