Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

by Merlin Sheldrake

link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the ‘Wood Wide Web’.

What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find, and what we find when we actually look.15

You carry around more microbes than your ‘own’ cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy.

Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life.19

The lichening rod effect describes what happens when lichens strike familiar concepts, splintering them into new forms.

‘There have never been individuals,’ they declare. ‘We are all lichens.’51

What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.

‘excrescences

Biology is built around a

taxonomic system that has no way to recognise the symbiotic status of lichens. They are literally unnameable.

‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’