Get to Know: Merlin Sheldrake

And How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures

One of the best parts of my job is that I get to meet very cool people. Call me biased, but I think the natural world attracts some of the world’s most inspiring and creative people.

One of these very cool people is Merlin Sheldrake — biologist, philosopher, author of the brilliant and acclaimed book Entangled Life (which, if you haven’t read, you should right away), and colleague of mine at the relatively new NGO SPUN.

Merlin’s work amazes me and is actually quite provocative. He illuminates the critical role of microscopic underground fungal systems in sustaining nearly all living systems. He also shows how fungal systems have minds of their own and challenge our normal — and all too-human — perspective on what constitutes intelligent life.

I was thrilled that Merlin agreed to do an interview for our newsletter.

Meet Merlin:

1. Every time I mention your book to fellow environmentalists, they smile, stop what they’re doing, and start sharing their favorite parts. Can you give us the backstory? How did you end up writing such a fascinating and provocative book?

That's kind of you to share! When writing a book, one gets to know it so well that it can be easy to forget that it will grow up to have its own life in the wild. It's always lovely to know that it's landing with people. 

I was motivated to write the book by my wonder and fascination with fungal life. Fungi are a kingdom of life that has not had a kingdom's worth of attention, and this is a problem. I hoped that by writing a book about them for a general audience I might play my small part in alleviating our fungus-blindness, and our blindness to microbes more generally. What we are blind to we are bound to take for granted, ignore, exploit and more likely destroy. We can’t afford to overlook these organisms and the processes they oversee. 

What's more, fungi are fundamentally interconnected organisms and make us more aware of the dense networks of interconnection that make life possible. I hoped that by writing this book I might be able to invite readers to experience more of a vivid sense of the intricate webs of interaction and communication that we are bound up within. The more vivid this sense is for me, the more I feel the urgent need for us to change our attitudes towards the more-than-human world. 

2. You can see I stole your book’s subtitle,  “How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures” for this issue of our newsletter.  Can you give us a few brief examples of big accomplishments by fungi? 

Fungi underwrite the regenerative capacity of the biosphere in part because they are metabolic wizards with a breathtaking capacity to arrange and rearrange the world. Fungi can digest anything from rock to kerosene, and without their powers of decomposition our lives would be inconceivable. If nothing decomposed, the Earth would pile up kilometers deep with the bodies of animals and plants. The metabolic ingenuity of fungi impacts human lives in a number of ways – bread, alcohol, cheese, soy sauce, penicillin, anti-cancer drugs, immunosuppressant drugs that enable organ transplants... it's a huge list.  

And then there are fungal relationships: life is a story of intimate collaboration, and fungi are major players in some of the most blockbuster symbioses in the history of the planet. For example, plants only made it out of the water around 500 million years ago because of their relationships with fungi, which served as their root systems until the ancestors of plants were able to evolve their own. Today, almost all plants depend on these fungi (known as mycorrhizal fungi, from the Greek for fungus, mykes, and root, rhiza), which form intricate networks that lace through the soil and scavenge for nutrients which they trade with their plant partners. Without fungi, plant life would be impossible. 

3. I’m not going to try to summarize your book — our readers should just go get a copy and read it.  But one thing you don’t really emphasize in your book is how fungi might be put to use. That’s the kind of topic we focus on here — specifically how to best accelerate and scale environmental solutions. For example, how do you think fungi can help us address the climate and biodiversity crisis?

You can think about this question in many ways because fungi are so embedded in the biosphere. I'll focus on the mycorrhizal fungi I mentioned above — the ones that grow in and around roots and supply plants with crucial nutrients. In return for nutrients, plants supply these fungi with energy-containing carbon compounds like sugars. Our estimates suggest that on a global scale, 13 billion tonnes of carbon enter the soil through the activity of these fungi, where it supports intricate food webs — about 25% of all of the planet’s species live underground. 

Mycorrhizal fungi don't just help carbon enter the soil, but they also stabilise it once it gets there, helping to make underground ecosystems the store of 75% of all terrestrial carbon. But climate change strategies, conservation agendas and restoration efforts overlook fungi and focus overwhelmingly on aboveground ecosystems. This is a problem: the destruction of underground fungal networks accelerates both climate change and biodiversity loss and interrupts vital global nutrient cycles. Mapping and protecting these vital fungal communities would help us harness their power both to support planetary biodiversity and to keep carbon in the ground. This is the core mission of SPUN and is one of the reasons I'm so excited to work with this incredible organisation doing such urgent work. 

4. Shifting gears a bit, we all know there has been a lot of interest recently in “magic mushrooms.”  Why do you think fungi have evolved to produce the powerful psilocybin these mushrooms deliver?

