These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.He is a musician and performs on the piano and accordion. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. Yet over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.Įntangled Life is a mind-altering journey into a spectacular and neglected world, and shows that fungi provide a key to understanding both the planet on which we live, and life itself. Their ability to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. These endlessly surprising organisms have no brain but can solve problems and manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In fact, nearly all life relies in some way on fungi. They enabled the first life on land, can survive unprotected in space and thrive amidst nuclear radiation. They can be microscopic, yet also account for the largest organisms ever recorded. Neither plant nor animal, they are found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them. A remarkable work by a remarkable writer’ Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland I ended it wonderstruck at the fungal world. ‘A dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing book.

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