How Fungi Shape Our World, From Carbon Sinks to Zombie TV: | Ep217: Merlin Sheldrake

Merlin Sheldrake
One of the things that we're studying is exactly this: how much carbon enters the soil through fungal pathways every year. And a recent study that we put out suggested that 13 billion tons a year moves through these channels. So that's about a third of the quantity of carbon released by humans through our energy related emissions every year. So it's a non-negligible sum, and it's probably more than that. It is a very conservative estimate. So what this means is that these fungi are vital pathways for carbon to move into one of the most important stores of carbon, the soil that exists on the planet. And it doesn't just move into the soil through these pathways, these fungi stabilize the carbon in the soil once it arrives there.

Bryony Worthington
Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Merlin Sheldrake, author, scientist and advocate with a passion for understanding and celebrating the underground networks that dictate so much of how our natural environment works — the mycorrhizal fungi that have been altering our planet for over a billion years. Largely overlooked within policy circles, this hugely diverse kingdom is just starting to be given the attention it deserves thanks, in no small part, to Merlin's efforts. His book Entangled Life has now sold over a million copies around the world. I was delighted to be able to sit down with Merlin in person after our fireside chat on stage at the Innovation Zero conference in London this May. He's a wonderful communicator and fantastically knowledgeable scientist, and this is a topic that's gaining increasing attention, partly as we understand more about the ways in which fungi already altered the carbon balance of our biosphere, and partly because of the many opportunities these ancient innovators offer for solving environmental problems. Please join me as Merlin guides us on a trip through the magical and mysterious world of fungi.

BW
So Merlin, thank you so much for joining me. We have just stepped off stage here at Innovation Zero in Olympia in London, and I wanted to just start this episode, as we always do, by asking you to introduce yourself in your own words, please.

MS
My name is Merlin Sheldrake. I'm a biologist and a writer. I study fungi, and in particular mycorrhizal fungi, which are a group of fungi that form relationships with plants and which underpin so much of life on our planet.

BW
And as perhaps you will know, Cleaning Up is a podcast that's focusing on leadership in an age of climate change, and I was really keen to get you on the program, because the things that you study, they are — as a species, as a realm — they're very overlooked, but they are kind of like archetypal innovators, and they're agents of change, and in this changing climate that we're in, they might be something that we need to collaborate with more, right? There's a lot of unknowns and known-unknowns about the way that the biosphere is responding to climate change, and you've been looking in depth at this particular aspect of that. So tell us a little bit more about what you've been working on and what you've discovered.

MS
Yeah, I think that's right. I do think of fungi as innovators, and I think they're innovators in lots of ways. You can think about them as innovating metabolically or chemically. For example, they found out how to decompose wood, which just transformed forever the way that carbon journeys through its earthy cycles. You can think about them innovating in terms of relationships — forming new symbiotic relationships that transform biological possibility, that open up new horizons of life. For example, fungi forming relationships with algae to create land plants changed everything. So I think that that long story of innovation through life is really important when we think about how we innovate, and also the future of our innovation, because so much of that innovation will involve other organisms and learning from them, but also partnering with them. So one of the things that I study are these mycorrhizal fungi that form relationships with plants. They have trading relationships with plants. So plants supply the fungi with carbon in the form of sugars and fats. The fungi supply the plants with nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus that they've scavenged from the soil, and together, they create the conditions for all life on land. And so I work with an amazing group in Amsterdam, and we've been studying in detail the ways that these networks grow, how they solve problems spatially, in the way that they grow and that they route materials around their rambling bodies, and we just had a paper out in nature about that, and it's really sort of an imaging robot, and it's super zoomed in, if you like. And then I work with an organization called SPUN, the Society for the Protection of underground networks. And we're looking at, on a much more global scale, how communities of mycorrhizal fungi are distributed around the world, what they might be doing, and how we might start to better take them into account when we are thinking about conservation and restoration.

BW
Before we go diving in deep on this topic, could you just explain to us: what is a fungus?

