Transcript: MERLIN SHELDRAKE on Embodied Entanglements /365
Ayana Young Merlin is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. You can find him at merlinsheldrake.com.
Merlin Sheldrake Thinking about fungi can make the world look different. The lives of fungi can jolt us out of well worn habits of thought, can help to make the familiar seem unfamiliar again, can help loosen the grip of many of our concepts and lead us into new ways of thinking and new ways of thinking we really do need at this moment in time.
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Merlin Sheldrake. Well, Merlin, thank you so much for joining us on this wintry day. So excited to wander with you. Welcome.
Merlin Sheldrake Thank you. It's great to be here.
Ayana Young So gosh, so many places that we could begin, but I definitely want to start off by acknowledging how significant your work has been and how much incredible attention you've brought to the fungal world. And with this, I think so much of the human experience is about meaning making which you clearly work towards in your research and writing. And I'm wondering if you could show us down the path of our relationship to fungi beyond just momentary interest or fascination, but down to real deep, even life altering and affirming meaning.
Merlin Sheldrake The way that I think about it, I suppose, is that fungi are, you know, they're a kingdom of life which is as broad a category as animals or plants. There's lots of ways to be a fungus and this is a hugely diverse group of organisms that underlies the regenerative capacity of the biosphere. These are organisms that are responsible for so many vital processes that maintain the composition of the Earth's atmosphere—that create soil, that nourish plants—that we enter into relationship with the moment that we become an embodied creature on this planet. Relating to fungi is not an option. And so, the question is how much do we presence the fact that we're relating to fungi? So, in answer to your question, I find that weaving the story of the living world that one might have or deepening and expanding it to include the fungal kingdom, such that life itself is a story play that plays out partly as a result of fungal activity. And in response to fungal activity then the whole process of being alive, the whole process of existing on the planet, whoever you are, whether you're a human or otherwise becomes something to do with fungi. And so the act of being alive, however you make meaning of that is, is embedded within fungal story and fungal presence.
Ayana Young Yeah, I was thinking about that word presence, which, to me, feels like one of the most valuable things we have at this time and probably always of what we can share with each other and our relationship with the earth. And what is the benefit of popularizing fungi? Like, what maybe do you want from this or I think about your work with conservation and SPUN, but also, even the collective consciousness. It's really incredible to see how much the interest in fungi have grown over even just the past decade, five years, two years, definitely from your book. And it's, really, in so many ways exciting. But I do wonder, did you have an intention? Were you hoping, Oh, I really hope this inspires people, maybe, or what was your hope?
Merlin Sheldrake I think there were three main hopes in, certainly in writing Entangled Life. I mean, I do a lot of popularizing of fungi outside that context these days. But in that project, I think the first hope was that I might play my small part in helping to alleviate people's fungus blindness. That our just sheer ignorance of fungi means that most of our accounts of the living world are radically incomplete. An account of life that doesn't include fungi is an account of a living world that doesn't exist. And so, I wanted to help to reveal these organisms that spent so much of their time hidden from us, so if we have quite a basic hope there.
But there was another level of hope, I suppose, which was that one of the things that fungi teach us is about the way that life is relationship, the interminglement of embodied being on the planet. And in so many ways, fungi teaches this. And so I wanted to, maybe, on my second hope was that through this discussion of fungi, it might become clearer that life is relationship and that organisms can't be thought of as somehow separate from the many other organisms that they're living with—that being is always being with, that becoming is always becoming with. And I think this is a very fundamental truth about the living world and suddenly not a new idea. I think modern science is remembering this idea, perhaps modern science has forgotten this for a little while. But it's certainly an idea that you find present in so many traditional knowledge systems around the world. So, I think fungi can lead us there. And so, I think my second hope was that discussion of fungi could reveal a world of interminglement, of interrelationship, of interdependence, of intimate reciprocal dependence.
And, perhaps, third was that fungi is so weird and their lives confound so many of our categories. So many of the categories we use to organize our existence. And I feel that… I suddenly felt this myself that the lives of fungi can jolt us out of well worn habits of thought, can help to make the familiar seem unfamiliar again, can help loosen the grip of many of our concepts, and lead us into new ways of thinking. And new ways of thinking we really do need at this moment in time. So that was perhaps the largest of the hopes, of three hopes, you know, that fungi… thinking about fungi can make the world look different, more generally, and that different might be fertile, helpful, and healing.
