THE TELEGRAPH, August 31st 2020

Mushrooms, moonshine and psychedelics: Merlin Sheldrake on the wild life of fungi 

The biologist’s new book is about the interconnectedness of nature. Should we see everything from Covid to Class A substances differently? 

By Susannah Goldsbrough 

When Merlin Sheldrake’s book, Entangled Life, arrived from the printers, he marked the occasion by eating a copy. Not plain – that would be insane. First, he dampened the pages, then he seeded them with the fungi that produce oyster mushrooms and waited for the fat, fleshy plates to sprout through the covers. 

“It was great!” he tells me cheerily, of chomping on two years’ worth of research and writing. “They tasted just like normal oyster mushrooms, which is encouraging. It means they fully metabolised the book.” 

Most authors would be more concerned with how their work was being consumed by readers, but biologist Sheldrake is rather unconventional. When we spoke over Zoom last week, he’d just returned to England from Greece, where he had been travelling with friends researching traditional wine-making methods. Traditional, meaning the way the ancient Greeks did it – by crushing grapes with your feet. “It’s quite an interesting feeling,” Sheldrake says, “stomping around on grapes. You can feel them popping, a bit like walking on bubble-wrap.” 

This was not his first experience with alcohol production. In Entangled Life, he describes developing an enthusiasm for moonshine while at university, after being introduced to the idea by a neighbour’s boyfriend: “Things escalated quickly. After a couple of years I had several large brewing containers, including a fifty-litre saucepan... My room was lined with barrels of bubbling liquids, and my wardrobe filled up with bottles.” 

It was, in part, this early experience with the magical potential of yeast, the active ingredient in fermentation that transforms sugar into alcohol, that inspired Sheldrake’s great scientific passion and the subject of his new book. Unlikely as it might sound, Entangled Life is a playful, strange, intensely philosophical study of fungi. 

Until very recently, human knowledge of this most mysterious lifeform, neither plant nor animal, has been extremely limited. This is astounding, given the sheer preponderance of fungi in the world – there is an estimated six to 10 times more species of fungi than there are plants – and their seismic impact on life on earth. The first plant life emerged onto dry land around 600 million years ago, thanks to the nutrients provided by fungi; human societies began to transform from hunter-gathering to agriculture around 12,000 years ago, in part as a response to the possibilities of yeast; and even penicillin, one of the cornerstones of modern medicine, was first isolated from a fungus. 

But most of us know next to nothing about fungi. “One of the reasons for that is technological,” Sheldrake tells me. “It’s only in the last few decades that we’ve developed techniques that allow us to make sense of the microbial world. DNA sequencing means we can grind up the DNA in a sample of soil, and find out who’s living there, but before that we simply didn’t have access. Microscopes can only tell you so much.” 

Another reason is taxonomic – it wasn’t until the 1960s that fungi were designated as their own biological kingdom. Before that, he says, they usually occupied “some dusty corner of the department of plant sciences. Historically, there’s been a kind of institutional neglect.” 

But the main reason for the fungus-shaped hole in our cultural life, Sheldrake speculates, is a failure of imagination. “Fungi live much of their lives out of sight. What we see most of the time are mushrooms, and mushrooms are ephemeral – imagine if all you knew about an apple tree were the apples that showed up once a year. It’s harder to feel curiosity about them, and to satisfy that curiosity.” 

Sheldrake has found many intriguing ways to satisfy his own fungal curiosity. He grew up in London, on the edge of Hampstead Heath, which provided an outlet for his childhood fascination with non-human life. (His father is Rupert Sheldrake, the scientist who has caused controversy with, among other ideas, his theory of “morphic resonance”.) Young Merlin obsessed over compost, a physical record in microcosm of the enormous levels of decomposition carried out by fungi on a global scale. 

He went on to Cambridge, where he studied plant sciences. His research has since taken him from the tropical forests of Panama to truffle-hunts in the hills of Bologna; down into the stinking depths of a wood-chip fermentation bath in California, and up to the colourful cognitive heights of an experimental LSD trip. 

Fungi may soon play a more obvious role in all our lives, without requiring half the effort put in by Sheldrake, thanks to their potential uses in sustainable solutions to the climate crisis. Their exceptional eating abilities – “appetite in bodily form”, as Sheldrake describes it in the book – are already being harnessed for environmental clean-up operations, in a rapidly expanding field known as mycroremediation. In Mexico City, the fungus that produces oyster mushrooms is being used to decompose disposable nappies. 

