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44 pages 1 hour read

Merlin Sheldrake

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020

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Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “Before Roots”

Fungi are one of the oldest, if not the oldest, living organisms on earth. The first land plants, green algae, moved out of the water around 600 million years ago. This was beneficial for the photosynthetic organisms, as they gained direct access to sunlight and carbon dioxide. However, the Earth’s surface was harsh, dry, and had no organic soil where plants could root. They likely would never have succeeded in colonizing and evolving if land-dwelling mycelial networks didn’t exist first.

From the very beginning of life on Earth’s surface, plants and fungi have come together in mycorrhizal relationships. Fungi inhabit plants’ root systems, allowing plants to access nutrients gathered by fungi and fungi to glean what they cannot access from plants. Over 90% of modern plants rely on fungi in some way. Mycorrhizal relationships can be very complex, but generally involve plants transferring energy from sunlight and carbon dioxide to fungi, and fungi using hyphae filaments to access nutrients in tiny pockets of rock or other places that plants’ roots cannot reach. Plant-fungal relationships can look very different depending on the plants, the fungi, and the ecosystem in which they evolve. These relationships are just beginning to be understood. Experiments are often imperfect, as they are completed in sterile laboratory conditions that are difficult to scale, in both size and complexity, to the natural world.

It is obvious, however, that fungi play a huge part in determining how plants grow, where they flourish, and how they respond to environmental conditions. This has been the case for as long as land plants have existed. Sheldrake writes that plant-fungus relationships are often viewed from the plants’ perspective. This makes sense; plant biology is a much better developed discipline than mycology, and plants are much easier to see, appreciate, and study. However, this bias has resulted in a tendency to see plants as using fungi for their own benefit. In reality, it may be more accurate to think of fungi as having the upper hand in plant-fungal relationships. The complex chemical and electrical signals of mycelial networks have guided the lives of individual plants or specific biospheres. Fungi can make plants more or less attractive to animals, thereby impacting all forms of life on earth. Moreover, fungi have also impacted climactic conditions: Fungi helped cool the ancient climate by encouraging trees to grow taller and absorb more carbon dioxide.

By developing large-scale agriculture that is heavily dependent on antimicrobial pesticides and inorganic fertilizers, humans have greatly impacted the mycorrhizal relationships within much of the Earth’s soil. Recent research has attempted to use fungi to reverse the damage, but Sheldrake warns that this is not easy. Mycorrhizal relationships are complex systems that evolved over millions of years, and while adding a few mycelia to agricultural soil may be helpful in some cases, it is in no way a substitution for natural soil conditions.

Chapter 6 Summary: “Wood Wide Webs”

“Wood Wide Webs” delves deeper into the complex relationships between fungi, plants, and other life. In recent decades, this network has come to be called the “wood wide web.” Sheldrake is somewhat hesitant to adopt this term, as it anthropomorphizes the mycorrhizal network by comparing in to the internet, which was created with intentionality by humans who continue to manage it. The wood wide web concept also shows a tendency toward plant-centrism, with plants placed as websites and fungi as the hyperlinks that connect webpages together. In reality, fungi are dynamic organisms with their own drive to survive; no part of the wood wide web exists exclusively to link other parts. Sheldrake agrees, though, that the internet can be a useful metaphor for the complex tangle of roots and mycelium that lies just underneath nearly every landscape on earth. Both are decentralized, and both are capable of transferring huge amounts of information over great distances.

Most members of mycorrhizal networks exchange benefits with other organisms. Plants often provide photosynthetic nutrients and shade, while fungi provide mineral nutrients, as well as a physical network through which information, chemicals, and electric impulses can pass. These exchanges are often surprising to human onlookers. Sheldrake outlines an experiment that proved that bean plants, when attacked by aphids, can send signals to other plants that cause those plants to produce aphid-repelling chemicals. This discovery and other similar experiments highlight the complexity of plant-fungi communication networks, challenging the common belief that plants compete with each other more often than they work together.

Sheldrake is particularly interested in myco-heterotrophs, plants that he calls “hackers” of the wood wide web. He studied one of these organisms, Voyria, during his time in Panama. While most members of ecological networks both give to and take from other organisms, myco-heterotrophs don’t appear to contribute anything. They are unable to photosynthesize, which has allowed them to grow into bizarre shapes and colors. Many species of orchid, for example, are myco-heterotrophs.

Chapters 5-6 Analysis

Chapters 5 and 6 are in-depth explorations of mycelial networks, the most widespread and important part of fungal life. Chapter 5 approaches mycelium historically, considering the history of fungi themselves and the history of the human study of them. Chapter 6 shifts to the modern era, explaining how mycelial networks impact our ecosystem and how cutting-edge research has begun to understand these vast underground worlds.

Chapter 5 explores the historic biases that shaped the way humans have come to understand fungi. The 19th century saw the rise of Darwinian theories of evolution, as well as the rise of free-market capitalism. When early mycologists began to propose that fungi and plants live in mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships that blurred the lines between individual species, these ideas were largely shunned. On one hand, these descriptions appeared to go against the basic concept of evolution, which at that point was understood as species splitting into distinct, individual new species that went on to live very different lives from each other or their common ancestors. Adaptation was seen as something that happened with no outside help; the fittest members of a species survived and went on to produce fit offspring. To early evolutionists, competition and parasitism were the only types of interactions between species. This understanding also fit well into the capitalist landscape of 19th-century industrialization. It was difficult for researchers living in this framework to imagine that other species might share resources for mutual benefit.

Research throughout the 20th century has challenged this view. Sheldrake introduces the concept of involution, a tweaked version of evolution that involves species not only branching apart but coming together and finding new ways to benefit the ecosystem as a whole. Many researchers believe that understanding involution is critical to helping the planet survive ecological collapse at the hands of humans. With Westerners primed to see individualism more readily that cooperation, humanity has developed many systems based on the idea that plants and animals are essentially islands. This is most visible in commercial agriculture, which has long ignored the relationships between crops and the organisms that surround them, instead pouring resources into nonnatural ways to grow single organisms as quickly and on as big a scale as possible. Entangled Life does not explore how premodern agriculture maintained a stable relationship with the organisms in the soil. Modern antimicrobials certainly play a part in the destruction of agricultural soil, but so do more ancient methods, such as tilling fields and clearing complex ecosystems to plant one or two species.

In Chapter 6, Sheldrake examines the analogy “wood wide web” as a descriptor for the array of fungi and root systems that underlies every natural landscape. On one hand, he sees this term as inaccurate, as it immediately brings to mind the internet and may cause people to believe that the mycorrhizal network is, like the internet, one single worldwide system. In reality, there are many different wood wide webs, whose makeup and functions depend entirely on the organisms that live within them. On the other hand, Sheldrake admires the catchiness of the term; after it was coined in the late 1990s, he saw a strong uptick in people expressing interest in mycelial networks. He compares the term to his own analogy between fungi networks and polyphonic singing. Still, while these terms help laypeople to form a mental picture of how fungus works, they ultimately fall short. Instead, he proposes trying to imagine the mycorrhizal networks on their own terms: “Are we able to stand back, look at the system, and let the polyphonic swarms of plants and fungi and bacteria that make up our homes and our worlds be themselves, and quite unlike anything else? What would that do to our minds?” (174).

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