** Overly Entangled **
The chemists of the natural world get short shrift. The paucity of research about fungi belies the fact that there are somewhere between 2.2m and 3.4m fungi species, compared to the 6-10m known plant species, even in the non-motile biology world, plant-centrism abounds.
Entangled Life aims to remediate that imbalance, with overly entangled results. Like any discussion of fungi I’ve ever read, the author starts with truffles, a fungi that solves the biological problem of signaling for animals while underground with pungent odors now valued in markets across the globe.
More interesting is the discussion of hyphae and nutrient transfer; Here descriptions of the entangled life that fungi live, and the role of nutrient transfer in symbiotic plant life was fascinating. I could help but think that symbiotic relationships offer a key example of Seeing Like a State’s metis systems - knowledge that is resistant to piecemeal understanding.
At times, Sheldrake’s pontifications waxed too philosophic. I don’t need every chapter to be a treatise on how fungus can show me a new way to live. Furthermore, Sheldrake presents information in contextless and gee-whiz facts: “globally the length of hyphae is about half the width of our galaxy.”
This means that after only a few weeks I’m struggling to retain much.
** 70th book of 2021 **