Sheldrake says it won’t be long before fungi start to appear in mainstream consumer products, as a sustainable alternative to materials like plastic and leather. “Dell are already shipping thousands of products a year using fungal packaging, and Ikea are working on something similar.” 

He wants to encourage us to take a greater interest in our rubbish. “We have a very dysfunctional philosophy of waste, which is largely to do with concealing it from people so we don’t have to think about it. I think a more curious attitude towards the streams of waste that we produce and live within, where people think more carefully about what happens to a product before it arrives in your hands and after it leaves them, would be really helpful in revising those streams, to build something more sustainable.” 

But fungi offer more than just practical solutions to environmental problems. Entangled Life grapples with the concept of the individual – something so integral to the way we understand ourselves, but so ill-suited to a lifeform that seems to think without a brain, operates in networks and can never be isolated to a single body. Instead of trying to adjust his understanding of fungi to human terms, Sheldrake sprouts off in a different direction, and tries to adjust human terms to fit fungi. 

“The individual is an idea on which we rely so much in our own minds, and in how we create and choose to organise our societies. But it is not some neat biological fact. We can see different levels of organisation in the biological world, and we can think of organisms as consisting of multiple nested individuals.” 

As an example, he describes the rubber-hand illusion, in which a rubber hand is placed on a table in front of participants, coming out of their sleeve, as though replacing their actual hand. The participant then watches the rubber hand being stroked while, simultaneously and out of sight, their real hand is stroked. After a few minutes, people begin to believe the rubber hand is their own. 

“We are always redrawing the boundaries of ourselves,” Sheldrake says. “That makes me think about what would happen if we tried to re-imagine our societies as something more than just networks of neat individuals acting in their own interests.” 

Politically, this may sound pretty spicy for a book about mushrooms. That’s probably because Sheldrake has a masters degree in the philosophy of science – the rigid segregation in academia between the humanities and sciences is something that has always frustrated him. Part of what drew him to the idea of a book designed for the ordinary fungus-sceptic, rather than the fungally- enthused expert, was the opportunity to blend the two. (Printed amid the advance praise for Entangled Life are a few lines from JH Prynne, one of Britain’s leading experimental poets.) 

Sheldrake’s book was written before the Covid-19 pandemic spread silently from animals to humans, and then across the world. His central vision of the interconnectedness of all life-forms feels shiveringly prescient, but to Sheldrake, invisible networks are the way the world has always worked – it’s just that most of us have never had to think about it before now. 

“We imagine ourselves to be in control, and then suddenly we come up against the power of a genetic entity not considered by some even to be alive. That’s a familiar theme to anyone who studies microbes, but I think the pandemic made it much clearer for people who hadn’t previously spent so much time thinking about our relationship to the natural world.” 

He concedes that some of the safety measures that have become commonplace – maintaining distance from one another, and deploying physical barriers such as masks – may serve to reinforce, rather than revise, our conception of ourselves as separate, bounded individuals. 

But he points out that the lockdown also allowed people to connect with aspects of the physical world in ways they may never have done before. “People might have different relationships with the trees in their park because of the way they were only able to spend time there and nowhere else during lockdown – or with the animals, or the people that they lived with.” 

“I’m definitely not a pandemic-utopianist, but I think people might be more receptive to some of the ideas in the book than they would have been previously.” 

One idea to which some might not be so receptive is Sheldrake’s interest in the psychedelic drugs that are derived from fungi, including psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and LSD. He is understandably reticent about the extent of his own experimentation with these substances – both of which are Class A drugs – but candid in his belief in their potential. 

“I think they’re fascinating substances that can help us to understand the nature of human minds and consciousness. The establishment of certain societies and clinics where people can go and take psychedelics in a safe environment, with therapists on hand and various experts around them, is already enabling people to have transformative experiences, and to learn new things about themselves and about the capacity of their minds.” 

He thinks the “war on drugs” has left society with “a very dysfunctional attitude” towards them. “You don’t hear so many people being nervous or scared about the harmful effects of alcohol or caffeine, even though they are rife. And that’s just because we’ve had fewer stories peddled to us by certain authorities about their harmful effects.” 

Does he think it’s time to loosen drug laws? “Absolutely. I think that some kind of framework of regulation in which some drugs were available for clinical use would be progress.” 

It seems that fungi can take you off in all sorts of directions. Sheldrake will soon be back in the field (or forest), continuing his research into the fungal networks spreading just below our feet. In the meantime, he hopes people will enjoy the book – and then dispose of it responsibly. Oyster mushrooms, anyone?