00:04:09.920And what is the benefit of popularizing fungi? What maybe do you want from this? Or I think about your work with conservation and spun, but also even the collective consciousness. It's really incredible to see how much the interest in fungi have grown over even just the past decade, five years, two years, definitely from your book.
00:04:33.600And it's really, in so many ways, exciting. But I do wonder, did you have an intention? Were you hoping, oh, I really hope this inspires people, maybe? Or what was your hope?
00:04:46.920I think there are three main hopes, certainly in writing Entangled Life. I mean, I do a lot of popularizing of fungi outside that context these days, but in that project, I think the first hope was that I might play my small part in helping to alleviate people's fungus blindness, that our just sheer ignorance of fungi means that most of our accounts of the living world are
00:05:16.900radically incomplete. An account of life that doesn't include fungi is an account of a living
00:05:24.300world that doesn't exist. And so I wanted to help to reveal these organisms that spend so much of
00:05:30.360their time hidden from us. So quite a basic hope there. But there was another level of hope,
00:05:36.780I suppose, which was that one of the things that fungi teach us is about the way that life is
00:05:44.320relationship, the interminglement of embodied being on the planet. In so many ways, fungi
00:05:54.060teach us this. My second hope was that through this discussion of fungi, it might become
00:06:02.160clearer that life is relationship and that organisms can't be thought of as somehow separate
00:06:08.660from the many other organisms that they are living with. That being is always being with.
00:06:15.220That becoming is always becoming with. I think this is a very fundamental truth
00:06:20.740about the living world, and certainly not a new idea. I think modern science is remembering this
00:06:27.300idea, perhaps. Perhaps modern science has forgotten this for a little while, but it's certainly an
00:06:32.740idea that you find present in so many traditional knowledge systems around the world.
00:06:36.900world. But I think fungi can lead us there. I think my second hope was that, that the discussion
00:06:44.240of fungi could reveal a world of interminglement, of interrelationship, of interdependence, of
00:06:49.080intimate reciprocal dependence. Perhaps third was that fungi are so weird, and their lives confound
00:06:59.700so many of our categories, so many of the categories we use to organize our existence.
00:07:04.880and i feel that i've certainly felt this myself that the lives of fungi can jolt us out of well
00:07:11.140worn habits of thought um can help to make the familiar seem unfamiliar again and can help loosen
00:07:19.280the grip of many of our concepts um and lead us into new ways of thinking and new ways of thinking
00:07:26.320we really do need at this moment in time so um that was perhaps the the largest of the hopes of
00:07:33.620three hopes that um yeah that fungi thinking about fungi can make the world look different
00:07:38.620um more generally and uh and that that different might be fertile helpful and healing oh that's
00:07:47.140beautiful and i i feel that for myself for sure in entangled life how fungi makes our worlds change
00:07:56.440our minds and shape our futures you write quote the politics of symbiosis have always been fraught
00:08:02.800Is nature fundamentally competitive or cooperative? A lot turns on this question. For many, it changes the way we understand ourselves. It isn't surprising that these issues remain a conceptual and ideological tinderbox.
00:08:18.440end quote oh yeah thinking through the history and philosophy of science
00:08:25.520how is the interpretation of symbiotic relationships changed throughout time and
00:08:31.100how does our changing understanding of symbiotic relationships show how science is deeply
00:08:38.960intertwined with culture it's a great question i mean science has always been something that humans
00:08:43.520do. It's a human activity. In fact, I think of it as the sciences. Science has never really been
00:08:51.620one thing, one monolithic thing. We tend to think of it that way with science, a singular word with
00:08:57.180a capital S. But really, it's the sciences, which are a diverse collection of practices, methods,
00:09:03.740of values, norms, languages, codes of conduct, and that there's lots of ways to be a scientist.
00:09:17.420Actually, an expert in the study of fossilized fishes is a layperson with regards to the
00:09:24.060distinguished professor of quantum physics. The sciences as practiced by humans will reflect
00:09:33.740the ways that humans are making sense of their own lives outside their scientific practice.
