Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures was one of the must-reads of 2020. Amongst other accolades, it won the 2020 Wainwright Prize (Global Conservation Writing Category) and the 2021 Royal Society Science Book Prize. Its author is touring the UK this month with a ‘unique one of a kind journey… part science, part story, part sonic experience’. The Secret Life of Fungi Live will be coming to New Theatre Oxford on 26 October, and we were thrilled to get our own private audience with Merlin to find out more about the many ways in which should be looking to fungi for the answers to some of life’s more challenging problems.
What led you to this field of study?
I was studying, the biology of plants, and it became clear that you couldn't really make sense of plants without also thinking about their fungal collaborators. I became very interested in the symbiotic relationships between plants and fungi, and the way that these symbiotic associations have transformed life on Earth. This then led me into the world of fungi and all the remarkable things that they can do.
That’s interesting;, I had the idea that mycology fell into the department of zoology, is that incorrect?
Fungi are their own kingdom of life. Animals are a kingdom of life; plants are a kingdom of life; fungi are a kingdom of life, but they only won their taxonomic independence in the late 60s. Unlike plants or animals there aren't really any departments of fungal sciences
In actual fact, fungi are more closely related to animals than they are to plants which is surprising, as on first glance, they do seem to be more plant-like. Indeed, for many years, they've been studied in plant departments because before they were assigned their own kingdom of life, they were thought of as lower plants.
Are you hopeful that they will eventually be assigned their own department of study?
So much of life is about relationships between organisms, and often these relationships make daring leaps across kingdom boundaries, so I'm not sure that different departments are actually the best way to divide up the field of Biological Sciences.
What can we all learn from the study of fungi?
There are lots of lots of things we can learn from fungi. They are organisms that grow into networks that explore their environments, and these networks are solving problems. Some of these problems are spatial problems – how do I distribute my body between these three sources of food, given that I'm being chewed on here by this predator, or that this source of food is larger than that source of food. Fungi have evolved to deal with these sorts of problems all the time and so there are situations where we can present them with spatial problems to solve in the form of labyrinths or mazes.
Did the success of Entangled Life take you by surprise?
Oh, totally. I wasn't prepared for that response.
It was a book for a general audience, I wanted to let the fungi lead me into these tangled discussions. I thought of it like having a dinner party for a whole load of different people who might come from very different backgrounds and might have different relationships with biology or the sciences in general, but they could all have fun at that same dinner party.
And, what can audiences expect from The Secret Life of Fungi Live?
They can expect an experience where science meets storytelling. The audience is going to somehow choose a route through a network of possibilities, and in doing so we'll be exploring some of the more bewildering and inspiring aspects of fungal life. Fungi live their lives as decentralised organisms, and so they live their lives as networks, exploring space. I want to convey something of this to the audience.
You've engaged in some quite surprising collaborations including working with Bjork, Iris van Herpen and Stella McCartney. How did these come about?
People within the worlds of fashion and design world became interested in fungi and approached me. I think there's lots of reasons why fungi are inspiring from an artistic point of view: they're able to respond to a changing world. Unlike us, they don't have defined growth forms; short of an intervention, if you're born with two arms, you'll end up with two arms, but fungi don't have a body plan in the same way. They’re constantly weaving themselves in and around their environment, constantly unfolding themselves into possibility. I think that's very exciting and has been very exciting for artists in many different fields, including fashion.
Finally, something of a rogue question: does your heightened awareness of these manifold networks and connections ever start to feel overwhelming? Do you ever long to think of yourself as an individual?
We are webs of interconnection, and if you think about that long enough, [I suppose] it can become quite disorienting, because it becomes difficult to work out where you stop and the world begins. There's a reason why we think in terms of boundaries, and distinctions, and individuals, and autonomy, and independence, and so on: these are tools, conceptual tools that can really help us in navigating a confusing, changing world. So yes, I hear your point that it can be overwhelming, and I have felt that myself.
[However], the reason I think it's important to think about these webs of connection is because by not thinking about them, we've got ourselves into quite a lot of trouble. We’ve gone very, very hard on the individual side, which has led to a kind of reductive situation, which involves forgetting our links to life. And when we forget our links to life, we end up in situations like we are today.
I think fungi can help us remember our links to life and help to break down some of those individualistic assumptions. [They can] help lead us into a more interconnected worldview and potentially help us adapt more effectively to life on a damaged planet.
Merlin Sheldrake will be at New Theatre Oxford on Sunday 26 October. There will also be a worldwide live stream of The Secret Life of Fungi Live on Monday 20 October at 7.30pm. To book for either and to find out further information visit fane.co.uk
