66 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
compound found in so-called magic mush-
rooms, for use in controlled settings. The
effort has been backed by researchers and
scientists, and passionately supported
by David Bronner, the C.E.O.—in this
case, cosmic engagement officer—of
Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. The ballot
initiative follows clinical trials conducted
at Johns Hopkins, New York University,
and U.C.L.A. in the use of mushrooms
to treat addiction and depression. Psilo-
cybin has already been decriminalized in
Santa Cruz, Oakland, and Denver.
Meanwhile, the American diet in-
cludes more mushrooms than it used
to—about four pounds per person a
year, a gradual increase from just one
in the sixties. The hefty portobello
burger is ubiquitous, and, even before
the current pandemic, there was a grow-
ing interest in the everyday role that
fungi play in our lives on a microbial
level: “home fermentation” (whether for
sourdough, kombucha, kimchee, or
harder stuff ) has become a mainstream
hobby. Amateur mycology has flour-
ished on the Internet. There are videos
about foraging, and how to induce any
mushroom to release its spores onto a
sheet of paper, leaving a beautiful print
of its gills. I recently found a Web page
devoted to pictures of mushrooms that
convincingly resembled human butts.
Fungus, as Merlin Sheldrake writes
in “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make
Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and
Shape Our Futures” (Random House),
is everywhere, yet easy to miss. Mush-
rooms are the most glamorous but pos-
sibly least interesting members of this
kingdom. Most fungi take the form of
tiny cylindrical threads, from which hy-
phal tips branch in all directions, creat-
ing a meandering, gossamer-like net-
work known as mycelium. Fungus has
been breaking down organic matter for
millions of years, transforming it into
soil. A handful of healthy soil might
contain miles of mycelia, invisible to the
human eye. It’s estimated that there are
a million and a half species of fungus,
though nearly ninety per cent of them
remain undocumented. Before any plants
were taller than three feet, and before
any animal with a backbone had made
it out of the water, the earth was dot-
ted with two-story-tall, silo-like fungi
called prototaxites. The largest living
organism on earth today is a fungus in
Oregon just beneath the ground, cov-
ering about 3.7 square miles and esti-
mated to weigh as much as thirty-five
thousand tons. If fungus can inspire awe,
it can also be a nuisance or worse, from
athlete’s foot to the stem rust that afflicts
wheat and is considered a major threat
to global food security. Last year, the
C.D.C. identified the Candida auris as
an emerging public-health concern; it’s
a sometimes fatal, drug-resistant patho-
gen that has emerged in hospitals and
nursing homes around the world. The
more we learn about fungi, Sheldrake
observes, the less the natural world makes
sense without them.
Sheldrake was drawn to fungi because
they are humble yet astonishingly versa-
tile organisms, “eating rock, making soil,
digesting pollutants, nourishing and kill-
ing plants, surviving in space, inducing
visions, producing food, making medi-
cines, manipulating animal behavior, and
influencing the composition of the earth’s
atmosphere.” Plants make their own food,
converting the world around them into
nutrients. Animals must find their food.
But fungi essentially acquire theirs by
secreting digestive enzymes into their
environment, and absorbing whatever is
nearby: a rotten apple, an old tree trunk,
an animal carcass. If you’ve ever looked
closely at a moldy piece of bread—mold,
like yeast, being a type of fungus—what
appears to be a layer of fuzz is actually
millions of minuscule hyphal tips, bus-
ily breaking down matter into nutrients.
The fungus kingdom spreads by way
of spores. This is where mushrooms, the
part of fungus that makes it above
ground, show their prowess. The shaggy
inkcap mushroom—soft and tender
when cooked—can break through as-
phalt and concrete pavement. Each year,
fungi produce more than fifty mega-
tons of spores. Some mushrooms are
capable of onetime exertions in which
spores are catapulted through the air at
speeds of fifty-five miles an hour. But
the contribution that fungi make to the
larger ecology is fundamental: by turn-
ing biomass into soil, they recycle dead
organic matter back into organic life.S
heldrake is in his early thirties, a bi-
ologist who holds a Ph.D. from the
University of Cambridge. But his evan-
gelical zeal for the fungal world makes
it plain that he’s drawn to the weird-ness of it all. (His father, Rupert, is a
former research biologist who became
known for his belief in “morphic reso-
nance,” which posits a kind of shared
consciousness within nature.) His book
recounts the requisite tales of cham-
pion truffle hunters, psychedelic adven-
turers, his own love of home-brewing
beer. One of the heroes of “Entangled
Life” is Paul Stamets, a logger turned
mycologist and entrepreneur who lives
in Washington State. (Stamets also
steals the show in “Fantastic Fungi,” a
2019 documentary directed by Louie
Schwartzberg and narrated, somewhat
creepily, by the actress Brie Larson.) In
2005, Stamets published “Mycelium
Running: How Mushrooms Can Save
the World,” an influential work that
was taken up by fellow fungal enthu-
siasts as a kind of manifesto. A TED
talk drawn from the book has been
viewed millions of times.
Stamets’s fascination with fungus
began with a world-changing moment
of his own: a psilocybin trip cured him
of a lifelong stutter. Convinced of the
mushroom’s special power—he could
talk to girls now!—he began harvest-
ing exotic varieties, building a profitable
mail-order business that sells grow kits,
extracts, cultivation gear, even fungal
dog treats (Mutt-rooms). He briefly
worked with the Department of De-
fense to study the antibacterial and anti-
viral compounds that fungus had de-
veloped to protect itself in the course
of millions of years. Penicillin had fa-
mously been isolated by accident, in
1928, when Alexander Fleming noticed
that his petri-dish colony of staphylo-
coccus had been ravaged by an inciden-
tal growth of mold. Perhaps our old-
growth forests, filled with mycelia that
had adapted in order to ward off inva-
sive bacteria, held the key to prevent-
ing future pandemics. Their preserva-
tion, Stamets believed, was a matter of
national security.
Stamets is an advocate of what he
calls mycoremediation—the use of fungi
to remove toxic substances from the
environment. Fungi have helped clean
up diesel-contaminated soil; they’ve
broken down pesticide residues, crude
oil, and plastics. Disposable diapers can
linger in a landfill for hundreds of years,
but in 2014 scientists reported that they
had grown oyster mushrooms on a sub-