Teaching at the Children’s Forest School – 📸: Lola @chicawithbees
Dear Fellow Myconauts,
I could use a little help from my fungal friends. Two weeks before Christmas, while I was finishing writing my book, I was laid off from my IT project manager job of ten years due to AI replacing my job. Now that my book is almost complete, I have time to find a new job to support myself and I need help finding opportunities – potential employers you can recommend or positions you see posted online that align with the following. My gift lies in communicating technical ideas with non-technical stakeholders and vice versa. With this gift I excel at organizing, facilitating, and managing diverse groups of people to work together.
Program Manager
Development & Fundraising Coordinator
Facilator, Community Partnerships
Community Engagement Manager
Public / Community Science Program Manager
Strategic Initiatives Manager
My Experience – From IT Management to Conservation Organizer
My professional experience is in program management working at the intersection of conservation, community science, education, and cross-sector partnerships. I have experience leading complex initiatives, coordinating stakeholders, and guiding mission driven work.
See my current CV/resume here.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn too.
With a background in enterprise IT project management and a B.S. in Statistics, I bring strong operational and analytical experience leading complex initiatives every step of the way from planning through implementation to testing and feedback. I have managed international teams across software development and enterprise systems projects, overseeing scope, stakeholder communication, documentation, testing, training, and cross-functional execution for large-scale business operations.
Alongside my technical and operational background, I am deeply engaged in biodiversity conservation and community-centered environmental work, with a particular focus on fungal conservation and public engagement.
I am the founder and chair of an international fungal Conservation & Stewardship Committee, where I lead strategy development, partnership building, and organizational conservation initiatives. I have also founded fungi-focused conservation and education initiatives centered on stewardship, community learning, and values-based environmental engagement, including fundraising efforts that raised over $30,000 to support programming and impact.
My work includes conservation field mycology, leading field teams, project planning, stakeholder coordination, and specimen/data collection for publicly funded biodiversity mapping initiatives in California. I have also served in nonprofit board leadership, helping launch conservation projects, secure funding, and develop educational programming.
As an author of the first fungal field guide of Los Angeles and conservation educator, I am passionate about translating technical and scientific concepts into accessible, engaging experiences for public audiences, institutions, and stakeholders.
I am particularly interested in roles in conservation, museums, botanical gardens, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations where I can contribute to program management, strategic initiatives, partnerships, community science, public engagement, and conservation leadership.
I am interested in connecting around:
• Conservation program management
• Community science initiatives
• Public programming and education
• Biodiversity and fungal conservation
• Ecological remediation & restoration
• Environmental advocacy & climate action
• Strategic partnerships & interdisciplinary collaboration
Aaron’s Upcoming Talks
Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic ✨🌝🍄🟫
Friday, July 24th, 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm $10 – $40
I’ll be teaching a workshop on Mushrooms and Mythology. Exploring our ancient human relationships with fungi through stories of folklore, science, and art. Here’s more info from Descanso:
Join the creative community of Descanso Gardens for Descanso After Dark, a summer event series that brings people together through art, performance, and interactive experiences in nature at night in the gardens.
Descanso After Dark: Nature’s Magic invites you into a night of wonder and whimsy inspired by the hidden magic of the natural world. From earth-based folklore to the secret lives of plants, explore the mysteries that surround us every day and lean into the wonder of Descanso.
Wander the grounds at your own pace, discovering performances and activities that unfold throughout the evening.
Exploring the Mycoverse
Imaging a Queer Mycology with the Third F Manual
Monday, June 8th, 6pm, free by donation
(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)
For pride this month we invite you to join us we learn how to enter the world of fungi and explore how fungi can queer us and our ways of living, rotting what no longer serves us. We will be following instructions and a deck of cards created by Riita Ikonen and Michael Crow call the Third F Manual to lead us into the world of fungi.
Our discussion is inspired by a queer mycology essay by Elliana Efird from last year asking the question, “how does one theorize with fungi?” The essay reflects on the state of queer mycology and how we can continue to grow on the foundations of one of this new mushrooming field of inquiry which started with the paper The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Disclipline by Patricia Kaishian (author of Forest Euphoria which we discussed last year) and Hasmik Djoulakian.