Ayana Young That's beautiful and I feel that for myself, for sure. In Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures you write, quote, “The politics of symbiosis have always been fraught. Is nature fundamentally competitive or cooperative? A lot turns on this question. For many it changes the way we understand ourselves. It isn't surprising that these issues remain a conceptual and ideological tinderbox,” end quote. Yeah, thinking through the history and philosophy of science, how is the interpretation of symbiotic relationships changed throughout time? And how does our changing understanding of symbiotic relationship show how science is deeply intertwined with culture?
Merlin Sheldrake It's a great question. I mean, science has always been something that humans do. You know, it's a human activity. And in fact, I think of it as a science, it's, you know, science has never really been one thing, one monolithic thing. We tend to think of it that way with science, a singular word with a capital S. But really, it's the sciences which are a diverse collection of practices, methods, values, norms, languages, codes of conduct, and that there's lots of ways to be a scientist. And actually, you know, an expert in the study of fossilized fishes is a lay person with regards to the distinguished professor of quantum physics. And, and so the sciences as practiced by humans will reflect the ways that humans are making sense of their own lives outside their scientific practice. And you often see this in the form of metaphors and analogies and the sciences depend on metaphors and analogies, just like humans do in general. But when you use a metaphor, an analogy, you are comparing something to something else, and by doing so, you are revealing something of your map, of your net of cultural coordinates. And so you often see social values and opinions and so forth, freighted into the sciences through metaphor and analogy. So when it comes to the study of science of the study of symbiotic relationships, and the various metaphors and analogies used to make sense of these relationships, you have a really quite an amazing window into the lives and values of people at the time or people surrounding the scientists making these observations in question.
And so you can really think about these relationships as a prism through which the social values of scientists are dispersed. So, when the word symbiosis was brought into biology in the late 19th century to describe the lives of lichens. It was brought in by a guy called Albert Frank, and he wanted a word to describe the living together of unlike organisms that didn't presume to know what that relationship was like. Because until that point, the only way to describe the intimate sharing of bodily space was parasitism or disease. And that very much… these words very much presume to know what the relationship is like… how that relationship unfolds, or at least who benefits and who doesn't. So the symbiosis was a way to talk about association but without foreclosing an understanding of that relationship.
So then what you have is you have a load of scientists starting to study these, what at the time seemed improbable relationships between different organisms, between unlike organisms. And the analogies and metaphors that we use to make sense of them are varied hugely. Some people use… I think the lichens are a great example. Some people use analogies of master and slave to describe the [unknown] and the fungus, some of the relationships between men and women, some of the relationships between nations… All sorts of often very problematic analogies were made revealing the types of revealing something of the social context of those making those observations. So I think it's really an interesting place to track changing societies over time. You know, how do people make sense of symbiotic relationships? And you can see.
And so, today, you have a whole range of metaphors on offer to talk about, for example, plants and their mycorrhizal partners. You have a kind of socialism that's a kind of utopian vision of sharing and caring. You have hyper capitalist metaphors and trading on kind of jostling on market floors, the economy in the soil. But really, I think the most helpful way to think about it now is my… The way that I tend to think about it and know that these things will change. But symbiotic relationships are on a kind of continuum of who benefits. So you might think about this continuum with one pole of the continuum being parasitism or disease where one or more partners benefit at the expense of their partner. So someone's someone's being harmed and someone's winning from that. And then, the other end of the spectrum you might think about the pole of mutualism where all the partners benefit from their association. And in reality, most relationships slide around on that continuum. You know, a given plant and a given fungus, you know, over the course of their lives together in this one pot in this greenhouse here—they'll both probably benefit from the association, but at any one moment one of them might be giving more than they get because these things are fluid and processes in time. So that's how I tend to think about them. So a lot of it's about assumption. We were guided by societal norms into imagining certain things as possible, and certain things as impossible and we project those possibilities and impossibilities onto the lives of non-human organisms that we seek to understand, and thereby often naturalizing or trying to make these human social values. So it's a fascinating field and a kind of feedback loop.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's hard for us to understand anything without our human lens on it. And I don't know how we could ever get out of that. But I guess it kind of reminds me of trying to differentiate between metaphor and reality and in an interview with Robert McFarlane, you say, quote, “But I've come to think of our minds as the most mycelial parts of ourselves. Mycelium is a living growing opportunistic investigation, speculation and bodily form. A portrait of someone's mind might look something like a mycelial network. Mind maps certainly do. It soon became clear that mycelium would be a foundational metaphor for the book, whether I liked it or not,” end quote. Yes, I'm really interested in what you see as the line between metaphor and reality. And of course, clearly, metaphor is incredibly helpful in explaining and understanding concepts. But especially when dealing with such amorphous and tangled subject matter. What does the metaphor cross the line into or when does metaphor cross the line into reality? And how, maybe… how can we fully understand where mycelial connection begins and ends?
