This blog has been a long time coming. A recent interaction with an overly emotional person finally sparked the powder keg. I have spent years working on trying to debunk the bull#@t about our worlds favorite new fungal pathogen. But the myths and legends just keep on coming. Year after year. While I am aware that I do not have the entire world as my audience I do hope that the next time someone tells you all the fairies will die if you harvest any more Chaga that you will please point them in the direction of this blog. Hopefully this way, little by little, we can chip away at the nonsensical claims made about Chaga.
Because a fellow forager and online presence that I am acquainted with has already written a very extensive and dare I say the best blog on everything pertaining to Chaga the internet has available, I will not be writing here about anything but the myths and legends. If you want to read Matthew Normansell’s article go here. Make sure you read it in an English accent as Matt is from England.
#1. Chaga Is Not A Mushroom
Chaga is a sterile form made up of the tissues of the Inonotus obliquus and the Birch tree host, that scientists usually call a “Sclerotium”. Some people call it a “Pseudo-sclerotium”. What this tells us essentially is that this mass is not a Sporocarp (produces no spores) , and that it is a growth occurring as a result of the fight between the fungal pathogen (Chaga) and the host tree (Birch). The medicinal aspects that we love to promote about this growth are as much a product of the tree as they are of the fungus. One could hypothesize then, as I am wont to do, that if “Chaga” is found on any other tree it is not truly Chaga.
Beautiful Tree Cancer!
#2. No, You Do Not Have To Harvest In Winter.
Nobody has ever been able to point me in the direction of the imbecile that began this myth, but I wish they would. This one really irks me. Imagine having a cancerous growth on your body and people insisting to you that its chemistry is different in the winter. That is how ridiculous this myth is. There has never, not ever, been a single paper showing that Chaga harvested outside of the winter months has any difference in chemistry. Not a one. I harvest Chaga in the winter months because it is easier to see as the trees have no leaves, and there is nothing else to forage besides conifer needles. That’s it. No fancy explanation required. If I see a Chaga chunk in another month I most certainly take it if I need or want it, but I make sure to dry it quickly as they mold much faster in the warmer months.
#3. Chaga Will NOT Cure Every Ailment
I know this may come as a surprise, but Chaga is not the cure that it is oft touted to be. We certainly drink Chaga in our household, and that will probably not change any time soon, but the reason we drink it is not to cure us of every ailment known to man. It is typically because it tastes good and there are some medicinal qualities we enjoy. Chaga is unfortunately enjoying a position in society right now that is not unlike the Snake Oil of the past. This is definitely not to say that Chaga does nothing, but rather that the clinical evidence is sparse at best. Currently, unless I am mistaken there are no human clinical trials, only in vitro and animal studies. And while there are 190+ studies on this sclerotium I do believe it would be unwise to pretend that the science is as settled as we often are capable of doing. Of course this does not mean that at some point in the future it won’t prove itself to be as miraculous as we think it is.
This is a great spot to detour into the land of Placebo for a moment. Placebo is a wonderful thing that we often just brush aside as if it were no big deal. If you really think about Placebo for a moment it is quite possibly one of the most miraculous things human beings are capable of doing. Just believing you can be healed by something actually makes your body heal itself. I believe that the ancient model of healing by shamans and medicine people relied heavily on this condition that we now label the Placebo effect. Of course I do not think that they knew this was happening. I believe that human beings are actually devolving away from having placebo be effective because of our insistence in our society in knowing the “truth”. This is a sort of psychological or cultural damage that may take eons to recover from.
The truth is that in Russia and Siberia where the origin of drinking Chaga came from people are healed by using it. Cancers and other conditions are healed there and maybe it is the actual phytochemicals and mycochemicals in the fungus, but probably a lot of the effect comes from the people’s own minds making their bodies heal. All of this is to say that while I truly do believe in the power of placebo it would not be correct for me to tell people that Chaga has qualities that are not yet shown by science.
