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

Sheldrake opens the book by describing a day in the rainforest during his ecological field work. His primary focus is a large tree, but the forest around him teems with life of all kinds. Many kinds of plants sprout from the tree’s roots, while others grow entangled with its canopy. Howler monkeys and toucans scream in the treetops, while snakes, tarantulas, and millipedes hide in the thick understory. Sheldrake has one goal: to follow a single tree root through the chaos as far as he can go.

It is slow work; after an hour he is soaked, is covered in mud, and has only moved a meter. He has learned to identify different trees by smell, so he pokes his nose into the trench he has dug, searching for a specific strong scent. As he follows the root, it becomes smaller and smaller and divides into countless branches. The branches, in turn, are covered in their own networks of minuscule fungal filaments. Sheldrake hopes to study the relationships between fungi and trees, so he has finally found what he is looking for.

Fungal species exist everywhere on earth, in nearly every possible environment, from jungles to deep-sea sediments to the frozen landscape of Antarctica. Sheldrake’s work is vast in scope because of the sheer amount of fungi that exist on Earth: There are between 2.2 and 3.8 million species of fungi, at least six times the number of plant species. Strikingly, only about 6% of these species have ever been described. The diversity found within the species that have been studied suggests that there is a gigantic amount of fungi-related biological mechanisms that humans have not even begun to analyze. While most people think of mushrooms when they hear the world fungi, these fruiting bodies are only a small part of the fungal world. The vast majority of fungal cells exist as mycelia, branching networks of tiny filaments. These networks can grow to enormous sizes; the largest known organism on earth is a fungus in Oregon that has lived for over eight thousand years and currently covers ten square kilometers. Fungi were the first complex organism to live on land. For 40 million years before the advent of plants, the planet was covered in mycelial networks that grew huge mushroom-like structures called prototaxites. As plants, then insects, then animals began to evolve, fungi shaped that evolution in ways that are just beginning to be understood.

Sheldrake has been interested in fungi for his entire life. As a child, he grew mushrooms in his bedroom and examined them in the natural areas near his childhood home. As a teenager, he made homemade alcohol out of naturally occurring yeasts. Eventually, at the University of Cambridge, he entered the department of plant sciences, since there was no such thing as a department of fungal sciences. During his undergraduate years he became interested in plant-fungus symbiosis, and he eventually embarked on a PhD project to study mycorrhizal relationships in the Panamanian jungle. While there, he noticed a small white plant called Voyria, commonly known as ghostplant, which relies so much on the mycorrhizal network that it has lost the ability to photosynthesize. Voyria acts as a jumping-off point for Sheldrake’s discussion of relationships, both in the fungal world and in life generally. By examining unusual species like Voyria, whose entire existence depends on its relationship with fungus, humanity can recalibrate its understanding of what it means to exist as a living being on planet Earth. No animal, plant, or fungus can exist without establishing relationships, and fungus may facilitate a huge number of these relationships in incredibly complex ways.