Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Sheldrake concludes his book with a key experience from his childhood that profoundly shaped his worldview. His fascination with fungi began with the realization that they are decomposers — “who unmake pieces of life. Nothing could happen without them. This was such a useful idea. It was as if I’d been shown how to reverse, how to think backwards. Now there were arrows pointed in both directions at once. Composers make; decomposers unmake. And unless decomposers unmake, there isn’t anything that the composers can make with.” (Sheldrake, 2020, p. 250)

He takes this thought even further and ends the book with a strikingly poetic gesture: “Fungi might make mushrooms, but first they must unmake something else. Now that this book is made, I can hand it over to fungi to unmake. I’ll dampen a copy and seed it with Pleurotus mycelium. When it has eaten its way through the words and pages and endpapers and sprouted oyster mushrooms from the covers, I’ll eat them. From another copy I will remove the pages, mash them up and, using a weak acid, break the cellulose of the paper into sugars. To the sugar solution I’ll add a yeast. Once it’s fermented into a beer, I’ll drink it and close the circuit.” (Sheldrake, 2020, p. 251)

In the following short video, Merlin Sheldrake discusses one of the key messages of his book and explains how thinking about fungi can change the way we see the world.