Aaron will also share a little about their new book about queer mycology coming out this November 2026, Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles: Curiosity, Queerness, and How to Love a Fungus which you can pre-order on their website here.
Note: prior knowledge of mushrooms may be helpful, but prior experience in mushroom exploration is not required.
Is a River Alive? Exploring the Rights of Nature
Monday, June 22nd, 7pm, free by donation
As Exploring the Mycoverse grows, questions about what does a future with fungi look like have been a primary interest amongst the Mycoverse myconauts. To explore this question, we will take a step back and consider larger conservation movements of nature through Robert Macfarlane’s 2025 NYT’s besteller Is a River Alive?
In our discussion, we will explore how rivers and fungi can inspire us to rethink the conservation and stewardship of nature.
From the publisher:
Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, Economist, Guardian, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly • One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 • One of NPR’s “Books We Love” for 2025 • One of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best Science Books of 2025 • A Chicago Public Library Top 10 Favorite Book of 2025 • A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction for 2025
“Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.
Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.
Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.”
Imaging a Queer Mycology with the Third F Manual
Monday, June 8th, 6pm, free by donation
(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)
You are invited to join us to celebrate our fifth anniversary of gathering and sharing our love of fungi together. We have grown and myceliated to have reached over 1,000 people these past five years of over 100 free, open to the public workshops.
We will celebrate be sharing food together, watching a short ethnomycological film together, and revisiting a few of our favorite fungi-inspired activities we’ve done together including activities from the feminist ethnomycological zine, Learning and Collaborating with Fungi by Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell.
A World Appears – The Stakes of Recognizing Nature’s Consciousness
Monday, June 8th, 6pm, free by donation
(Note we’re trying something different, we’re meeting earlier at 6pm!)
Join us as we explore how the recent research about the consciousness of natural world is connected to the future of conservation. Michael Pollan’s new book sets the stage for the high stakes of who we consider to be conscious deserves legal rights and protections. Along with the rise of AI technologies and their trillion dollar industry, comes the claims for legal for protection and rights – arguments centered around consciousness.
We will be discussing the book in its entirety. If you don’t get a chance to read the book, we invite you to please watch Michael Pollan’s talk about A World Appears he gave at this year’s Bioneers conference, a conference centered on building better relationship with the natural world.
From the publisher:
When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: that it feels like something to be us. Yet the fact we have subjective experience of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts, and a sense of self? What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, considering we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of the sea? In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.
When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.
In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with our deepest selves.
Coming out November 2026…
You can now preorder my book Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles: Curiosity, Queerness, and How to Love a Fungus via my website or wherever you buy books! If you purchase through my website you directly support me and my work. I am offering signed and personalized inscriptions (fun for gifts!) through my website. I am so excited for you to read it. From the publisher:
“Welcome to the Mycoverse of Los Angeles! In this wondrous guide to common local mushrooms, Aaron Tupac opens Angelenos' eyes to the mycelial ties that bind us all together. From the San Gabriel Mountains, across the sprawling metropolis, and clear out to the coast, Southern California is teeming with fungal life, whose underground networks support an array of ecosystems. Organized by habitat, and featuring full color photos to aid in identification, this guide will help you spot and marvel at mushrooms burgeoning throughout the cityscapes, sand dunes, oak forests, and deserts that surround us. These fungal neighbors have lessons to teach us, too: through loving observations and stories, Tupac shares our latest understanding of mushrooms' radical reciprocity, vibrant gender fluidity, and the incredible imaginative possibilities that fungi bring into our lives.”
Spores that caught our attention ✨
Sign up to volunteer for habitat care at Eaton Canyon Natural Area.
An immersive fungi exhibition in Canada featuring SPUN, Caro Arevalo, Modern Biology, and more!
Robert Macfarlane’s Underland film is screening at the Glendale Laemmle making its North American debut this friday June 12th! Though tickets have yet to go on sale. 👀
Looking sporeward,
Aaron
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