Guerrilla Mycology
Chanterelle Foggin interviews Caine Barlow
Caine Barlow. Photo by Bob Hutchison.
We recognize the generations of local Aboriginal people who have lived and derived their physical and spiritual needs from the forests, lakes, streams, creeks, rivers, and beaches of the tweed shire over many thousands of years as the traditional owners of this land. In particular, the Tul–gi-gin, Moorung Moobar, and the Goodjinburra clans of the Bundjalung nation, their wisdom, totems, ancestors, and their elders past, present, and emerging, on whose land this interview was conducted.
Caine Barlow is a Mycologist and Fungi Educator based in Melbourne, Australia. He gives regular talks on mycology, fungi conservation, and teaches gourmet mushroom cultivation. He is a member of the Australian organisations Entheogenesis Australis, The Australian Psychedelic Society, and a co-founder of the Entheome Foundation. He has written for DoubleBlind, ThirdWave, Microdose, is a “Trusted Identifier” on The Shroomery, and is a moderator and admin on many Facebook fungi groups. Caine’s Instagram is @guerrillamycology
Hi Caine, Welcome. Thank you for accepting the invitation to chat.
Hi Chanterelle. Thank you for inviting me to chat with you.
I know you have a deep passion for ethnobotany, and that it is an important topic for you. What's your favorite entheogen, and Why?
That is a multifaceted question for me, there are so many incredible plants and fungi entheogens, and I find them all fascinating. Being primarily fascinated with mycology , and entheogenic fungi - from that perspective - I'd have to say Psilocybe subaeruginosa would be my favorite entheogen. But in another context, I'm also fascinated with plants, and there is, I guess, a genus of plants that are very closely aligned with my upbringing that I would have to call my favorite entheogens. I would probably refer to Brugmansia sanguinea as my favorite plant entheogen and maybe even my “spirit flower”. Due to its reputation, i have never had any interest in the experience, and I have a very respectful relationship with these particular plants. The flower itself is a gorgeous trumpeted shape, and the colouring is quite spectacular, it's a beautiful yellow flower transitioning into red, with beautifully curled ends, visually stunning. So, my relationship with this entheogen began when I was a child - I was caught playing with some sanguinea flowers in my grandmothers garden; she told me off, telling me it was poisonous, and I guess at the time this kind of sparked a bit of an interest in it being a dangerous plant, but it wasn't till I was really a teenager that I fully appreciated the plant in a wider cultural context when I was reading books by Carlos Castaneda and he was describing Datura - Brugsmansia spp. are referred to as “Tree Datura”. With Brugsmansia spp., the flower droops, it hangs downwards and is quite pendulous and bell-like, whereas Datura spp., they are small hardy plants, and their flowers are held upwards. Brugmansia always feels like the centrepiece of the witches’ garden, and my interest in poisonous plants extends outward from them.
Caine, you have a way of being extremely generous, especially to novices in both the fungi and ethnobotany world; that's something that you're quite respected for in the underground community. But you also exist in the academic world. Can you tell us about your public persona and how you've wanted to be perceived, and how you flow between those two worlds?
I think because I was pretty much a self-taught mycologist, I really appreciate and respect the world of citizen science, knowing that you don't have to have academic credentials to be able to follow a scientific process. To be able to notice something interesting in the environment and to be able to then follow up that thought process, and to go ahead and do it, whether it be in mushroom cultivation or learning how to grow significant plants. You can work out how to do citizen science easily, and there are lots of examples of that happening, of people doing things by themselves to push science forward outside of that academic sphere. Academic study is important in the context of learning scientific rigor and scientific discipline; of learning the importance, say, of peer reviewed studies. Learning the scientific method is important in that context, and I felt that academia probably was important for me to learn that sense of discipline, to learn where and how to find information and then also how to interpret that correctly; then being able to communicate that. It is important to communicate science properly, and unfortunately, it becomes a problem in the community when science becomes diluted or misrepresented (often unintentionally). There are a lot of people who struggle to communicate science in a beneficial or relatable way. So, I hope I communicate effectively in my online interactions as a trusted identifier on places like The Shroomery, or PMANZ, or other groups on Facebook, and with the videos that I've done for Entheogenesis Australis and my work with MYCOmmunity Applied Mycology.