While we are on the subject, there is good reason to not drink Chaga all the time; the oxalates. If you have bad or sensitive kidneys then you should definitely avoid Chaga as it is extremely high in oxalates. This means that for those that are already prone to kidney stones this fungus will make you form new ones quicker and more efficiently, and you definitely do not want that. Click here for an academic paper on oxalates in Chaga. Another good reason to steer clear of Chaga is because it lowers your blood sugar, so if you already have very low blood sugar Chaga can worsen that condition. This means that for people on insulin or diabetics this sterile mass may be the wrong medicine. Whatever you choose to drink is your choice ultimately, but you should definitey do some studying before you take the leap.
#4. There Is No Correct Way To Harvest Chaga.
I hate to break it to you, but there is no correct way for you to remove the sclerotium. People often tell you that they do it such and such a way and that such and such a way is the only correct way to remove chaga without hurting the tree. This is once again all nonsense and not founded in any science. There are many ways to skin a cat, and just as with cats there are many ways to remove Chaga, and none of them are “the right way”.
First lets establish one thing: The Birch tree becoming infected with Chaga is a death sentence on the tree. The fungus is a true parasitic and it actively destroys the Birch tree. There is no universally accepted amount of time from the time of infection to the death of the tree, but most agree it is somewhere in the ballpark of ten to twenty years. Click here for info on time to death. The other important factor worth mentioning that fits nicely into this debunking is that the actual mass that you harvest is not separate from the tree. It is a fungus, but it is also the tree itself.
The reason I establish these two facts with you right now is because people often say that you should harvest this way or that way to “not harm the tree”. Clearly as mentioned above, the Chaga is the tree so you removing it in any way is harming the tree. Secondly, whatever way you remove the Chaga will not make it more or less likely to die. It literally plays no role as the tree is already on its way towards the afterlife. Of course there are ways that one can harvest that may help in the tree breaking in half, or you could kill the tree before its death sentence via Chaga. But that would be very hard. Killing the tree entirely is usually not done by Chaga harvesters, but rather usually by people destroying forest habitat to build another damned Wal-Mart. Link
I harvest my Chaga with a cement chisel (not sharp) and a mallet. This allows for better accuracy in harvest. I only harvest the actual Chaga, which we know is the battleground between the tree and the fungus. I do not harvest the Birch tree. Some Chaga makes its way into the tree pretty far, others are fairly shallow. Stick to harvesting just the Chaga, and not taking wild swings into the tree with an Axe, and you can probably safely assume that a replacement sclerotium will be there in four or five years for you to pick again. You can do this until the tree eventually dies.
So long as you are not digging into the Birch tree tissues itself the tool you use is really of no importance other than preference. People making claims that the tools matter are just being tribal. It is just another thing for humans to argue about. Stupid assertions like these ones are the assertions anthropologists often hear Hunter Gatherers say about their neighboring tribes. “They make their shoes wrong” or “They don’t harvest it correctly”. These are just societal preferences and have no real bearing on the rightness or wrongness of how something is accomplished. We do the same things in our world as well. I have worked in carpentry for nearly 20 years and the amount of times that I have heard someone tell me the “correct” way to do something is staggering. It is a comical human trait and we should realize that by now, especially in regards to Chaga harvesting.
#5. Chaga is Not “Over-Harvested” or Unsustainable.
This one is going to cause some brains to explode, I can already feel it. It is almost universally accepted as true because the awesome guy, and only occasional snake oil salesman Paul Stamets said that wild harvest of Chaga was making it more scarce. Funny that in his same utterance about the scarcity of Chaga he tells the listener that he has his farmed Chaga mycelium for sale, and he never once states how those two things are incompatible. One cannot have a vested interest in hocking a product and conveniently find that the competitors product is actually wildly over-harvested and unsustainable. But because he has so much sway in the world of mycology his utterances are taken as gospel. While I am deeply disturbed by his gross product peddling tactics, I do actually really respect his wisdom in the world of Mycology…Just not in this case.
This subject gets brought up constantly so I am going to be writing a lot here! Buckle up! I want you to close your eyes and imagine a forest. A pristine, birch forest. white bark with black blotches as far as the eye can see in every direction. Birch trees grow in the Northern Hemisphere so add some snow. Next add a few other species of trees and some animals to make this scenery look real. No humans in this scenario. Just nature (We are nature but not generally thought of as such) and time. Now fast forward slightly while still keeping the forest in tact. Birch trees are constantly growing up, developing, becoming infected with some fungus or another then dying. This Cycle continues on and the forest shifts and changes with changing climate and different levels of rainfall.