Merlin Sheldrake Well, I think it's very difficult for us to really understand that because it's so difficult even just to see the fungal network outside in the bustling wilds of a soil in a forest. You know when you take… when you harvest… when you sample a fungal network—a bit of soil—you've broken the network. You've destroyed, it's destructive. And so we can't see through soil. You can see mycelium growing on the surface of a log, for example, or on fallen leaves on the floor of Earth. But it's rare or impossible really, for us to see in situ, the fungal network doing its thing, engaging in its life and the crazy labyrinths that they live within. So I think it's very difficult for us to make sense of mycelium. I think there are lots of ways that this way of life challenges our animal imaginations.
When it comes to metaphor, I just think language is fundamentally metaphorical. And it reveals, maybe, a basic truth about life that we were talking earlier about how all organisms live, somehow in relation to many other organisms, that no life can happen by itself, even in principle. And so when we're talking about webs of meaning like we have in language, no particle of meaning can mean by itself, even in principle. And you see this relationality of language of different bits of language and particles of language and particles of meaning revealed in the form of metaphors and analogies where there are links. There's a kind of conceptual rhyme, some kind of kinship between… kinship and meaning between different concepts or words that reveal the webbiness of the language and the fact that you need this web of interrelation to have anything called language in the first place. So maybe the fundamental importance of metaphor and the way we make sense of the world is actually revealing something about the interrelationship of the world itself.
Ayana Young And maybe a personal question for you around these interrelationships is how do you think that your way of seeing has been shifted and complemented and even challenged by say, your family or your partner. I know you have such incredible joint projects with those closest to you. I'd really love to hear how you feel you're in symbiosis or are entangled with your family.
Merlin Sheldrake Yeah, I mean, on so many levels—in so many levels one's aware of and so many levels not aware of. And sometimes these relationships fruit in the form of official projects you're doing together. I guess, We're going to do this. We're going to make something together. It might look like this. It might look like that. But a lot of the time, you are just existing and that existing… Might say the growing tip of my life is growing out from a kind of tangle of association in relationship with my family and with my loved ones who have shaped me, shaped the conditions in which I can grow and feel and imagine and somehow imprinted in me in all of the ways that that influence has formed a kind of a core or become a core part of my being. So yeah, so I think there's… a lot of that happens in many, many ways.
One project that was… that's been fun recently is with my wife Erin Robinsong, is a poet, and we did a project together called Return Address. And it stemmed from this idea that actually, David Abram, who is a friend, a college ecologist and a philosopher. We were chatting with him about prayer, the nature of prayer, and he said that, in his view, prayer was simply talking to the world rather than about the world. And we're playing with this idea for some time and realized that we do a lot of talking about the world. At least certainly, I do a lot of talking about the world in the educational frameworks that I've been brought up within and trained within. I do a lot of talking about the world. And so, talking directly to the world—it seemed like a wonderfully simple way to address the relationships that exist, that make up the living world whether or not we like it or think about them.
And so, the practice of this… the exercise which took the form of a kind of essay by me and then a series of poems by Erin, and really a kind of workshop where we would lead groups. The prompt was people were invited to go out into the outside, to go and find some entity. It could be the sun. It could be a wave on the sea. It could be the sea. It could be a rock, could be a grain of sand, could be a bucket of sand, could be a tree, what… pine needles, pinecone, a branch of a pine tree, any number of, whatever you chose. And then to address the entity directly. To turn the third person into the second person to call it a you. You know, How are you doing? You look so good today. You know, and Erin had this wonderful list of ways to help people get started, and compliments are a great way, easy way to start if you're trying to address your pine needle and you're feeling a bit awkward. And this actually was a very simple practice to turn the living world into a you… will enter into a you rather than an it.
