The Substrate of Mystery

Transcript

Emmanuel Vaughan-LeeMerlin, welcome to the show. It’s nice to be in conversation with you again.

Merlin SheldrakeGreat to be here. Thanks for having me.

EVLI wanted to focus our conversation today around mycelium. And so I wonder if we can begin with a very basic question, which is, what is mycelium in a mycelial network?

MSSo most fungi spend most of their lives not as mushrooms, which are the reproductive structures of some fungi, but as mycelial networks; and these are branching networks of tubular cells, and they allow fungi to feed. It’s how fungi feed. We put food in our bodies. Fungi put their bodies in their food, and they do so as branching networks of cells called mycelium.

EVLYou know, on the one hand, mycelial networks offer an amazing biological model of interconnectedness, but in your work you also suggest that they can be a philosophical doorway through which we can step beyond our well-worn ways of thinking about how the world works and also our place in it. Talk to me a little about this.

MSSo many of the ways that we design our lives and structures and social organizations, certainly within modern societies, seems to reflect our quite centralized bodies. We have heads, where we have our brains that we’re very proud of, and rightfully so; and we have hearts, which are the centers of our circulatory systems. And then we have heads of state, we have capital cities, we have all sorts of centralized systems that we build. And so for me, mycelial networks, they do things so differently. And they don’t have centers of operation. Their coordination is decentralized: it’s a little bit everywhere and a little bit nowhere.

EVLRight.

MSAnd so I think they offer so many fertile avenues for thinking because they represent such a different way to be alive, a different way to solve problems, a different way to rise to the challenge of living.

EVLIn your book Entangled Life, you share experiences where your own scientific inquiry often mirrors the mutual and dynamic nature of mycelial networks. And you make a point that if one is to study and truly understand a flexible network or a decentralized network, if you will, you have to assemble a bit of your own, and you write of a recurring theme related to this: Look at the network and it starts to look back at you. Tell me about this and what it means to practice mycelial thinking in your own work.

MSWell, you know, fungi explore possibilities with their bodies. There’s a fungus called Phanerochaete velutina that I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, and some wonderful experiments where people give Phanerochaete a block of wood. It eats wood, so it devours the block of wood. When it has finished the block of wood, it starts to grow outwards in search of more food. But it doesn’t go in one direction; it grows outwards in all directions at the same time. And when it finds a new block of wood, the behavior of the whole network changes, even though just a small part of the network has touched the new block of wood. Then it withdraws the parts of its network that don’t lead anywhere delicious, and it strengthens its connection with a new block of wood. And as it does so, it completely remodels its body, remodels its connections.

And so, for me, this makes me think about, you know, since I was a child, I’ve instinctively thought of the future as a moment like now, but later. But when I look at Phanerochaete exploring in all directions at once, it makes me think about the future as a cloud of possibilities and the present as a place where we choose between possibilities. And of course, the present is determined by the past and all the past decisions that have been made that led us to the present moment. So what I mean by all of this is that, it’s clear to me that when you are watching Phanerochaete do this, you’re watching a fungus explore possibilities with its bodies. But, we explore possibilities too, and we do so with our imaginations. So I think our minds and our imaginations are very mycelial. I think that is a mycelial part of our existence. And so one of the ways that I have fun with thinking about fungi is by feeling how my mind and imagination actually feels just quite fungal anyway, whether or not I’ve been thinking about fungi.

EVLWell, you describe mycelial networks with these tubular filaments that go out and create connections and branch, and they’re known as hyphae—these threads that you can see when you even just dig in the soil, and you see those white threads connecting everything—and they branch outward and then fuse together. And if hyphae couldn’t branch, one could never become many. And if they couldn’t fuse, they couldn’t grow into complex networks. And these networks can go on to create relationships with plants, giving us mycorrhizal partnerships. And you write that if you could place your nose into the soil, it would feel like the performance of a jazz group, with the players listening, interacting, responding to one another in real time. Talk to me a little about these relationships that are constantly improvising.

