Today’s book review is not about Harry Potter’s textbook for first-year Herbology – that would be One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi by Phyllida Spore. The book I’ll be discussing today is titled Entangled Life. It is authored by Merlin Sheldrake; that’s not a pseudonym, and he’s a real bona fide scientist, I kid you not. And the book is indeed about fungi.
If you want to know more about fungi, this is the book for you. While aimed at a general audience, it’s a bit denser and slow-going than your typical science trade-book. Spineless, The Tangled Tree, or I Contain Multitudes are breezier reads. Entangled Life shares similarities with these books: it has interesting first-person anecdotes, discusses a web of complexity, and digs beneath the surface at things you can’t see. I’m happy to say it’s well worth the patience and effort to read the book cover-to-cover. The narrative gets breezier in the second half, but the joy of reading it comes from building on the slower first-half.
Given my ignorance about fungi, other than my hobbit-like enjoyment of edible mushrooms, there is so much to learn from Sheldrake’s book. I’d been thinking about zombies lately, one thing that jumped out were “zombie fungi” Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which apparently take over whatever free will carpenter ants might have. In what looks like mind control, the ant is forced to climb up high on a plant, something it normally wouldn’t do. The ant is then forced to “clamp its jaws around the plant in a death grip”, at which point the “mycelium grows from the ant’s feet and stitches them to the surface. The fungus then digests the ant’s body and sprouts a stalk out of its head, from which spores shower down on ants passing below.” That sound diabolical, straight out of an Alien movie.
In the same chapter as the zombie fungi, “Mycelial Minds”, are the ergot fungi, famous or infamous for being a source of the drug LSD. There are a lot of mind-altering chemicals out there, and psilocybin mushrooms, of which there are many varieties, have been consumed by humans through the ages for their mind-altering effects. Apparently there are cave paintings celebrating what look like mushroom deities, and there’s even a theory that such neurochemicals helped hominids free their minds. Magic mushrooms, we call them now. I wonder what Phyllida Spore had to say about these mushrooms, or if such “magical” properties were out-of-bounds to first-year Hogwarts students.
My favorite part of the book was the last three pages of Chapter 6, “Wood Wide Webs”. Celebrating the complex connections and relationships among fungi and their ecosystem, Sheldrake asks broad age-old questions, not too dissimilar from the questions I would ask while pondering origin-of-life questions. But he does this with both aplomb and wonderful prose. Here’s one of the best paragraphs that captures the heart of the story.
“… fungi form and re-form their connections with plants, tangling, detangling, and retangling… wood wide webs are dynamic systems in shimmering, unceasing turnover. Entities that behave in these ways are loosely termed ‘complex adaptive systems’: complex, because their behavior is difficult to predict from a knowledge of their constituent parts alone; adaptive, because they self-organize into new forms or behaviors in response to their circumstances. You – like all organisms – are a complex adaptive system. So is the World Wide Web. So are brains, termite colonies, swarming bees, cities, and financial markets… Within complex adaptive systems, small changes can bring about large effects that can only be observed in the system as a whole. Rarely can a neat arrow be plotted between cause and effect. Stimuli – which may be unremarkable gestures in themselves – swirl into often surprising responses. Financial crashes are a good example of this type of dynamic nonlinear process. So are sneezes, and orgasms.”
Symbiosis, a term we are now use familiarly to describe relationships between living organisms, came about by studying fungi. Coexistence is a tension between competition and cooperation. It’s complicated. And fungi show a full spectrum of different behaviors towards their neighbors. Beyond psychedelics, fungi have a many-layered relationship with humans. They help us to bake bread and brew beer. Some are willing to pay top dollar for the delicacy of odorous truffles. And there is a whole range of marvelous sustainability and eco-industry solutions – Chapter 7 showcases many creative examples, which simply gave me the “wow, fungi can do that?” feeling over and over. There’s also an intriguing narrative in Chapter 8 that connects the mutation of the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme in primates (thus allowing us humans to enjoy a drinking buzz without being violently poisoned in the first few sips), to the quest for biofuels.
In his epilogue, Sheldrake muses on how “fungi make worlds; they also unmake them.” In response, now that he’s finished the book, he plans to sacrifice two copies to fungi. One will be dampened and seeded with fungi that will decompose or “eat” the book, and when they’ve sprouted mushrooms, he will eat them. And thus, eat his own words. The other will be mashed into sugars, and yeast will ferment it into beer, which he’ll drink. Sheldrake calls this “closing the circuit”. Making and unmaking. Composing and decomposing. The circle of life and death.
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