For decades a compelling narrative has taken root in both popular science and portions of the ecological literature: that forest trees are joined beneath the soil into a cooperative collective, trading sugars and warnings through a subterranean lattice of fungal threads sometimes called the "wood-wide web." The mechanism is real enough in outline. Most trees form symbioses with mycorrhizal fungi, whose filaments, or hyphae, sheathe and penetrate root tips; because a single fungal individual can contact the roots of several trees, a physical conduit linking distinct plants plainly exists. From this uncontested anatomy, however, a far stronger claim has been extrapolated - that mature "mother trees" deliberately subsidize their offspring, and that the network functions as a channel for altruistic exchange. The evidentiary basis for the stronger claim is thinner than its popularity suggests. The foundational experiments demonstrated that isotopically labelled carbon can move from one seedling to another, but movement is not the same as benefit, and a conduit is not the same as a purpose. Carbon that departs a donor root may be intercepted and metabolized by the fungus itself, never reaching a second plant in any usable form; where transfer to a neighbor does occur, the quantities are frequently trivial relative to a recipient's photosynthetic budget. Moreover, the direction and magnitude of flow track steep source-to-sink gradients of the sort that govern passive diffusion, which is precisely what one would expect of a system with no coordinating agency at all. None of this shows that the networks are ecologically inert. It shows, rather, that the observations underdetermine the competing interpretations. The same isotope data are consistent with a fungus behaving as a self-interested trader, extracting carbon from whichever host can spare it and delivering nutrients to whichever host will pay most in return - a marketplace, not a commune. On that reading, apparent "generosity" between trees is an incidental byproduct of fungal book-keeping, and the mother-tree imagery mistakes a side effect for a strategy. It would be an overcorrection, though, to dismiss the phenomenon as mere anthropomorphic fancy. Rigorous field studies have detected modest survival advantages for seedlings established near conspecific adults with compatible fungal partners, and the defensive-signalling experiments, whatever their limits, have been replicated often enough to warrant continued scrutiny rather than reflexive dismissal. The reasonable position is neither the romance of the cooperative forest nor its cynical negation, but a demand that each functional claim be tied to a measured effect on fitness under conditions that exclude the simpler explanation. What the episode illustrates most sharply is a recurring hazard in ecology: the ease with which an appealing metaphor, once installed, recruits ambiguous data to its support. The hyphal connections are documented; the traffic they carry is measurable; the intentions ascribed to that traffic are not. Until experiments are designed expressly to discriminate between fungal self-interest and plant cooperation - rather than merely to confirm that something moves - the grander story should be held, like the carbon itself, provisionally in transit.