MSSo, I mean, all organisms are relating all the time. Relating is not an option regardless of how we think about our lives. Our own bodies emerge from relationships with microbes. Our bodies emerge from relationships with all that sustains us. Even things we don’t think of as alive, like air and water. These are all relational, flowing processes that allow us to make and maintain our bodies. So being is always being with. But fungi, I think, can help us think about this relational nature of life, because they express relationship with their bodies, because they form these physical connections. And they’re so evidently connective; they embody connectivity.

And so there are all sorts of fungal relationships that have changed the history of life. And one that I think about a lot is the relationship between plants and mycorrhizal fungi. You know mycorrhizal fungi explore the soil, they find nutrients and water, they supply these to plants. Plants do photosynthesis, they eat light and carbon dioxide, they make energy-rich compounds that they feed the fungi with. So that’s a huge, huge relationship that’s changed the history of life. It enabled the algal ancestors of land plants to move onto the land in the first place. And it transformed what was possible for everyone that followed. So there are endless examples of these fungal relationships, which didn’t just change the life for the fungi and their partners, but for everyone else as well.

EVLRight. This business of one becoming many really muddles our categorizations. And you say, “From the point of view of the network, mycelium is a single interconnected entity. [But] from the point of view of a hyphal tip, mycelium is a multitude.” And I love this line from the book, and I’m curious how you think this perspective can help us break out of the boundaries we like to place around living things, including ourselves.

MSYes. So, you know, the concept of individuality is so important. And as individuals, as selves, we think, and we feel, and we imagine, and we are the subject of rights and responsibilities. And this is really important, all of this. But because we are constantly in flux and flow and relationship with the world—you know, the Latin word for “individual,” it means undividable. And so many collaborations are undividable. Like lots of plants, if you take away their mycorrhizal fungi, even though the mycorrhizal fungi are a different organism, the plants wouldn’t be the plants. And so, all of these collectives are actually kind of new undividable individuals, because when you divide them, they stop being the entity that they were when they were together. So I just think it’s helpful to make this question of individuality visible again, rather than, not just have it as an assumption: that we just assume that we’re individuals, we assume that all other organisms must in some level be individuals. And the reason why I think it’s helpful to turn that assumption of individuality into a question is because it leads us to a much more flowing, processual, interconnected understanding of the world, which I think just better reflects what’s actually going on; and has ethical implications, too, because if we understand the world that way, it’s much harder for us to justify destructive, ecocidal, genocidal, et cetera, behaviors. So that’s one of the reasons why I find that question helpful.

EVLThe ways that fungi and mycelium function is decentralized, as you said. And it challenges our notion of how we consider how a brain functions, how intelligence works. Talk to me a little bit about that.

MSThe cognitive sciences evolved around human intelligence and the human abilities, and so many of the benchmarks and ways to understand and assess intelligence reflect the things that we can do and that we can do well.

EVLRight.

MSAnd so I think that’s led to a situation where, I mean, it’s changing now, but it’s led to a situation in the biological sciences where we would assess other organisms on criteria which are based around us. And really these other organisms aren’t participating in that competition. And so, when we set up this competition with these other organisms—like, well, we can recognize ourselves in the mirror; can they? And they may or may not be able to. And if they’re not, then does it mean they’re not intelligent, or does it mean that they just don’t do that kind of recognition in mirrors? You know, if they set a test, another organism set a test, like an octopus set a test for us, we’d fail probably on many counts. If a plant set a test for us about, you know, comparing what we could do to what it could do, we’d fail on many counts; likewise with fungi.

So that more limited view led to an understanding where there was a kind of big league table, with humans at the top and then higher animals further down, and basically using humans as a yardstick to judge intelligence. So why that’s changing is because it’s become very clear—I mean, I think it’s been clear for a while for a lot of people—but all organisms arise to the challenge of living in their own way.

EVLRight.