MS
So fungi are a kingdom of life that's as broad a category as animals or plants, there's lots and lots of ways to be a fungus. And when we think of fungi, we normally think of mushrooms, but mushrooms are just the reproductive structures of some fungi. So not all fungi produce mushrooms, and even the ones that produce mushrooms produce mushrooms on the whole for a short period of time every year. But most fungi live most of their lives not as mushrooms, but as branching fusing networks of tubular cells called mycelial networks. And so a lot of what we'll discuss concerns these networks, how they behave, and how they do the amazing things they do.

BW
And how they act as a kind of conduit between other living things. I guess there was a period, wasn't there, where the concept of a Wood Wide Web suddenly caught everyone's imagination, that suddenly trees were no longer seen as isolated individuals, but that there was this underground network. And it's really not the roots of the trees so much as the mycorrhizal network that's connecting the trees, am I right?

MS
So many plants have these fungal networks on their roots, and those networks can connect more than one plant together, and more than one fungus can relate to more than one plant. So you have these shared, overlapping networks of plants and fungi. Sometimes those networks can transmit stuff from plant to plant. And I studied a type of plant that didn't have leaves, it didn't have a really green kind of chlorophyll. It didn't photosynthesize, and it receives everything it needs to grow from other plants, green plants, photosynthetic plants, through the fungal network. So there's those cases. There's also cases where even if there's no material being transmitted between different plants, these shared networks can be very, very important, because a young plant, for example, can connect to a pre-existing fungal network and benefit from that connection without having to create — to fund, if you like — that network itself, when it's small, and in the shaded understory.

BW
And this is partly why we think that undisturbed or ancient woodlands maybe are such good sinks of carbon, because I can remember reading a study that the New Zealand government undertook, where they they put out a tall tower network of sensors to see — they were working on a carbon market for their for their country — and they wanted to see to what extent their biosphere was a sink, an active sink. And they were expecting that the new growth forests would be the strongest sink, because that's the kind of thing you'd expect, adding carbon to the timber. But actually, it turned out that it's the undisturbed, ancient woodlands in the south of the island that were the strongest sink. And I think there's still an element of question as to what is happening in that case, because it's not obvious that the carbon is above ground in that case.

MS
That sounds like a great study, and I think it's so important — this point that there's, I think, a common delusion that you can just replace one ecosystem with another. But it's simply not true, and especially when you're talking about old ecosystems — old growth forests, old growth grasslands, where these ecosystems have assembled over centuries, sometimes millennia. That matters, over those time periods, you get some species doing certain things that they only can do when they have other species around them doing the other things that they're doing in certain conditions, which don't just repair overnight. And so I think in so many cases, unfortunately, there's an assumption that you can replace one with another and it can just grow back just like that. It’s bot the case.

BW
Yeah, that interoperability — or fungibility, as that's the word we use in markets, that something's fungible, you can just swap one for the other. When we think about climate change, obviously it's an equation with two halves. You've got us pumping out carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses that have been stored for millennia in the ground. That process of us releasing, in an incredibly short timescale, all of this stored carbon into the atmosphere. But then we've got the biosphere dynamically interacting with this elevated CO2 in the atmosphere. And it's roughly about half of our emissions that are being captured, aren't they, by the biosphere, into the oceans, into the land. How much of a role are fungi playing in that mopping up of at least half of what we're emitting.

MS
One of the things that we're studying is exactly this: how much carbon enters the soil through fungal pathways every year. And a recent study that we put out suggested that 13 billion tons a year moves through these channels. So that's about a third of the quantity of carbon released by humans through our energy related emissions every year. So it's a non-negligible sum, and it's probably more than that. It is a very conservative estimate. So what this means is that these fungi are vital pathways for carbon to move into one of the most important stores of carbon, the soil that exists on the planet. And it doesn't just move into the soil through these pathways. These fungi stabilize the carbon in the soil once it arrives there, and they also divert this carbon towards the soil food webs that are really vitally important. So even if some of that carbon is respired and reenters the atmosphere again, it's doing so through vital soil processes that everything depends on. So it's a kind of circulatory system that we haven't really taken on board, in part because it's very difficult to study. And so we're trying to develop new tools to make these lives more visible to us.

