The real problems facing UK field mycology:

from the Annual General Meeting, March 21st 2010

A typical sentiment from the lower plants officer at Scottish Natural Heritage, David Genney: The problems between the ABFG and BMS seem insurmountable. A great shame. But not a debate I think I should enter.   Few of us want the politics, but while it is important to keep them in proportion, if we don't face up to them, they are having a detrimental effect on the advance of field mycology and of fungal conservation..

There have been too many failed projects in field mycology, decisions that make no mycological, no conservatory, no economic sense. We have a responsibility to look after our UK stocks of fungi for the next generation, and we seem to be making a ‘dog's breakfast' of it by allowing political sensitivities to get in the way of progress.   Example: in 2006 the ABFG invested in a set of online information pages that were designed to help everybody on BAP species, including what they actually look like, where they exist, and when they have been recorded. However, 4 years on, the dossiers can't be put to use, because a number of recorders and groups are still not offering to copy across their data. “Why should we help the ABFG? It's not our club!”

CATE is a formidable achievement that shows what can be done through sensible cooperation. A group of different specialists working together have produced something innovative, exciting, and far, far in advance of anything else that British mycology has at its disposal for data management.   But . . . one typical observation among others: You are as things stand wasting your time trying to get Group X on board with CATE, it is very heavily loaded, more than ever now, with the old school.

The January 2010 BMS strategy document pointedly sidesteps any suggestion of working with the ABFG, in spite of various approaches. It states in effect that the Society should focus on restoring a monopoly or ‘turn its attention completely towards inclusiveness.'   But the monopoly position finds little support within the broader field community , which I think these days would see it as a fairly dated position.

Perversely, that entrenched position of putting the clock back, regardless of whether or not it works efficiently, has if anything hastened the erosion of 'inclusiveness'. Pete Stevens of Natural England has noted: There now seems to be greater polarisation than ever. I would suggest that dogmatism can be its own worst enemy.

There is no question of the ABFG intruding on areas in which the BMS is best equipped and unquestionably does a first rate job. But there are other areas, notably concerned with field mycology and conservation, where the ABFG has clearly has moved ahead. It has the bulk of membership support, has made substantial investment, and has delivered results.

The ABFG has now invested about £20,000 in CATE, a lot of money, and CATE is much the more effective machinery for data analysis. The challenge is how to break the impasse that is stopping CATE from doing what it is designed to do, and worse, is now threatening to copy it.

Spend £20k by all means, but not emulating an investment that's already been made, to try and gain ground in some kind of political horse race. Field mycology can't afford continual squandering of resources and there is a plea to the people who adopt the position: I'm not going to help, because that might put my gang at a disadvantage : Step back for a moment and take another look. The ABFG and the BMS are not rival gangs, but inevitably one is going to develop strengths that the other doesn't achieve in quite the same degree, and vice versa.

When money and effort has been pumped into CATE to advance the conservation effort where it was stalling, and there are people still determined to knock it and block it, simply because their lot aren't running it, for many on the outside it begins to look like complete madness.

People on the outside now compare this situation unfavourably against birds. If the RSPB and BTO were able to work out a sensible division of responsibility for the benefit of ornithology, isn't it about time we as an interest group did so for mycology? If we don't sort this out I believe that the next generation of fungal caretakers will have the right to look back at us and say, ‘ they screwed it up' .

The sensible route is to go forwards realising division of management responsibility with the BMS, and put an end to the rivalry and duplication of effort. We keep a strong independent ABFG, with its own integrity, its constitution, its policy of constructive innovation, its focus on practicalities. It's important not to forget that the ABFG and the field wing of the BMS do have accountably different policies about what is the best way forward. The ABFG would not exist otherwise.

But having 2 voluntary organisations with limited resources competing against one another for the same ground becomes a waste of time, money, and energy, and after 10 years of it, UK fungi deserve better.

Michael Jordan

March 2010

.