Poured Over: Merlin Sheldrake on Entangled Life: Illustrated Edition

By Jenna Seery / December 2, 2023 at 6:00 am

“It’s important for us to examine those inherited perspectives that … guide the way that we think and feel and imagine with regard to other life forms on the planet.”

Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition brings readers back to the wondrous realm of fungi, now with stunning photographs that illuminate this mysterious piece of our world in a new way. Sheldrake joins us to talk about adding a new medium to his work, the influences of fungi on culture, important conservation efforts and more with guest host, Chris Gillespie.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Chris Gillespie and mixed by Harry Liang.              

Featured Books (Episode):
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Entangled Life: Illustrated Edition by Merlin Sheldrake

Full Episode Transcript
Chris Gillespie
You’re listening to Poured Over the Barnes and Noble podcast. My name is Chris Gillespie. My guest today is a biologist and author whose 2020 book Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds change our minds and shape our futures, became a best seller in both the New York Times and The Sunday Times and went on to win the Royal Society Book Prize, as well as the Wainwright prize. Three years later, he’s back with a gorgeous new adaptation of that book entitled entangled life the illustrated edition how fungi make our worlds. Please join me in welcoming Merlin Sheldrake. Merlin, thanks for being here.

Merlin Sheldrake
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

CG
Our pleasure. So before we begin, I was wondering if you’d be able to briefly explain to the listener what the Entangled Life series is all about what these books are sort of, broadly speaking.

The Entangled Life, the shortest way to say it is to use a subtitle, which is how fungi make our worlds change our minds and shape our futures. These are books about fungi, about the way that fungi have played a vital and often underappreciated roles in the history of life, how they’re responsible for many of the vital processes of the biosphere today, and how they will continue to influence the trajectory of earthly existence moving forward.

It’s big stuff, and a really, really fascinating book. And so there are so many terms in this book, and I am not a biologist, I’m not a scientist by any means. So I am going to avoid trying to pronounce most of them. So you’re saying fungi is that? ? Here’s a fun guy.

Fungi, fungi, fungi. It’s really up to you. I say fungi. But many of my colleagues say fungi and fungi.

So we’ll have some fun with that. So before we dive into the specifics of the book, I’m kind of curious about how this new illustrated edition came to be. Was it always your plan to release an illustrated edition at some point? Or was that an idea that came to you following the success of the original book,

It came to me following the success of the original book, but it’s always been something that I’ve been very passionate about. So much of the work of researchers in biology is, is looking at things looking at stuff, looking at other lives. And particularly in the case of the study of funghi. A lot of what we know about funghi has come about because of the diligent and visionary and patient work of researchers who have taken the time to look at them often under a microscope, I myself have spent a lot a lot of time looking at funghi under a microscope. And in these processes you learn about you get a feeling for the organisms in a different way. There’s some kind of ambient understanding that creeps in that trickles in. And that’s something that I’ve always wanted to play with and communicate. And in the first entangled life, I was able to include some images, but not nearly as many as I wanted to. So this has been a long standing…

This is a fascinating project. And I had not read the previous book, but I had read this one, the visuals are incredible, and certainly do help to illustrate what you’re writing about and what you’re explaining, and certainly was very eye opening for me. The writing in this book is an abridged version of the text from the original book. So how was that adaptation process? Like for you in terms of, did you know what you wanted to include going into it? Or did you kind of piece that together over the course of producing the book?

Yeah, it was that was a little tricky. With the way I’d written the book in the first place, I thought of each chapter, or indeed the whole book because it kind of braided stream braiding together different parts of narrative, different stylistic tones, you know, me in the story reporting on things versus relaying the kind of more narrative voice from nowhere. So different kinds of style, different kinds of texture, different narrative strands, and for me, that really mirrored fungal life in some way, fungi live their lives as networks, and it can grow on lots of fronts at once. And so this is something I really enjoyed putting together in the first instance, when writing the book. So averaging was tricky, because lots of the bits of the of the chapters depended on the other bits in a kind of architectural way, where if I pulled out one bit, then other parts would collapse, so I had to be quite ruthless. But once I got on my ruthless hat, then it became quite enjoyable. I just went around hacking off whole parts of it, you know, just feeling quite free about it and not feeling precious. When I when I sort of taken on board what really, I had to do so then it became quite fun. And I realized that I could tell quite a few different stories from the same original text. So there were some difficult judgment calls, but overall, the sense of shedding was satisfying and I’m happy with how it’s turned out.