But it's very profound. It totally changes everything. It changes the orientation that we have towards that entity, because what you're doing by changing from the third person, that it, into the second person, that you, is that you're acknowledging that the entity that you're addressing is a locus of experience. And you know that there's pine needle, pine, branch, the stone, the sand—these are all entities subjected to changing environments and they respond to these changing environments in all sorts of ways, some of which we understand, many of which we don't. And so by honoring the entity as a locus of experience, by calling it a you, and by putting yourself into direct relationship, by using the second person, and all sorts of wonderful things start to happen. And it's quite subtle, but can be quite, quite amazing how it just changes the tone of one's engagement. So it's not that we expected the stone or the pine tree to understand our human language. But it was more an exercise to remind ourselves that humans aren't the only organisms worth addressing, that we live in a world of relationship and interrelation, and a world of communication. Because without communication, no organisms could coordinate their togetherness. And that communication happens in many types of languages, chemical languages, visual language, sonic language, it's all sorts of languages. But anyway, that's one project that we did together and it was bridging the perspective—central biological perspective to poetic perspectives. And it was really fun and fruitful.
Ayana Young Thank you so much for sharing that, I really got lost in your response. And I feel really drawn to speaking to the world and not about the world. Especially now I think, when I was awakening to the world, I was really interested to learn about the world. Because it seemed all new. It seemed like I was unlearning and breaking apart my conditioning and lies of what I had been taught. But at this point, I crave the elemental. And I think that speaking to the world, to the earth, is so much about being with the elements, and not philosophizing about them, but being present with them, and how that shifts an entire worldview, ideology, lifestyle. It's incredible. And I feel like for the first time maybe practicing being human… not cyborg, not modern, but just being in this body with the Earth body. And yeah, I can't seem to want to leave that connection. So thank you for sharing that because it really, I think, spoke to a lot of what I've been in process with recently.
There's something else you said that struck me about, I think, was the rock and the changing environment. With climate change, and, gosh, all that we're losing, the Anthropocene extinction. I know for so long, I wanted to cling on to a steady state, something stable. But maybe the truth is, the Earth is just not stable, and so I’m like wandering in my own work, although I fight mines and salmon habitat, and that's still something I don't want to give up doing. But I wonder with so much work in whether it's the conservation world or the climate change world, if that's what I can call it for now. Are we fighting for something that isn't actually realistic?
Merlin Sheldrake I mean, we know just from looking back and we've known since, since deep time as a concept has arrived in the field of human inquiry in the 19th century, that this story of us is a story of astonishing change. In so many ways. We are living in life as a process, unfolding in time. And there are reverberations in that process. There are cycles, and there are rapid transitions into radically different states. But if you think about things in terms of processes rather than if you think about the fundamental nature of reality as a process in time, which modern physics actually reveals to us. Because we might think of stuff as matter as pretty new, hard and solid and unchanging substance, like a substance, but actually, when you boil it down to atoms and molecules you find energy bound within fields. And that's much more like a process than a thing. But if you think the world is made up of things, fundamentally, things or substances, then the kinds of questions you ask are quite different. So if you're a substance person, for whom, you know, the fundamental nature of reality is substances which are recombined in various forms to give us the world we see and experience… To a substance person, because the fundamental nature of reality is substance, that substance is stable until it's changed. So the question you ask about the world is how does anything change? Because left to its own devices, substances will stay the same no matter in motion. Until a force is exerted to change something, they won't change. So if you're a substance person, the question you tend to ask is how things change.
If you’re a process person, the fundamental nature of reality is endless flux, change. The question you ask is different because everything is always changing. If the fundamental nature of reality is to change then the question we ask is, well, why does anything remain stable? And how do we find stability in a world of fundamental flux? No, and in reality, I think we need a bit of both of these perspectives because there are lots of things that do have stability, enough stability for us to think of them meaningfully as a substance, or potentially a thing. But I think that this dynamic between process and substance understandings is something that we see enacted in a really fundamental, a deep, mythological, archetypal framework, in the form of habit and creativity.
