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Entangled Life
How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures
Introduction
A mind-bending journey into the hidden world of fungi that, like Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire and Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes, will change your understanding of life on earth.
About Fungi
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet they make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that support and sustain nearly all living systems. Some fungi range for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet, others form networks that link trees together underground, known as the "Wood Wide Web." Their ability to digest rock and decompose wood allows them to make the soil in which plants grow. Fungi also play leading roles in human life: from yeasts that cause bread to rise and orchestrate the fermentation of sugar into alcohol, to psychedelic fungi, to the mold that produces penicillin and revolutionized modern medicine. Fungi can digest many stubborn and toxic pollutants from crude oil to polyurethane plastics and the explosive TNT, and are being deployed in breakthrough technologies to make sustainable building materials and wearable leather. Edible mushrooms can be grown on anything from coffee grounds to used cigarette butts. And the medicinal compounds produced by fungi can be used to fight diseases and relieve the colony collapse of bees. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.
Author's Perspective
Merlin Sheldrake's exploration of this astonishing kingdom of life reveals how fungi—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how the world works. Bringing to light science's latest discoveries, he points us toward the fundamental questions that fungi provoke about the nature of life, intelligence, and identity.