Psilocybe cubensis and Amanita muscaria. Artwork by IzWoz.
If there was one person who most influenced your journey into the field of ethnomycology, who and why was it? A mentor or author?
There was no one person who I would consider a mentor in terms of mycology, but I really valued my conversations with Dr Genevieve Gates. She gave me a lot of advice and encouragement. She definitely helped me decide on a certain direction and a pathway to follow. But mentoring, in general, comes from more than one person. I also value my interactions with and advice from Sapphire McMullan-Fisher, Tom May, who supervised my Master's research project, and Chilean mycologist Giuliana Furci. I think it is also important to point out that peer mentoring is incredibly valuable, and that there are countless individuals with various nom de plumes that helped me along the way.
In terms of authors and ethnomycology, perhaps Johnathan Ott. His depth of knowledge and rigour is something I look up to, particularly his knowledge across all the ethnobotanical and mycological literature, and bringing together such dense tomes as he has done. Richard Evans Schultes is also a significant figure, his respectful participation in cultural traditions and ceremonies; taking note of their plant narratives and regarding them as important. Knowing his life story as a botanist and explorer is inspiration in itself! I would have to include Gaston Guzman for his book, “The Genus Psilocybe”, which was a pretty significant book to come across as a teenager in my wanting to understand mycology and the genus Psilocybe. Carlos Casteneda, on the other hand, is where my fascination began. And then there is the Douglas Rushkoff book “Cyberia,” which was valuable in the sense that it introduced me to a sense of citizen science, that psychedelics were used widely in academics, and it introduced me to Terrence Mckenna. There are also contemporary authors whose works continue to inspire me; Alison Pouliot, Benedict Allen (a contemporary explorer who occasionally touches on ethnobotany), Langdon Cook, Peter McCoy. I could actually go on!
You’ve just mentioned some of the authors that influenced you in your journey into ethnobotany and one of the interesting aspects around ethnobotanists and ethnomycologists is often a fascination with books themselves. Would you say the shoe fits for you, and what is it about books that fascinates you?
Yes, the shoe definitely fits. There is definitely something about ethnobotanists and their book collections! You will quite often hear about famous ethnobotanists who have incredible book collections, such as Gordon Wasson, for example, who donated his collection to Harvard University, Terrence McKenna is known to have had a huge library, and then there's Jonathan Ott, who's also known to have had quite an impressive collection. Within Australia, there's Michael Bock, who's always quite happy to talk about his collection, and then I find myself having a collection spanning states. I have always been into books, and I definitely would call myself a bibliophile. I love books that are really well put together; old hardcovers with the leaf uncut, well bound - and the smell of old books almost verges on hallucinogenic. Books can be very beautiful objects.
I think a big part of the interest around books for ethnobotanists and ethnomycologists is the mystery around a lot of plants and fungi. There are so many cultural narratives and myths that refer to plants or fungi. As an ethnobotanist, you want to be able to work out what plant they are referring to. If you read Homer’s Odysseus, for example, one of those foundational mythological narratives taught in schools, Odysseus and his crew arrive at Circi's island, and she gives all the crewmen a brew that turns them into pigs. We are exposed to ethnobotanical narratives from a young age, stories that involve consuming a plant and something magical happening; as an ethnobotanist you have to wonder what the hell is the plant in the brew, what clues are present in the narrative, in the language, in the magic - what has happened here? How do you unravel the myths so to speak, trying to find the real narrative - so you find yourself reading those books and then following the trail and going down that garden path quite happily. You only have to look at the books put together by R. Gordon Wasson, Jonathan Ott, Sasha and Ann Shulgin, Keeper Trout, and Snu Voogelbreinder to see how highly valued books are within ethnobotany.