That’s great. And then does that shredding process like you described? Does that change your relationship to the original book about how you think about it, where you’re like, Oh, I guess I didn’t really need this paragraph or this chapter or this section? Or do you kind of feel like the first book is its own thing stands alone. And this happens to be a separate thing that’s like sort of a sibling title to it, if you will.

Yeah, when I read through the original, then I liked it more, actually, more than I did before. Now that I’ve read the kind of slimmed down version, I realized how much I didn’t need all of those things to tell the full nuanced story that I wanted to tell. So I think of this as a kind of maybe a little sibling to the original one, not in any kind of inferior way. But more that the emphasis is different now that, that it’s maybe a more about the imagery, the text opens up the imagery. But there are definitely nuances that are just simply wouldn’t fit in this fashion and photos in the original is the place to go.

So talking about that imagery, how did you go about acquiring these photos and deciding which ones to include in the book, I did see in some of the photo credits that the photos were from you originally, but there are a lot of other photographers, and individuals who contributed to the book because I imagined, you know, writing the book, adapting the book, abridging the book is one sort of skill and talent. But then I’m assuming you probably had tons of photos, like what percentage of all the photos you had access to you actually made it into the book.

So what I did is I went around knocking on the doors of all of the best fungal photographers that I knew. And there’s photographers sometimes working with, with cameras, sometimes with cameras with macro lenses, and sometimes cameras attached to microscopes. There’s a real variation and scale there. But I think of them all, ultimately, as photographers, even the ones that are taking photos on microscopes, even though that don’t mean you’re working on a microscope, there are a huge number of additional challenges and additional skills required. I knocked on their doors, a whole load of fungal images. And I said, look, you know, could you share your favorite images, sometimes I was looking for certain things like looking for pictures of truffles, or the lives of truffle in a more general sense. And I might ask the dose, or sometimes for psychoactive mushrooms, you know, and then there were just loads and loads of images. And then I had to go through and choose the ones that I thought were most vivid, also the ones that I felt illustrated the ideas in the book in the best way. So it was a dance between the most captivating images and the ones that were the best fit. And also looking for a sense of balance. You know, there’s lots of pictures of mushrooms in the world. And on the whole, most readers have seen pictures of mushrooms before. And of course, I was going to include pictures of mushrooms in this book, but I didn’t want to have it to skew towards mushroom pictures, I wanted to also have maybe some less familiar type of image in that book to balance things out of it. So that was another consideration. It was an amazing process, you know, just gazing at a slicing images for days and days and days, I got kind of dizzy.

Yeah, it’s remarkable because like you were saying about a lot of these images were taken using a microscope, or a camera attached to a microscope. So we’re looking at literally microscopic organisms, or structures or whatnot. And now they’re blown up to the size of this great, like gift book, coffee table book kind of size. It’s really remarkable. Seeing how like the image resolution is, is great. And you can see that these things that are you’d never be able to see with your naked eye or now, you right in front of you. And they’re colorful. And it was really incredible. Do you have any favorite images from the book? I know, it’s tough to talk about a visual book like this on an audio only platform. But would you be able to describe any of your favorite photos.

Some of my favorite ones are the images of lichens. They were made by an amazing lichen researcher and they show cross sections through lichens and reveal the intimacy of the relationship between the different partners within the lichen. And this was views that I’d never actually seen before in this kind of resolution, and taken so skillfully, you know, prepared so skillfully, that the scenes are really visible. Sometimes when you’re looking down a microscope, you have to know what you’re looking for, for it to be meaningful. And so lots of the time in a research context, it’s not always easy to for people who haven’t been trained to look at this kind of image to make sense of them. So some of the skill of a microscopist making images that are for more public consumption is to prepare the samples in a way where it’s evident from the composition that this is a living organism and you kind of know what aspects of the living organism you’re looking at while also being able to see what’s going on inside. I feel like these lichen images really succeed in that in a remarkable way. Some other ones that I really find very powerful are the images of Maria Sabina the curandera from Mexico who, the healer who worked with psychedelic mushrooms with psilocybin containing mushrooms and, and there are a couple of photos of her in the book that come from the archive in her village, which are very kindly shared by the archivist and showing her teaching a young girls how to lead mushroom ceremonies. And these are just very powerful images that that I just had never seen before. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen that before, apart from the custodians of the archive. And it was just a new view for me and just captured so movingly saying her great wisdom, very evident on her face, and in the way that she’s conducting herself with regard to students.

