Mycelium and Grit: What Pennsylvania’s Forests Teach Us About Ecological Grief and Community Resilience

Beneath Pennsylvania’s forests lie a living infrastructure most of us never see: mycelium—threadlike fungal filaments that lace through soil—and the mycorrhizal networks they form with roots. In a healthy woodland, this underground web moves water and nutrients, trading minerals for sugar and quietly increasing the odds that young trees survive beneath the canopy.

At the center often stands an elder: the “mother tree.” Because it captures more sunlight, this tree produces more sugar than it needs—and, through fungal partnerships, shares that surplus with saplings struggling in shade. The forest, in other words, is not merely a collection of trees. It is a community built on exchange.

Mycelium and Grit, a new essay by PSR PA staff member Rebecca Cardin, begins with this ecological reality and follows it into the Marcellus Shale gas boom in Susquehanna County. The same basin that sustains spruce, moss, and mushrooms also holds oil and gas. But fracking reshapes the relationships that keep forests alive.

Fine particulate matter spewed into the air settles on leaves and can interfere with photosynthesis. Industrial overuse of water strains moisture-dependent fungal networks. Salt-laden brines and complex contaminants used to extract gas also alter soil chemistry in ways that may not be visible until damage is advanced.

But this is not simply a story about environmental degradation. It is a story about systems—and what happens when they fracture. Through extended interviews with residents and advocates Frank Finan and Rebecca Roter, Cardin examines ecological grief, community division, and the quiet determination and endurance of those who choose to document, organize, and persist.

Statistics can describe contamination. This essay captures something harder to quantify: how harm moves through bodies, relationships, and memory—and how resilience does, too.

We invite you to read Mycelium and Grit in full, spend time with the beautiful photographs, and consider the networks that hold our communities together—and what it means to protect them.