So enjoyed speaking with Kamea Chayne

“An example I always love to use when I talk about disability is ghost pipe, monotropa uniflora, which is a small, almost like bowing, it looks like it's praying, white plant that grows in the undergrowth of the forest up in the Hudson Valley where I live…

They're white because they don't photosynthesize. They don't do their own food production. They receive all of their nourishment from underground mycorrhizal systems. […]

People talk about parasitism and commensalism as being two different things, but they’re actually on the same spectrum of symbiosis.

Most relationships oftentimes oscillate between those two poles… in the millennia in which they are involved mutualistically… It depends on when you look at the relationship, when you take the snapshot.

For me, it's more interesting to think about… [how] the ghost pipe is receiving food and not giving anything back. But what about the quality of the relationship? What if the Russula and Lactarius [mycorrhizal systems] know that it's really important for this being to be part of the ecosystem?“