Rarely does the humble fungus make for pleasant news. True-crime aficionados have recently transformed themselves into amateur experts on the death cap mushroom, while fictional spores have infected us with horror via The Last of Us, Annihilation and various alien franchises.

At the same time, it’s fungi we have to thank for penicillin and other vaccines. Mystics have long borrowed their abilities to alter consciousness, and their powers are routinely harnessed to produce everything from sourdough breads to blue cheeses.

Merlin Sheldrake knows well the confused responses that fungi inspire. “They can poison you, they can feed you, they can cure you, they can give you confusing insights or visions. There’s so many things they can do, so they’ve often been associated with mysterious powers.”

And yet, he admits: “They do hang around dead things.”

Sheldrake is perhaps the world’s best-known mycologist, or fungus expert. His book Entangled Life is an international bestseller, equal parts biology and philosophy, science and cultural history. It digs down into the reasons mushrooms, lichen, moulds and yeasts have occupied such an ambivalent if not downright contradictory position in our collective psyche.

Fungal networks can span vast territories, and Sheldrake’s book explains how these systems not only speak across their expanse, in a very particular sense, but also allow other organisms to exchange information.

Entangled Life emerged into the world in 2020. It’s perhaps no coincidence that it tapped a vein of fascination worldwide just as humanity was finding itself so isolated. “Fungi are all about connection and inventing new ways to relate, so something about those things going on at the same time made sense in a funny way.”

The book’s exploration of communication at the subterranean level was a welcome contrast to the sense of loneliness and misunderstanding that many felt above ground. The result was a newfound and very widespread interest in a realm of the sciences that even biologists had long avoided.

Fungi, not known for their love of daylight, were having their moment in the sun.

Sheldrake’s specialty shouldn’t be a footnote. A mycorrhiza is a relationship between a plant and a fungus, and the natural world wouldn’t exist without them. “I was studying plant biology, and they told us about mycorrhizal fungi, which most plants depend on to live, and which all plants have once depended on. The lineage of land plants depends on the mycorrhizal relationship back in time.”

But this relationship had never really been given that much attention. Most fungi live as networks, not individuals, and it’s much harder to study something that doesn’t have distinct edges. “It was only decided they were their own kingdom of life in the late ’60s. Before that, they were sort of seen as lower plants. You’d study fungi as agents of disease or decay, problems that have to be solved, or you’d study them as this unglamourous corner of the plant world.”

The source of Sheldrake’s interest in fungi is as porous as the subject of his subject. “Beginnings are always hard. My father’s a biologist and he brought me and my brother up to take an interest in the living world, to take an interest in the many lives unfolding around us. And so we had pets and plants and were outside a lot, and mushrooms were part of that exploration of the world.”

Nowadays, fungal networks are sometimes called the “wood wide web”. They allow plants to throw vital information across short and long spaces, warning of weather changes and other conditions via chemical and electrical signals.

To be clear, fungal networks aren’t actually like the internet for trees. But as a science communicator, Sheldrake knows that conveying complex ideas in an accessible fashion is both challenging and necessary.

“Metaphors can help us see and think and understand and feel,” he says. “We get into trouble when we start to mistake the metaphors for reality because if we do that then we can get locked in a story which doesn’t actually correspond to what’s going on in the world.”

By the same token, those who argue that the natural world is necessarily characterised by competition and violence might want to examine their metaphors.

“The view of the living world as fundamentally competitive and fundamentally full of conflict has been overemphasised,” Sheldrake says. “Some kind of redressing of that balance is important, but I do think there’s a balance.

“If you look at one type of mycorrhizal fungus and one plant, sometimes the fungus is getting more than it gives and sometimes the reverse. On average over the course of their lives they’d probably both benefit. I prefer to think of togetherness as being collaboration, and collaboration as always being a kind of fluid blend of co-operation and competition and conflict.”

Just like the relationship between organisms revealed in Entangled Life, it’s rarely either/or. “If I think about family dinners at home, when I was 11 and my brother was nine, there would be conflict, there would be teasing, there would be fighting, there would be very, very loving connection, but this all sort of flows into each other. And so the idea that relationships are one way or another is the problem. The main thing that I think is important is this idea of collaboration.”

That notion extends to our own relationships to the world around us. “I think it’s a really important question that can help us to step out of some of these narratives of separation, where we have been taught to believe that we are somehow separate from the living world when it’s obvious that we’re not. Not only does that lead us to behave as a species in ways which are ecocidal and destructive, it can also confuse us and make us mad in some way,” he says. “We’re convincing ourselves sometimes that we’re separate, but we’re obviously not.”

Sheldrake’s emphasis on the invisible communication occurring between plants and fungus shouldn’t be confused with a naïve sense that the planet has our backs covered. “I mean, it’s bad, right? It’s really, really bad. There’s no getting around that fact. It’s an unfolding disaster, and it’s been that way for quite a long time.”

Our planet has had a handful of extinction-level events, he says, in which 75 to 90 per cent of species were destroyed. “That’s an astonishing amount of extinction. But life continued.”

We can settle into the possibility that something will continue after we’re mulch, then. But Sheldrake says this just indicates how limited our imaginations have become in terms of what’s possible. Giving up isn’t an option.

“Everyone alive today is part of an unbroken lineage reaching back into the distant past and in that lineage there have been terrible cataclysms. Most species that have ever existed are dead, are extinct. But we always have an opportunity to respond,” he says.

“There is no alternative.”

Merlin Sheldrake: The Secret Life of Fungi is at Melbourne Recital Centre, December 5.

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