I do want to talk more about mankind’s relationship to fungi around the world and throughout history, because that is obviously such a major point in the book. But sort of thinking about the images, and the visuals, because you have the all the photos of, of mushrooms, of fungi of different things. Some of them are quite striking and beautiful in terms of their color or the symmetry, there’s this kind of it’s very powerful to see the kind of beauty that exists. So on such a small scale of microscopic are seeing these sites that we typically would not see or would not be looking for, for those of us who are not fungi, experts or biologists. But I was also wondering, because looking at some of the images, like they’re great images, but I couldn’t help myself. Some of them I and I don’t remember which one specifically. But I kind of found myself getting a little queasy looking at because I was looking at the fungi. I was like, oh, and I was like, that’s interesting. Why is this happening right now? So I was wondering how much I disgust is kind of a strong word. And I don’t mean it, that I’m disgusted by the images. But I think there’s a visceral reaction that many of us have towards different types of fungi. Do you think that’s a evolutionary trait that we as humans picked up to keep ourselves safe? Or is that more of a societal construct that we’ve just been conditioned to not find beauty in these things?

I’d say it’s more cultural, because if you just look at the world cuisines, for example, you go around the world and a whistlestop tour of traditional cuisines in different parts of the world, I think you’d find very frequently that you ran into foods that were considered delicacies in the place you were but that you found gross for whatever reason, there might be in the far north, you might be eating fermented walrus blubber, you might be using a very, very slimy kind of mushroom in Korea, that’s considered a delicacy, you might be eating a French cheese that smells so strong that actually this one French cheese gets, that’s actually illegal to carry on public buses, because it’s such a strong smell. So I think wherever you went, you’d find yourself running into the limits of your horizon of acceptable flavors. And I think it’s a bit like that with these fungal images that there’s actually is an image and microscopic image of some moldy cheese like chicken and cheese that’s supposed to be moldy. And I love that image, I included that image, partly because when you see it, it looks so disgusting. When you find out that it’s a delicacy that you’d eat without thinking, you know, for your lunch probably eliminate at least many of the people I know would eat it for their lunch, then there’s an interesting dissonance that sets up, you know, between the foul and fragrant. And I’d like to play with that a little bit. Because I think it’s important for us to examine those inherited perspectives that so often inherited from our cultures that guide the way that we think and feel and imagine with regard to other life forms on the planet. So I do use that a little bit in the book sort of deliberately. But also, because I think it’s fun. I think it’s fun to feel those feelings of disgust and then wonder why one is disgusted, I think it’s a healthy confusion.

Absolutely. Certainly, I appreciated being able to be curious about that. And think about that. And it does certainly change or change my perception a little bit about just being more attuned or aware of these types of organisms, just in my own backyard. After reading the book, I went for a hike. And I was just amazed by the different kinds of fungi that I saw on the trees, on collapsed trees on those stones, they were everywhere. And I was like, wow, I really wouldn’t have been paying attention to these things, the way that I am now paying attention to them. So it’s very eye opening. I think I was also wondering, in terms of, you know, the cultural differences and the different perceptions of it. Are there any cultures that kind of value the aesthetics of mushrooms or fungi in the way that so many of us in the Western worlds like you know, we’ll get flowers as a gift or we’ll have flowers on our clothes or decorations. Is there anyone that really It owns that kind of, I appreciate the aesthetic of the mushroom of the fungi.

You can find this kind of attitude in Central and Eastern European countries, also in East Asian countries. So in Japan and Korea and China, and in Japan actually giving much of tacky mushrooms in boxes as a kind of as a gift is a thing that happens. And these are very highly prized mushrooms. They’re very unusual flavor quite yet utterly themselves. Yeah, I mean, I just talked to a friend who just come back from Yunnan province in China, and at a market in a town there, they’d found 800 species of edible mushrooms on sale. Which is remarkable. If you go to the largest supermarket in North America or in England, I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be 800 species of the total number of species represented in that supermarket of animal flat fungus, I thought there would be as many as 800, let alone a small town with 100 Just mushroom species alone. So I think that’s a kind of indication of fungal enthusiasm. And if we take that as an indication of fungal enthusiast, and then when I go into my supermarkets in England, I find maybe one or two types of mushroom for sale. I think we have a nice comparison there. Yeah, I think China and mushrooms have been used medicinally certain medicinal mushrooms, like Reishi have been documented in very ancient medicinal texts, and have been valued as a healing agent as a source of longevity and health and represented in visual format and written form in these in these old texts.

