Book Report: Entangled Life (100)

7. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures (2020) (3/10/23)

I'm not sure where I heard about this book, but its subject, fungi, would have been enough to capture my attention. I've enjoyed hunting (and eating) wild mushrooms for decades now, and I figured this book would give me insight into that pastime. Well, insight, yes—not into fungus foraging per se, but much, much more.

The author is a British mycologist who, for his PhD, studied the way nutrients circulate via underground mycorrhizal networks linking fungi and plants in the forests of Panama. But that was just a start: he has a mind brimming with questions—and lots of tentative answers as well. Tentative because the lifeforms he explores in this book—mushroom mycelia, yeasts, lichens, the "wood wide web," etc.—are so wide-ranging, their means of growth and thriving impossible to observe in their entirety, their effects on our world and on us so complex that we can only really investigate simple aspects of them.

The book was slow going—generally lively enough (Sheldrake is a very good writer), but technical and occasionally rather repetitive and rambling. It was fascinating, but I did have to take my time. In its 225 pages—eight chapters, plus intro and epilogue (also 50 additional pages of tiny-type notes, which I am drawing the line at)—we learn about such varied matters as how underground truffles attract animals—such as pigs and dogs when it comes to our own hunting of these delicacies—in order to spread their spores; the motility of mycelium, "living labyrinths" of hyphae that are constantly sensing where nutrients are available or are needed and adjusting their physical structure and interactions in response; fungi as manipulators, as in the case of psychdelic psilocybin mushrooms or the "zombie" mushroom Ophiocordiceps (popularized lately, in a way, in the TV series The Last of Us, but acting in the real world to take over the minds and bodies of ants and flies, again as a means of spreading spores); research into the use of fungi's digestive powers to mitigate environmental damage, or of their shapeshifting abilities to create alternatives to plastics; the very everywhereness of these lifeforms. And on and on. 

Reading this book was mind-blowing: I had no idea how ubiquitous fungi are, how crucial they are to the above-ground world as we know it (some 90 percent of plants and trees depend on mycelium to thrive), how powerfully varied and influential they are. In an effort to describe their mystery and magic, Sheldrake often resorts to anthropomorphism and analogy, but he also goes to pains to remind us that trying to understand these lifeforms on our terms does them a disservice. They have been around since land became habitable–since well before we came along—and have been working out relationships, networks, and agreements with all manner of other lifeforms (including us) that entire time. We could certainly be taking a lesson on cooperation and mutual assistance, adaptability and possibility, from them.

For my usual quote, I will go with the final paragraph of the introduction, "What Is It Like to Be a Fungus?" It doesn't give a sense of Sheldrake's descriptive powers, but it gives an idea of what his goal was in writing this book.

Fungi inhabit enmeshed worlds; countless threads lead through these labyrinths. I have followed as many as I can, but there are crevices I haven't been able to squeeze through no matter how hard I've tried. Despite their nearness, fungi are so mystifying, their possibilities so other. Should this scare us off? Is it possible for humans, with our animals brains and bodies and language, to learn to understand such different organisms? How might we find ourselves changed in the process? In optimistic moods, I've imagined this book to be a portrait of this neglected branch of the tree of life, but it's more tangled than that. It is an account both of my journey toward understanding fungal lives, and of the imprint fungal lives have left on me and the many others I've met along the road, human or otherwise. "What shall I do with the night and the day, with this life and this death?" writes the poet Robert Bringhurst. "Every step, every breath rolls like an egg toward the edge of this question." Fungi roll us toward the edge of many questions. This book comes from my experience of peering over some of these edges. My exploration of the fungal world has made me reexamine much of what I knew. Evolution, ecosystems, individuality, intelligence, life—none are quite what I thought they were. My hope is that this book loosens some of your certainties, as fungi have loosened mine.