“I love books that are really well put together; old hardcovers with the leaf uncut, well bound - and the smell of old books almost verges on hallucinogenic. Books can be very beautiful objects”
What's the most creative, unusual, or out-of-the-box substrate that you've managed to cultivate mushrooms on?
I've used quite a few, I've grown mushrooms on old books. I had this beautiful photograph of growing fungi from Tolstoy’s “War and peace”. I’d been reading that damn book for, I think, six months, and I got to the middle = it was a copy from a “little library” I'd collected = and I got to the middle of the book, and someone had ripped out like fifty pages, so “well let's grow mushrooms on it!” I've used spent corn cobs, collected from after the kids had eaten their corn, frozen them, pressure cooked them, and grown mushrooms on them. I’ve used leftover cooked pasta unwanted from dinners. I've used shirts and jeans. I did try spent bunya nut shells to grow oyster mushrooms, but the whole situation went toxic. I suspect the presence of natural moulds makes these a complicated substrate, and you have to treat them a lot longer than I had time for. Probably the most experimental was using egg as a substrate, but that went foul. I’ve also done a lot of cultivation experiments using ground cricket powder… but that’s a story for another day.
Psilocybe subaeruginosa spore print. Image by Jonathan Carmichael.
Given you’ve been foraging mushrooms for 30 years, what changes have you observed environmentally? What about in the underground scene?
So in terms of ecology, I've noticed changes with regards to climate change, with the season starting later and later. When I began foraging in the early 90s around Hobart, the mushroom season would start mid-March, but then by the mid to the late 2000s, and then the early 2010s the season would be pushing mid-April to even May before it was even wet enough. Walking around the forest in April with the understory still so dry, with no mushrooms appearing, was for me a significant observation. The season had shifted essentially a whole four weeks over a 15 to 20 year time period.
Culturally, I noticed a change in the sense of respect around foraging, to treat the environment better. Mushroom patches, for example, were just getting trashed and then people realised that we all have to be careful about this. Too many people used to be hitting the same spots, but people are now communicating to others that it is best to forage gently, to not pick immature mushrooms, and leave no trace. To tread lightly! There has been an increase in the popularity of foraging and a change in the type of people wanting to forage, it used to be the thrill seeking kind of teenagers looking for Psilocybe, but then it transitioned from that to suddenly people in their 40s and people in their 50s who are learning about the beneficial aspects of Psilocybe.
There has been a whole other culture become more visible with the interest in foraging that has come from a sense of self-sufficiency. We certainly have seen an increase in people wanting to get back to nature in general - native, natural foods that are growing in their own environment, without pesticides and chemicals.
In previous interviews, you’ve said you found your tribe in the underground ethnobotany community that also tied into the early 90s psych trance doof music scene, so how has your love of psychedelics affected your musical tastes and appetite?
Psychedelics allow you to open your mind to different forms of artistic expression, for me, I developed an interest in experimental music types. I found a passion for the gritty, earthy textural nature of music. listening to what the sound waves are doing, how they are morphing, and the different ways sounds interact. Some of my interest in Psy trance was inspired by the fact that it happened in the forest. The Bush doof scene in the 90s was set out in the middle of the forest - they would set up a genny, speakers, and record decks playing tracks from records that were coming through from England. It was this amazing scene - you could hear the “doof, doof …” from miles away, then suddenly find yourself at the party with these incredible organic sounds, it's tribal, it’s rhythmic, the heartbeat of the earth, if you will, amongst these squelchy kinds of sounds. There is this appreciation of sound as textures and feelings and a certain physicality around it - you feel it really kind of resonance through you. A lot of that early psy trance was highly influenced by Indian culture. Indian culture is so psychedelic, Not only visually, but anyone who listens to Ravi Shankar will fully appreciate the harmonics and stuff that's going on in his music; so in psy trance, the use of samples of sitars and chanting, not only psychedelic but alluding to the spiritual.