BW
And one of the things that you've done, and we should talk about your book, because I think most people will have encountered you through Entangled Life. The book that you've published that's now sold over a million copies. Tell us a bit more about how you came to write that book.

MS
So I'd been studying mycorrhizal fungi, and had been getting more and more interested in them and the book — I've forgotten exactly how it happened, but it arose. But one of the things that was thrilling about it was to be able to move between so many different aspects of fungal life, because fungi touched so many aspects of human life, from Biomedicine to agriculture to forestry to environment.

BW
Well, we should pause there with biomedicine, because, I mean, penicillin, essentially, is a fungus, right? That's probably one of the most dramatic breakthroughs in terms of human health, right?

MS
So it was one of the big transformative moments in modern medicine. And it's a fungus that produces a compound called penicillin. And the fungus produces this chemical to defend itself against bacterial attack. And what we're doing when we use penicillin, is where we're redeploying a fungal medical solution for itself within our own bodies. And there are many other examples of that. And so I said fungi produce all sorts of chemicals that are useful to humans and have been useful to humans for a very, very long time. So that's one of the ways that our lives depend on them, and that we have already woven them into our societies and our cultures, even though we don't think about them as much as we should.

BW
We'll come on to your advocacy to try and change that. But this kind of innovation, this chemical innovation that they have… They’ve been around the earth for a billion years, right, so they've had a chance to try a few things out. Tell us a little bit about how they can do this, to change what they digest, because that gives it a potential use, or is already used to help us with bio–remediation. Tell us a little bit about how that works.

MS
So I think it's probably best illustrated with a story. A friend of mine did an experiment where he wanted to see if oyster mushroom mycelium could digest used cigarette butts. And cigarette butts are made out of a chemical, a plastic called cellulose acetate. And so what he did is he got the oyster mushroom mycelium, it was growing on grain, and he added in some unused cigarette butts. And over time, it got used to the unused cigarette butts, and it started to grow into them and on them and digest them. And then he just kept adding more unused cigarette butts, until, in the end, over a few weeks, it was just living on unused cigarette butts. And then he started adding in used cigarette butts, which is a different kind of challenge, because they contain polyaromatic hydrocarbons, all these poisons. And so again, just a little bit. And then a few more. In the end, this oyster mushroom mycelium was living on pure used cigarette butts. And he describes it, he’s called Peter McCoy, and he started an organization called Radical Mycology. And he describes it like the fungus is like a jailer, riffling through its keys to try and find a key that will unlock the lock the chemical locks that it's trying to unlock. And eventually it gets there, but it might take a few goes to do that, so they have these deep wells of metabolic potential that they deploy when they need to, and it allows them to really rise to different kinds of metabolic challenges in a way that we really can't do ourselves. So I think that illustrates some of their brilliance, and also the ways that we could work with them to break down pollutants or other recalcitrant compounds that we want to break down.

BW
And this is because throughout this time on Earth, they've been breaking things down, starting with very difficult circumstances of very barren rock, perhaps just straight after the volcanoes have erupted… It doesn't take long, does it, before small microbes are starting to break that down as a source of food, as a form of growth. And so they've done a lot of things in this course of time. But they seem to have a memory of that. How does that even work? How can they riffle through their picks to find the right one?

MS
Well, I mean, these are enzymatic capacities in their genomes, and they just don't express things they don't need to express. So they're very adaptable organisms, in the sense that the fungus grown on cigarette butts is going to be very different from the same that you could have taken a fragment of that very same network and grown it in a totally different environment, and they'd be quite different. They're expressing different chemical profiles, they would have different sorts of network morphologies. Fungi, they pour themselves into their environments, and they're so responsive to their environments that, in a way, that's maybe surprising to us. Because, of course, we respond to our environments as well, but we have body plans. Short of an intervention, if you start off with four limbs, you'll end up with four limbs. And fungi aren't like that. They have this developmental fluidity, and so we can sometimes be confused by that.