00:09:40.160And you often see this in the form of metaphors and analogies.
00:09:43.340I know the sciences depend on metaphors and analogies, just like humans do in general.
00:09:48.340But when you use a metaphor and analogy, you are comparing something to something else.
00:09:51.780And by doing so, you are revealing something of your map, of your net of cultural coordinates.
00:09:56.960You often see social values and opinions and so forth freighted into the sciences through metaphor and analogy.
00:10:08.460So when it comes to the science of the study of symbiotic relationships and the various metaphors and analogies used to make sense of these relationships, you have quite an amazing window into the lives and values of people at the time, of people surrounding the scientists making these observations in question.
00:10:30.800And so you can really think about these relationships as a prism through which the social values of scientists are dispersed.
00:10:37.720So when the word symbiosis was brought into biology in the late 19th century to describe the lives of lichens, it was brought in by this guy called Albert Frank.
00:10:48.320And he wanted a word to describe the living together of unlike organisms that didn't presume to know what that relationship was like.
00:10:57.180Because until that point, the only way to describe the intimate sharing of bodily space was parasitism or disease.
00:11:06.120And these words very much presume to know what the relationship is like, how that relationship
00:11:11.800unfolds, or at least who benefits and who doesn't. So the symbiosis was a way to talk about
00:11:16.840association, but without foreclosing an understanding of that relationship.
00:11:23.680So then what you have is you have a load of scientists starting to study these,
00:11:28.820what at the time seemed, improbable relationships between different organisms, between unlike
00:11:34.100organisms. The analogies and metaphors that were used to make sense of them varied hugely.
00:11:40.820The lichens are a great example. Some people used analogies of master and slave to describe the
00:11:45.860alga and the fungus. Some of the relationships between men and women. Some of the relationships
00:11:51.300between nations. All sorts of often very problematic analogies were made, revealing
00:18:48.580is with my wife, Arianne Robinsong, who's a poet.
00:18:51.680We did a project together called Return Address.
00:18:57.660It stemmed from an idea that David Abraham,
00:19:04.080who is a friend of an ecologist and a philosopher,
00:19:08.280we were chatting with him about prayer, the nature of prayer.
00:19:10.880And he said that in his view, prayer was simply talking to the world rather than about the world.
00:19:18.480And we were playing with this idea for some time and realized that we do a lot of talking about the world.
00:19:24.100At least certainly I do a lot of talking about the world.
00:19:26.160And in the educational frameworks that I've been brought up within and trained within, there's a lot of talking about the world.
00:19:32.460And so talking directly to the world, it seemed like a wonderfully simple way to address the relationships that exist that make up the living world, whether or not we like it, or think about them.
00:19:46.280And so the practice of this, the exercise, which took the form of a kind of essay by me and a series of poems by Erin, and really a kind of workshop where we would lead groups.
00:19:57.520and the prompt was people were invited to to to go out and to be outside go and find some entity
00:20:03.820it could be the sun it could be a wave on the sea it could be the sea it could be a rock it could be
00:20:07.200a grain of sand could be a bucket of sand could be tree what any a pine needle pine cone a branch
00:20:13.460of a pine tree any number of whatever you chose and then to address the entity directly to turn
00:20:20.360the third person into the second person to call it a you. How are you doing? You look so good
00:20:28.100today. Erin had this wonderful list of ways in to help people get started. Compliments are a great
00:20:33.120easy way to start if you're trying to address your pine needle and you're feeling a bit awkward.