As a teenager, I developed a love for Pink Floyd, particularly with the live recording “Live at Pompeii.” Pink Floyd were also associated heavily with the foundations of electronic music, they were experimenting with audio electronics very heavily, and were doing lovely, fascinating, textural stuff; so for me, it was a natural progression from the Floyd to what is now “old-school” psytrance.
“Psychedelics allow you to open your mind to different forms of artistic expression, for me I developed an interest in experimental music types. I found a passion for the gritty, earthy textural nature of music. listening to what the sound waves are doing, how they are morphing, the different tones, and different ways sounds interact.”
You studied permaculture in 2020. What permaculture principles do you apply in your cultivation and your life generally?
Permaculture is a really important thing for me, and it was just such a pleasure to have time through that lock down period in Melbourne to finally realise that interest in permaculture. I'd been chasing that opportunity to do a PDC for years.
I think probably the two most important permaculture principles for me are “value the marginal” - ethnomycology and ethnobotany feel like marginal spaces - and “observe and interact.” Watching a space, observing how the environment is changing throughout the seasons and observing patterns. I guess that kind of comes back to foraging as well, in that you're constantly observing the environment, you're looking for those things that perhaps indicate where a mushroom is going to appear, the settling of the dew, temperatures starting to drop. Suddenly there is that smell that emanates from the understory, that kind of fungal, slightly rotting smell, perhaps even the leaves starting to change colour. Interacting with those edge spaces that other people don't tend to. Fungi are edge dwellers; they tend to occur on the edge of the trail, on the edge of the garden.
You've done a lot of work with the charity Entheogenesis Australis. What attracted you to this organisation, and tell us about your favorite project you have worked on with them.
I discovered the online forum, The Corroboree in the mid 2000’s. I was getting heavily into ethnobotany again after a break; I was also co-administering a web forum called “Australian Ethnobotany”. I was in daily communication with people within the Australian Ethnobotany community, and at some point, it was mentioned “you know it's gonna be real quiet next week because we're all going to the EGA conference.” I was like what's this? It was too late to attend that year, that was 2006. The following year when it came up, I decided I was definitely getting a ticket. So I got a ticket, traveled to the event, and here was this amazing group hanging out in the forest talking about plants and ethnobotany. I kind of had no idea what I was getting myself into, it was part conference, part festival, and partly get together. For me, it was this incredible weekend in the forest talking about plants, talking about medicinal plants, and ethnomycology with all these incredibly knowledgeable people - I found my tribe. I'd been living in a small rural town in Tasmania, disconnected, and here was this community of people who had this dedication to plant medicines. I’ve attended every EGA conference since (bar one). EGA has been a significant part of my life for more than 15 years, and some of my best friends are in that group, so it's been lovely.
In terms of my favorite projects I've done with EGA; the educational stuff that I've been doing, communicating knowledge about fungi and the idea of being safe. The harm reduction aspect of educational videos where I talk about learning to identify a fungus and then its lookalikes is rewarding too. For me the harm reduction and raising community awareness aspects of the videos I've been involved in has been a standout part. This is something that I believe adds value to the whole community.
Your research project at the University of Melbourne was based around fungi conservation, what should foragers know about protecting and conserving our Australian funga?
Primarily it is being respectful of where you forage, not foraging within certain areas, state parks or national parks for example. It gets a little tricky because there's a certain sense of desirability around looking in these areas because you may find interesting things in those spaces. But yeah, no foraging in parks is a significant rule, then being sensitive to what is happening in an area, maybe there have been fire or floods, and these areas need time to come back from having been damaged, so some sensitivity to that end is very helpful. Other aspects around foraging are only take what you need, and because my interest is cultivation, one of the things I like to encourage is the idea that if you can cultivate a fungi rather than forage for it. So rather than going out and foraging for turkey tail (Trametes versicolor) or Ganoderma, for example, these can be very easily cultivated at home. This helps preserve endemic species in the wild so that in the future with the right funding Australian mycologists will be able to do the work we need around these species and others.