BW
Culturally, mushrooms have ebbed and flowed in our consciousness. There was a period in the 60s where, during the flower power era, perhaps magic mushrooms were flourishing everywhere, and then it died down again. And it feels a little bit like we're having a cultural moment where appreciation for this kingdom, this realm of natural life, the realm of the fungi, is coming back into public consciousness, even to the extent that there's been a very successful computer game The Last of Us based on this very extraordinary fungi called the cordyceps. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

MS
Yes, I had to write an op-ed for Time magazine saying, ‘No, you don't need to be afraid of fungi,’ after the TV show of The Last of Us came out, I believe the second season just came out. But it's based on… the first thing to say is, this fungus doesn't do this to humans, or even mammals. But there is a whole group of fungi that do zombify insects. And the ophiocordyceps fungi on which the film is based, or the TV series in the game is based, specialize on ants. And so they grow into ants. They change the ants’ behavior in a way that suits the fungus. So the ants normally would stay low to the ground and keep out of harm's way, but the ants that are infected, they grow, they become fascinated by heights. They climb up the nearest plant and then just at the right height for the fungus to fruit or produce its spores, the fungus compels the ant to bite onto the underside of a leaf, and then it kills the ant. And then it sprouts this spore producing body out of the ant's head, and then rains down spores on unfortunate ants passing below. And what's amazing is that the fungus is able to control the ant, it seems, chemically. So it's producing these dynamically producing waves of neurotransmitter compounds that control the ants body. It's really a fungus in ants clothing, and it's grisly but remarkable. And there are lots of other fungi that do this to different insects and invertebrates.

BW
And don't they all bite almost at the same time as well. That's the extraordinary thing.

MS
Yeah, the precision. So, I mean, this case with the ophiocordyceps and carpenter ants, this particular pairing, yeah, the infected ants bite always on the underside of a leaf, the vein on the underside of a leaf, and they'll align themselves with the sun. They bite around midday. And what's more, they've been doing this for a long time. Fossilized leaves exist, and they have a very distinctive mark on them where the death grip has taken place, called the Death Grip. And then these fossilized leaves make it clear that these ophiocordyceps have been causing ants to make the death grip for about 30, 40 million years.

BW
This is kind of mind blowing, right? Because, and what I think it does is so humbling. Firstly, that fungi have been around for a billion years, and plants have only been around for 400 million years, but that's also mind blowing. But it's a totally different form of intelligence to perhaps what we're used to. And we're at Innovation zero. I just did a session about artificial intelligence and data and computers, but this form of intelligence just seems so alien. What's the latest thinking on how they do this? How do they have this apparent mind without a mind?

MS
Yeah, it's remarkable. And I think one of the key things is that we used to we're very cerebro-centric, and we think about our brains, and we think about brains in general as the way that intelligence happens. But our brains didn't evolve their tricks from scratch and the properties of brains reflect very fundamental properties of almost all life, electrical excitability, the ability to respond to changes in the environment and often to form networks, so to connect with other cells. And fungi do this very well. They've been doing this in their way for a very long time. And also key, I think, is that the problems that they have evolved to solve are very different from the problems that we have evolved to solve. Likewise, with plants, and so if you test a fungus for intelligence using, say, for example, the ability to recognize itself in a mirror, you might come to the conclusion that humans are smarter, or at least a fungus is not intelligent. But you could test a human with things that the fungus will definitely beat us at. And so I think that's really key, the context dependency of intelligence. And it's really about problem solving and responding to changing environments. And everyone has different problems to solve, and everyone has different environments to navigate. So within the fungal case, we've been studying in the lab, how mycorrhizal fungi are able to divert materials around their bodies, how they can balance the needs they have to find new plant roots to relate with. They also have to explore their environments, to forage phosphorus and so on. And they're able to do this… they're able to, for example, to change the width of their tubes depending on demand. They can have two way traffic in their tubes. And they have certain, it seems like, local rules that they follow to allow them to navigate trade offs, but without having to have some kind of central processing. But a lot of it's still very, very confusing to us, and that's why we've got this imaging robot to allow us to study this in great detail. But I find it very helpful, just in general, as I go about my life, to remember all these different ways there are to be. To remember all these different ways there are to rise to the challenge of living.

ML
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BW
Tell us a little bit about your work, then at SPUN, tell us what the acronym stands for.