00:20:38.340This actually is a very simple practice to turn the living world into a you or the entity into a
00:20:43.600you rather than it but it's very profound uh it kind of changes everything it changes the
00:20:49.320orientation that we have towards that entity because what you're doing by changing the
00:20:54.080from the third person the it into the second person the you is that you're acknowledging
00:20:59.520that the entity that you're addressing is a locus of experience um and you know that this
00:21:08.080high needle the pine branch the stone the sand the sun these are all entities subjected to
00:21:13.100changing environments and they respond to these changing environments in all sorts of
00:21:17.180ways some of which we understand many of which we don't and so by honoring the entity as a locus
00:21:23.520of experience by calling it a you and by putting yourself into direct relationship by using this
00:21:29.320second person and all sorts of wonderful things start to happen and it's quite subtle but but can
00:21:34.480be quite quite amazing how it just changes the tone of one's engagement so it's um you know it's
00:21:41.780not that we expected the stone or the pine tree to understand our human language, but it was more
00:21:51.180an exercise to remind ourselves that humans aren't the only organisms worth addressing,
00:21:58.720that we live in a world of relationship and interrelation and a world of communication,
00:22:05.540because without communication, no organisms could coordinate their togetherness.
00:22:10.460and that communication happens in many types of languages
00:23:04.540And I feel really drawn to speaking to the world and not about the world, especially now. I think when I was awakening to the world, I was really interested to learn about the world because it seemed all new and it seemed like I was unlearning and breaking apart my conditioning and lies of what I had been taught.
00:23:30.720but at this point I crave the elemental and I think that speaking to the world to the earth
00:23:40.040is so much about being with the elements and not philosophizing about them but being present with
00:23:50.260them and how that shifts an entire worldview ideology lifestyle it's incredible and I feel
00:23:57.360for the first time maybe practicing being human. Not cyborg, not modern, but just being in this
00:24:08.960body with the earth body. And yeah, I can't seem to want to leave that connection. So thank you
00:24:18.060for sharing that because I really, I think, spoke to a lot of what I've been in process with
00:24:22.600recently. There's something else you said that struck me about, I think it was the rock and
00:24:29.520the changing environment. With climate change and gosh, all that we're losing,
00:24:36.060the Anthropocene extinction, I know for so long I wanted to cling onto a steady state,
00:24:42.980something stable. But maybe the truth is the earth is just not stable. And so I'm wondering
00:24:51.800in my own work, although I fight mines and salmon habitat, and that's still something I don't want
00:24:57.820to give up doing. But I wonder with so much work, whether it's the conservation world or
00:25:03.080the climate change world, if that's what I can call it for now,
00:25:08.340are we fighting for something that isn't actually realistic?
00:25:13.020I mean, we know just from looking back, we've known since deep time as a concept has arrived
00:25:20.180in the field of human inquiry in the 19th century that this story of us is a story of
00:25:29.580astonishing change um in so many ways yeah when you're living in life as a process um unfolding
00:25:39.180in time and there are reverberations in that process there are cycles
00:25:44.580and there are rapid transitions into radically different states.
00:25:51.860But if you think about things in terms of processes,
00:25:55.860rather than if you think about the fundamental nature of reality as a process in time,
00:26:02.100which modern physics actually reveals to us because we might think of stuff as matter,
00:26:06.260as pretty hard and solid and unchanging substance, like a substance.
00:26:11.140But actually, when you boil it down to atoms and molecules, you find energy bound within fields.
00:26:16.300And that's much more like a process than a thing.
00:26:20.220But if you think the world is made up of things, fundamentally made up of things or substances,
00:26:25.360then the kind of questions you ask are quite different.
00:26:27.360So if you're a substance person, for whom the fundamental nature of reality is substances,
00:26:33.060which are recombined in various forms to give us the world we see and experience.
00:26:38.580If you're a substance person, because the fundamental nature of reality is substance,
00:26:42.500that substance is stable until it's changed.
00:26:45.560So the questions you ask about the world is, how does anything change?
00:26:49.080Because left to its own devices, substances will stay the same, matter in motion.
00:26:55.360Until a force is exerted to change something, it won't change.
00:26:59.580So if you're a substance person, the question you tend to ask is, how do things change?
00:27:02.980But if you're a process person, the fundamental nature of reality is endless flux and change.
00:27:09.600The question you ask is different, because everything is always changing.
00:27:11.980The fundamental nature of reality is to change.
00:27:14.260Then the question you ask is, well, why does anything remain stable?
00:27:18.360How do we find stability in a world of fundamental flux?
