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

Boddy studies microbial life as a professor at Cardiff University in Wales. Several of her experiments about fungal wood decomposition appear in Entangled Life. She has argued that fungi are the most important life form for humans. Boddy engages in extensive public advocacy in the name of fungi, and she teaches how fungi help ecosystems and how humans might harness this power. She contributed to the documentary Super Fungi: Can Mushrooms Help Save the World? (2013) and served as president of the British Ecological Society.

Adamatzky is a computer scientist and major figure in the field of unconventional computing; in particular, he has experimented with different types of biocomputing. He is known for using slime molds to solve geometric problems. Adamatzky proposes that fungal networks can be used as a type of computational system to track the health of ecosystems.

Margulis made major contributions to the study of symbiosis during the 20th century. In particular, she proposed the theory of endosymbiosis, which upended the conventional understanding of Darwinian evolution. She theorized that eukaryotic cells might have been the result of a symbiotic relationship between single-celled organisms and bacteria, which merged with the organisms to become each cell’s organelles. Margulis helped develop the Gaia hypothesis, which states that the Earth is one large, interconnected system.

McKenna was a well-known public intellectual and mystic who wrote extensively about ethnobotany, the study of human cultures’ interactions with plants. He serves as a major inspiration for Sheldrake and was a family friend. Sheldrake credits McKenna with first inspiring his interest in fungi’s ability to alter the human mind. As a child visiting McKenna’s house, Sheldrake was told that a concoction he saw being prepared would make him see visions, but that he was not allowed to try it until he was older. McKenna and his brother Dennis published Psilocybin: A Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide (1976) under the pseudonyms O. N. Oeric and O. T. Oss, a how-to book that helped spark the rise of psilocybin experimentation in the Western world as well as the interest in casual mushroom growing in general.

Field is a mycologist who specializes in ancient mycorrhizal relationships. Using both fossils and modern plant specimens, she traces how the oldest relationships developed and grew over time. Many of the oldest fossils show that plants and fungi in deep history had very similar relationships to those found today. Field is quoted several times in Entangled Life, especially regarding her work surrounding how fungi can be integrated into climate models.

One of Sheldrake’s coworkers at Vrije University, Kiers studies the “wood wide web,” focusing specifically on biological market models. In Entangled Life, Kiers is a strong advocate for increased mycological research and a critic of viewing fungi in too-human terms. Often, researchers apply their own economic and political viewpoints to fungi-plant relationships, characterizing them as either a competitive model similar to late capitalism or as an egalitarian utopia where all organisms cooperate and form quasi-socialist communities. Kiers hopes to highlight that the wood wide web shows evidence of both cooperation and competition, and to discover exactly what these mechanisms look like in the real world.