Merlin Sheldrake will be speaking as part of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures’ “Ten Evenings” series at 7PM on Monday, April 13th.
When I first got in touch with author and biologist Merlin Sheldrake for this interview, I heard back that he was offline in Bhutan for the month. That response didn’t surprise me after having just read his bestselling book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Sheldrake’s research regularly takes him to remote corners of the world where he digs up mycelium or carefully examines miniscule mushrooms. I’m already a plant and mushroom enthusiast so I was delighted to learn about the fascinating fungal beings that Sheldrake describes in his book but I was enthralled by all the deep questions he raises about what it means to be a living thing in our universe.
It seems both terrifying and exhilarating to be studying a category of life forms of which only 6% have been described. How do you not get completely overwhelmed? And how often is your mind blown? Do you ever worry that our human brains aren’t even capable of understanding the things you’re trying to understand?
It’s beautiful and exciting to let fungi lure my mind into unusual positions; I can feel my mind stretching when I try to imagine what it must be like to be a fungus. But ultimately I feel like fungi lure us into remembering that life itself – the whole wild unfolding of the living world – is an astonishing mystery, full of experiences and perspectives and possibilities that we can barely begin to comprehend.
Learning about fungi has taken you so many places. You write about being buried in compost and secretive truffle hunting expeditions and when I heard you speak at a conference last year you showed a photo of yourself lying in mud with your hand trying to reach something in a deep hole. I wonder if you can share some of the strangest places or absurd situations that you’ve encountered thanks to this field of study?
The other day I was playing around with my brother Cosmo and our colleague Jonathan Hope in the brewhouse where we make our hot sauce. Cosmo had a device a bit like a lie detector that allows you to measure the variations in electrical conductance as a small current passes between two electrodes. He stuck the electrodes in a big pile of grains being devoured by a koji fungus and connected the device to solenoids that whacked glass bottles, making dinging noises at haphazard intervals as the bioelectrical activity of the koji fluctuated. There were lots of levels of absurd.
Reading your book encouraged me to question my own identity? Am I one being? Am I a joint venture of millions of different tiny creatures? Does researching fungi make you question who you are regularly?
Many of our concepts – from time to chemical bonds to genes to species – lack stable definitions but remain helpful categories to think with. Individuality is another such category, and it certainly does useful work for us. But it can also cause harm. Our individualism shapes the way we form connections with each other and affects the distribution of resources and responsibilities. It is by imagining ourselves as neatly separable – from one another and the ecosystems that sustain us – that we justify both the exploitation and oppression of other humans, and ecological devastation.
From a biological point of view it isn’t always clear where the boundaries between individuals should be drawn. A substantial proportion of our genome has been acquired from viruses and we carry around more bacteria than cells of our own, without which we would not grow and behave as we do. We are ecosystems, composed of – and decomposed by – an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light. Our microbial relationships are about as intimate as any can be, but we are not a special case. Bacteria host smaller bacteria and viruses within them. Even viruses can contain smaller viruses. If we look more broadly at the living world it becomes clear that individuals aren’t natural facts, but categories that depend on our point of view.
Where does this leave our culturally treasured notions of identity, autonomy, and independence? Perhaps it would be helpful to think of these categories as questions, rather than answers known in advance. But so much of daily life and experience – not to mention our philosophical, political, and economic systems – depends on individuals that it can be hard to stand by and watch the concept dissolve. What happens to “us”? What about “them”? “Me”? “Mine”? I think this confusion is healthy and can help us grow – culturally, ethically, and ecologically. Fungi frequently tempt me into these places, and certainly deepen and expand my sense of what it means to be alive.
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Entangled Life is a worldwide bestseller and introduced so many people to the world of fungi. I’m curious what readers want to ask or tell you when they meet you. Are they showing you photos of a mushroom that grew in their yard? Are they asking you philosophical questions?
Both and more. There are so many amazing questions. Some people want to know if life came from space; some ask me how to cure their toenail fungus; some ask whether they should give medicinal mushrooms to their cats; others want to tell me about the entities they experienced on their last psychedelic trip; some want to know how we can deepen and expand conservation frameworks to better include fungi; many want to know whether fungi live underwater.
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You write about your fermentation experiments in the book and you’ve also started a hot sauce company with your brother. Have you been working on any more edible (or sippable) experiments with yeasts? Also, will you have any bottles of hot sauce for sale in Pittsburgh?
Alas not, but they are available from our website (www.sheldrakeandsheldrake.com). We’ve just launched a delicious new product – a spicy shoyu, or soy sauce, made from a fungus called koji (Aspergillus oryzae) and chillies. Yeasts aren’t the main players here but they’re certainly around. We’ve been aging the sauce in oak barrels, which brings some delicious bass notes.