MS
So the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks.

BW
It does sound like it could be a spy ring.

MS
Yeah, it's true. I so rarely think of it like that, but if I heard it for the first time, I think I probably would. So it's an NGO and we are working to map the mycorrhizal fungal communities of the planet, because we have maps of ocean currents, we have maps of vegetation, we have maps of soil types, geological maps, climate maps, but we don't have maps of these communities that live underground and which are responsible for so many of the important things in the living world. Now they're having to regulate the climate, because it's carbon that's entering the soil through their networks. They are supporting biodiversity. So, to have these maps would allow us to take them into account when we’re making our decisions. And that's so important, because it's like we're trying to solve a puzzle with several missing pieces, and this is a very, very key missing piece that we're trying to put onto the puzzle board. So one of the things SPUN is doing is this: so who's living where, and to provide tools and techniques for people to be able to see that and to know that. And then we're also looking at threats, who's threatened where and by what. So how could we start to alleviate the pressure that we're putting on these communities around the world. And then we're also looking at functions. So how, who's doing? Which communities are responsible for extra amounts of carbon drawdown, for example, which ones are responsible for unusual metabolic, which ones are able to help plants survive in deserts in a particularly amazing way?

BW
Well, just on that, I was in Sri Lanka with my family, and we were at the beach, huge desert dunes, and we came across an elephant dung. Lo and behold, out the middle of the dung was growing this beautiful mushroom. I just thought, these things can really exist almost anywhere, can't they? It’s extraordinary.

MS
Yeah, totally. We just were on a SPUN expedition, SPUN and the Fungi Foundation, in Mongolia in June. We did a long traverse of the Gobi Desert, looking at these very, very dry places. You know, you think, where's the fungi in the desert? But actually, there are many examples of them there. And the ones we were looking at were on plant roots. There are some plants that can make a life in deserts. And the reason we were interested is because so much of the world is desertifying. So as more and more of the world becomes desert, how can we learn from the plants that survive in deserts already because of their fungal relationships? As we're thinking about this sort of desert future that some parts of the world are going to face and already do, what can we learn from those well adapted partnerships?

BW
And just practically, when it comes to how we approach conserving nature, or trying to preserve nature. Is it the case that fungi, the presence of fungi alone, could be used as a designation for a special site? Does it appear on the red list, the IUCN endangered species list? What's its status in the world of conservation?

MS
So thankfully, the IUCN have just included a lot more fungi than there were before. But they're still very underrepresented compared to animals and plants, and often just excluded entirely, because many frameworks refer to flora and fauna, or plants and animals, without referring to fungi, which is the third kingdom of macroscopic life. So it's a problem. It's like a systemic exclusion. And that's a problem because it means that fungi are then underrepresented in our frameworks, but also our educational systems. They're underfunded.

BW
And does it also mean that it's a little bit of an informal community that studies them? I think you've spoken about that. It's quite amateur, isn't it? A lot of the fungal knowledge that we've gained has been through enthusiastic individuals and slightly informal science?

MS
I mean, I'd say that in the long history of it, for sure. I mean, all the sciences were in some sense amateur, until the late 19th century, when what we think of as modern research universities started to come into being. But because fungi were only discovered, they were only described as a kingdom of life, in the late 60s, and before, they were thought of as lower plants, unglamorous plants, studied in the least glamorous corners of botany schools, it meant there'd be less opportunities to study them. So I'd say that for a long part of modern scientific history, a lot of fungal research has taken place in a less formal context by passionate amateurs. Amateur coming from the word ‘I love’ in the true sense of this word. Visionary, extraordinary individuals working outside formal context. So now there are many more ways to study fungi, and a lot of this work is done by extraordinary professionals. And thankfully, this has changed.

BW
It's professionalised, as it should. But there is a kind of folklore around mushrooms, and partly because this crazy chemical arsenal that they are able to wield does not just crazy things to creatures and other species, but also it has a psychological effect on humans. And there is even this theory, which I read recently, about the sort of stoned ape, that there was a period through human evolution where maybe some form of expanded consciousness was linked to our consumption of these substances. Do you put any store in that?