So then why do you think it is that in our so much of our Western culture, why is it that we tend to have such a misunderstanding or just general under appreciation of fungi?

It’s good question. And people have wrestled with this for a long time. Why are some cultures mad about fungi? And why are some cultures more generally kind of fearful of them? There are no really good answers. I think people have complex entities to fungi for lots of reasons. One is that we are comparatively ignorant about the fungal world, most fungi live their lives out of our sights, and it’s harder to know them, it’s harder to see them doing what they’re doing, say with compared to, compared to a plant, that ignorance can breed suspicion, and, but also fungi can associate with death and decay and consume kind of dark or appeal to sort of Gothic fears, and are often being used as indications as signals of a kind of decay or rot or no to indicate, say, within novels, and to indicate that kind of dank place. I think that kind of association builds up over time. But also, if you are ignorant about mushrooms, say you were growing up in the 18th century in England. They were very unreliable guides to mushrooms. And so you went outside and your children were poisoned by eating a mushroom that was poisonous. And it would be perfectly rational, I think, in the absence of reliable information to advise them not to eat any mushrooms at all. It’s only when we start to get more reliable information about mushrooms, that one can start to be more discerning. And much of the information in the English-speaking world certainly has been quite unreliable until you know 150 years ago.

And you mentioned the kind of Gothic attitudes or the sort of fear of fungi for a lot of people in certain cultures, I think probably our culture here in America, but it’s also curious. Are you familiar with the series, I think it was on HBO maybe earlier this year, but the last of us with the zombies who are basically coming from a fungal parasite that shows is scary is terrifying. So you think that there is something inherently scary to us as people about mushrooms because of like you said, the ignorance, we’re not really sure how they work, because they don’t really fit neatly into, like a clean bucket for us to understand them. Like they’re not an animal necessarily. They’re not a plant. I kept reading your book and thinking about the duality of the fungi because they’re, they’re sort of two things at the same time. Like they’re kind of opposites, where they’re organic, sometimes and inorganic, they’re individual, but then they’re also plural, their sexual but asexual, simple complex, like there’s all these dualities. Is it possible to think of fungi or understand fungi without really comprehending or kind of really having a grasp on the sense of duality?

Yeah, there are so many puzzling things about them. I think one of the interesting things about fungi is that thinking about them makes the world look different. And they reveal I think, many of the limitations and the kinds of structures and concepts that we use to organize our lives. I think our sense of dualities often arises from the rigidity of our structures and our binary classification if it’s either this or this. And it’s not necessarily that it is either that or that it’s just that our system is one which forces it to be either that or that. And so we get confused when it doesn’t fit into one or the other. And we shuttled around and that kind of duality and feeling confused often. So I think plugging reveal a lot of the places where our binary structures were thin and lose their usefulness and where we have to reach for other ways of understanding more contextual, more thinking about context and nuances of context, while thinking about ambiguity without having necessarily to resolve at one way or another plurality, and all those are kind of shimmering gray areas that resists definite one way or another type of thinking. So yeah, I think I think it makes sense that we would feel that duality when confronted with the strangeness of fungal life. But I think the invitation that funky for us is to relax some of that rigidity and to think and feed in new ways about the living world.

It’s amazing the, the nature of the natural world and the living world. And you read about these things, and you’re like, I you know, it’s not that truth is stranger than fiction, but just the complexity of these things, and how they, they don’t fit into that kind of binary system, like you were saying, and you’re like, ah, the living world is so much bigger than us humans perceive it to be or it doesn’t necessarily play by the rules or fit into that kind of neat, tidy structure that we would prefer it to. Which I think is a good thing that it doesn’t fit into that. But you talk a lot about human’s relationship with fungi in the book, and plants relationships with one guy, but he also talked about the relationship that animals and insects have with different types of fun, guys. So were there any dynamics of that variety of that nature that really stood out to you? Or is there anything specific that you’ve learned about fungi through other species relationship with the fungi?

