For Vermont Coverts readers, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake must be looked at in context. In the past 7 years, several popular books have been published which address communication between trees and present the “forest” as a complex organism which shares information and resources between its many constituents, both arboreal and fungal. Briefly:
 
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (2015), shows trees and forests as complicated “social beings”, communicating with each other and sharing nutrients through their roots and the fungal web that permeates the forest soil.
 
Then in 2017, David George Haskell wrote The Songs of Trees, tracing the way 12 trees, in different environments, communicate and demonstrate that life’s meaning arises from the relationships and interdependence of all life, showing the real beauty in connectivity.
 
In his complex, many layered 2018 novel, The Overstory, Richard Powers presents trees as social beings and their fate as a symbol of how humanity has mishandled our relationship to the rest of nature.
 
Fittingly, the most recent addition to this contextual list is the autobiographical, Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard (2021). In this fascinating auto-biographical work, Simard writes of her discoveries and struggles as she learns the ways in which trees use fungi to perceive, adapt, remember, recognize, communicate, and have agency.
 
There is also a pre-cursor to these works, the 2005 Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets. It is, I believe, the first work to highlight the critical importance of fungal networks in natural communication. I also recommend the 2019 documentary, “Fantastic Fungi” on Netflix.
 
A dictionary definition to avoid some confusion, mycelia are the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a mass of branching, threadlike hyphae.
 
Beautifully written, Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2020) presents a much broader view of the fungal world than Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, though both are journeys toward understanding this strange and ubiquitous life form. Simard concentrates on the way our forests are knit together by mycelial networks, while Sheldrake presents our entire world, and indeed ourselves, as part of this fungal network.
 
There is almost no place on earth you can’t find fungi, from a kilometer beneath the Antarctic ice to thermal hot springs. There are no plants that have ever been found that didn’t host fungi, sometimes 100’s of varieties. Fungal spores are the single largest source of airborne particles in our atmosphere (50 gigatons every year).  Fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants.
 
Their variety, from penicillin mold to truffles to lichen (a fungi/alga symbiont that covers an estimated 8% of the planet’s surface) to the mycelia that connect our forests beneath the soil, is endless. Sheldrake calls fungi the “ecological connective tissue by which much of the world is stitched into relation”.
 
While avoiding talking about “minds” or “thought”, several types of fungus (Ophiocordyceps and Entomophthora) have “learned” how to control insect behavior for their own benefit. Slime molds are able to consistently find the shortest distance between two points and have been used to accurately model real world transportation systems.
 
Sheldrake has written a fascinating, wide-ranging book on the fungal world. It is true that we have spent more time looking up than looking down in our forests and are only now beginning to realize what we’ve missed. He goes beyond our forest based mycelial networks and shows us how we live, and are indeed part of, a world which is a fungal network.