MS
Well, I think it's certainly the case that most of the many, many cultures around the world use psychoactive substances, and often these substances are thought of as medicines, as sacred, they’re folded into some of the most profound cultural ceremonies and rituals. And so it's these substances that change the way that we think, that we feel, that we imagine the way that we relate to each other, the way that we conceive of our place in the universe. None of that's in question. It's evident that's the case. So wherever psychedelic mushrooms were first consumed, I can only imagine that they had a profound influence on the way that we thought, felt and imagined and conceived of our place in the universe. Now whether they had a biological effect on it, some people say, ‘well, eating these mushrooms resulted in our brains growing much larger.’ We've got to explain, there's something to be explained. There's something called the brain boom. No one denies that. From about 3 million years ago to about 200,000 years ago, our brains grew four times the size than they had done in the previous 60 million years of primary evolution. No one denies that in our journey to becoming humans, our brains grew. Whether this is because people ate psychedelic mushrooms or…

BW
It's sometimes linked to the fact that we learned fire, meaning we could consume proteins.

MS
I think fire is obviously very important. Bipedalism, having hands that can gesture and that can make tools. I think there's lots of factors involved. But obviously I think it's beyond question that these substances transform our cultures, and that itself can then influence our biologies and our society in all sorts of ways.

BW
And it's been really interesting, if you think about the arc of social history, there was this period during the 60s where this interest in the scientific research in these psychological effects was this starting to mushroom up and LSD came on the scene, but then there was this really strong reaction against it, particularly in the US, where it was really taken back, and all the research was stopped, and the funding was cut. But I feel that that era is now coming to an end. There's a new kind of liberalism, or just a new scientific inquiry and curiosity about these chemical compounds and what we can learn from them. And I've certainly come across lots more people who are engaged in scientific research about could some of these substances be a much more effective cure for psychological ailments? Treating depression with perhaps a resetting mechanism, rather than a long dependence on chemical drugs that you're encouraged to take. And that is something that you cover in your book, and is a feature of the way in which we're evolving with these entities.

MS
For sure, and quite rightly, I think lots of this research has focused on so-called pathological states, though, that are psychiatric problems. And I think there's a lot of promise for these medicines to help us with that. But also it feels like something that's got a bit lost in that is that people who don't qualify as having one of these psychiatric problems can also benefit from these experiences. That they can help us get more well, come into greater presence, come to a greater aliveness, and yeah, I think that’s been a little bit set back from some of these conversations and worth throwing in there.

BW
And then there's been quite a lot of the everyday chemical substances we use that are mood altering are just kind of accepted as part of society. So, for example, caffeine, which Michael Pollan in his book talks about caffeine being probably the hardest drug to get off if you've become habituated to it. But also alcohol, right? And alcohol tracks back to a fungus, right? So do you want to talk about that, because I do love the story of your experiments with yeast and alcohol.

MS
Yeah, it's so important. I think we forget we think about alcohol as the way alcohol is today in modern societies. But alcohol is how, for many, many, many years, we could preserve things that we had a lot of. Say, apples or pears that show up at a certain time of year. And it's in the form of cider that those nutrients can be preserved, and that medicines… lots of medicines were made in beers or wines or preserved in alcohols, but also ritual feasting and statecraft, the way that societies were formed and built at different times and places in human history.

BW
There was a period in British history where most people drank a form of alcohol. It might be very weak, but it was safer to drink that than the water. There was something about the fermentation process that made this drink more likely to be good for you than just scooping water out of the Thames.

MS
And nutritious. You know, it's a kind of food. You break down alcohol as you break down the calories in food. I mean, you break it down into energy. And so laborers would be paid in pintages of cider. And there's so many ways that our cultures and societies in different times and places have been bound up with yeasts and , of course, there's bread as well, lest we forget.

BW
Which you can make, I learned, without needing actual yeast. Because yeast is everywhere. It's in the air and it's on your skin, and if you make your bread, it'll just do what it does.