So you see this in Hindu traditions personified in the form of Shiva, the god of change, of creation and destruction, flux, or creativity, you might say. And then Vishnu who is the preserver of order, so the preserver of habit, yeah, and how things can continue as they have. And in reality, one needs a bit of chaos and a bit of stability. You know, we need to have it and we need creativity. We need, always, some measure of flux of novelty. But a total overdose of novelty and flux would be totally overwhelming. There'd be no forms that would arise in our mind. If you start with a liberal mind, no stable ground, no firm concept it will be exhausting and terrifying, and a kind of madness maybe. And in the physical world, you wouldn't have any kind of new stable molecules forming into compounds which were forming to know usable structures that can be manipulated by living organisms into the form of their bodies, and so on. But without any creativity, you'd be locked in endless cycles of repetition. And so it would be impossible to say is it on the human level to have a new thought? To deal with a new situation, a situation he hadn't been confronted with before, nothing would ever change. So it wouldn't be living in an evolutionary life story on a planet that's in constant flux. So you need this balance of these two: the habit and creativity. And sometimes we stand perhaps in our lives more in a place of habit because we're dizzy with flux, you know, when we want that we want that stability. And sometimes we dive into the flux because we're stifled and constrained by the stability that’s become suffocating and hard.
So I think as living organisms, we deal with this dance. I think it is really a kind of dance all the time. I think all organisms deal with this dance and I think you see this playing out on a physical level, in all sorts of interesting ways. So yeah, so when you talk about the stability and with this question, you pose then, um, yeah, that's where I'm led to and to appreciation of the dynamic balance and then necessity of both the habit and the creativity, both the chaos and the order.
Ayana Young That actually felt relieving to hear that I sometimes get so wrapped up in the heartbreak and the anxiety of what's happening to the Earth and working in restoration and conservation. I think when I was… when I first started it was very exciting because it felt like a creative response to the destruction, to the chaos, felt stabilizing. But the more that I practiced it, you know, with restoration, and I was really into micro remediation. And I was thinking, what are we restoring to? Are we restoring to pre colonial times? Who's deciding on where and how and what species? And it started to kind of lose some of its momentum for me. And maybe it's really—I'm speaking more specifically about forest restoration—maybe we're just deciding on what biodiversity we want in that moment. And if that's what it is, then okay, fine, I want to hear that. But I think the powers that are choosing what restoration is feels a bit… It has this weird control element that I can't quite wrap my head around. And then on the other hand with conservation, although, of course, important, and I'm still working in that world and I don't plan to move out of it exactly, but the transactional nature of it, the capitalistic nature of it. From the outside, I go, oh, gosh, yes, let's protect this place. Let's make sure no resource extraction happens. But then… But then what it takes to do that and what land is protected and what land is spared? You know, and then I can go a step further, and where we're headed with the electrification of our energy systems, and more and more extraction. And when I was researching for this interview and I was looking into what you were doing with Giuliana Furci—who I adore, I've had on the podcast before on the Fungi Foundation—helping to conserve places through fungal diversity. I love it. And I'm also... I'm in that tension of sitting in the trouble of where we go from here.
Merlin Sheldrake Yeah, well, there are many…. There are many difficult questions that face anyone who hopes to mitigate the ecocidal destruction unfolding at pace. And um, but I think your piece about conservation and restoration is very interesting in light of this question of stability and change, because, yeah, so what baseline are you going to restore to? What are you optimizing for? These are all choices we're making. What are you conserving? What state are you conserving… what state in the long evolution of this ecosystem or whatever we're discussing are you going to keep it at? And I think that there are lots of problems there.
And, you know, we could end up creating theme parks which are ecological states, which never really exist in the wild. Or we can end up harking back to fantastical, nostalgic places, because of all sorts of reasons, many of which can be problematic. Or we can just simply get it wrong when we're restoring and plant that wrong kind of tree in the wrong kind of place because of ignorance or because of other kinds of incentives that have been laid on top of the process. There are so many ways to get it wrong and to cause harm, and to cause more problems. And I don't think that means we shouldn't do it. And I think there are lots of ways that we can, that we can start to… I think imagining ourselves in relationship is a very nice, a key way to go. And to imagine a symbiotic picture of life where, you know, oh, cool, what organisms are improvising through time? I think about this a lot, about how we're improvising in this conversation. We're improvising in our lives. You know, we have constraints within which we improvise, and we have fields of possibility which confront us. And the way that we navigate a changing world is improvisatory. But humans aren't the only organisms improvising.
