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Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath you. Now imagine lying in a field, or on the forest floor. The same applies, though we rarely think of it: the dirt beneath you, whether a mile or a foot deep, is teeming with more organisms than researchers can quantify. Their best guess is that there are as many as one billion microbes in a single teaspoon of soil. Plant roots plunge and swerve like superhighways with an infinite number of on-ramps. And everywhere there are probing fungi.

Fungi are classified as their own kingdom, separate from plants and animals. They are often microscopic and reside mostly out of sight—mainly underground—but as Merlin Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, they support and sustain nearly all living systems. Fungi are nature’s premiere destroyers and creators, digesting the world’s dead and leaving behind new soil. When millions of hair-like fungal threads—called hyphae—coalesce, felting themselves into complex shapes, they emerge from the ground as mushrooms. A mushroom is to a fungus as a pear is to a pear tree: the organism’s fruiting body, with spores instead of seeds. Mushrooms disperse spores by elaborate means: some species generate puffs of air to send them aloft, while others eject them by means of tiny, specialized catapults so they accelerate ten thousand times faster than a space shuttle during launch.

But Sheldrake is most interested in fungi’s other wonders—specifically, how they challenge our understanding of nonhuman intelligence and stretch the notion of biological individuality. Fungi infiltrate the roots of almost every plant, determining so much about its life that researchers are now asking whether plants can be considered plants without them. They are similarly interwoven throughout the human body, busily performing functions necessary to our health and well-being or, depending on the fungi’s species and lifestyle, wreaking havoc. All of this prompts doubts about what we thought we knew to be the boundaries between one organism and another.

Sheldrake is a biologist with a specialty in tropical ecology, and Entangled Life combines scientific research with his experiences in the field. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge, researching the tropical rainforests of Panama, where a ghostly white flowering plant of the genus Voyria survives not by photosynthesis but through a relationship to a tropical fungus that feeds it minerals through its roots. He also moves easily into the realm of philosophy, particularly to make sense of discoveries that push the limits of current scientific understanding. (His father is Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge biochemistry Ph.D.-turned-philosopher famous for his inquiries into the paranormal and for his work on panpsychism, the school of thought that views all matter as experiencing consciousness.) Where others see a wall separating science from speculation, Sheldrake sees food for fungal thought—more opportunity to, like fungal networks, “stitch organisms into relation.”

He careens around the research, pausing here and there for personal discoveries and anarcho-scientific antics. He describes eating a spoonful of spore “caviar” to remind himself that fungi, so often reduced in research papers to computer models and theoretical hypotheses, are still earthly things: “One can’t eat a machine or a concept,” he writes. He takes LSD—a molecule originally synthesized from a fungus—to better understand mushroom motivations, and he informs readers that the illustrations for the book were drawn with ink from the shaggy ink cap mushroom, a specimen capable of erupting through asphalt and lifting heavy paving stones overnight, “although they are not themselves a tough material” (no one knows how they do it). In another chapter Sheldrake describes a plan to inoculate a copy of Entangled Life with oyster mushroom spores, then cook and eat the fungi that have eaten his book. You can see him actually do it on YouTube—thus, he points out, eating his words.

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