Insects, insects, relationship with fungi is extraordinary. There’s so many ways to be an insect. Of course, there are so many ways to be a fungus. And I think coming back to what you said in your question before, I think there are that the Last of Us a TV show, which is science fiction, but there are good reasons why we would feel terrified by a by fungi given some of them live, like the lives of gruesome zombie defying powers that can take over and puppet an animal body. Now there’s lots of they don’t do this to humans or mammals, but they did do this to insects. And that’s what the Last of Us was based on. And I think it makes us the perfect material for horror, horror sci fi story because it you know, touches many deep and primal fears ranging from a lack of control loss of control to the zombie fear, you know, being a Walking Dead to being invaded, being consumed alive, that revolting intimacy. Yeah, but I think there’s good reasons to feel that kind of, at least I can understand why the last of us came about. And of course, funky do cause lots of problems for humans, there are new fungal diseases of humans are on the rise and funky, cause the damaging diseases of crops take names for certain fungal disease kills, ruins enough rice every year that could feed 60 million people. There is a whole kingdom of life, we have ambiguous relationships with them, sometimes scary relationships with them. And although it’s only a very small fraction of the fungal world that causes this kind of problem for humans, I should add, but when it comes to insects, there are so many wild relationships and they’re the kind of zombie fungi that we’ve just discussed that the growing body of insects and puppet their behavior in a way that suits the fungus. And these are fascinating because how the fungus can get such precise control of animal behavior is wild. And something we don’t really fully understand yet. But there are also relationships with insects which have led to remarkable insect societies forming so termites, for example, termites, or leafcutter ants both form some of the largest insect societies in the world, and millions and millions of individuals. And in both cases, the leaf cutter ants are the termites, the microtome is termites. They spend most of their lives gathering food for fungus which they grow in enormous mounds. And they provide the fungus they cultivate this fungus is a form of agriculture is a specific kind of fungus. They grow only this fungus and to the exclusion of other fungi and other organisms. They feed it in the leafcutter ants feed the fungus for fragments of leaf and the termites feed it with bits of wood slurry that they have regurgitate and they’re able to cultivate the fungus digests the leaves digestive wood and provides the insects with food and allows them to grow into these complex societies the termites produce and they make mounds that allow the fungus to grow. In the baking hot, dry conditions of the Sahara, the termites were able to provide the fungus with cool damp conditions. Because of the architectural features of their mounds, they have galleries and vents that carefully regulate the co2 and the oxygen levels and moisture levels. So these are really remarkable stories of collaboration between insects in the fungal kingdom that make possible entirely new ways of life. I think the fungus insect story is very much like that, you know, they have different kinds of ways of relating, and remarkable really across the board.

When I was reading the book, I was wondering how much of these kinds of traits have these features these quirks, we can use the, the mind control of the ants as a pretty dramatic example of it. But how much of this is something that you think fungi evolved over time too, as a way of being like, Hey, this is a good way of making sure that like as an organism, we survive, or we spread if we kind of take advantage of other organisms, or if we partner with other organisms, this is good for our organism, or how much of that is, do you think is just some kind of side effect or a coincidence that there’s something in the fun guy that just happens to do this? And it’s a strange little thing? How much of it do you think is like a survival mechanism versus just kind of a bizarre side effect?

Well, I think usually, when we’re looking at these relationships, we’re looking at enduring relationships. So the association between the leafcutter ants and the fungus, that’s 10s of millions of years old, 13 years old, 14 million years old, same with a termite with the zombie fungi again, 10s of millions of years. So these are quite stable relationships over a very long period of time. You know, humans, modern humans are thought to have arisen about 200,000 years ago. 10s of millions of years ago, some of them are far from incidental associations. Although I think you can definitely get incidental associations as well. But these relationships, even if they go on for a long time can change, they can there’s that lives off tree sap and it’s not able to extract from the tree sap as much, or all of the key minerals it needs. So it has glands where it has in its body, where it keeps a fungus that can help metabolize the tree sap and provide it with key nutrients. And Japanese researchers were set very surprised to find out that that fungus was it was a quadriceps fungus, very close cousin of fungus that a zombie fungus. And somehow Sicard had domesticated it and turned the fungus this off your quadriceps fungus from being a certain killer into being an indispensable onboard nutritional partner, you can see these flips over the course of evolution and no friend can become foe in a surprisingly small number of evolutionary steps.

