Life Below Ground: Entangled, Vibrant, and Thriving
February 19, 2025
In early February of 2025, I sat ensconced on my sofa sipping tea, the soft winter light filtering through falling snow and the bay window behind me to illuminate the pages of Merlin Sheldrake’s brilliant book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures (2020). Page after page, Sheldrake revealed to me the vast, hidden filaments of life below ground that make possible everything that is visible above ground. Had the earth not been blanketed by 18 inches of snow, I likely would have run outside to push my fingers through the rich soil of my raised garden beds in search of the mycelial network about which Sheldrake writes so passionately and engagingly. It also made me think about how gardening depends upon so much more than just sunlight, water, and soil: the quality of the fungal habitat operating below the surface matters immensely.
Entangled, vibrant, and thriving, fungi are everywhere at work as conduits and converters, helpmates and symbiotes, making life possible. Fungi have existed for tens of millions of years, and they are literally everywhere from seemingly bare rock to the gaps between plant cells. In this book, Sheldrake approaches fungi from a variety of perspectives including the culinary in chapter 1, “The Lure,” which is about truffles; networks in chapter 2, “Living Labyrinths,” which is about the decision-making of fungal hyphae; symbiosis in chapter 3, “The Intimacy of Strangers,” which is about cooperation between lichens, algae, and bacteria; and pharmacology in chapter 4, “Mycelial Minds,” which is about the properties of ergot alkaloids and their effects on other organisms such as ants and humans (reading this chapter, I understood the scientific basis for The Last of Us franchise of video games and TV series). Four more chapters round out the book, but rather than list them all here, I’d like to write about a few of the interesting ideas they contain.
Chapter 5, “Before Roots,” explains how mycorrhizal relationships between plants and fungi affect everything from plant growth to the global climate to the taste of fruit. To grow, plants need nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous, zinc and copper, and water—which fungi provide to plants in exchange for which plants provide fungi with carbon (pp. 130–131). Plant growth decreases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and at the same time, fungi burrow into rock unlocking calcium and silica, which “react with carbon dioxide, pulling it out of the atmosphere” (p. 131). In other words, the efficiency of the mycorrhizal relationship between plans and fungi have the power to change global temperatures. But these relationships—or rather, the particular fungal communities that partner with a given plant—have a direct effect on the flowers, appearance, oils, and flavor of these plants. For example, different species of fungi change the flavor of strawberries, the oil profile of fennel, and the antioxidants in artichokes. An important takeaway from this chapter is that soil microbiome is just as important as human gut microbiome, and that mycorrhizal fungi are like “ecosystem engineers” (p. 145).
Researchers have learned that fungi spread out in networks analogous in some ways to the Internet, which is explored in chapter 6, “Wood Wide Webs.” Scholarly work in the 1980s and 1990s by researchers such as David Read and Suzanne Simard demonstrated that mycorrhizal fungi networks enable plants to pass resources among themselves. This discovery meant changing our understanding from “competition between plants” to a model of “distribution of resources within the community” (p. 153). Moreover, the flow of resources isn’t static or unidirectional—it changes depending on the changing needs of the linked plants. One of the important takeaways from this chapters is that by failing to pay attention to fungi, we misunderstand how plants and forests and ecosystems more broadly actually function. The chapter asks us to think about the effects of metaphor, perspective, and asking good questions. The importance of interdisciplinarity is underscored.
Some mycelium can grow in extreme conditions, which allows them to be put to unexpected uses such as mycofabrication and mycoremediation. Chapter 7, “Radical Mycology,” gives examples of both. Mycofabrication refers to the use of mycelium to build things such as packaging, surfboards, slippers, and tsunami-detection devices (p. 192–196). On the flip side, mycoremediation refers to the use of mycelium to clean contaminated ecosystems. For example, certain fungi can degrade pollutants as varied as pesticides, explosives, crude oil, and synthetic hormones, including some types of toxic pollution from houses destroyed by wildfires. Sometimes you get two-for-one: the Pleurotus mycelium can grow on used diapers, breaking them down to produce edible oyster mushrooms. One key to success in these endeavors is “local mycologists learning how to partner with local fungal strains to solve local problems” (p. 186). Often grassroots enthusiasts devise solutions that are then further researched by scientists or even become the basis for a new company.
Ultimately, however, fungi remain relatively understudied and warrant greater attention. Sheldrake’s book helps to raise awareness and enthusiasm for mycelium, and may well inspire a new generation of scientists and amateur enthusiasts. In Chapter 8, “Making Sense of Fungi,” Sheldrake repeats a caution laced throughout the book: that although metaphors are useful and important, we should be wary of superimposing human categories and analogies onto fungi and their behaviors. Such comparisons are helpful but ultimately lead astray. The best approach is to try to understand fungi on their own terms, through interdisciplinary studies, and to reframe our understanding of fungi’s role within nature by adopting their perspective—by placing mycelium at the center of the story.
Further Explorations
Fantastic Fungi. Directed by Louie Schwartzberg. Written by Mark Monroe. Featuring Brie Larson, Andrew Weil, and Giuliana Furci. Moving Art Studio, 2019. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8258074/
Babenzelle Pygmies. “Women Gathering Mushrooms.” The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Edited by David Rothenberg & Marta Ulvaeus. Wesleyan University Press, 2009. https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu/islandora/07-women-gathering-mushrooms-babenzele-pygmies.
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape our Futures. Random House, 2020.
“The Last of US (franchise).” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_(franchise).