Mycelial Knowing for Ecopsychology: Fungi and More-Than-Human Relations for Crisis Contexts

Abstract

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.