Review by Christina Gillett
Perhaps the easiest way to sum up how I feel about ‘Entangled Life: How fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures’, is to say that before I’d even finished the library copy, I bought my own copy that I could re-read and loan out, and started re-reading it with my son – but not at bedtime because it is too exciting. Even reading it second time round I stop often to say ‘Wow.’
There are a lot of cool facts, snippets of fascinating research and Merlin Sheldrake writes brilliantly. I knew – had studied on my biology degree – about symbiosis and certain species depending on each other, including examples involving fungi, and understood about the existence of complex relationships and various ‘butterfly effects’. But I really hadn’t grasped the significance of fungi. I didn’t realise that ‘90% of all plant species depend on mycorrhizal fungi.
They are the rule not the exception: a more fundamental part of planthood than fruit, flowers, leaves, wood or even roots.’ It makes the widespread use of fungicides mind-boggling and frightening.
We know that fungi can be givers and takers of life, but Sheldrake explains how, by disrupting the relationships between the plants (that we depend on for food) and the fungi that they depend on, we have made plants more vulnerable to the harmful fungi, and less able to assimilate necessary nutrients, and we have put our food supply at risk. We also disrupt the abilities of fungi to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and store it. Fungi have played a major role in influencing our climate throughout the history of earth – and we could actually quite do with their help right about now.
The book also has fascinating things to say about the surge in interest in consuming mushrooms for all sorts of benefits that we are discovering, although Sheldrake also points out that many other cultures have known about these benefits for millennia – even the neanderthals knew 50,000 years ago. It’s perhaps more of a remembering than discovering.
Entangled Life is a source of optimism, describing the many ways that humans are learning to value fungi and team up with it to solve our greatest (human-caused) problems. ‘Mycoremediation’ is being used to restore contaminated ecosystems, filter water, clean up toxic substances, reclaim gold from electronic waste, replace harmful building materials – there are tonnes of examples.
As long as people don’t start thinking it’s ok to trash the planet because the mushrooms will clean it up, it makes reassuring reading. It’s another area of exploration, interest and action that is growing fast. Part of the reason this is happening so quickly is because of the power of community: the world of fungi has grabbed the attention of amateurs and hobbyists, and experts are taking the time to train DIY ‘radical mycologists’ to do things like cultivate fungi at home and share findings together.
And at the same time, although fungi research is making seismic leaps, Sheldrake emphasises that we have barely started to understand the complex world of fungi and all the dynamics and interactions fungi participate in or orchestrate. Scientists learn how things work by controlling all the factors so that you can clearly see what is doing what and what causes what. You can’t fully do that here because of the sheer complexity and variability and dynamic nature of fungi life and relationships. This might be a problem because people in power tend to demand solid evidence before implementing good things. But for a long time, without really knowing what we’re messing with, we have worked hard to eliminate fungi, not realising how this affects plant, planet and human health.
The thing that has really hooked its hyphae into my mind is there in the title – how inextricably entangled life is. Around the time I started reading this book I also attended a talk ‘Reimagining our Rivers’ as part of the Festival of Nature 2025, and I was reading Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, and more recently I’ve just finished reading Wilding by Isabella Tree (about the rewilding of Knepp Farm). This concept of entangled life was loud and clear in those places too. Yes it’s too complex – even for the experts – to understand exactly what is happening amongst the relationships and interdependencies of the natural world, and how exactly our actions influence it, the cause and effect etc.
But we don’t need to understand everything perfectly. Without knowing the specifics, we can understand enough to know that we need to be more intentional or ‘mindful’ with our behaviour, because we can say for sure that what we do has an impact. Someone at the river talk said that we ‘forget that everything that happens on the land ends up on the sea’. Our actions are not as inconsequential as we think. Little old me can set spores in motion. In Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet it says ‘the wellbeing of the planet depends on the wellbeing of your own body and mind, just as the wellbeing of your mind and body depends on the wellbeing of the planet’. The word planet here could also be replaced by fungi.
Our culture prizes independence, being self-made, resilient and not relying on anyone. So we tend to overlook signs of our awkward interdependency. Someone was recently telling me, in their setting they try to maintain a dance between attending to individual needs and community needs so that everyone has the chance to thrive. Fungi seem to be experts at navigating this kind of dance between their needs and the needs of the systems they are part of. It’s not that they never compete or have conflict, but they are able to balance it with cooperation and nurturing. If we can learn to do that too, perhaps we will find that our needs are actually more in harmony with our surrounding systems than we think.
Ignoring, neglecting, harming, destroying fungi, we are ignoring, neglecting, harming, destroying ourselves. As Sheldrake says: ‘We are unthinkable without them, yet seldom do we think about them. The cost of our neglect has never been more apparent. It is an attitude we can’t afford to sustain.’
I loved this book – I think you could justify dedicating a whole book club to it, and it would take a long time to run out of things to talk about.
