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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Introduction

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 7-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Radical Mycology”

Sheldrake sits naked in a pile of rotting wood chips, a practice known as fermentation bathing and popular primarily in Japan. As he sweats from the chemical heat of decomposition, he muses about fungi’s power and influence throughout world history. He wonders if fungi can help heal some of the scars that humans have created in the world’s biome.

Coal, a naturally occurring rock that has been harnessed by humans to both transformative and destructive ends, exists because of the gap in time between the evolution of woody plants and the evolution of fungi that could decompose them. Today, there are a huge number of wood-eating fungi, but during the Carboniferous period dead trees fell, sunk into anoxic swamps, and stayed there. These trees were eventually buried and, after millions of years of pressure and temperature acting on them, they became dense, highly volatile coal deposits. Sheldrake uses the science of coal formation to explain the vast amounts of energy that pass through wood-eating fungi, called white rot fungi. When these organisms did not exist, the energy became trapped underground as coal, before eventually being released by humans during and after the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century.

Sheldrake and many other modern mycologists, both professional and amateur, believe that white rot fungi can be harnessed to transform the world. People like Peter McCoy, who leads a group called Radical Mycology, and Paul Stamets, who has started a fungus-based business empire, have used fungi in creative ways to build new, sustainable products and decompose pollutants. They have also helped inspire a rush of amateur mycologists, a group mostly connecting via internet that believes that fungi may save the world. White rot fungi are particularly helpful for decomposition; similarly, certain fungal species have been trained to subsist on cigarette butts, used diapers, neurotoxic chemicals, and agricultural and industrial waste. In many cases, the mushrooms that grow from these fungi are completely free of contaminants and can be used as a food source.

Fungi can also be used to manufacture a huge array of items, and several companies have begun to make fungi-based materials on a large scale. Humans are not the first species to develop such systems. For example, Macrotremes termites have been growing white rot fungi for years to decompose wood that the termites themselves cannot digest. Sheldrake likens the fungi production plants to huge termite mounds, pumping out hundreds of pounds of fungal material in precisely controlled environments. Although fungus as an industrial product is a relatively new concept, it has caught on with several large companies. For example, IKEA hopes to replace foam packaging with mycelium-based foam in the near future.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Making Sense of Fungi”

The final chapter of Entangled Life focuses on a type of fungi absent from most of the previous chapters: yeast. In many ways, yeast is the easiest to ignore of all fungi. It does not grow into mushrooms and does not live as elaborate mycelial networks. However, it is the fungus by far the most intimately connected with the human species, both by biology and by choice. Human bodies are full of yeast, which has evolved alongside our own biological systems. Humans have also been collecting other yeasts for thousands of years and using them to transform our diets.

Pioneering anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss believed that yeast was the first catalyst for agricultural development. He speculated that hunter-gatherer groups began to combine yeast and honey to produce mead, the first instance of intentional cultivation. Whether this theory is correct, yeast was widely used to make leavened bread and alcohol early in human history and has continued to play an important part in culture ever since. Several ancient societies, including the Egyptians and Greeks, deified yeast or had gods specifically associated with it. The tendency to revere yeast and other fungi is common across cultures (fungophilia), but many societies have also abhorred and feared them (fungophobia). There are few cultures with a neutral attitude toward fungus.

Sheldrake suspects that the modern Western world trends more toward fungophobia, citing the moral panic surrounding psychedelic mushrooms in recent decades and the historic characterization of fungi as agents of disease and parasites. He hopes that recent developments in the understanding of fungi, as well as his own work, move the world more toward fungophilia.

Sheldrake deepens his own connection to yeast by becoming an avid brewer. He describes his apartment as a university student, full to the brim with jars of fermentation experiments. On a trip to the Cambridge Botanical Gardens, he is inspired to ferment an apple from Newton’s apple tree. After a furtive expedition to harvest some apples, he makes a delicious cider: “I called the cider Gravity and lay heavy and reeling under the influence of yeast’s prodigious metabolism” (222).