MSAnd so, if you think about intelligence as sets of abilities to solve problems, abilities to change what you’re doing in response to changing circumstances and the ability to make decisions between different causes of action, then it becomes clear that all organisms are intelligent just in different ways. And so why fungi are helpful is because, or at least for me, is because they are so evidently solving problems. There are so many complex problems their lives present them with, and they’re solving these problems. So, for me, they illustrate very clearly that you don’t need a brain to solve complex problems. And, for me, that starts to erode this paradigm based on prejudice that puts humans at the top of a big old league table.

EVLYou describe how hyphae live in a flood of sensory information with their tips constantly interpreting data and deciding courses of action. And we use our brains to integrate sensory input, but mycelial networks don’t work that way. There are many of everything. There’s no single hub like we have in our own selves. So the question can no longer be, where do sensory streams converge within fungal intelligence? And if the question isn’t where, what’s the question?

MSYeah, no, we like a where. And I think the question for me is, well, given that—say you’re addressing a fungal network—you know, given that you can do this, this, and this, how is it that you can do this, this, and this? And then we can step out of the need for the where and just get into the how, and then start to understand more on their terms how they’re doing, what they’re doing. And I work with an amazing group in Amsterdam, and we have an incredible system to study in great detail what’s happening inside mycorrhizal fungal networks with an automated microscopy, an incredible robotic arm, which takes plates and allows us to look inside them in great detail. And we’re trying to understand how they do what they do, how do they process information, how do they coordinate their behavior? And there are so many open questions about this. But, yeah, I think it’s more about a step. It’s not like, well, what’s the brain? It’s more like, well, given that you do things differently, how is it that you do what you do?

EVLAnd what are the questions that have risen to the surface in this investigation? When you put where off to the side, what are the other forms of understanding?

MSSo we had a big paper come out in Nature a few months ago reporting the first findings. And so, they can balance, they can juggle competing demands very well. So, for example, if a network is growing out, part of its needs involve exploring its surroundings to get phosphorus, to get nutrients from the soil. And to do that, they’d want to grow into dense, intricate networks to have as much contact with the soil as possible to extract as much phosphorus from the soil as possible. But another of their needs is to find and relate with more plant roots, because from plant roots it gets energy, it gets, you know, energy-containing carbon compounds, like fats and sugars. So, to do that it has to do more of a long-distance type exploration, which is a quite different kind of growth to the proliferating and densifying to extract from its local environment. So we found that they have a kind of traveling wave way of growing. So they send out these exploratory tips, which are looking for plant roots, and then a wave of densifying network behind those tips to allow it to explore in the soil. And that it can change that, sort of, that trade off between the sparse network that it can explore further and the dense network that it can extract more efficiently locally. It can balance those very, very well. That’s just one of the things that we noticed.

EVLAnd when you look at that from a philosophical perspective, what kind of understandings or questions does that raise for you?

MSI mean, one of the ways that I find fungi helpful philosophically is— And I like very much the work of Alfred North Whitehead, who has a process-relational metaphysics, a process-relational worldview: that everything is made up of processes unfolding in time, and all those processes are always relating to other processes. So for me, mycelial networks embody this, make it very clear. And you can see the growing tips unfolding in time; as they grow in time, they leave behind them this sort of map of their history, their recent history. Because each growing tip is winding through the world: it’s branching, it’s fusing, it’s making decisions. It could go here, it could go there; which way should it go?

EVLRight.

MSBut it’s always unfolding into relationship, both with its surroundings and with itself and with other organisms. So that’s the main sort of philosophical place that mycelial networks take me to. And then, many other places from there. But that’s the kind of first main philosophical step.

EVLYou describe in the book how the way fungi often make decisions is akin to us passing through two doors at once, that they can do multitudes. We can do one thing, they can do many things at once. And now, of course, we can’t literally mimic this, but I wonder if there’s something about how mycelial networks make decisions that we can learn from to do with how we can hold complexity and navigate duality.