MS
It's incredible, isn't it? And so for a long time, yeasts have, because they're microscopic, people had thought of it as divine. There have been gods and goddesses of fermentation for an unknowably long time. It was only in the late 19th century that they were identified as invisibly small, what we'd call organisms now. So yeah, our intertwined relationships with yeast are fundamentally important to who we are and how we behave.

BW
Okay, so listen, this has been wonderful, and I could talk to you for hours, but we haven't got too much time left. I wanted to just cast our minds forward then. So you're doing this work with advocacy, and the aim is really to get this conversation started about how we can be more aware and more thoughtful in the way that we consider this kingdom of life. But thinking forward, what would you like to see change about the way things are done today?

MS
From a fungal point of view, I think I'd like to see fungi written into conservation frameworks and taken into account in our restoration strategies, our educational programs, in the way that in our scientific research programs. And I think that fungi can help us to think more relationally in general, which can help us overcome some of our reductive individualism which, I think, is responsible for a lot of the problems that we face. So I think fungi can help us conceptually.

BW
So just pausing on that, because I love that phrase. So the reductive individualism is, as you would describe it, this kind of idea that we're all individuals. Is that what you mean? That there's a sense that everyone's being talked to individually in their own little world. Even more so now with technology, is to try and rediscover this sense of connection.

MS
Well, we're fundamentally interconnected beings. The air we breathe in and we breathe out, the water and the molecules that flow through our body, that continually reconstitute our actual bodies. And then we have all these organisms that live in and on us, without which we can’t do what we do and behave as we behave. And then, of course, the way we relate to other humans and animals, and the way that pets, or the animals, for example, can in hospitals soothe people and help people recover from illnesses, just by the emotional way that they are. And humans too, in the fact that loneliness is a cripplingly dangerous epidemic. So all these different levels in which we need others and so are constituted by others. And I think we forget that when we're socialized into this kind of individualism where we think of ourselves as neatly bound autonomous units, which is just not true on a biological level, and it's not true on a social level. And I think it's an illusion that helps us to justify social and ecological devastation. And so when we're thinking about how we rise to these challenges that come about through social and ecological devastation, I think part of the challenge that we have to address is how we conceive of our relationships, both with each other and the living world more generally.

BW
One of the things that is now being explored is how these organisms could create materials that could replace, perhaps, materials that are currently coming from fossil fuels. So could you give us a couple of examples of that?

MS
Yes. So these fungal networks, fungal mycelial networks, they are appetite in bodily form. They're eating their surroundings. So if you were to feed some mycelial networks, for example, corn stalks or crushed up hemp agricultural waste products. They grow around those crushed up hemp stalks or whatever it is, and they'll kind of bind together in a semi-digested mass. And these materials turn out to be really useful, and they're used in packaging. They're light, they're decomposable. They can be grown on a waste product in two weeks.

BW
So it's kind of like biological 3d printing, is it?

MS
Yeah. In a sense, yeah. And you can also get them to grow like foams, which you can then sort of flatten into leather like materials. So there's lots of ways that this huge amount of potential here, because these materials can be used to disrupt very damaging, environmentally damaging, materials.

BW
And presumably they decompose. So the sheer number of single use things that we have? Where we're looking for tensile strength and cheapness, so we end up with plastic spoons that are thrown away immediately. Is that something that you could imagine, as an industry, that we're going to be harnessing this tech, not technology, but these living creatures, to create these outcomes?

MS
I think so. And for all sorts of various different things, I have a hot sauce business with my brother, and we've just started shipping our hot sauce in mycelial packaging.

BW
What is a mycelial package, though?

MS
Yeah, so for example, there's glass bottles. And the glass bottles have a little bit that you stick one end into, and you stick the other end into, and that fits neatly in a box, so that the bottle is protected in postage. And you can just get that. You can put that into a compost heap. It's basically as cheap, at the scale that we're using it, as the alternatives. And it's light, it's coming from a waste product.

