I wanted to be a tree

I wanted to be a tree.

Turns out I’m actually mycorrhizal fungi.

The realisation came at a time when I was wondering whether anything I was doing was really making a difference. If you’ve spent time in conservation, environmental or healthcare work, that feeling might be familiar. The problems are so large, the need so constant, that it can sometimes feel like whatever we do is never quite enough.

Someone once reminded me that forests don’t survive on trees alone. Beneath the soil is an immense network of mycorrhizal fungi — connecting roots, redistributing nutrients, helping ecosystems recover after disturbance. The work is mostly invisible, but without it, the forest struggles.

That idea has stayed with me. In conservation work we often imagine impact in very visible terms. Standing up, speaking out, pu

shing forward, holding the line. Important work, absolutely. But ecological systems have never depended on a single way of contributing. They depend on guilds — different forms of life doing different kinds of work that together allow the system to function.

Some catalyse change.

Some stabilise things when everything feels fragile.

Some metabolise grief and help others remain in the work.

Some connect people and resources in ways that quietly strengthen the whole network.

Lately I’ve been exploring this through what I’ve been calling an ecological model of consciousness — a way of understanding human behaviour and systems through patterns we see in nature. Cycles of growth, stability, disruption and renewal. The roles that emerge within those cycles. The conditions that shape what is possible.

From that perspective, burnout can look a little different. It is not always a failure of the individual to cope. Sometimes it is what happens when a system keeps asking everyone to play the same role, long after that role is sustainable.

Many of the conservationists I speak with aren’t lacking commitment.

They’re carrying too much of the system’s grief.

What gives me hope is the possibility that renewal doesn’t depend on one kind of person carrying everything. It depends on many different roles emerging, each doing their part in the ecosystem of change.

Which means the question may not be how do I push harder to be the tree.

It might be: What role is the system asking me to play right now?

And what would it take to trust that this, too, is part of how the system renews?