MSYes. I think there’s a lot. You know, it’s this idea of mycelial networks being a bit like— Well, at least, I’m a fungus nerd. I’m a fungus nerd, and I think often in fungal terms. But, as I say, I feel like our minds are quite mycelial, our imaginations are quite mycelial, just by their nature. And so we might not be able to grow outwards in all directions at the same time, but I think we can explore many possibilities at the same time with our minds and with our imaginations, crucially. Our imaginations are what give us access to the possible.

So, yeah. So if we had to set out to find water in a desert—one of us—we would have to pick one direction to explore. And we very well might not find water. But if there was a group of us and we found a way to relate with each other and communicate, then we could each walk off in different directions and, through form coming together into a kind of collective that can relate and communicate, we could explore in many directions at the same time. So I think there are ways that we can do what fungi do when we start to relate and to use our relational skills and imaginations.

EVLBut it forces us to be in relationship with other human beings, or other beings, to do so.

MSYes.

EVLWe can’t do it by ourselves.

MSNo. I mean, you could do one direction in the desert, and then come back, and then do another and another one, but—

EVLRight. But that’s not very efficient.

MSYeah. You’d probably die of thirst before you could explore every direction.

EVLRight. So it pushes us to kind of step back and say, well, the only way that you could potentially survive in a scenario like the water scenario is through collaboration.

MSExactly. Which is what’s happening in the living world all the time. You know, whether or not you can be like a fungus and grow outwards in all directions. By collaborating, by inventing new ways to relate, you can extend your reach, and you can do things together that you couldn’t do alone. And that’s really one of the recurring themes of life.

EVLAnother big theme that you touch upon is pointing out how mycelial networks are structures of reciprocity, which kind of builds on what you were just saying. And they really seem to function as a living architecture of exchange. So it isn’t just taking something for itself, but it’s also giving something in response. And could you talk a little bit about how fungi build and sustain these symbiotic relationships with other organisms and why these relationships are so important?

MSYeah, so I mean, in many cases there’s an exchange, like with plants and mycorrhizal fungi: They each give each other something that the other doesn’t have. So they both benefit. So we think of that as a mutualism; it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. It’s on the mutually beneficial end of the relational spectrum. But on the other end of the relational spectrum, there’s a parasitism, where one partner is taking, and the other partners are not getting anything in return. And fungi do this as well all the time. You know, like the fungi that grow into ants and puppet their behavior, and manipulate their behavior to benefit the fungus. It doesn’t have the ability to walk or bite, so it hijacks a body that can, then devours it, discards the body when its job is done. So there’s plenty of examples of that too. And in that case, I don’t know whether the reciprocity model works—

EVLApplies.

MSOr really applies. And even when you have a situation like with, say, plants, and say you have one plant and one mycorrhizal fungi living together in a pot, you know, that’s not how it normally works in the wild world. But let’s say you had just one plant, one mycorrhizal fungus, there’d be moments in their life together where one’s giving more than it gets, and then the other’s giving more than it gets. Over time, it’s mutually beneficial. So there’s a lot of fluidity in these exchanges. And there are situations where mycorrhizal fungi can—say, for example, if you fertilize mycorrhizal fungus and plants, then the plant has less need for the mycorrhizal fungi. It might start to feed its fungi less, and the fungus might have to fight harder to get the energy it needs, and it could become more parasitic that way.

So even in well-established mutualisms, you have fluidity and this dynamism, and I think that’s really always going on. And if you think about the relationships in our own lives, you know, there’s all sorts of fluidity there. And collaboration is always a kind of blend of, you know, there’s conflict and competition alongside cooperation. And I think of collaboration as housing all of those dynamics in fluid dynamic ways. And so I think you see a lot of that with fungi and fungal relationships.

EVLSo you can move between being the parasite and being a participant in a positive exchange of reciprocity quite easily in a fungal model. And you can in human beings.