One thing that has remained in this visualization is the Chaga. This forest is not imaginary however. it is real even today, and it is covered with Birch trees infected with Chaga mycelium. The biggest contributor to you not seeing these forests covered with Chaga is simply distance. The most expansive and heavily harvested forests are in Siberia where people will spend weeks wandering around the bush picking Chaga for the world market. They have been doing this for a long time and their production has not slowed. But there are forests nearer to us right now that have vast amounts of Chaga, but most Americans are simply too lazy or scared to venture into the woods far enough to find these untapped resources. And that may in fact be a good thing. So the inevitable happens: Chaga becomes scarce the closer one gets to civilization.
Scarcity of Chaga with proximity to civilization is not a basis for telling people that Chaga hunting is “unsustainable” or that it is causing “damage to the environment”. Both of these utterances are based in pure fallacy and a misunderstanding of how these Sclerotia even come into existence. I have spent days reading anything I can find with concrete evidence to support how exactly it is unsustainable, and I have repeatedly come up empty handed. Everything is feelings, emotions and people copying others that said it was unsustainable. Here, here, and here are three ridiculous examples. The first link is especially cringe-worthy. This is an actual quote from their website:
“A sustainability practice we always engage in when picking these Chagas are to throw some of the harvest back to the woods to proliferate the continued growth of the mushroom else where in the forest.”
I have read a lot of fluff and inaccuracies surrounding Chaga, but this one just might take the cake. Remember way earlier when we talked about how Chaga is a sterile protrusion which is not a sporocarp? Well, tossing a sterile mass that contains zero spores back into the woods does absolutely nothing to help the fungus reproduce. Zero. Zilch. I am all about giving back symbolically as I feel that can be a powerful thing to do as a hunter or forager, but lets not delude ourselves here, it does not in any way help with sustainability of the fungus.
Chaga is not something that one should ever think of as rare. Even inside the city limits of my hometown I have found pounds of Chaga that were apparently missed by other harvesters. In rural areas where the primary trees are Birches it is hard to not find Chaga. Because a tree can be infected with this fungus years before it starts to show a protuberance, it may very well be impossible to know what percentage of trees are carriers of this pathogen. Some estimates put it as low as 1 in 20,000. I believe that number to be total malarkey. A more appropriate estimate comes from here which states:
Infection rates in natural birch stands vary widely, but typically range from 1-20% of the trees showing signs of infection (Kuz'michev et al. 2001). Little or no data exist in Russia on rates of infection on different birch species, in different forest types, or in various environments, because the fungus was not typically included among data collected in forest inventories (Protasov and Danilin, Far East Forest Inventory Enterprise, 2004).
Chaga occurs throughout the range of Betula species in the circumboreal forest of the Northern Hemisphere. It occurs in pure birch stands and also on birch in mixed forests with other conifer and hardwood species. Typically, well-developed chaga sclerotia are found on trees over 40 years of age, but the infection likely starts earlier. Suppressed or weakened trees might have less resistance to the spread of the fungus after infection.
Much of the argument that Chaga harvesting is unsustainable hinges on semantics. If Chaga sclerotia are locally picked 100% then that would be economically unsustainable, but not biologically unsustainable. The difference lies in the simplest of ways: Chaga mycelium will continue to grow and thrive despite all of the sclerotia having been harvested. Indeed, the sclerotia themselves will quickly regrow. Since the part humans harvest plays no role in the viability or spread of the species stating that overharvest is occurring is nonsense of the highest order. Biological unsustainability and Economic unsustainability are two completely different beasts and to treat them as the same is wrong.