Epilogue Summary: “This Compost”

As a child, Sheldrake used to be mesmerized by the smell of life and decomposition in the wilderness. In “This Compost,” he describes one of his first introductions to fungi, when he saw that the leaf piles he had carefully assembled to jump into had begun to disappear. He dug through the piles and realized that the bottom layers were damp, full of worms, and starting to look more like soil than like leaves. At first, his young brain assumed that the leaves must be sinking, or that the soil must somehow be traveling up into the leaves. When his father told him that the leaves were decomposing, he was suddenly thrust into the world of fungi. He began to do experiments to try to catch the fungi in the act of decomposition. He could not believe that something so voracious could be invisible to the naked eye.

Sheldrake compares decomposition to its opposite: composition. Both depend on each other: Without decomposition there would be nothing for composers to build with, and without composition there would be nothing for decomposers to eat. Entangled Life is Sheldrake’s composition, made from years of fascination with decomposition. Once it is published, he will seed a copy with a mycelium, which will eat the book and grow into oyster mushrooms. He will mash another copy into pulp and use it as the basis for fermenting a jar of beer. He will eat the mushrooms, drink the beer, and therefore complete the loop.

Chapter 7-Epilogue Analysis

Chapters 7 and 8 explore the long history of human-fungi relationships. Chapter 7 focuses on modern efforts to harness mycelium as a technological tool—endeavors on the very cutting edge of fungal research. The chapter primarily consists of examples of the ways that contemporary individuals have employed fungi for increasingly creative uses. Chapter 8 becomes more philosophical, outlining the oldest human-fungal relationship: the use of yeast. By the end of the chapter, Sheldrake’s writing and actions take on a lyrical and symbolic air, as he details his process of making cider out of natural yeast and the fruit from Newton’s apple tree. The implication is not only that contemporary scientists stand on the shoulders of the giants who preceded them but also that from the human-centric theories misled by individualist bias will arise a new understanding of the organic world anchored by knowledge of symbiosis and cooperation.

The title of Chapter 7, “Radical Mycology,” indicates the extent to which a specific subset of modern fungi fans believe that mushrooms have the potential to change the world. The chapter is a call to action for Sheldrake’s readers as well. After spending six chapters exploring the many facets of fungal life, he brings them into the modern world of technology and innovation. Although many of the fungi-based innovations found in the chapter are the result of large-scale projects done in huge labs with extensive funding, Sheldrake ensures readers that revolutionary mycology does not require this type of infrastructure. With just a modified glass jar and a syringe, many types of fungi can be grown at home, and anyone can begin to experiment with fungi.

Sheldrake uses irony throughout Chapter 7 to highlight the fact that humans reached fungi-based innovations far later than animals we consider less intelligent. The primary example comes in Sheldon’s comparison of two fungi-growing facilities: termite mounds and the Ecovative lab. Although humans have the entire technological world at their disposal, the solution to effectively growing fungi ends up very similar to a structure built by insects for millions of years.

Chapter 8 revisits many of the concepts found in Entangled Life through the lens of yeast, which has a very old relationship to humankind. Sheldrake has a close personal relationship to yeast as a lifelong fermenter. The final scene of the final chapter acts as a symbolic metaphor for fungi’s long, complex relationship to people. Science ignored fungi for a long time, as these organisms did not fit into our preconceived stories about life on earth. They cannot be neatly defined, and thinking about them often brings more questions than answers. Sheldrake likens this dichotomy to Newton’s legendary apple tree. The image of Newton discovering gravity after being hit on the head by an apple is tightly cemented in our cultural consciousness, yet this may have never happened. Nevertheless, cuttings from Newton’s apple tree have been used to grow new trees around the world, and tour guides earnestly explain that these trees are exact copies of the one that inspired the theory of gravity. Sheldrake finds this inherent contradiction funny: Newton’s apple tree might never have existed, but its clones are revered and the apples protected. He sees parallels between this enduring myth and the problems encountered when one begins to study fungi. As a symbolic gesture, he gathers some apples from the Newton tree in Cambridge. He must do so under the cover of darkness; the apples are not allowed to be picked because tourists want to see them fall. He makes cider from the apples, and he describes its effects as intoxicating but surprisingly clear. At this point, the cider becomes a metaphor. He is drunk from the alcohol, which is the literal result of the symbiosis between the yeast and the apples, but is also intoxicated by the stories that can be found within science. This circularity recurs in the Epilogue’s poignant plan to use physical copies of Sheldrake’s book to engender more of the organisms that so fascinate this mycologist—his composition will be the food for the decomposers that might eventually save the world.