MSAnd as human beings too. And in that moment where you’re getting more than you give—I mean, if you just took that little episode—then by this definition, yeah, you were being a parasite. But that relationship might unfold for several years. And over time, you would think of it as mutualistic, because in that moment you might’ve been getting more than you give, but you might start giving loads more later. And I think it works like that a lot with humans. Now, there are lots of friends who, in our long friendship, I might need help from at times, or they might need help, but over time it’s a mutually beneficial thing. But take one of those moments and you’d see a one-way exchange.

EVLRight. Right. The biologist Lynn Margulis put forward the idea that great leaps in evolution of early life were not driven by competition alone, but by symbiosis. Complex life, humans included, exists thanks to what she called “the intimacy of strangers,” which is a term I always loved. And fungi have long embodied this collaborative way of being, this idea of exchange and collaboration, of opening ourselves to this intimacy of strangers. While it’s always relevant, it feels more relevant to me right now as we look at how we can navigate our mounting ecological challenges here; it points to a larger way that we need to engage with the world.

MSTotally. Yeah. I think this is a really important point, and I think about it a lot. And life is a story of intimate relationships. And many of these relationships have formed at times of crisis, because at times of crisis there’s a radical need to do something different, to survive in a way or in a place that it wasn’t possible to survive before. And usually this happens by organisms coming together in new ways. So, plants and mycorrhizal fungi are a great example. Early days of life on land: rocky, scorched, desolate; algae couldn’t make a life there unless they struck up relationships with fungi. But lichens are another good example. They can live in often very extreme places in extreme ways. And the partners that make up a lichen wouldn’t be able to live in those places unless they had come together into this new form. So if crisis is a crucible for new symbiotic relationships, I think this can be a really powerful lesson right now, as we face and are in so many crises, to look to the history of life for inspiration; to think, how can we come together to find new ways to relate, come together across societal boundaries, cultural boundaries, disciplinary boundaries, species boundaries, to invent new ways to relate, to rise to these times of challenge and transformation.

EVLAnd to look to the more-than-human, outside of historical human examples of the past, which perhaps was always there in traditional ecological settings but wasn’t so dominant in more recent Western scientific paradigms that we modeled so much on, that made ripples not just into the scientific fields, but into political and economic structures.

MSTotally. And it happens all the time. And, I mean, I’d like to think about service dogs, you know, and guide dogs, and dogs that, you know— I was talking to someone who has a truffle dog, and he was talking talking about how if someone goes missing in the mountains near where he lives, then there are people who can come out with their dogs to look for the lost people. And many of those people and their dogs aren’t like part of mountain rescue. There are networks of local amateurs who do this as a kind of social offering. So we come together: it’s just one person and their dog, and how they can work together to find someone who’s fallen off a cliff and isn’t injured; or a service dog who can make life possible for someone who wouldn’t otherwise be able to get around; and charities that train service dogs to, not just like a dog for someone with blindness, say for example, but someone who has a completely unique set of challenges, and a dog can be trained to allow that person to live.

So we see this happening all the time. And, I think those—you know, it is a very old story—but I think there’s a wild world of possibility that emerges when we start to remember how important those interspecies relationships are, have always been, and can still be.

EVLA big theme in your work and what fungi point us to, mycelial networks point us to, is to embrace the hidden, what we can’t always see. And that’s very different from, like I was just saying about Western scientific models, which stem from the Enlightenment, which always taught us to reveal or to try to understand how everything worked, and not be so comfortable with the unknown or mystery. And I’m curious to hear your thoughts about learning to work with what is not yet visible, but perhaps can be sensed.