The ability of some fungi to make mind-altering chemicals like psilocybin that slip into the workings of our brains is particularly intriguing, and has long been a source of puzzlement and speculation. Both fungi and plants produce a wide range of substances that have a mind-altering effect on animals. Sometimes these compounds act as deterrents: nicotine, for example, is produced by some plants and paralyses insects, whereas caffeine suppresses their appetite. Mushrooms like the death cap defend themselves with deadly poisons. Hallucinogens contained in other plants and fungi may serve to baffle herbivores and take their minds off their next meal. 

The case of psilocybin is less clear-cut. The current best estimate puts the origin of the first “magic” mushroom around 65 million years ago among wood-rotting and dung-loving fungi — tens of millions of years before humans evolved. These habitats are also home to insects that “eat or compete” with fungi, and some researchers suggest that psilocybin, with its potent neurological activity, may have evolved to defend mushrooms from hungry animals by causing confusion or suppressing their appetite. The problem is that if psilocybin has evolved to be a deterrent, it's not very effective. There are species of gnat and fly that routinely make their homes within magic mushrooms and snails and slugs devour them without apparent ill-effect.

These observations have led some to propose that psilocybin instead acts as a lure, somehow changing animal behaviour in a way that benefits the fungus – although how, exactly, isn't clear. The answer probably falls somewhere in between. Psilocybin mushrooms that are toxic to some animals could still make a good meal for those able to develop resistance. Some species of fly are resistant to the poisons produced by the death cap mushroom, for instance, and have near-exclusive access as a result. 

Interestingly, today, many psilocybin-producing fungi find themselves in a very different predicament. Whatever benefit psilocybin originally provided, its interaction with human minds has transformed the evolutionary fortunes of those fungi that can make it. Psilocybin certainly doesn't act as a human repellent — to stand a chance of overdosing, a human would have to eat a thousand times more mushrooms than required for an average trip. Quite the opposite, in fact. 

Humans seek out psilocybin-producing fungi, transport them around the world, and have worked hard to develop new methods to cultivate them. (Humans don't seem to be the only creatures to take such an interest: Michael Beug, the mycologist in charge of the poisoning reports filed by the North American Mycological Association, told me that there are a number of cases of dogs eating psychoactive mushrooms with effects that appear familiar to human observers. Only once has he dealt with reports of a cat who ate mushrooms repeatedly, and appeared to become quite “bemushroomed.”) 

A new story of domestication is in full swing. In cupboards, bedrooms, and warehouses, a handful of tropical fungal species are making new lives in otherwise inhospitable temperate climates. In colliding with a new type of animal, a chemical that might once have served to fuddle the wits of pests has been transformed into a glittering lure.

5. Your book is beautifully written and accomplishes the rare feat of articulating compelling philosophical arguments driven by compelling science. Congrats. How did you manage that? 

It was an adventure. 

Early on I decided to produce a first draft by writing very quickly and scrappily. Somewhere in this puddle of text, I hoped, I might find a book. The momentum of this approach helped prevent paralysis. It also allowed me to see more clearly the themes emerge. Reworking this formless mass became a process of trying to understand fungal networks, which are conceptually and intuitively slippery: Fungal coordination takes place both everywhere at once, and nowhere in particular; a fragment of fungal network can regenerate an entire new organism, meaning that a single fungal individual — if you’re brave enough to use that word — is potentially immortal; fungal networks are indeterminate shape-shifters, living maybes that fuse and branch, decanting themselves into their surroundings. It soon became clear that fungal networks would be a foundational metaphor for the book whether I liked it or not. 

All the while I did my best to maintain as much contact with the fungal world as possible. I drank large pots of tea made from chaga and reishi mushrooms, for example, and tried to eat mushrooms for at least one meal a day. I still do.

6. We always like to ask our interviewees how they feel about environmental challenges.  Are you hopeful or not so much?  What do you anticipate over the period ahead?

Huge upheaval! I'm hopeful about some things and less so about others. We often hear about tipping points as scary negative things — which they certainly can be. But we don't often think about positive tipping points, where favourable outcomes arise in a rapid and unstoppable cascade. The collapse of ecocidal industries could happen in this way, for instance, increasing our degrees of freedom surprisingly quickly. 

7. We also like to talk about books here.  What can you recommend to our readers? 

For those that haven't already read it, The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf is a long-time favourite of mine. It explores the life of the remarkable adventurer and natural philosopher Alexander von Humboldt, and the many ways that he helped shape our understanding of the biosphere today. 

Thank you, Merlin! 

Curiosity spiked? Check out this article from Dazed magazine about the fantastic new Bjork-narrated documentary (presented by Merlin): “Fungi: Web of Life.”

Onward,