Fungal Networks Are Often Hidden and Overlooked. But They Can Help Save Us.

By Tatiana Schlossberg | June 24, 2023 | The New York Times

Merlin Sheldrake taking soil samples in sand dunes on the coast of Chile. “Fungi are a kingdom of life that have not had a kingdom’s worth of attention,” he said.Credit...Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist and author, is doing his best to show the world all the amazing things fungi can do to benefit life on a damaged planet.

About 500 million years ago, when aquatic plants began to inch toward land, they couldn’t live there on their own. They enlisted fungal mycelium networks, which served as their root systems for a few tens of millions of years before they developed their own and could live independently. Still, about 90 percent of plants depend on symbiotic fungi.

But during that time, the planet was transformed: Early plants and their fungal networks helped lower the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 90 percent, enabling the conditions for life on Earth as we know it.

These days, human activities are sending atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soaring (though not quite as high as during the pre-fungal period), and scientists and other fungal enthusiasts are hoping that fungi might be able to help us sustain our own existence by drawing down all that carbon once again.

To Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist and author of “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures,” that is really just one of the amazing things fungi of all kinds do: as “ecosystem engineers,” and as the enablers of our very lives on this planet, whose centrality we ignore “at our peril,” he said. (Continue to The New York Times for the full article.)