MSYes. So, no, exactly. That whole Enlightenment metaphor is about illuminating and casting light on and revealing. And so much of the research that I’m involved with is about revealing and illuminating. It’s like you put something under a microscope to see it and you illuminate it to reveal it, so that we can see it. And that work is extraordinary and so exciting. And, it has, you know, you learn so much about the world from using microscopes, from a long time ago. So I’m pro-illumination, and I find that metaphor helpful as well. You know, someone explains something to me; I’m like, yes, that’s illuminating. It’s like you’ve shined a light on that, and I can understand it now. So I’m pro-illumination, but of course there’s so much that we can’t see, and so many things that we know very well are going on. Like, for example, the way that the biosphere is regulated by vast networks of exchange and gaseous fluxes and biogeochemical processes, dust blowing over from the Sahara fertilizing tropical forests in South America, rivers in the sky made up of water vapor that sustain whole ecosystems, but we can’t really see them with our eyes.

So there’s so much that’s hidden that we know exists; that’s not visible but we know is there. But then there’s lots of things that we might not know are there, but are hidden. So they’re sort of unknown unknowns, the hidden hiddens. And I like remembering them and feeling their presence, because it draws me forward into inquiry. And it also builds in a kind of humility; it’s like remembering all the things that you know you can’t know, or don’t know.

EVLYeah.

MSSo for me, I find that quite comforting, that substrate of mystery. I’ve learned to enjoy remembering that substrate of mystery. It doesn’t make me— I think for some people it might be more worrying to have that substrate of mystery. Maybe there’d be a sense of— or maybe it’d be like floating on a deep ocean and feeling like you could sink. Whereas for me, I feel more like that deep ocean allows me to float. Maybe it’s like that, like trusting that you’d float in the water rather than worrying that you’d sink in the water.

EVLAnd what might come up from the depth, too? There’s that liminal space at the end of what is mysterious that, you know—scientifically you could say the greatest discoveries often come from when you’re looking in another direction, but you’re holding space for something to come forth to be illuminated that you wouldn’t know—seems relevant. Holding space for the emergent and the way that mycelial networks point to that.

MSTotally. And that’s something that, you know— The most exciting things that happen in the research that I and my colleagues do, our most exciting ideas, they bubble up mysteriously from our imaginations when we’re playing and having fun together, and not so often when we’re manipulating numbers or looking at spreadsheets. So it’s like that substrate of mystery—yeah, exactly as you say—is where astonishing things arise from. And if you try to forget that substrate of mystery, then it feels like there’s less chance to receive the beauties that bubble up from there.

EVLAnd, how do you feel that that can help us further, at this time when we’re dealing with so many unknowns, and seeking solutions to a lot of those unknowns—or often ignoring the solutions at the same time? But, what’s the value of mystery in responding to crisis?

MSYeah, well, I think one of the problems that we face is that it can seem like the systems and structures we live within are somehow natural or inevitable. Or, at least we can be told that. That there is no alternative, you know, one hears this a lot; this is the way it has to be, dah dah dah. And I think that limits our imaginations, it limits our sense of possibility. And so, the remembering of the vast field of the possible, whether or not you can see or describe those possibilities, I think is so important in responding to the situation that we’re in, because we need to remember all the ways there are to be alive, remember all the ways there are to organize our togetherness. And to do that we’ll have to set off into some of these imaginal places that involve thinking outside the roads that’ve got streetlights on, or the roads that are on the maps that we can see, and start exploring in places where there might not be any streetlights, or on tracks and paths that might not be on the current maps.

EVLAnd what about the mysterious knowledge we perhaps hold in our bodies, ancestrally, like the memory of— Human beings have worked with fungi since human beings have been around, they just don’t talk about it necessarily now. It’s been there. That knowledge doesn’t just disappear. It has to be held in like an epigenetic imprint inside of us that has value. You know, we’re always looking for new solutions, but there’s something inside of us about how to be in relationship with the living world that fungi, and all manner of relationships in the living world, is pointing us to. How do we engage with that more directly, do you think?

