Sustainers of the Forest – a tight topic

Last Updated on August 1, 2016 by Patrick

I’ve recently watched some abstract photography portfolios and one of the abstract photographers said something like this, which I found it amazing: “What we see as decomposition from our point of view is recomposition from nature’s point of view.” – and it impacted me. I also remember the fact that the deciduous trees shed their leaves in autumn and grow new ones in spring and they are not at all attached to the past leaves that decompose on the forest floor, or at least they don’t show it. :-D

So, I revisited my collection of photos from Cornu de Sus (Upper Cornell), Câmpina County, in my country, from the beginning of september, in 2013, and I’ve revised all of the images and I found some really good ones that I’m going to keep. And one of them was this image of a macro with mushrooms on the beech trees forest floor which I processed it a little and turned it into black and white, since it looked much better.

Now, I don’t know how many of you know this about the forest habitats and their sustainability. I have studied this case recently and some people told me that our planet, for example, is not sustainable at all. I found this to be a nonsense. Of course it is sustainable and one can understand this by merely going outdoors, in nature one day and by paying attention to it and see how nature generates and regenerates itself constantly, everlasting, without stop. The only ones who decided (yeah, your read well – decided) to be unsustainable is us, humans.

Ok, so I was going down hill, actually, in the forest and I reached the forest road which was used by the locals in the area and I was looking around, I was contemplating this beautiful place, this beautiful, serene and quiet forest in the morning (I should mention that it wasn’t the first time I went there, but actually a few times before this). All of the sudden I saw these white mushrooms on the right side of the path and I decided to shoot some macro with them.

As I am writing this presentation, the story of the forest comes to my mind. Have you ever wondered why forests thrive on their own? I did. I heard it from a native american. He was speaking about the forest fungi and their contribution to the whole forest habitat. He tells how the fungi maintain the entire forest habitat by providing it with nutrients from breaking down of all the remains on the forest floor. Whichever gets on the forest floor is decomposed in the course of time to it’s primary elements in order to transfer them symbiotically to the trees and to the other plants. And thus the whole forest habitat sustains itself through this symbiosis between species. There’s a whole network of white thin filaments (like spider webs) entangling the forest through the ground and it could actually be just one fungus covering the whole forest from within, so to speak (could be this large). If a tree falls down, for example, the fungus or fungi will decompose it through time to feed the forest once again. This is the natural recycling process of the forest.

Ain’t that amazing? Do we have something to learn from this? Absolutely!

Click on the image below for a better view!