PhronesisForests are not collections of individual trees competing for resources. They are network economies: trees are connected underground by vast mycelial networks—mycorrhizal fungi—that route carbon, water, nitrogen, and phosphorus between trees based on need rather than proximity. We formalize the mycorrhizal network as displacement infrastructure within the Displacement Framework: a system that minimizes D() of other systems by routing resources from nodes in surplus to nodes in deficit.
The “Wood Wide Web” is the internet of the ground state. We develop the formal structure of this concept, characterize the network topology of mycelial systems, trace the full carbon loop from photosynthesis through decomposition, and analyze how conventional agriculture systematically destroys this infrastructure. The mycelium is the underground economy of the forest—and its disruption is a displacement whose cost propagates through soil carbon, forest resilience, and ultimately to atmospheric CO_2.
The return path—no-till agriculture, mycorrhizal inoculation, forest cover preservation—reconstructs the infrastructure that makes the planetary ground state maintainable.