THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, May 22nd, 2020

‘Entangled Life’ Review: Digging Into Enigmatic Organisms

Without decomposing fungi we’d be buried under plant debris. With them, all sorts of compounds can be broken down, from petroleum to sarin gas.

By Eugenia Bone

Like many people, I got interested in mycology because I wanted to find wild mushrooms, especially morels, which are in season right now. That required some study on why they lived where they lived. I admit it was a rather mercenary starting point, but the more I learned about fungi and their fruiting bodies, mushrooms, the more fascinated I became. Fungi are implicated in all aspects of life on Earth. They live most everywhere and in most everything, and some can—theoretically—live forever. They function as a shadow immune system and procurer of nutrition for plants; they are the source of some of the worst plagues of people and animals and crops, and the best medicine we have. Without decomposing fungi we’d be buried under miles of plant debris, and with them, all sorts of organic compounds may be decomposed, from petroleum to sarin gas. They bind soil particles so they don’t blow apart when water passes by and they seed raindrops. As the English biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes in “Entangled Life,” his rich and colorful portrait of fungi, “the more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.”

Mr. Sheldrake manages the immense subject of mycology by taking a literary approach. He looks at fungi through a variety of themes and analogies, and in the process is able to disclose so much more about these enigmatic organisms. A chapter called “A Lure,” for example, explores the way fungi attract mates, prey and animal vectors—the whole point of truffle aroma is to get animals to dig them up so their spores disperse—and how they are in turn lured by plants to attach to their roots and become pipelines to the buffet of nutrients in the soil. Another chapter, “Living Labyrinths,” describes the bizarre morphology of an organism that can divide itself to take both routes in a forked path, and meditates on the nature of the nonhuman perception and intelligence of “decentralized organisms” without heads or brains.

Equally provocative chapters describe the “radical” decomposing powers of fungi, their implications for pollution remediation and their ability to transform industrial and agricultural waste into a variety of new materials, from building blocks to vegan leather. A chapter on the evolutionary role fungi play in plants introduces us to Toby Kiers, who posits that subterranean fungi function like a marketplace, trading the nutrients they gather in the soil for the sugars that plants make through photosynthesis, even shuttling nutrients from areas of abundance to trees in areas of need—a kind of “buy low, sell high” model. There are investigations on how and why fungi participate in plant communication and inquiries into the curious fungi that affect animal nervous systems, serotonergic systems and muscular systems, such as the Ophiocordyceps that creates “zombie ants” and the Psilocybe mushrooms that cure some people of despair.

But there’s more packed into this lively stew of scientific fact, poetic observation and philosophical musing. Interwoven throughout are glimpses of the author: trailing an Italian truffle hunter and his dog in inappropriate shoes; sinking into a Californian fermentation bath of decomposing woodchips, “a complex cuddle, blissful and unbearable in turn”; stealing apples in Cambridge from a clone of Isaac Newton’s tree, pressing them and calling the resulting cider Gravity. The author Robert Macfarlane says there is “something faintly antiquarian” about Mr. Sheldrake and, indeed, I kept picturing the 32-year-old—brother of the composer Cosmo, son of the parapsychologist Rupert and friend of Terence McKenna (father of the stoned-ape theory)—as a millennial version of Charles Darwin, fresh off the Beagle, presenting his findings to the Royal Society in waistcoat and tie.

By the end of the book, a few overarching themes emerge about how we relate to fungi. One is the folly of anthropomorphism, our tendency to use a human concept, like “nurse,” to make sense of a nonhuman organism such as a fungus that provides nutrients to a needy tree, when that nurturing fungus can also be the tool by which plants kill each other. Anthropomorphism boxes in our understanding of an organism. “When we humanize the world,” writes Mr. Sheldrake, “we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms.” Another is our practice of using intellectual hierarchy to describe organisms in nature. Classical science used human intelligence “as a yardstick by which all other species are measured,” which is not good news for slime mold. And yet slime molds exhibit sophisticated problem-solving behavior all the time. Mr. Sheldrake points out that such organisms “think” differently, and if we can let go of our intellectual pecking order, “our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change.”

Mr. Sheldrake returns again and again to our growing understanding of symbiosis, the interconnectedness of life that he admits has “collapsed into a cliché” but remains a model for evolutionary creativity, ecological stability and responsible human behavior. “Biology,” he writes, has “transformed into ecology—the study of the relationships between living organisms.”

“Entangled Life” is a gorgeous book of literary nature writing in the tradition of Mr. Macfarlane and John Fowles, ripe with insight and erudition. It may appeal most to readers who have a little mycology under their belts, but the language is eloquent and the analogies plentiful enough to secure the pleasure of someone less scientifically literate. Frothy beach reading? Maybe not. But food for the soul, definitely. And for this reader, who got her start in mycology through appetite, “Entangled Life” is a feast.

Ms. Bone’s most recent book is “Microbia: A Journey Into the Unseen World Around You.”