Fun of fungi
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures By Merlin Sheldrake Bodley Head £20
Books often carry dedications – to people and occasionally to nations or lost generations, but not very often to fungi.
Merlin Sheldrake bucks the trend by expressing ‘gratitude to the fungi from which I have learned’. If the word ‘fungus’ stirs memories of dank, mushroom-covered carpets, forgotten bread rolls transformed to green trolls, old tree trunks with swelling, blood-red organs or roof timbers reeking of dry rot, then this is the book for you. It may change your view of the whole world.
It’s not just that we need reminding about the positive face of fungus – the gustatory delights of mushrooms and truffles, the medical miracle of penicillin – though these are fascinating strands in this long, labyrinthine story. What this book demands is a new way of thinking.
We are challenged to think about what it’s like to be a fungus – not an individual with a defined sense of self and physical boundaries, but a life form existing in a network, intimately connected to other species and kingdoms.
We’re encouraged to consider the identity of lichens – not ‘like a package from IKEA’ with distinct components and an order of assembly, but rather ‘dynamic systems’. If we go back to the Devonian period, the earth was covered in Prototaxites, towering fungi which dominated for 40 million years (‘twenty times longer than the genus Homo has existed’). Not everyone will find this comforting but, once you get used to being unsettled, it’s a breathtaking ride.
Sheldrake is remarkable on the micro and the macro: both in his capacity to bring to light a vast, ancient, teeming, largely invisible world and in the presentation of details. Sentence after sentence erupts unexpectedly: ‘ Pleurotus
mycelium – a white rot fungus which fruits into edible oyster mushrooms – can grow happily on a diet of used diapers’; ‘I lay naked in a mound of decomposing woodchips.’
There are splendid anecdotes, such as the author’s truffle-hunting in Oregon with Charles and his ‘diversity dog’, Dante (for whom ‘God lives just below the surface of the soil’). There’s his midnight scrumping from the venerable descendant of Newton’s apple tree in the Cambridge Botanic Garden.
The book is packed with brilliant individuals such as Kate Field, who recreates ancient climatic conditions to explain evolutionary mycorrhizal exchanges. Or Suzanne Simard, whose discovery of how birch and fir trees sustain one another with carbon led to recognition of the ‘Wood Wide Web’.
Then there’s the ‘fungal evangelist’ Paul Stamets, whose conversion occurred in a lightning storm when he was caught in a tall tree after ‘a heroic dose of magic mushrooms’. He makes money from fungal dog treats (‘Mutt-rooms’) and has helped save hundreds of besieged Syrians from starvation by inspiring the cultivation of mushrooms in their underground shelters.
You quickly become absorbed in the twists and turns of the great fungal saga, but there are tangles, too. Try as hard as you like to think like a fungus, if you want to share your thoughts with a fellow dynamic system, it means resorting to the human invention of language.
Biologists are troubled by the way language perpetually humanises the world, preventing us from understanding non-human organisms on their own terms. Darwin caused a rumpus by referring to the root tips of plants as their brains, not because the hypothesis was flawed but because of the idea that a plant has a brain.
Sheldrake’s lively mycological discussions frequently sprout musings on language. Mycorrhizal fungi and plants are described as ‘promiscuous’. Certain orchids are distinguished by their ‘take now, pay later’ habits. If the best way to explain the workings of an unfamiliar living system is through behaviour recognisable to the reader, our attempt to think like fungi is doomed. But it’s a heroic failure.