BW
So this is making me think, there's a lot of talk in our sector about the role of fossil fuels, right? And that there's a lot of pushback in saying, it's such a versatile commodity, there's no way that we can live without it. We've got to keep getting it out of the ground, because it goes into medicines and plastics and things that surround us every day. But really what's happening there is just, you've got a kind of a homogenous substance, which is oil, which happens to have rich chemistry that we then, as humans have speciated out into lots of uses. But what you have with fungi is the opposite. It's a huge, vast array of living organisms that can produce almost anything they need, including what we might need. So perhaps it's just a flipping of the script, and for me, what's exciting about this, is that the realization that this fossil obsession that we have is just one paradigm, one way of living. And before it was discovered, we met our needs in other ways. And there's absolutely now much more of a clear vision that we can go beyond it and meet our needs, not reduce our needs, but meet our needs and even grow our needs just by harnessing different natural processes.

MS
I mean, fungi, they're so innovative and chemically, it’s one of the great theaters of innovation. And I think we can see that we've already proven to ourselves that this is capable of shifting what's possible for us, and for that, we can invite them to be chemists for us in a certain sense. And through that, we can meet all sorts of needs, and we can solve all sorts of problems, and we can rise to all sorts of challenges. And so I think moving forward, learning from them, and also learning to work with them, will be vitally important.

BW
Well, just to end then, especially when you consider that throughout their time and throughout their existence on this planet, the composition of the atmosphere has varied quite crazily. And also, plants themselves have varied the atmosphere, haven't they, and there would be very little oxygen if it hadn't been for the arrival of photosynthesis. So at the really macro scale, we're getting into concentrations of CO2 now that we haven't seen for hundreds of thousands, but it's not billions of years. And so is that ultimately also a hope? That we can somehow find a system within which we're actually… In the same way that we're negatively affecting the composition of the atmosphere, can we work symbiotically with fungi and the natural world to get us back to a more equitable level?

MS
I mean, I think it's totally within the realm of possibility to do that conceptually. Whether we actually do is another question. But I think a key point is, there's this episode where, in the history of life, where mycorrhizal fungi came together with algae, they formed land plants. Land plants start growing on land, which is a much higher CO2 environment than the oceans and the waters where they came from, the rivers and lakes, and they started to pull so much carbon out of the atmosphere by growing these trunks and growing bigger and bigger and making the soils which got deeper and deeper that we entered period of global cooling, which was actually catastrophic for forests. It was called the Carboniferous rainforest collapse, and it was all to do with the carbon being pulled out of the atmosphere by the new forms of life that have been enabled by these symbiotic relationships. So, yeah, these organisms have participated in this kind of process before. I don't know if you'd want another rainforest collapse caused by them…

BW
And also, it took an inordinately long time. I suppose that's the other thing. This is not a fast process, because here you're talking millennia. Well, listen, it's been so fun to catch up with you. Thank you so much, Merlin. You have got a new film that's currently available. Do you want to just tell us what the name of that film is, and a little bit about that.

MS
It's called Fungi: Web of Life, and Bjork narrates it beautifully, and it's got incredible time lapse footage by some of the best time lapse photographers working today. Which really, I think, invites you into fungal life in an extraordinary way. And you can see it in various screenings around the place and IMAX cinemas in particular.

BW
Well, thank you. I hope all our listeners will pick up a copy of Entangled Life and delve into this realm, and also watch that wonderful movie. Thank you so much for joining me, Merlin.

MS
You're welcome.

BW
So that was Merlin Sheldrake. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. How the planet responds to the elevated carbon dioxide levels we've caused is one of the many uncertainties that makes predicting our future so hard. Fungi are a vital part of the complex biosphere that support us. Hopefully, we can introduce the right level of protections that allow us to understand them better, and to benefit from some of the innovations they've developed over a billion years on planet Earth. We'll put links in the show notes to Merlin's book, the Bjorak narrated film: Fungi, Web of Life, and the charity SPUN that he helped establish. My thanks as always to Oscar Boyd, our producer, to Jamie Oliver, our editor, and to the rest of the talented Cleaning Up team and wonderful leadership circle members who make the Cleaning Up podcast possible. Please join us at the same time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up.

ML
Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live. If you've enjoyed this episode, please hit like, leave a comment, and also recommend it to friends, family, colleagues and absolutely everyone. To browse the archive of over 200 past episodes, and also to subscribe to our free newsletter, visit cleaningup.live. That's cleaningup.live.