So you do, in the book, you kind of give us a little bit of insight into a few of the different adventures that you went on when writing the original book, exploring all these different kinds of relationships between fungi and us as humans. One of the more fun examples, you said that you went truffle hunting in Italy, I was wondering if you got to taste any of these legendary rare truffles.

I did actually. And, and even better than tasting them was smelling them in the field. And when as soon as they’d been on Earth, the freshness of the smell there, they were just remarkably vivid. That truffle smell is created by living metabolizing cells. And you can’t dry a truffle expect to taste it later that you can with some funghi. And so the moment you pick it, this smell is starts to fall off. And so by the time it arrives, in LA, it will be far less vivid and flavor than it was when it came to the ground. So being there when it’s unearthed and being able to smell the ground and smell its flavor in context. You know, because these organisms have evolved for this, this flavor has evolved in within a certain context to attract animals in that place. So you can smell the wet cuts above the other smells in the forest. You can see how it sort of drifts in relation with other smells and catches your attention. It’s a very different experience from tasting on a plate in a restaurant. So it’s very I was excited to have that that chance to be in situ with a truffle in its home.

And you enjoy the smell and the taste. It was a pleasant sensation for you.

It was for me, yeah, it’s not for everyone. I’ve met people who don’t like the smell of these white truffles. I love them. I love the funk. I love the kind of quite high pitched like off notes that it’s not what you’d expect and it’s very much itself. It’s kind of like a chord I guess slightly. Slightly discordant jazz chord I find in music. It’s something that I really enjoyed. And once tasted, it’s very hard to mistake for anything else.

That’s awesome. A different experience that I was curious about was, you took some kind of psychedelic drug an LSD or something else distilled from of a fungi. But you did this in a controlled laboratory like environment. And I was wondering if this was, if writing this book, researching the book was the first time that you’ve done anything like this, and what that experience was like for you?

It was studying LSD, the effects of LSD on the ability of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, to solve problems. Yeah, it was a remarkable experience. And important, I think it was, it was a powerful experience. To me, as a scientist, I spend so much of my time doing experiments on other living organisms. And it’s nice to have experiments done on you sometimes. It feels like a key part of scientific training, I wonder how the collective body of the sciences would be different if all scientists had been experimented on themselves at some point in their training. So that was an important perspective shift in itself. And a very powerful experience, it is a sense of my mind being much faster than I normally thought of it as. and a sense of wild places in the mind where we’re not wouldn’t normally spend time. But knowing their changes the way that didn’t change my relationship with the way I understood myself and selfhood more generally. So that was very powerful. I had taken psychedelics before, in England in 2004, magic mushrooms, so called Magic mushrooms were legal when they were fresh, when they are not prepared, not dried, as loopholes and loss there were a couple of years when they’re being sold out in the high streets and companies were selling 10s of 1000s of trips a week, and a huge number of people were taking these mushrooms because they were legal. And the loophole was closed soon afterwards. But cat was out of the bag for many people and when they were quite close, but that was a time of experimentation for me.

Would we benefit from looser laws that would allow more people to have access to this type of thing? Do you think that would be good for society? Or do you think that would be bad for society?

I think the current status of certainly in North America and the UK as well, it’s a federally in North America, because obviously, it’s very, it’s a kind of a mosaic of experimental deregulation right now in much of the states. But um, I think that kind of the war on drugs, what we inherited from the war on drugs, type of drug isolation is hugely damaging to society, and that there are definitely other ways to organize our societal relationships to powerful chemicals than these often what seems to be very vindictive, criminalizing structures. And certainly when it comes to compounds, like psychedelics, which have many potential benefits to humans, it seems perverse that they should be classified as they are, while at the same time very dangerous drugs, like alcohol should be readily available. It feels like there are some inconsistencies perhaps in the way that this is being practiced. So I’m not saying psychedelics are for everyone. I don’t think they are. I think there are certain things that really need to be in place for him to be done safely. But I certainly think that they shouldn’t be binned with and categorized as in the way that they currently are.

Looking forward, and kind of thinking about the future, sort of what kinds of possibilities or solutions might fungi help us unlock. In the near future in the distant future? Are there any that you find, like really promising and super exciting?

