all my relations

 

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In their relationship, plants and mycorrhizal fungi enact a polarity: plant shoots engage with the light and air, while the fungi and plant roots engage with the solid ground. Plants pack up light and carbon dioxide into sugars and lipids. Mycorrhizal fungi unpack nutrients bound up in rock and decomposing material. 

These are fungi with a dual niche: part of their life happens within the plant, part in the soil. They are stationed at the entry point of carbon into terrestrial life cycles and stitch the atmosphere into relation with the ground. To this day, mycorrhizal fungi help plants cope with drought, heat and the many other stresses life on land has presented from the very beginning, as do the symbiotic fungi that crowd into plant leaves and stems. 

What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.

—Merlin Sheldrake,

Entangled Life

 

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Spribille describes lichens as the most ‘extroverted of all symbioses’. Yet it is no longer possible to conceive of an organism - humans included - as distinct from the microbial communities they share a body with. The biological identity of most organisms can’t be prised apart from the life of their microbial symbionts. The word 'ecology’ has its roots in the Greek word oikos, meaning 'house’, 'household’, or 'dwelling place’. Our bodies, like those of all other organisms, are dwelling places. 

Life is nested biomes all the way down.

We can’t be defined on anatomical grounds because our bodies are shared with microbes, and consist of more microbial cells than our own - cows can’t eat grass, for example, but their microbial populations can, and cows’ bodies have evolved to house the microbes that sustain them. 

Neither can we be defined developmentally, as the organism that proceeds from the fertilisation of an animal egg, because we depend, like all mammals, on our symbiotic partners to direct parts of our development programmes. 

Nor is it possible to define us genetically, as bodies made up of cells that share an identical genome —many symbiotic microbial partners are inherited from our mothers alongside our own DNA, and at points in our evolution art history, microbial associates have permanently insinuated themselves into the cells of their hosts: our mitochondria have their own genome, as do plants’ chloroplasts, and at least 8 per cent of the human genome originated in viruses (we can even swap cells with other humans when we grow into 'chimeras’, formed when mothers and foetuses exchange cells or genetic material in utero). 

Nor can our immune systems be taken as a measure of individuality, although our immune cells are often thought of as answering this question for us by distinguishing self from 'non-self’. 

Immune systems are as concerned with managing our relationships with our resident microbes as fighting off external attackers, and appear to have evolved to enable colonisation by microbes rather than prevent it. 


—Merlin Sheldrake
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures

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The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what’s going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called “true enough.” 

I think that’s a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.

―Rupert Sheldrake

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