It's better to leave fungi in situ and to learn cultivation methods around how you can obtain samples without disturbing or destroying a mushroom. For example, the toothpick method, where you insert a toothpick into the tree and collect it a couple of weeks or months later, once it's myciliated, and then you can grow that out on agar. There is a little bit of a rule around maybe taking between only 50 to 75% of any given patch to leave some for other foragers and for the animals, because many marsupials enjoy a good munch on fungi as well.
Psilocybe subaeruginosa. Photo by Jonathan Carmichael.
What keeps you passionate about ethnomycology to this day?
What keeps me fascinated about ethnomycology are all the narratives that we have within our community that have not been followed up on, or that we are currently unaware of. Mushrooms are a hidden underground part of our culture in a weird way, they have these myths and narratives around them. There are works like Valentina and Gordon Wasson’s beautiful book “Mushrooms, Russia, and History”, or more recently Allison Pouliot’s “Allure of Fungi”. But what other myths, what other stories, are present in our community that have not yet been recorded or discussed? I think that for me, following those narratives is exciting.
What contemporaneous knowledge is there that we're not aware of that we can record, and what traditions, values, and practices are evolving now that are going to impact how we collect or see fungi going into the future?
Definitely, for me, this comes back to my interest around psychoactive fungi and recording our own evolving cultural practices, we have an Australian foraging culture, and because it's just seen as non-clinical use, it's kind of almost like it’s unregarded. It's like, hang on a minute, there's all these beautiful cultural practices that we have around psychoactive fungi that go unwritten and untalked about in mainstream culture because they are just seen as drug culture. I think there are some interesting studies to be explored there. I also feel that unground practices should be included in the ongoing discussion about how these medicines can be used, as the value in the experience becomes widely accepted and legitimised.
We are in a world where psilocybin-assisted therapy is becoming more prevalent. Are there any Australian Psilocybe mushrooms you see being utilized for future medical and or therapeutic use? If so, where and how?
I think there is a small problem, in that we currently don't fully understand the Australian Psilocybe species diversity. We’re aware of a number of species. Psilocybe cubensis, which is an introduced species and probably for the short and medium term, would probably be the fungi that gains the most attention in terms of ongoing psilocybin-assisted therapy and how to access psilocybin for that therapy. Because it is so culturally popular, it's not seen as a problematic mushroom. Personally, I see Psilocybe subaeruginosa as a little bit more interesting because it is such a potent mushroom and from anecdotal conversations, it seems to have more of an interesting entourage (or ensemble) effect. They may produce other interesting compounds, alongside baeocystin, nor-psilocybin nor-baeocystin, aeruginescen, and MAO inhibitors. This is where it's an evolving space, there are groups like Hyphea Labs in Oakland California, who are looking into what these mushrooms are producing and in what amounts. They are able to do that as they are in a decriminalized space. This is the thing about psilocybin containing mushrooms in Australia; we are held back because of the law and lack of research. As much as I see Psilocybe subaeruginosa as an interesting case, it also has the wood lovers’ paralysis issue around it. That research has only just started to be put together, and thanks to people like Symon Beck, we are starting to get a better idea of how it works, and how we can provide harm reduction to the community.
We don't know what other psychoactive mushrooms there are within Australia. There are new species being found - people are looking in areas where they hadn’t looked previously. We have Psilocybe alutacea; we don't know what the alkaloid content is yet, but that's a nice endemic mushroom. Psilocybe papuana could potentially be interesting as well, but with P. papuana it seems to be only found in remnant rainforest - they're the kind of fungi where we probably need to be careful in terms of conservation. But then people are finding other exciting things; there's new species that have been given community names like Psilocybe sp. “tasmaniana”, which is not the described P. tasmaniana, but it's being referred to as P. tasmaniana by overseas researchers. Then there is P. samuiensis which is probably introduced.
