A fascinating glimpse into Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life
Marcus du Sautoy, the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University introduced biologist and mycologist Merlin Sheldrake as his guest for this 2023 annual lecture. Merlin is most famous for his book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, which hit the stands in 2020 and was hugely successful in opening doors and minds to the wonderful world of fungi and its network of underground pathways known as mycelium.
In one hour, Merlin could barely dig under the surface of such a wide topic but he certainly entangled our interest. For those not quite so well versed in the lore of the mushroom kingdom, Merlin’s disarming charm, loveable enthusiasm and effortless capacity to weave a narrative from seemingly inanimate fungI found attendees rooted at the the stem.
Fungi are not just odd, fragile shapes we were told never to touch when walking through the woods as children. They inhabit nearly every corner, every lightless crevasse under the most inhospitable pressures and in the most extreme environments that many other forms of life would simply perish in. They form the backbone of a symbiotic platform conducive to further life and further complexity. There may be no better evidence of this than in the woodlands that survive around us.
Sure, the scale of deforestation is unfathomable, but under the layers of what’s left, Sheldrake examines the relationship between plant and fungi that stretch over half a billion years – when plants evolved further from aquatic algae to land-based organisms. This expanse of time would encapsulate the stretch of evolution humans from crabs twice over, he expands on how this symbiosis has been formed and reformed constantly – an ever-changing bond.
The networks that fungi use to ‘communicate’ are referred to as Mycelium. Through this, according to Sheldrake, fungi deploy vast labyrinths of intricate tubular filaments, stretching under the woodland surface like a hidden nervous system, seeking out water and nutrients and sending signals across an enmeshed maze of an ecological economy.
These Fungi integrate themselves with plant roots and facilitate what can only be described as a biological trade. Photosynthesis of the plants feed the mycelium, swapping carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other essential nutrients to those which seemingly ’need’ it most.
A core test of consciousness is to examine what it might feel like to be something. There is an innate experience as to what might be like to be a cow, a worm or even Boris Johnson. For some, they might begin to feel what it’s like to be a fungal network. Responding to trees in distress and sending medicinal supplies through your mycelial tendrils; seeking out nutrients and passing it to the growing saplings; or deploying noxious toxins to ward off creatures like deer chewing on the bark. Filaments that receive these messages seem to be able to store this information, even when old sections are destroyed or simply die away – the new ones growing in their stead seem to set off in the correct directions and some may be eager to call this a mycelial “memory.”
Sheldrake is abundantly cautious here. He is emphatic that we cannot get carried away with our metaphors simply because we don’t understand how to better describe what we are looking at. It is too easy to anthropomorphise or perhaps worse yet, reduce his findings into reductive bio-chemical reactions, transferring molecules along strings of life resembling chains of GCSE osmosis. But it’s the emergent “communities” that make it hard not to get excited about, and it’s here we have a chance to learn something useful.
One of the core concepts he is keen to express is a fresh way of looking at how we manage what’s left of our patchy woodland landscape. He explains what it takes for these mycelium to thrive; the need for leaving dead wood to rot; more leaves; less soil disturbance; fewer herbicides and absolutely no more fungicides! Fungi have been facilitating the health and maintenance of our landscape for centuries, without being fully understood.
This alien, subterranean world is still galaxies apart from our own, but thanks to people like Merlin, we can at least start to see how we can stop doing further harm to what we have left. Perhaps we can begin to foster more effective ‘dialogue’ with the nature around us, maybe even communicating a way for us to help repair the damage we’ve done, building new, thriving ecological colonies for generations to come.