Thinking With the Wood Wide Web: Exploring Coexistence Beyond Anthropocentrism

In my Environmental Humanities Master’s thesis, I will explore the ecological system known as the Wood Wide Web through interdisciplinary perspectives involving both scientific literature and the humanities. The Wood Wide Web is known in the scientific world as the mycorrhizal network, an ecological assemblage of fungi and plant roots. The aim of the thesis is to investigate the Wood Wide Web as a multispecies phenomenon in order to rethink interactions among species and coexistence. I am adopting a methodology that includes a conceptual and analytical approach, with which I will introduce and analyze ideas and theories critically; the thesis will be interdisciplinary, ranging from scientific studies to humanistic disciplines. I will explore the space between the natural sciences and humanities, highlighting the potentialities of the Wood Wide Web as an ecological process entangled with humans. In the first part, I will delineate the ecological and scientific research of mycorrhizal networks in order to comprehend the functioning and implications of this complex system. I will focus particularly on Suzanne Simard’s research and the origin of the Wood Wide Web concept and as well as on the central role that fungi are acquiring. This chapter gives the basis for the critique of anthropocentrism through an investigation of Darwinism’s legacy, thanks to the challenges that the mycorrhizal network study has implied. The second section deconstructs human exceptionalism by revisiting the “Great Divide” described by Latour and examining how nature–culture separation has shaped modern political thought. It analyzes interdependence as a material and ontological condition, focusing on the implications of nonhuman agency. Drawing on relational ontology authors, the Wood Wide Web functions both as a scientific case study and as an epistemic interlocutor that unsettles assumptions of autonomy and individuality. Richard Powers’ The Overstory serves as a literary case study, showing how narrative can render perceptible nonhuman agency, multispecies entanglements, and deep temporal scales. The final section examines how recognizing interdependence reshapes political imagination, engaging critiques of new materialism, the chapter turns to cosmopolitics, Multispecies Justice, and care as frameworks for rethinking governance under conditions of ecological entanglement.