Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

It is typical of Merlin that he became fascinated from a young age not with the charismatic megafauna of the world, but instead with the undersung, underseen inhabitants of the biota: lichens, mosses and fungi. He studied them as an amateur teenage scientist, counting lichen species on gravestones and granite boulders, and trying to comprehend the subterranean architecture of fungal life – above-ground mushrooms as fruiting bodies that stand as mere fleeting allusions to immense underland structures. ‘My childhood superheroes weren’t Marvel characters,’ Merlin once said to me, ‘they were lichens and fungi. Fungi and lichen annihilate our categories of gender. They reshape our ideas of community and cooperation. They screw up our hereditary model of evolutionary descent. They utterly liquidate our notions of time. Lichens can crumble rocks into dust with terrifying acids. Fungi can exude massively powerful enzymes outside their bodies that dissolve soil. They’re the biggest organisms in the world and among the oldest. They’re world-makers and world-breakers. What’s more superhero than that?’