All organisms are improvising within their constraints and within the field of possibility that they face there are degrees of freedom. And so, when you think about it like that, it's like, yeah, well, we know we might not be conserving an ecosystem which really existed before humans or we might be restoring this in a pretty dodgy way, but you know, we're planting the wrong tree in the wrong place. But in the bigger picture, you know, we're sort of improvising our way through time, together with other organisms also improvising their way through time and wild and strange things happen. You know, there are blockbuster relationships that transform the fortunes of all parties involved. Think about humans and horses, for example. Humans and yeast. Humans and apples, or many plants, flowering plants and bees to pollinate it.
I think about how these associations might have just risen quite serendipitously at one point, but then they can spin the whole trajectory into different directions because suddenly there's dance partners involved and one's improvising with these other organisms. And all the organisms involved have agendas and evolutionary interests and a responding to the other entities’ changes. So when you look at it like that, you know, it was dancing through time in this improvisational way with other organisms, and some things don't unfold very well, and some things unfold more successfully. But if you see it inside of that bigger story than maybe it's less, I don't know, I find it quite heartening to think about it like that. I'm not sure why. But it just, it makes me feel like… well, notice we're growing and we're growing with. We're listening. We're listening with. We’re responding. And as long as one is doing one's best to respond, to listen, to be in relationship, to behave in a way which is not ecocidal, in a way that likes life—then it's better to be doing that than doing nothing.
Ayana Young Yeah, that again, you have a way of relieving my broken heart. It's like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And, we are constantly dancing with others. And we don't know how one connection sprouts a new one and where that takes us. And I guess, maybe you could share a bit about some ways you're improvising, whether through SPUN or MOTH or the More Than Human Project, I know you're doing so many things to be in relationship with the Earth as it is right now. So yeah, I'd love to hear about how you're dancing with these projects.
Merlin Sheldrake Well, a lot of my work at the moment is… there's fungal research, you know, the work of research especially in winter of mycorrhizal fungi, and these fungi that live in association with plants that exist in trading relationships with plants and plants supply their fungal partners that grow in and around their roots with energy compounds, like sugars, fats, that they produced in photosynthesis. And the fungi, in return, supply plants with nutrients like nitrogen or phosphorus that they forged from the soil. And together, they make what we call plants and soils. So one part of my work with with a wonderful team based in Amsterdam is looking at a very, very small scale, looking at mycorrhizal networks, imaging, the flows of material inside these networks to try and understand how these fungi are communicating with themselves and with plants, how they're able to move material around their rambling networks of bodies. Their bodies, which are really bodies without a body plan subject to continual revision, remodeling. There's a wild kind of intelligence there, and we know too little about it. So we're trying to try and understand this very small scale, you know, how they're coordinating their lives.
And then we're also through Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, SPUN, trying to look at the very, very big scale, trying to map the microbial communities of the planet. So look at this global scale to try and understand who lives where and what everyone's doing. And the reason why these maps can be really important is because there's lots of people who understand that these fungal relationships are a key and fundamental to life as we know it. But anyone who wants to take this information into account, it's very difficult for them to do so because you don't really know who's in the soil under your feet. You know, we have maps of ocean currents. We have maps of global vegetation. We have maps to climatic maps, but we don't have maps about who's living where underground. And so part of the purpose of making these maps is to enable decision makers to to take these lives into account when making their decisions. Yeah, so the research is very small, the research is very big. And then, really embarking on this project.
Together with my wonderful collaborators, and Toby Keirs is one, Giuliana Furci is one, and to try and turn this amazing data, this growing body of data into information that can really make a difference. And that might look like bringing these datasets into legal settings, legal settings into environmental litigation—so suing a government or suing a corporation or on the basis of the destruction that they are causing to the underground world. It might look like trying to influence policy by writing fungi into conservation frameworks and agreements. Yeah, basically the world looks different when you have a fungal lens. The world looks different and the decisions you make are different. And so trying to use these fungal datasets to build the fungal lens that can be applied to various, often terrifyingly large, world-making, decision-making bodies and processes. And so it's a thrilling moment really, to draw our awareness towards the underground towards these, the lives… these hidden lives that are responsible for so much and yet they're so out of our sight.
