Mycelial Knowing for Ecopsychology
Fungi and More-Than-Human Relations for Crisis Contexts
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21837070 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Merve Kurt (0000-0001-5955-4698, University of Dundee, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-19 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ecopsychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1942-9347 • E-ISSN: 1942-9347 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/19429347261452106 |
| OpenAlex | W7161843958 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 46 |
Ecopsychology argues that mental health cannot be understood separately from ecological conditions, but much of its quantitative evidence base still approaches nature mainly as an external therapeutic resource that acts on individuals. This article suggests that this way of framing the issue is epistemologically insufficient in the context of climate and environmental crisis, where ecological loss, fragility, and unequal exposure to harm are not peripheral concerns but part of what shapes psychological life itself. It develops mycelial knowing as a framework for ecopsychological knowledge production. Instead of using fungi as metaphors, the article turns to specific fungal ecologies and to debates within mycological science as an evidence-based way of rethinking how ecopsychological explanations are produced. Drawing on a conceptually structured narrative review of research on greenspace exposure, ecological grief, fungal ecology under global change, and common mycorrhizal networks, the article identifies four epistemological commitments, which are distributed causality, threshold visibility, non-purist transformation, and disciplined relationality. It also explains the mechanism through which these commitments are developed, which is heuristic and epistemic transfer under evidential constraint. In this way, the framework brings together the affirmative literature on nature contact and the literature on crisis without collapsing one into the other, while also locating ethical obligations within the process of knowledge production itself
Ecological crisis · Harm · Narrative · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Plant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies · Urban Green Space and Health
More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas
Global warming and recurrent mass bleaching of corals
The health benefits of the great outdoors
Effect of exposure to natural environment on health inequalities
Worldwide decline of the entomofauna
The relationship between nature connectedness and happiness
Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems
View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery
The connectedness to nature scale
Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss
The shallow and the deep, long‐range ecology movement. A summary∗
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Climate anxiety as posthuman knowledge
Inventing Temperature
Epistemic Injustice
Style' for historians and philosophers
The Nature Relatedness Scale
The restorative benefits of nature
Matters of care in technoscience
Transforming epistemological disconnection from the more-than-human world
The Ethnography of Infrastructure
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Situated Knowledges
The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography
| Highly cited | No |
|---|