Tom Lathan

Why fungi might solve the world’s problems

The cleverest of all organisms, they make medicine, nourish plants, digest pollutants and even influence the Earth’s atmosphere, according to Merlin Sheldrake

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issue 12 September 2020

The biologist Merlin Sheldrake is an intriguing character. In a video promoting the publication of his book Entangled Life, which explores the mysterious world of fungi, he cooks and eats mushrooms that have sprouted from the pages of a copy of the book. In another video, the double bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado ‘duets’ with a recording made by Michael Prime of that fungus eating the book.

Readers of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland will recognise Sheldrake from his appearance in that book, where he serves as Macfarlane’s guide to the hidden world of fungi as the two hike around Epping Forest. Sheldrake doesn’t just bring his scientific knowledge to this encounter, but also a bottle of cider that he has pressed from apples fallen from Isaac Newton’s tree in Cambridge, and which he has playfully labelled ‘Gravity’. He is a writer unafraid to admit that he finds the coming together of plant roots and fungi ‘sexy’. All of this is to say that Sheldrake is an unusual thinker — a good job, considering the unusual nature of his subject.

Fungi confuse and confound our attempts to understand them. They ‘slip around the systems of classification we build for them’, Sheldrake writes:

A single species of fungus can grow into forms that bear no resemblance to each other whatsoever… [and] many species have no distinctive characteristics that can be used to define their identity.

And yet, they have been, and are still, Sheldrake explains, vital to all life on earth. Without fungi — whose symbiotic relationship with plants enables both parties to ‘trade’ nutrients — plants would not have made the leap from sea to land some 500 million years ago:

Now they are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behaviour and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.

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