And so yeah, so working across these different fields and disciplines is very exciting. And we have wonderful collaborators in the form of César Rodriguez at NYU who's convened a gathering called a kind of collective, called MOTH Collective, More Than Human Rights Collective. And it's trying to deepen, work out ways by bringing together an interdisciplinary group of lawyers, judges, scientists, philosophers, artists to deeper, to want to really think very broadly and experimentally about ways to deepen and expand legal frameworks to reflect the fact that we're living on a very, very, very multispecies planet, locked in very, very, very multi species relationships embedded in a living world. Yeah, are there ways that we can deepen and expand our legal systems to take account of this and in doing so help to steer us off the destructive cost we are so locked into? So, really wonderful project and so special to spend time with people in so many disciplines coming together with different ways of thinking about problems, different ways of posing problems, different kinds of question. And just being together and hashing things out and playing, really. And there are various new interesting projects which are emerging from that coming together, from that convening. So yeah, those are a few things.
Ayana Young To get into the weeds a bit with both the research for mapping biodiversity of fungi and then the legal aspect, what would one do with these tools? Like in the project I'm working on up here in Alaska to stop or halt this proposed mine under glacier on one of the last rivers that hold all five species of wild salmon, there's many ways of halting a project like that and some of it is definitely legal. Some of it is research based on ecological biodiversity. There's so many ways to, I don't want to say skin a cat, but that's what came to me. So, yeah, I'm fascinated to hear how you would take fungi through the process of protecting a place and the power of that place coming through these different tools of, I guess, society and modernity.
Merlin Sheldrake I think there are lots of ways to do it. I mean, one example: There's a collaboration that I'm working on at the moment with SPUN and with Giuliana Furci and The Fungi Foundation and with the MOTH collective and with the Sarayaku people and Indigenous people in Ecuador. And what we're doing is, together with the Sarayaku, who… the Sarayaku have been involved in all sorts of battles about their land and have won and been very successful in their, in their battles, to defend their lines of land from mining and from oil drilling. And one of the things that's going on right now is that they've just won a case very recently in the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court. And they have a huge amount of dynamite that's been buried on their territory by a mining company, but never detonated. And there's this question of how they get rid of it. The government has a legal obligation to remove it, in consultation with the Sarayaku. And so, Sarayaku are really fighting for this not to be detonated, because to do so would be to blow up a whole portion of the forest and in their worldview, the living forest house, etc. The forest is a living whole and their home and part of them. And so, where our project comes in together is that by describing fungal communities and underground, we'll be able to go provide datasets that the Sarayakun then take to the Ecuadorian government and say, Look, these untold diversity underground, that doesn't feature in our wranglings, usually, because we don't have ways to describe it.
We've now got ways to describe it, and we've described it and here it is, and these are some of the many, many, many lives that you will destroy by blowing up this dynamite or by installing another mine somewhere in there, and so on. So, being armed with the data to describe the life in the depths of the soil—which until this point has been pretty much a black box—gives one quite a lot of power in negotiation and in any conversation about land because we're talking about what's living in the land. You know, this isn't just some place, a container for water and nutrients, and is home to a quarter of the world's species who live underground.
And so what the way that one can describe that diversity, there's all sorts of ways that the conversation can change. And so we're very interested in this particular collaboration about the way that the fungi can support Indigenous land rights, fights, and lead us into a more interconnected view of forests. You know, fungi need us there because they are networks, they weave life into relation. So that they naturally can take a stab, but particularly interested in this case, is the way that by describing fungi, we can help equip local communities to better keep hold of their land and in order to steward it in a way which is appropriate, and that likes life.
Ayana Young Yeah, I could really see now how if you're able to popularize and almost mainstream the importance of fungi and then you can show how much biodiversity there is then it's kind of embedded in people that fungi are important then. And so it becomes something that's valued in policy, in legal frameworks, where before it was this kind of weird, unknown. And I can see that this could be something that shapes legislation in the future, ecological legislation, which is exciting, and of course, comes with so many challenges. And I think hearing stories of success is so important for us because we need to understand the frameworks that succeed and be able to mold them to our places, and we can try all of these different tools at beating back the ecocidal empire.