So I think humans have been working with fungi for another very long time. And in so many ways, now, whenever we cultivate a plant, we’re cultivating fungal species because all plants depend on funghi that either live in their leaves and shoots or live in their roots. Whenever we may ferment foods, we’re usually involving funghi somehow, through torturing so many medicines that have transformed human life I’ve started off as compounds produced by funky like penicillin. And so moving forwards I think that that these basic manners and basic ways of working with Fundy will continue and just deepen and expand. So fungal drugs moving forward, and what undiscovered fungal drugs are there. I think they’re a great deal. And Paul Stamets, mycology and mycologist and his team at Washington State University have found that fungal antiviral compounds can prolong the life of bees, which is obviously a really big issue right now. So these jungle drugs might not just be drugs for humans but drugs Animals in trouble that we depend on. I think there’ll be an exciting and long story of medicinal compounds produced by funghi, then fungal foods. Now growing mushrooms, for example, you can grow a very healthy and often medicinal foodstuff on agricultural waste in a couple of weeks, without needing big fields to do. So there’s a kind of alchemy there, turning waste into food. And I think fungal foods moving forward will be a really big deal for us as a species, and of course, they have been for a long time already. To uncle building materials, there’s a whole new field emerging of fungal building materials by encouraging funghi to grow through, say corn stalks, you can produce bricks or boards or any particular shape you’d like. And indeed, a kind of textile like leather, like material deeds are versatile materials that can replace polluting materials, again, be grown in a matter of weeks on material on waste that would otherwise be a problem to dispose of, then fields of agriculture and forestry, huge areas of human endeavor, both for materials for food, and for sequestering carbon, and helping to mitigate the effects of, of climate change. And whenever we cultivate plants, we’re cultivating funghi. And there are lots of ways that we can make these industries more regenerative and less damaging by becoming more ecologically literate by thinking about the lives in the soil by thinking about the associations these plants make, and working with these fungal associates rather than getting in the way of these very ancient associations. So those are just a few I think, there. There are many more to discuss.

It’s incredible. I was thinking about, you know, when I was reading the book, and kind of like you said a little while ago about how fungi have evolved over millions and millions and millions of years. And I’m like, wow, us humans are kind of the New Kids on the Block, you know, in terms of life on this planet, especially compared to fungi. And it kind of almost feels like, it’s fungi’s world. And we’re just the kind of ones who are living in it, they’re kind of the, I got the impression that fungi were kind of the unsung heroes are workhorses of the natural world that are keeping so many of these different natural systems together and fueling them or, you know, working with animals and having these relationships. And you write a lot in the book about how to some extent, sort of their bread and butter, if you will, our sort of environmental disasters over the millions and millions of years when there’s really strange, bizarre hard changes going on. Fungi, you know, seize the opportunity, and really thrive in those kinds of disasters. And I was thinking about like, well, you know, if fungi really need good disasters, we humans are, you know, certainly happy to provide those and with everything that’s going on with the climate crisis, and everything, I was wondering, if you think are we headed into like a new golden age of fungi? Cause I think that, you know, you sort of said that there’s all these different solutions. I feel like fungi may be having their time in the spotlight pretty soon, because we’re gonna need all the help and solutions we can get.

So in some sense, yes. But there are lots of ways to be a fungus. And so we are destroying the habitats of many, many fungal species. At the same time, as we are providing opportunities for other fungal species. When we clear cut a forest, we knock out the habitat for a huge number of fungal species that depend on the plants and the environment created by the plants to live. At the same time, when we change the climate and change the range of certain species of pest, we might make it possible indirectly, for a pest to arrive in a forest that never been in before and wipe out that forest and then, and then all of those dead trees are the home to decomposing funky, that now suddenly have a huge area of plant material to rot they wouldn’t otherwise have had. So it’s no simple story. We’re very worryingly doing a huge amount of damage to underground ecosystems at the moment. And that’s very bad news for us and many, many organisms on the planet. Because the soils are the kind of guts of the planet they’re the place where the so much of the cycling of essential nutrients take place and at the home to a vast number of species without which we would not be able to live. So I’d say in the near term, we’re doing more damage to the frontal world than we are providing opportunities.

Then that leads me into my next question of how can we as a society, as humans be better neighbors and stewards for fungi?