Let me state for clarification purposes here, I am not saying that one should harvest all of the available Chaga, or saying that I follow such a practice. What I am saying is that even if one did that no harm would come to the world as a result. If a Chaga salesman wants more to sell next year then it makes sense to not harvest all the available pieces of it that he or she finds. That is basic economic sustainability when one is dealing with a natural resource. However, if many people move into an area and pick clean all of the available Chaga then that resource would no longer be available and they would have to move onto more abundant spots. On the surface this might appear to be “bad for the environment” but fungi and other organisms do not behave in exactly the same ways. Chaga is not Passenger Pigeons. A natural resource like Passenger Pigeons or Wild Leeks are easy to extirpate because what you see is what you get. With fungi like Chaga the opposite is true. The conk that one harvests is just the tip of the iceberg. Or in this case the myceliumberg.
The single biggest threat to a loss of Chaga is not harvesters but habitat loss. When we point fingers at harvesters and blame them for the lack of access to Chaga two things are occurring: We are not taking responsibility for our own lack of ambition to find a better spot, and we are blaming the wrong people. If we as wild harvesters of anything stood up against the machine that is eating our wild habitats we would make giant strides against losses of prime places to find Chaga or any other wild edible. But in the end it is way easier to point a finger at the person that shares your interests and is essentially on your team than to really fight the true fight.
The one thing worth mentioning that might, but probably not, have an effect on the growth of these conks is that harvesting them too deeply opens up the tree to disease and they will die sooner as a result. Problem with this is that the trees with Chaga are already on Death row, and it would be hard to imagine these trees getting more dead. But I admit, I do not study tree pathogens so I cant truly comment on this. However it is worth stating that people harvest bark every place in the world that Birch trees grow, often opening these trees up to massive infection, and they seem to weather the loss of their bark relatively well. Most of the trees one sees with a ring of black bark are trees that were once peeled for their bark.
Chaga sporocarps form under the bark and after the tree has died. This mysterious process has not been seen too many times. But we do know that it occurs. The primary agent of spread is thought to be either wind carrying the spores or burrowing insects getting spores on themselves and infecting other trees with the spores when they burrow into uninfected trees. In the latter case if one is concerned with Chaga availability then one should not promote the use of any insecticide as our world is in the beginning of a bug apocalypse anyway.
But Should You Harvest Chaga?
This is the biggest question. Do you need to harvest Chaga? We certainly enjoy strapping on the snowshoes and taking midwinter hikes to find Chaga, but there are most certainly other ways in which we could have fun in the woods during the winter. I love hunting in the winter, but that is not exactly family friendly. Perhaps what should be stated is that if you are going to insist on harvesting Chaga then leave the out of reach bulges. I never bring a ladder into the woods so if I cannot reach it otherwise I just leave it for other passersby to behold. It won’t increase the sustainability of the harvest as these protuberances don’t make spores, but it certainly increases the odds that people will be able to see Chaga, which in itself may have some inherent value.
Recognizing when you have enough of something is also a valuable skill to have as a forager. Especially a forager living in this modern era. If you don’t absolutely require the additional Chaga then why not leave it for the next harvester that comes along? This is courteous and it makes it easier for those just getting into foraging to engage in the activity. Hunter-Gatherers were and are very sharing people, Making sure everyone has access to a product of nature just seems like a good and human thing to do.
Grinding your Chaga into a powder also dramatically increases the length of time in which it will last you as this increases area that can be exposed to water which means you can use less to get the same results. We sell a product at my fiancés website called “Hot Chaga-late” which only uses a little bit of ground Chaga per container making it so that we do not have to harvest massive amounts of Chaga in order to have an amazing product. See this product here.
If you are truly interested in sustainability of our natural resources and you want to do something about it then get involved in your local community and find ways to make sure your Birch forests don’t get turned into parking lots. Blaming other foragers literally does nothing but divide us. Right now we need to be together as a culture in a major way. Point fingers where they make a difference. Often those fingers should be pointed back at ourselves for supporting the very corporations that ruin and pave over our forests. As paradoxical as it may sound, buy hunting licenses even if you do not plan on hunting. These licenses support keeping land available for public use. Hunters actually foot the bill for many land conservation efforts, while foragers generally just get to take from the land and pay nothing to keep it in conservation. We can put our money where our mouths are. Buy a federal duck stamp, or better yet, start a group called Chaga Unlimited. Whatever you do, do something, talk is cheap.