And yeah, I guess, to bring up that word, again, ecocide. I guess I'm thinking about this quote from Entangled Life and you write quote, “Fungi might make mushrooms but, first, they must unmake something else. Now that this book is made, I can hand it over to the fungi 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,” end quote. And yeah, I guess I often think about consuming or rotting being the finale or the end of the process. And with a fungal mentality, what would it look like to consume a rotting ecocidal ideology? Well, how could we decompose that in our minds and our communities? And what could fruit on the other side of that?
Merlin Sheldrake I think rotting in decomposition is a really good way of thinking about this, a really powerful metaphor from the living world. If there's something that's harmful or doing, causing great problems, let's decompose it, let’s transform it. Let's take what's good, let’s take the bits of value and cycle them, spin them around into some new cycle of transformation where they can form part of other entities. The nice thing about decomposition is that we might think about what are the conditions? If you want to compose something like a bucket of kitchen waste, for example, you think about what are the conditions that you need to compost it. You need moisture and some warmth and, but a lot of the time, you don't worry usually about the microbial communities, they're already there. So you kind of create the conditions for the decomposition to happen. It's being managed by other lives that one can enter into relationship with. So yes, I think that's a powerful metaphor to think about these big damaging ecocidal, destructive, or lethal forces that are causing so much harm at the moment. Because all of those are composite entities made up of so many, so many other entities and ultimately made up of people making decisions and so the decomposition metaphor allows us to think about what the transformation of that is. Some parts could reorganize.
I wouldn't subscribe to a view that would involve destroying every unit of a destructive system, because some of those units would be people and some of those people would be me. And so there's some way of thinking about this transformation and decomposition as a rearrangement of possibility, a kind of restructuring, and yeah, the transformation rather than destruction. And so yeah, we might think about—what are the conditions? What can we do? What are the conditions that we can create to hasten this on its way? Who are the beings we can partner with to hasten this on its way? And what are the many nutrients and delicious health-giving byproducts of this decomposition or fermentation? What are the ways that we might be nourished by the transformation of these unhelpful frameworks into more helpful frameworks? What nutrients will be released, and who could they feed?
Ayana Young Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and as we start to come to a close of our time, I guess I'm thinking about control, really, and how mycelial networks challenge our human understandings of control and even intelligence. You know, so much of what I've been thinking this conversation is, how do we do this? How do we think about this figured out, understand? But I guess, maybe as a way to wrap up, it's like, how do we let go at the same time, and maybe that also mixes with the chaos and the creation? There's something about surrendering to the unknown, to the mystery, to the weirdness. And I love how much the fungal world illuminates that for us. And so, yeah, I would just really appreciate hearing your thoughts on how the fungal world can help teach us about surrender and releasing control, and not just our physical control, but the ways that our minds want to continually control the outcomes and the processes of life.
Merlin Sheldrake It's a very big question. And one way that I've enjoyed learning from fungi about this is in fermentation, say fermenting a cider or beer. And you've got a herb jar with big populations of microbes, you know, of yeasts and bacteria, and they're doing their thing. And there are some dials, you know, you can fiddle with. There are some parameters that you're in control of—temperature, oxygen levels. But these are, these aren't really… it's not… you're not really in control of what these organisms do, you're kind of… you're luring them. You're kind of guiding them as much as you can, but they are responding in the way that they will respond. And the more one ferments, the more this becomes clear to the kind of push and the pull, and especially when working with wild cultures and wild populations of microbes. And so I felt this, really this beautiful dance in those situations where it’s well, I know, I have some things that are within my control, but some things aren't and I really have to be responsive and in some kind of dance with these communities of fungi. And that was a really helpful realization about control and about how, so often, we aren't really in control. But we can lure other things. We can, maybe, can set lures that can attract new entities or communities of entities towards certain outcomes. You can't force them to go there. You can sort of… you can tempt them. And I think things become much more fun when thinking about the influence that we can have, such as we have it, in terms of luring and tempting and inviting, rather than kind of pushing and controlling and dominating.
Ayana Young I like that. And I really appreciate the time and the thought and really the care and heart that you put into your work and how you're adding to a really powerful movement of Earth lovers and people who want to be in deeper relationship with what's around them. Yeah, so thank you.
Merlin Sheldrake It's been a great pleasure.
Evan Tenenbaum Thank you for listening to this episode of For The Wild. The music you heard today was by Matthewdavid. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, José Alejandro Rivera, and Evan Tenenbaum.