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

by Merlin Sheldrake

The current record holder, in Oregon, weighs hundreds of tonnes, spills across 10 square kilometres, and is somewhere between 2,000 and 8,000 years old.

Some species discharge spores explosively, which accelerate 10,000 times faster than a Space Shuttle directly after launch, reaching speeds of up to a hundred kilometres per hour

Fungi produce around fifty megatonnes of spores each year – equivalent to the weight of 500,000 blue whales – making them the largest source of living particles in the air.

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

The human sense of smell is extraordinary. Our eyes can distinguish several million colours, our ears can distinguish half a million tones, but our noses can distinguish well over a trillion different odours. Humans can detect virtually all volatile chemicals ever tested. We outperform rodents and dogs in detecting certain odours, and we can follow scent trails. Smells feature in our choice of sexual partners and in our ability to detect fear, anxiety or aggression in others.

There is a world beyond ours … That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known … I ask them and they answer me. María Sabina

modern industrial agriculture has been effective: crop production doubled over the second half of the twentieth century. But a single-minded focus on yield has incurred steep costs. Agriculture causes widespread environmental destruction and is responsible for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Between 20 and 40 per cent of crops are lost each year to pests and diseases, despite colossal applications of pesticide. Global agricultural yields have plateaued, despite a 700-fold increase in fertiliser use over the second half of the twentieth century. Worldwide, thirty football fields’ worth of topsoil are lost to erosion every minute. Yet a third of food is wasted, and demand for crops will double by 2050. It is difficult to overstate the urgency of the crisis.38

collaboration is always an alloy of competition and co-operation.