MSYeah, I think there’s a lot that we know because our bodies know. And to relearn, to remember, I think may be not as hard as it might seem. Because it’s been only quite recently that we’ve had these, say, a modern reductive understanding of the living world. Iain McGilchrist has a great line. He says, it’s historically anomalous and illogical, and it’s only been around for a very, very tiny sliver of human history. So I think somehow trusting that long past and that big momentum that the long past gives us, and remembering how fresh so many of these dismemberments and these severings, these stories of division and separation are, I find that boosts my morale, at least when thinking about ways forward. Like, for example, how this might manifest is someone going and spending time outside and feeling better. Like someone might go outside, they might feel calmer, they might feel better from some psycho-spiritual trouble, they might get better from a physical ailment. I mean, the National Health Service in England is prescribing people with mental health issues of various kinds time in allotments, you know, working in allotments with their hands in the soil. Because it works. And it’s not so much about how it works, but it works. And so I think in those moments it’s very clear that there’s a kind of recovery that can happen quite fast if we just spend time in relation in these places. Obviously, it’s not enough to deal with the very complex multilevel problems that we face today, but I think it’s a reminder that this can happen perhaps even quite fast.

EVLI wanted to talk to you about decomposition, which is a big part of what fungi do, and it’s a big part of what you’ve written about in your work. And you describe fungi in your book as “decomposers”—that’s a term I like—“who unmake pieces of life.” And you write, “Nothing could happen without them…. Composers make; decomposers unmake. And unless decomposers unmake, there isn’t anything that composers can make with”; which is a simple statement in many ways, but it also kind of upends how we think of everything at the same time, especially right now, which is a culture of making, making, making, making and not really valuing unmaking at all.

MSYeah. I mean, or shunting unmaking to the side. Have you seen those pictures of those beaches where ships are left, like giant ships just left—

EVLSkeletons.

MSYeah, the skeletons, all the different kinds of dump that there are around the world. Yeah, so there would be ways to design the ways that we make things, and the ways that we structure supply chains, the way we think about waste—there would be cyclical ways to do that. And I think that wouldn’t be, you know, it’s not a very complex idea, if you put something into the— The concept of recycling is an attempt to do that. But the unmaking yeah, it’s so very important. And in unmaking, of course, you are actually making as well: like when a fungus breaks down a bit of wood, for example, it turns a bigger molecule into smaller molecules. So it’s unmaking the big molecule, but at the same time it’s making those small molecules, which could go on to have all sorts of roles in the ecosystem. But the reason why I like thinking about the decomposition-composition kind of cycle is partly to remind myself that life forms are always doing something, and that everything is always in flux, and that that flux doesn’t just happen by itself, but is undertaken so often by living beings.

And so, yeah, I think there’s a kind of an obsession with permanence, staying change, fixing transformation; we do it with fridges and freezes, cosmetic surgery, fantasies of immortality. There’s lots of ways that we try to slow change, slow down time, or pretend that it’s not happening, and I think those are expressions of a kind of insecurity that might lead us to think less about decomposition, think less about these kinds of transformations.

EVLYou could also say “fear” instead of “insecurity”: there’s a big fear around decomposition. And, there’s this great example that you reference in the book, where you kind of provide this image of a planet piling up with waste and bodies, matter of all kind. If decomposition were to pause, that’s what would unfold. And we would see this as a crisis. We would see this as a huge issue. And from a fungal perspective, it’s the opposite.

MSYeah, totally.

EVLAnd there is something to learn from that.

MSTotally. You know, there’ve been lots of these kinds of moments in the history of life, though. In the last big extinction, the one that killed many of the dinosaurs, there was a winter that lasted for a very, very long time because of the dust, the debris. Lots of forests died. And it’s sometimes described as a period of global compost heap, you know, huge areas of dead forest, which are a nightmare from the point of view of all the creatures that want living trees to survive, including the fungi that live with living trees. But from the perspective of wood-decomposing fungi, this is a massive field day, and they had one. Yeah.

EVLYeah. So, it’s also going back to this point of finding opportunity within the crisis.

