“A must-read!” – Paul Stamets
“A true masterpiece.” – George Monbiot
“Truly Profound.” – Andrew Weil
Every now and again comes a book that recalibrates our worldview and reshapes our understanding of our relationship with the natural world. Merlin’s Sheldrake’s Entangled Life is such a book.
In this dazzling, eye-opening, revelatory book, Sheldrake takes the reader on a tour of an entire kingdom of life that most of us are only vaguely familiar with. On this journey, he reveals how fungi are changing our understanding of how the world works. Along the way, he compels the reader to ask the more profound questions – what is life? What is intelligence? What is identity?
In this delightful, deeply engaging, philosophical book, Sheldrake shares personal anecdotes, research stories, and lived experiences that remind the reader over and over again that fungi are vast and mysterious and sublime. Weaving together perspectives from ecology, biology, and psychopharmacology, Sheldrake inspires a sense of awe and wonder for mycology – the study of fungi.
We learn that mushrooms are the above-ground fruiting bodies of fungi – analogous to apples on an underground tree. We learn that truffles are the underground fruiting bodies of several types of mycorrhizal fungi. For most of the year, truffles exist only as mycelial networks, but these spore-producing organs are analogous to the seed-producing fruit of a plant.
We tend to believe that the human sense of smell is not too advanced, but human smell, is in fact, extraordinary. We can detect nearly every single volatile chemical ever tested. We even outperform dogs and rodents in detecting certain odours. Sheldrake explains how fungi exploit this sense of smell – buried as they often are under the soil.
In addition to being reminded that penicillin is derived from a fungus, we also learn that Agarwood, or oudh, is a fungal infection of Aquilaria trees and one of the most valuable raw materials in the world. (Gram for gram, the best oudh is worth more than platinum and gold).
We learn that some fungi have tens of thousands of mating types (approximately equivalent to our sexes). The mycelium of many fungi can fuse with other mycelial networks if they are genetically similar enough, even if they aren’t sexually compatible. The unique identity of an individual fungus blurs and the self shades into otherness. The fact that fungi are supremely adept at using a chemical vocabulary adds to their mystery and allure – especially when that vocabulary translates into a molecular language that we humans can understand – as in the case of gastronomical delicacies like piedmont truffles and portobello mushrooms.
What is truly astonishing is that even though we tend to think of fungi as a form of plant life, they are more closely related to animals. The difference, though, is simple: animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.
A section of the book is devoted to psychedelic mushrooms – or magic mushrooms. The ability of mushrooms to make the active compound, psilocybin, has evolved independently more than once and the gene cluster responsible for it is able to between different species of fungus. Sheldrake asks the philosophical question: Can these psilocybin mushrooms be thought of as borrowing a human brain to think with, a human consciousness to experience with?
Another section of the book is devoted to lichens – a complex life form that is a symbiotic partnership of two separate organisms, a fungus and an alga. The dominant partner is the fungus, which gives the lichen the majority of its characteristics, from its thallus shape to its fruiting bodies. The alga can be either a green alga or a blue-green alga, otherwise known as cyanobacteria. The more we understand lichens the stranger they seem. Sheldrake informs us that lichens’ fondness for rocks make them a geological force that changed the face of the planet. Lichens are how the inanimate mineral mass within rocks cross over into the metabolic cycles of living creatures.
This leads Sheldrake to ask important questions: Are network-based life forms capable of a form of cognition? Can we think of their behaviour as intelligent? What constitutes an autonomous individual?
Perhaps the most astonishing revelation is that trees secretly talk to each other underground. This underground mycelial network is called the Wood Wide Web. Through this network, mature trees can share sugars with younger trees, sick trees can send their remaining resources back into the network for others, and they can communicate with each other about dangers like insect infestations. This wood wide web fungal network provides highways for bacteria to migrate around the obstacle course of the soils.
Sheldrake asks us to reflect on the ramifications of these mycelial networks. Are we dealing with a superorganism? A metropolis? A living Internet? Nursery school for trees? Socialism in the soil? Deregulated markets of late capitalism? Fungal feudalism?
Fungi have profound lessons to teach humanity about Deep Ecology and collaboration. For millennia, we have recruited fungi to break things down – everything from soy sauce to alcohol. Radical mycology is a grassroots movement and social philosophy based on understanding the importance of working with fungi for personal, societal, and ecological resilience – fungi are able to break down everything from pesticides, synthetic dyes and explosives to crude oil, plastics and synthetic hormones.
When contemplating fungi we can’t but think at the level of the ecosystem. Perhaps the most important lesson we learn from this book is about the interconnectedness of life and how separate identities dissolve in the face of close examination. As the nature writer, John Muir, says, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” For most of us, when we think of fungi, we think of mushrooms, moulds, wood-rot, and infections. But fungi make up a massively diverse kingdom of life that is deeply interconnected with nearly every living system on planet earth – in the ocean, under the soil, within our skin, in the air, and even inside rocks. Fungi make and unmake worlds. There are in us and they are everywhere around us. They’ve been on planet Earth long before mammals arrived on the scene and will be around long after we disappear.
