Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“They are eating rock, making soil… nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions…manipulating animal behaviour, and changing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere.”
And yet, as Merlin Sheldrake (and what a superb name for someone writing about things with such apparently magical properties) points out, we do not even have university departments studying this ‘third kingdom’ while zoologists and botanists are busy researching the other two.
What is it like to be a fungus – to have your consciousness ‘distributed’ through a network rather than centralised in a brain with inputs from the familiar senses? Where do you – as (for example) a forest floor fungus – end, and the plant roots with which you are conspiring begin? Why did it take our Sciences so long to get our heads round the idea of ‘symbiosis’, and should we now be going beyond the simple discription of a conspiracy between two different forms of life to a more holistic approach?
Sheldrake takes us from a sensual hunt for truffles in the forests of Italy, via a description of the life of a mycelium (they can actually communicate the ‘shape’ of their environment to help them grow towards food, for example), to the story of their evolution as the first life on land – busy breaking up rocks before plants arrived to conspire with them in an exchange of nutrients, as they still do today. Fungi even provide the food for a plant who ‘cheats’ – the white leaves no longer bother with the expensive fabrication of chlorophyl for photosynthesis because the plant taps the underlying fungal network for its food.
Fungi can evolve to break down and render harmless the most vicious organic toxins – the dreaded Glyphosate, for example. They can also do terrifying things to ants – but then again, since they can alter minds, are the ants too stoned to feel the pain, or care? And what about what they do to the minds of people?
All this is just a taster of the content of this fascinating, information-dense story, written by someone obviously at the top of their subject, both by profession and by passion. Not being a life scientist myself, I found it worth stopping at the end of each chapter simply to allow my mind to take it all in.
I was curious that, apparently only some three quarters the way through the pages, the story began to ‘zoom out’ and become more philosophical. Then suddenly I cam to the denouement (if you can have such a thing, with fungi) – the remaining pages form a comprehensive bibliography and index.
I recommend this book for anyone interested in life and how it functions. Learning about animals and plants is great, but without knowning something of the other kingdom that lurks, links, conspires and quietly directs, no knowledge of life in all its glory is complete.
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