Fungi are everywhere but they are easy to miss. They are inside you and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years. They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel, and behave. Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, p. 3. Kindle Edition.
The transformational power of yeast has long been personified as a divine energy, spirit, or god. How could it escape this treatment? Alcohol and inebriation are some of the oldest magics. An invisible force conjures wine from fruit, beer from grain, mead from nectar. These liquids alter our minds and have been enfolded within human cultures in many ways: from ritual feasting and statecraft, to a means to pay for labor. For just as long, they have been responsible for dissolving our senses, for wildness and ecstasy. Yeasts are both makers and breakers of human social orders.
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, 56%. Kindle Edition.
Today's Featured Book:
Entangled Life:
How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
Genre: Nature
Published: May 12, 2020
Page Count: 345 pages
Summary:
When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave.
Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works.
This is our naturalist group's book club selection for October and November. I know little about fungi, and I'm eager to learn more.
As a book lover, what’s your biggest fear? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee-Addicted Writer)
I will turn seventy in November. I'm beginning to fear that I may not have time to read every book before I die.
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