to restoring the health of the planet, too. Sheldrake is based in London but I speak to him on the phone in Montreal, a cit he visits regularly because his girlfriend lives there. How did his fascination with fungi begin? “When I was a child I was intrigued by mushrooms—these curious things that spring up very fast and vanish very fast. But I’ve always been even more interested in the transforma- tions that take place in the living world, like a log turning into soil, or a seed or bulb growing into a plant. And, at some point, I learned that invisible organisms called fungi were key players in many of these transformations, so that turned me on to them as well.” Sheldrake also credits his father, biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake, with engendering his interest. In the epilogue to Entangled Life, he describes how his father used to carry him around on his shoulders when he was a small child, burying his face in flowers “as if I were a bee”. “He’s an amazing student of the natural world”, his son tells me. “I’ve been greatly inspired and influenced by his biological curiosit and the fact that he never gets tired of asking questions.” Later, Merlin Sheldrake did a PhD which took him to the jungle in Panama to study the relationship between plants and mycorrhizal fungi: a relationship that is crucial to understanding how ecosystems work. “In simple terms: plants are socially networked by fungi,” he writes. “This is what is meant by the Wood Wide Web.” Sheldrake tells me that Panama was an amazing place to study biology because “within a few hectares of jungle there are as many plant species as there are in the whole of Europe. And that’s just plants, let alone the microbes and fungi, animals and insects. Tropical forests are astonishing crucibles for evolution and places to study and think about life.” That’s not to say that our own domestic forests don’t also contain myriad wonders. Readers of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland might remember Sheldrake from the chapter entitled “The Understorey” in which they explore the soil of Epping Forest together. “All of the trees and bushes are connected with one another below ground in ways we not only cannot see, but ways we have scarcely begun to understand,” Sheldrake informs Macfarlane.
A new dawn
I ask Sheldrake why it is that we are only now beginning to understand the extent to which fungi shape our world, and may shape our future. “It is an astonishing thing that these organisms which run so many of the earth’s processes should be so under-studied and discussed. One reason is that fungi live most of their lives out of sight and it’s difficult to see them without modern techniques that have arisen recently, for example DNA sequencing technology and advances in microscopy. But also fungi were lumped in with plants until the 1960s when they won their independence, taxonomically speaking. That’s
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All of the trees and bushes are connected with one another below ground in ways we not only cannot see, but ways we have scarcely begun to understand
amazing when you think that they’re this whole other kingdom of life. There are universit departments for animal science and for plant science but none for fungal science and this means that the disciplinary bias against fungi has been entrenched.” For Sheldrake, signs of a resurgence of interest in fungi are welcome, whether it be via Silicon Valley psilocybin [psychedelic compound from “magic” mushrooms] micro- dosers, or our growing awareness of gut health. “I feel like we’re on the edge of a whole new realm of exploration and discovery. But it all requires a change of mindset: we have to learn to work with these organisms.” And indeed Entangled Life is a humbling book which made me think it’s high time we humans stopped regarding ourselves as the planet’s superior species, and as Sheldrake puts it, speak “in spores” more. “So much of our language has arisen from our mammalian bodies, and our mammalian needs and wants, but such language is ill-suited to discuss- ing the lives of these organisms which are so different.” What’s more, Sheldrake shows, fungi stretch all our tradi- tional definitions of “intelligence”; from slime moulds that solve the not inconsiderable problem of finding the quickest route to the exit in IKEA (yes, really), to the ways in which they take command of our perceptions when we consume magic mushrooms. In fact, Entangled Life is in itself an atempt to lure us into reforming our perceptions through the spectacular lens of fungi. “Ultimately what we need to do as a species is re-examine our relationships to the world in which we live, and I hope the book contributes in some small way to that process”, Sheldrake tells me. It’s fair to say that Merlin Sheldrake’s professional interest in fungi, like the hyphae [long filaments] that grow the fungal networks in the soil beneath our feet, has entangled itself into other areas of his life. Aſter discovering that he is a musi- cian, I listen to an appropriately trancey track called “Mushroom 30,000” by his band, Gentle Mystics, which also features his brother Cosmo. Sheldrake plans to conduct a fungal handover once he receives a finished copy—he’ll dampen the pages and seed it with a species called Pleurotus. “It will take about three weeks for the mycelium [collection of hyphae] to grow through the pages and endpapers, and about another week and a half for its fruit—oyster mushrooms—to sprout from the covers. So by the time Entangled Life is published, fungi will have decomposed my book, and I will have eaten my words and put them back into the natural cycle of composition where they belong.”
Metadata
Imprint Bodley Head Publication 07.05.20 Format HB, EB ISBN 9781847925190/ 9781473554689 Rights Chinese simplified, Chinese complex, Danish, Dutch, French (First Editions), German (Ullstein), Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish (GeoPlaneta), Swedish Editor Will Hammond Agent Jessica Woollard, David Higham Associates
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Book Extract
Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been—and continue to be—a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around 500 million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of millions of years until plants could evolve their own. Today, over 90% of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi—from the Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (rhiza)—which can link trees together in shared networks sometimes referred to as the Wood Wide Web. This ancient association gave rise to all recognisable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of plants and fungi to form healthy relationships.
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