00:27:22.600In reality, I think we need a bit of both of these perspectives, because there are lots
00:27:26.900of things that do have enough stability for us to think of them meaningfully as a substance.
00:28:02.920you might say. Then Vishnu, who's a preserver of order, so the preserver of habit and how things
00:28:11.940can continue as they have. In reality, one needs a bit of chaos and a bit of stability. We need
00:28:21.240habits and we need creativity. We need always some measure of flux, of novelty. But a total
00:28:29.980overdose of novelty and flux would be totally overwhelming. There would be no forms that would
00:28:34.840arise in our minds. If you start with the liver of the mind, no stable ground, no firm concept.
00:28:44.080It would be exhausting and terrifying and a kind of madness maybe. In the physical world,
00:28:49.740you wouldn't have any kind of stable molecules forming into compounds which would form into
00:28:55.740usable structures that could be manipulated by living organisms into the form of their bodies
00:29:02.000and so on. But without any creativity, you'd be locked in endless cycles of repetition.
00:29:11.140And so it would be impossible to say, on the human level, to have a new thought,
00:29:15.800to deal with a new situation, a situation you hadn't been confronted with before.
00:29:20.980Nothing would ever change. So you wouldn't be living in an evolutionary life story.
00:29:25.740on a planet that's in constant flux. So you need this balance of these two, of the habit and
00:29:31.100creativity. And sometimes we stand perhaps in our lives more in a place of habit because
00:29:36.520we're dizzy with flux, and we want that stability. And sometimes we dive into the flux because we're
00:29:42.440stifled and constrained by the stability that's become suffocating and hard. So I think as living
00:29:51.080organisms we we deal with this dance i think it's really the kind of dance um all the time and i
00:29:56.820think all organisms deal with this dance and i think um you see this playing out on on a physical
00:30:01.440level in all sorts of interesting ways so yeah so when you talk about the you know the stability
00:30:05.960and the with this question you pose then um yeah that's that's where i'm i'm led to um and
00:30:12.000and and to appreciation of the dynamic dance and the necessity of both both the habit and
00:30:18.180creativity, both the chaos and the order. That actually felt relieving to hear that.
00:30:28.820I sometimes get so wrapped up in the heartbreak and the anxiety of what's happening to the earth
00:30:41.540And working in restoration and conservation, I think when I first started, it was very exciting because it felt like a creative response to the destruction, to the chaos, felt stabilizing.
00:31:01.180But the more that I practiced it with restoration, and I was really into micro-remediation, and I was thinking, what are we restoring to? Are we restoring to pre-colonial times? Who's deciding on where and how and what species?
00:31:20.460and it started to kind of lose some of its momentum for me. And maybe it's really,
00:31:28.840I'm speaking more specifically about forest restoration. Maybe we're just deciding on
00:31:34.660what biodiversity we want in that moment. And if that's what it is, then okay, fine.
00:31:39.900I want to hear that. But I think the powers that are choosing what restoration is feels a bit,
00:31:47.700it has this weird control element that I can't quite wrap my head around.
00:31:53.480And then on the other hand, with conservation, although of course important, and I'm still
00:31:57.960working in that world and I don't plan to move out of it exactly, but the transactional nature
00:32:03.700of it, the capitalistic nature of it, I'm from the outside. I go, oh gosh, yes, let's protect
00:32:10.000this place. Let's make sure no resource extraction happens. But then what it takes to do
00:32:17.540that and what land is protected and what land is spared. And then I go on a step further into
00:32:24.160where we're headed with the electrification of our energy systems and more and more extraction.
00:32:32.740And when I was researching for this interview and I was looking into what you were doing with
00:32:36.980and Giuliana Forci, who I adore, who I've had on the podcast before and the Fungi Foundation,
00:32:42.800helping to conserve places through fungal diversity i love it and i'm also i'm in that
00:32:51.140tension of sitting in the trouble of where we go from here yeah well there are many there are many
00:33:01.820difficult questions that face anyone who hopes to mitigate the ecocidal destruction unfolding at
00:33:11.980pace. But I think your piece about conservation and restoration is very interesting in light of
00:33:21.020this question of stability and change. Because, yeah, so what baseline are you going to restore
00:33:26.600to? What are you optimizing for? These are all choices we're making. What are you conserving?
