It's rare to find beauty in mushrooms; certainly much less than flowers, designed to be propulsively, riotously beautiful. The beauty of these bulbous, spore-laden buttons is in their resilience, and their ability to pop up unexpectedly, reminding author Anna Tsing of the fleeting pleasures in our current state of indeterminacy and precarity. It is indeed then 'the mushroom at the end of the world' that is both a reason for despair, as well as for hope.

Often seen as parasites and invaders, mushrooms even grow on blighted grounds where flowers wouldn't dare. In symbiosis and mutual thriving, these fungal beings leave the soil richer, not caring about 'executive orders' or bills telling them they don't belong in doing so. In foraging mushrooms, you find joy in deriving nourishment from what the verdant tree refused and the land accepted. In foraging mushrooms, you find community and a parable for our environmental predicament in decimated landscapes and permanently altered climates.

This week, mushrooms mirror our biomes and echo their cry for conservation, to bring you tales of resilience and the unhanded joy in precarity. 'It's About Time - The Architecture of Climate Change' juxtaposes climate action and architectural design, underpinning time as a force. The Gaia Communication System offers an exoskeleton with haptics designed to attune one to their environment, while a conversation with architect Kongjian Yu unearths how landscape architecture is used as a survival tool.

Mushrooms precede us and will outlast us—it may very well be a mushroom in the sky that brings an end to the precarity. But Tsing claims that a Matsutake mushroom was one of the first things to sprout from the grounds of post atomic Hiroshima; they probably will be from our hubris as well. The mushroom picker, the lowly forager? Nowhere to be found.