Why I Love Entangled Life
Entangled Life is a profoundly weird and weirdly profound book about fungi. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read it over the summer, and I now find myself in the strange position of having had completely serious conversations in which I’ve referred to myself as a mushroom partisan. Book reviews often declare that a book will change how you think about humanity and existence itself, but few deliver like Merlin Sheldrake’s (and, yes, that is the greatest name of all time) book about the bizarre life that fills the ground beneath our feet.
I read Entangled Life after a great review reminded me of a video that I’d seen a couple years ago of a slime mold recreating the interstate highway system. The slime mold is set in the middle of a map of the United States and food is placed at the location of major cities. The mold grows out uniformly, finding the nodes of resources. Then, the parts of the slime mold that connect cities are strengthened while the others are pruned, and seeming by magic, something with no brain, central nervous system, or what we consider to be intelligence recreates the map of the interstate highways. Researchers have done similar experiments with Tokyo subway systems. I was primed to believe that fungi are more incredible than I knew, but I wasn’t prepared for the degree to which they exceeded my knowledge or my categories for life.
Fungi are maybe immortal. It’s hard to say because they’re so unlike humans. Humans have brains which act as a hub for all the senses, perceptions, homeostasis, and movement that we do all the time. Fungi don’t. They themselves are networks which communicate via chemical and electrical signals, and store information - memories. Fungi are not individuals, but meshes that can fuse with other meshes if they’re genetically similar. They form symbiotic relationships with plants to form lichen, which can survive even the unadulterated vacuum of space maybe indefinitely. Plants and fungal networks also form the ‘Wood Wide Web’ by which resources and information are passed from plants to fungi to plants. These networks allow some plants to live without photosynthesizing, being completely dependent on fungi to facilitate the transport of sugars from plants that photosynthesize, and these the value of resources in these exchanges are driven by supply and demand. And while we now know that this happens, we really don’t know how all this complex and brilliant behavior emerges from beings that don't have the intelligence of a goldfish, much less that of humankind.
Growing up, I was obsessed with intelligence. I was placed in my school’s Gifted program which in my own mind, as well as the mind of my peers, set me apart because of my ability to learn, and remember, and think. This became a huge part of my identity. There are still some reasons why I’m glad my school had a Gifted program and that I could be a part of it: I had a field trip designed for me so I could see cuttlefish, it gave me new friends while separating me from others, and my designation as being Gifted built an unshakable confidence in myself, build on (I thought) indisputable empirical evidence. But while it made me sure of myself, it made me sure of the world in ways that it isn’t. I was trained in the ways of meritocracy. I was taught that the most intelligence should be raised up and make decisions for those who are less intelligent, that intelligence itself was something firm, measurable, and definable as an IQ score. In high school, I was furious at political lobbying and the effect of money in politics not because it kept people trapped in cycles of poverty and fostered the desires of the wealthy, but because it unjustly kept those who were really the most brilliant from the seats of power.
Since high school, I’ve experienced a process of unlearning. The world is not what I thought it was. Fortunately and unfortunately, the world and life is not as certain as I thought. Getting the most brilliant people in the world to hold all political power won’t solve the world’s problems. What we’ve created as a species is far more complex and interdependent than what we can fully comprehend. We are more complex than we can understand. IQ measures something, but it’s not really intelligence, and if slime mold can efficiently solve supply chain challenges, we never knew what intelligence was in the first place.
I love Entangled Life because it helps me stay humble and it helps me change. It’s been fun and challenging this year to go back to articles that I’ve written and contradict them. I know I was unwaveringly confident when I wrote those points on which I now disagree, but I’m not embarrassed by coming to conclusions or arguing points I now think are misguided. That’s how I learn personally, and how we learn as a species. We need people to take dead-ends. We need the confidence to strike out in new directions. Some people will find new things and change the world, and others will strike out and be forgotten. The people who are wrong, including myself, aren’t failures, we’re just wrong. Like the slime molds that search in every direction, we don’t really know where our lives will lead, but we need people to take all sorts of paths. Thinking about how little we understand of fungi also helps keep me humble. I remember finding small brown balls of spores on soccer fields, squeezing them and seeing fine, living dust puff out, and picking and kicking mushrooms that grew out in the yard. I know I read Wikipedia as a kid and thought I knew for sure all that spores and mushrooms are, but reading Entangled Life, I see that no one knows all that fungi are, and maybe we never will. How can we hope to understand something that thinks, acts, and exists in ways so profoundly different than us? And not understanding comes with wonder and hope. I’m awestruck by what fungi can do, and my wife will tell you, I’m constantly distracted by them every time we go hiking. Tiny, everyday mushrooms are part of something beyond all of us, just beneath the crust of soil. The caps are a glimpse of something beyond us.
Unknowing fills me with hope. Along with my certainty in the way of the world, I grew up with a certainty in a small God, a judge literally beyond the clouds who rewarded the good and punished the bad. I was certain that I needed this God, but I could never quite trust Him. Now, I know God, and in knowing Him, I’m certain I understand nothing about Him. I trust completely in His goodness, and hope in His transcendence that all will be made well, even if I can’t understand how that could happen. And unknowing helps me trust in the goodness of nature. I had no idea fungi could break down plastics, petroleum, or nuclear waste. Fungi survive everything, and can destroy everything, and while destroying everything they remake it so that it might live again. Every new generation depends on fungi to break down and renew the old generation. I don’t know how life (at least our kind of life) will continue to survive on this planet, but everything I don’t understand about fungi, gives me hope that all will be well. If we knew all there was to know about life and existence, and things still looked the way they do, that would be bleak. But we don’t. Blessedly, we don’t know anything close to everything about life, the universe, and existence and I don’t think we ever will, but I have faith and, through faith, hope. I trust that somewhere there is a path we have yet to take, and I hope it will lead to new life.