On a kind of societal level, we can include fungi within conservation frameworks. Many conservation frameworks exclude fungi at the moment, which is a problem because without fungi you don’t have the animals, animal life and plant life that that we depend on. We can have more funding for fungal education and fungal research. Fungi are largely absent from school curriculum, which is a big problem. So there’s that kind of pro fungal behavior on a societal level, there might be more ways that fungi are integrated within our food systems. So we might eat more mushrooms, and in doing so be encouraging systems of production that think in terms of cycles. Now, there’s the waste from this growing these sunflowers, the storks can become the raw material for a new type of food, which in itself can replace maybe more environmentally damaging types of food, like, like meat, or at least reduce our dependence on meats and not necessarily replace them. There’s that level as individuals, and there’s all sorts of ways we can take an interest and these lives unfolding around us. And we can we can learn about them, we can notice them, when you garden, you might start using more organic fertilization, you might start composting, you might add less fungicide to your garden, you might add less inorganic nitrogen fertilizer to your garden, for example, might start fermenting foods more in your home, introducing these foods to your diet, which should be on the whole and beneficial for one’s health, but also be educational about the microbial world that we live within, you might leave more dead wood around in the garden or in any woodland you are responsible for you might or as a farmer, there are so many things you can do to encourage life in the soil. So there’s lots of ways depending on who you are and where you are, and what you do.

That’s awesome. That’s a fantastic list of different things that hopefully our listeners will be able to incorporate into their own lives. Maybe not all of those things, but certainly one or two would certainly be very feasible. I was also wondering, we’re going to be running out of time, momentarily, but I was curious, what’s next for you? What have you been working on what’s inspiring you are driving your curiosity these days.

I’m working with an organization called the Society for the Protection of underground networks or SPUN and we try to map the mycorrhizal fungal communities of the planet, fungi that form relationships with plants. We’re trying to make big maps of the fungal communities all over the planet and advocate for the protection of underground ecosystems. So to try and encourage decision makers to factor in the lives of the organisms living in the soil when making decisions. At the moment, the lives of underground organisms are normally just brushed over because we don’t know who’s where. And so these maps hopefully will provide tools that will allow us to start to change that that story. I’m also working with an initiative called the three F’s initiative, fauna, flora fungi, I’m trying to include fungi, within conservation systems for conservation frameworks and structures. And the purpose of that is to try and unlock funds for fungal research and fungal education as well as including fungi in our decisions we make about the living world. I’m also doing research with a great team in Amsterdam, into fungal life, and how fungal networks are able to coordinate their behavior and manage complex trading relationships with plants. And that involves lots of wonderful microscope work looking inside the networks looking at flows, and traffic within fungal networks on a moment to moment basis. So those are just a few a few things that I’m finding exciting but looking at the very small but also looking at the very large and wrestling with the question of how as a scientist, we can start to bridge the research we do on the very small scale, and the research we do on a very big scale.

So what were the organizations again in case our listeners are interested about learning more becoming involved somehow?

Yeah, spun.us Is the website for SPUN, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, and three F’s Initiative, or is fauna, flora fungi.org. And there’s lots more information about that initiative there. Some of my projects you can find out more about at my website merlinsheldrake.com.

I really enjoyed this conversation Merlin I really appreciate your time. Listeners, if you love nature, if you like or appreciate life on this incredible planet. This is a fascinating and visually captivating book It’s a great gift for anyone who enjoyed the original Entangled Life or really anyone who loves learning about nature and biology. It’s thought provoking and fun and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s really changed my perspective on fungi and educated me and something that I was completely uninformed about. I think others out there who are equally ignorant or oblivious about fungi will be fascinated with this book. And it will stick with them for a long time, not unlike the million-year-old fungi themselves, check out the book, go check out your you know your own backyard and see what kind of fungi you have there. And really just kind of think about fungi more thank you again Merlin for writing these books informing us about the importance and complexity of fungi in the microbiology of it all and what we can do to help the good kinds of fungi and subsequently help ourselves. So I really appreciate it. I think your work is really important. And I’m glad that books like Entangled Life are out there and available for readers.

Wonderful. Well, thanks so much for having me.

Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition How Fungi Make Our Worlds is available now at Barnes and Noble and Bn.com. Thanks again, Merlin for taking the time to speak with me today. Take care and keep up all of the awesome work.