Denying reality leads to life-threatening situations

Yesterday I wrote about the lack of snow in the mountains in early January. Winter sports fans will have to wait for now. More dangerous than the lack of fun is the fact that if we don't get enough precipitation in winter, we start the year with a water shortage. I mentioned that the water from the Christmas floods could not be captured because the straight riverbeds are cut deep and the channels are at higher ground. The water flows downstream and out of the country. The Carpathian Basin, which lives like an Edenic place in the Hungarian psyche, is moving towards a semi-arid steppe state. We are losing forests. What is left in their place, see the current Mediterranean macchia, which was once "Durilignosa" forests. Forests are species-rich habitats. In addition, their water-holding capacity is high and really large forests can irrigate themselves. See rainforests. Our species was very stupid to cut them out. We put our own lives in danger. The fact of the extinction wave is beyond the pendulum of many, but if our civilisation collapses, everyone will feel it and many of us will die. This is the reality.

Fungi respond to climate change. People cling to their lives as usual, and in their justified anxiety deny reality because they are powerless. Fungi are instinctive and act. Humans are cretinous creatures of the living world, intelligent in theory but dying out in a crisis of their own making. I like irony, but when it hits me, well, my smile is not sincere. It really fascinates me that fungi have been responding to climate change for decades and trying to adapt in their own way. Amanita caesarea and Amanita franchetii two fungi that came from the Mediterranean, their spores flying on the winds. Both are warm-loving, and their northward spread is a pretty clear sign of a warming climate! When in the summer of 2017, I found Caesar's mushroom everywhere in the forests of one of our northern mountains, I knew it was a bad. This mountain region of ours is almost alpine in nature, so it's cold. That was the past. Not cold anymore, very not! The gilded amanita is common in oak plantations of Békés county. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe my eyes. Then of course it dawned on me that I was seeing another sign of climate change.

The poplar fieldcap Cyclocybe cylindracea is listed as a rare warm-loving species in one of my old mushroom books. By the time I grew up, it had become one of the most common edible mushrooms in Békés County. The northward spread of Mediterranean fungi is a clear sign of a warming climate. Anyone who denies this is a danger to themselves and other living things. Don't deny reality, because you'll fall cruelly for it. We are surrounded by signs, which are not just signs, but phenomena that subvert our lives. I wonder how to find a way out of this big problem. Because action is needed, that's clear. After all, fungi, which are very simple creatures, also act. If you ignore climate change and don't change your lifestyle, if you don't do everything you can to slow it down, you're dumber than a mushroom. And yet our species considers itself the pinnacle of creation.