Trailblazer: Merlin Sheldrake

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms.

He recently published his first book called The Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Future. The book takes us on a magical journey deep into the roots of nature, in the mycelial universe that exists under every footstep we take. We talked to Merlin as part of our exploration of our relationship with nature, and how the psychological separation that we have created with nature in culture perhaps lies at the root of our climate and ecological crisis.

What’s the Story?

Merlin Sheldrake was drawn to the study of fungi in many ways since his early childhood. As a child, he was very concerned with how things can change. For example, how a bucket of compost turns into soil or dead leaves who seemed to him to be sinking into the soil. He began to be interested in decomposition, a process that seemed to happen out of his sight and yet happened so noticeably at the same time. The more he learned about this process, the more he was led to these mysterious fungi that seem to oversee so many of these natural transformations. Later when studying biology, he became interested in the study of symbiosis and the ways that organisms have found to live together in very intimate circumstances. When you start studying symbiosis and its history, you can’t go for long without running into fungi because they are major players of the symbioses who have shaped life on the planet. This is eventually what made him become interested in the symbiosis between plants and their symbiotic root of fungi.

About Entangled Life

What are Fungi?

“Fungi, they’re everywhere, but they're easy to miss. They're inside you and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for over billions of years. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, the ways we think feel and behave, yet they live their lives largely hidden from view...”

Fungi remain widely misunderstood and unknown to the general public. When speaking of fungi, we often think of mushrooms who actually are analogous to a fruit of a tree or a flower of a plant, a small ephemeral organ of a much larger organism of fungus. Fungi live their lives as decentralised mycelial networks in the soil, sprawling fusing branching networks of cubular cells known as hyphy. Fungi have many different types and uses in the ecosystem, such as rotting wood or connecting roots with each other, allowing an exchange of nutrients between different organisms. Because they represent a drastic different life form than humans, we struggle to understand these mysterious creatures through analogies. The image of a wood wide web is often used to describe fungi, as the exchange of information they create in the forest makes them comparable to the internet, but different fungi do very different things and there are lots of ways to be a fungus. Analogies such as the internet one, that try to understand the world as machines, can be helpful to our imagination. We need however to be mindful of how they can also be limiting as they understand nature as non alive and mechanistic. In fact, fungi by their sole existence challenge these mechanistic conceptions we have of nature.

How Fungi Challenge Our Idea of Nature As Non Alive and Mechanistic

Merlin’s book and the study of fungi represents an exciting contrast to such mechanistic stories because learning about the mycelial universe, is to understand how deeply interconnected and adaptive the natural world is. By thinking about the living world in machine terms, we could start to forget that these are just analogies and stories, and if we think about them as machines we are more likely to treat them as such. Starting with the ground beneath our feet is a good place to restart enchanting our lives, through understanding that we are afloat on this ocean of soil, on this is frosting and living wilderness and huge diversity of life. For us to open our eyes to these realms depends and expands our relationship with our surroundings, because what we previously thought as not alive becomes alive.

How Fungi Challenge Our Idea of What Intelligence Is

The question of intelligence is an active debate at the moment because there are many ways to think of it, and here again fungi challenge the way we have previously thought of intelligence. Merlin finds that the most helpful way to think of intelligence is to go to the latin root which means ‘to choose between options’. Fungi are no exceptions to this definition as they constantly have many different options to choose from. Fungi have proven to have great abilities to solve issues, like finding the quickest path out of a maze or finding the most logical connections between different points. As science is getting more aware of these incredible skills, people are starting to use them in order to solve difficult logical problems. This challenges the way that we think about intelligence because if we are using fungi to solve problems in human life, it forces us to be more generous in the way we attribute intelligence and cognitive facilities across the living world. For a long time we’ve been stuck in a very human centric model of intelligence, where we compared all other life forms to humans. This one way to think about it but it is not a very healthy way to think about it. It is important for us now to humble ourselves by understanding that life around us is intelligent, adaptive and responsive and that we actually have to learn to be adaptive and responsive to what we’re being faced with today.

How Fungi Challenge Our Idea of Individuality

A line of inquiry that has risen from Merlin’s study of fungi is how they challenge our conception of individuality. Fungi are easy ways into a more holistic view of nature because they’re fundamentally interconnected. You can’t think about a fungus without thinking about who it is living with and where it is living. “What we think of as biological individuals may reflect our needs and our concerns more than biological reality. We could learn to soften the boundaries of ourselves or at least think about the way selfhood might be a question rather than an answer known in advance, we might start to re evaluate our relationships.”

“It is by imagining ourselves as neatly separable from each other and from the more than human world that we justify exploitation of the natural world or of other people, it strikes me that if we could re evaluate those relationships that we form, the way that we form those relationships we might end up in some more perhaps responsible places with regards to the ecosystems that sustain us. If we see ourselves as part of these systems, which of course we are, then it becomes harder to justify pollution or justify an extractive behavior that would sabotage a biogeochemical cycle in which we depend.”

Recent Work, Challenges, Reasons for Hope & Outlook on The Future

In these times of a global pandemic, Merlin Sheldrake finds the narrative that we are in charge and have control is being diluted somewhat by the apparent uncontrollable nature of the coronavirus. “We’ve been thinking of this situation as a test for governments and their policymakers on how well they can handle the situation. However, if we were really concerned with this pandemic and future pandemics, we would stop doing what we are doing that are making pandemics very likely, and we’re doing a lot to make pandemics very likely, whether it be deforestation or all sorts of habitat destruction which forces animals into a different kind of contact with humans or the liberal use of antibiotics in farming which is a surefire way to breed new bacterial superbugs. Governments need to work on this current pandemic but if those in power are really serious about dealing with these threats in the future, then we would start to reevaluate some of those destructive practices.”

In the topic of surviving drastic environmental changes, fungi have once again their role to play. In the broadest sense, fungi have been around for over a billion years and have lived through almost all of the great extinction events of which we’re in the 6th. In more practical ways, fungi as the great recyclers of the planet are able to digest pollutants and to filter contaminated water with bacterial pathogens or heavy metal. They can extract the toxic byproduct of our irresponsible behavior and help decontaminate these environments.

Moreover, recent studies and experiments have shown a lot of exciting anticancer and antiviral drugs coming out of the fungal world, as well as psychological benefits of mushroom intake. Fungi also have promising use in the creation of mycelial leather and bricks, as more environmentally friendly alternatives to current practices. In short, whether it be on a philosophical, symbolic or practical level, we have a lot to gain from shifting our focus to the ground beneath our feet.