MSYeah, exactly. I mean, there’s always opportunity in crisis. And, you know, disaster capitalism is an expression of that. It’s like, we know there’s an opportunity in a crisis, so we’ll hasten the crisis and then make the most of the opportunity.

EVLSo, we know how to do it.

MSYeah.

EVLFungi are rooted in place, at least more than we are, even though they’re very malleable and they move and spread across vast distances. And we have to move to survive, whereas they are adapting to survive. So there’s something potentially relevant there as we look at adaptability, which is something very much that we’re having to consider at the moment, as where we’re living might no longer be sustainable; and we have to think about going somewhere else, but that somewhere else is no longer so sustainable anymore as climate change kind of brings everything to the local environment. So, what do you think fungi can point to, in terms of resilient adaptability in place, that we can learn from?

MSSo many things. So, finding new ways to relate, striking up new kinds of relationship. If you’re going to be somewhere and you can’t move somewhere else, then well, okay, who else is here and how do you relate with them? And what can we do together that we can’t do alone? So that’d be one thing.

Another thing would be to negotiate and re-negotiate existing relationships: like just sliding along on the mutualism-parasitism continuum. So, okay, with the relationships that we already have, how can that be nudged, changed, renegotiated, to help us better respond to the situation?

EVLRight.

MSSo new ways to relate, new relationships. Or reorganizing, renegotiating togetherness within existing relationships. And then, reevaluating our relationship with waste, and finding value in things that we might not see value in, I think, as well, is something that we can learn from fungi about how to survive in these kind of situations. And rather than thinking about things as waste, think about them as new opportunities to do something else or as the new step in a biological process that we might be able to harness for some use.

And also, you know, fungi, they’re chemical wizards, and their chemical metabolic powers are extraordinary. And so one of the things that we can see is that fungi don’t produce chemicals unless they need to. So, you know, they have the ability to do all sorts of metabolic things, if you look in their genome, but they wouldn’t be doing that unless they had to. So a given fungus in a given place is only expressing a fraction of what it can do metabolically. So I think that’s a helpful thought for us. If we are in a situation where we’re thinking, Well, hang on a sec, what do we do here?, remembering that we also have a kind of deep well of potential and that we might just be expressing a tiny part of what we can do at any one moment. And that if we can do some remembering, or some imagining or reimagining, that there might be this big deep well of potential and possibility that we have as well that we just don’t notice, we haven’t learned to see, or the times just haven’t prompted its emergence. So I think along those lines as well.

EVLI want to end our conversation asking a more personal question, and perhaps a more spiritual one. And it goes back to the opening of your book, where you have this line from the wonderful poet Hafiz, a Persian poet: “There are moments in moist love when heaven is jealous of what we on earth can do,” which is a beautiful line. And you could say it brings us to consider a transcendent, mystical quality of love becoming an imminent one with our relationship with the Earth. And I’m curious where fungi have taken you in your own kind of spiritual journey, in your own relationship with the Earth. Has it taken you into a deeper place?

MSYeah, literally, and figuratively and spiritually. I mean literally because I’m always burrowing around in the soil, taking soil samples, getting covered with mud. And so, there’s that. But, yeah, for sure, it’s deepened my relationship with the living world more generally; has deepened the way that I imagine, that I consider a possibility, and I understand my relationship with the more-than-me. And it’s helped me to understand different philosophies and spiritual traditions in other ways. It’s helped me to see, for example, to understand things in terms of cycles more than in terms of linear progress. It’s helped me to meditate on the relationship between death and life. And it’s helped me to fall into a processual understanding of my life, as well as of the world and the universe. And, yeah, it constantly pulls me into the mystery and keeps me close to the mystery. And that, for me, feels like a kind of spiritual practice: to stay close to the mystery, even if you can’t see what’s inside the mystery, but just to be close—a little bit like what we were talking about earlier. So they keep me there.

EVLMerlin, it’s been great being in conversation with you today. Thanks so much for taking the time.

MSIt’s been wonderful to chat. Thank you.