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

 Fungi are weird parts of the natural world because I don't think we evolved any mental units for them. Like, we definitely know what fruits are and vegetables to a certain extent. We like bright things in trees. We have a theory of mind that we built for other humans, and we seem to be able to extend it and generalize it to other mammals and then birds and then maybe the other living things. Yet, mushrooms are these weird things that can kill you or taste really good. Yeast can make your piss hurt like a fire or make the best liquids we can engineer. 

We are not evolved enough for the fungi.

Sheldrake attempts to get us there by a circuitous route: a mix of anecdote, review of materials, and only a little bit of explanation.

Fungi are trashmen, taking out and recycling the natural worlds' shit. They're the day traders, moving nutrients from one tree to another. They're VCs, investing in the future canopies of tomorrow. They're also hippie communes, bringing in many species until they merge into one. They're also literally at hippie communes, being what may be considered the best drug of all time. They're tiny microengineers, converting sugar into fun-poison. 

If this is elucidating, great! If it isn't, yeah, that makes sense. Sheldrake constantly has to approach the fungi with metaphors of human society, and points out how the popular scientific literature uses the same metaphors. Fish fins at least look a little like legs, and humans can be said to have the heart of a lion, but a glowing green slime on a map of the United States made out of sugar? Yeah okay uhm thats like the ... the... interstate? Cool okay cool.

This alienness of a kingdom of life is kind of cool, but also problematic: it means that we haven't funded or learned enough about it. It'd be like studying the ocean and not the atmosphere. Sure, you need the first one to live, but the second one is invisible, so why look into it too hard? Sheldrake talks about how this is very interesting because it opens up a huge door for Citizen Science^TM, and because we'll likely need to know more about fungi in order to make our agricultural system not planet-burning. Of course, this knowledge also exists in indigenous spaces and by remergently contextualizing it, we can bring it to bear on world problems

Oh, and the biggest take away is that magic mushrooms are probably okay to eat.