How do I see them being used in the future? To treat mental health, but also for wellness. I don't think the spiritual value should be understated - by better understanding yourself, your needs, and what you want to achieve in life, they give you the opportunity to heal. I think there's a clear interest in people wanting the natural mushroom rather than the synthesized product, the majority of groups in the United States have realized this, and that's what they are pushing for. I think groups in Australia are following the trend. Australia is a long way behind though, because of our legal restrictions, because of the way the TGA works, but also with the way that federal and state laws work. These mushrooms need to be rescheduled, and we can't decriminalize in the same way that some of these cities and regions in the United States can, so there needs to be a bit of a different push. The recent decrimininalisation of recreational amounts of various substances in the ACT is really inspiring, and it feels very positive.
“It’s like, hang on a minute, there’s all these beautiful cultural practices that we have around psychoactive fungi that go unwritten and untalked about in mainstream culture because they are just seen as drug culture. I think there are some interesting studies to be explored there. ”
How can mushrooms change the world?
There are so many ways that mushrooms can change the world! Fungi are culinary delights - I feel like particularly in Australia we're getting over our mycophobia and people are taking a bigger interest in fungi in general. Fungi are a great source of protein, and they taste amazing, so they are, as you know, great ways that we can add to our diets. Mushrooms have this incredible umami flavour and I feel that this is only just being explored in the broader Australian culinary community. The Australian foraging community is helping some fungi become more highly valued, and through being more highly valued, there's growing interest in how we can cultivate them. I think there's definitely a culinary sense of them changing the world.
In terms of agriculture and food supply, Pleutotus mushrooms can grow off many kinds of agricultural plant waste, grow from cardboard, or other plant-based waste like sawdust from timber mills. All the effort that goes into Agaricus, when there are many fungi that can be cultivated so much easier!
There is also the promise that fungi can also help in breaking down industrial waste. In environmental remediation, particularly with hydrocarbon pollutants, as with oil spills. There is this whole process of taking soil from contaminated sites, with decades and decades of contaminants, heavy metals, and hydrocarbon waste, and we need to be able to treat that soil. There is some potential for growing oyster mushrooms on some of that waste to reduce the amount of hydrocarbons, and using the mushrooms to collect and remove heavy metals. There are also strategies using plants and fungi together to fix those problems.
Fungi materials are becoming really interesting - fungi leather, fungi fashion. Amanda Morgan from Fungi Solutions, who happens to be another speaker at EGA 2022. I've heard her talk about how fungi is so nice against the skin and doesn't cause a reaction that some other materials have. Amanda is creating this incredible packaging to replace polystyrene, plastics, or other environmentally unfriendly packaging methods. Basically, she's growing mycelium through sawdust that's been shaped using molds, and they're really lovely products. They look beautiful, and it's that fungi technology crossover again. There is an architect in NSW, with a startup called MycoEden, where he's growing insulation panels for houses made out of mycelial materials. I am looking forward to seeing what he does.
Also, fungi for medicine, I'm curious to see how psilocybin will change the world with it being used not only for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and complex trauma, but also to compliment wellness. There are many people who are talking about how it's benefited them, and it's lovely to see those narratives. I think wellness is an important aspect. These beautiful spiritual states that come about from these fungi and how they can help people to improve their lives, in a sense helping people to “think smarter, not harder,” about how they can better live their lives.
What do you like most about doing mushroom workshops?
I love people going away realising how accessible cultivation actually is, realising that it's not a complicated process. To go away with a sense of enthusiasm and agency. I love watching adults and kids leaving my workshops with their eyes shining and beaming, wanting to know more about fungi with a sense of confidence around growing their own food, that this is not a complicated hobby. Providing people with a full circle moment in their lives is immensely satisfying. I also love teaching that it's not a strict method; mushroom cultivation is, in fact, super creative, and it's also empowering on so many levels.
Where can people find you?
In person, you’ll find me at various EGA or APS (Australian Psychedelic Society) events, or the odd festival. I’ll be speaking and running workshops at Garden States 2022. There is also my Instagram, GuerrillaMycology, and my website guerrillamycology.com, where you can reach me through my contact form. My website lists my upcoming workshops around Australia, and you may even find me in the forest amongst the trees.
Thank you very much Caine.
Thank you, Chanterelle.
Psilocybe cubensis. Photo by Enjaytee.