00:33:33.080What state are you conserving? What state in the long evolution of this ecosystem or whatever
00:33:40.900we're discussing um are you going to to keep it at um and i think that there are lots of problems
00:33:47.340there and and um you know we could end up creating theme parks which are ecological states which
00:33:53.560never really exist in the wild or we can end up harking back to to fantastical nostalgic places
00:34:01.740because of all sorts of reasons many of which can be problematic or we can just simply get it wrong
00:34:08.520when we're restoring and plant the wrong kind of tree
00:34:37.140I think imagining ourselves in relationship is a key way to go and to imagine a symbiotic
00:34:44.500picture of life where all organisms are improvising through time. I think about this a lot,
00:34:52.100about how we're improvising in this conversation, we're improvising in our lives. We have constraints
00:34:56.980within which we improvise and we have fields of possibility which confront us. The way that we
00:35:01.940we navigate a changing world is improvisatory. But humans are the only organisms improvising.
00:35:09.860All organisms are improvising within their constraints and within the field of possibility
00:35:13.860that they face, their degrees of freedom. And so when you think about it like that,
00:35:19.300it's like, yeah, well, we might not be conserving an ecosystem which really existed before humans,
00:35:25.140or we might be restoring this in a pretty dodgy way, but planting the wrong tree in the wrong
00:35:29.620place but if in the bigger picture you know we're sort of improvising our way through time
00:35:34.620together with other organisms also improvising their way through time and wild and strange
00:35:39.180things happen you know um there are blockbuster relationships that transform the fortunes of all
00:35:44.780parties involved think about humans and horses for example humans and yeast or humans and apples
00:35:50.160or many plants uh flowering plants and bees the pollinators and think about how these associations
00:35:57.120So it might have just arisen quite serendipitously at one point, but then they can spin the whole trajectory into a different direction because suddenly there's dance partners involved and one's improvising with these other organisms.
00:36:08.700And all the organisms involved have agendas and evolutionary interests and are responding to the other and to these changes.
00:36:18.340So when you look at it like that, you know, it's dancing through time in a variety of way with other organisms and some things don't unfold very well and some things unfold more successfully.
00:36:30.500But if you see it as part of that bigger story, then maybe it's less, I don't know, I find it quite heartening to think about it like that.
00:36:37.420i'm not sure why but it just it makes me feel like well um you know just we're growing and
00:36:45.340we're growing with well we're we're listening um we're listening with we're responding and as long
00:36:53.200as one is you know doing one's best to respond to listen to be in relationship to to behave in a way
00:37:00.720which is not ecocidal in a way that that likes life then it's better to be doing that than be
00:37:06.860doing nothing yeah that again you have a you have a way of relieving my uh broken heart it's like
00:37:16.760okay yeah that makes sense and and we are constantly dancing with others and we don't know
00:37:23.840how one connection sprouts a new one and where that where that takes us and i guess
00:37:30.900Maybe you could share a bit about some ways you're improvising, whether through Spun or Moth or the More Than Human project. I know you're doing so many things to be in relationship with the Earth as it is right now. So yeah, I'd love to hear about how you're dancing with these projects.
00:37:53.840Well, a lot of my work at the moment is fungal research, especially into mycorrhizal fungi.
00:38:01.980And these are fungi that live in association with plants that exist in trading relationships with plants.
00:38:06.900And plants supply their fungal partners that grow in and around their roots with energy compounds like sugars or fats that they've produced in photosynthesis.
00:38:15.940and the fungi in return supply plants with nutrients like nitrogen or phosphorus that
00:38:21.740they've foraged from the soil and um and together they make what we call plants and and soils so one
00:38:29.880part of my work with it with a wonderful team um based in mstem is looking at a very very small
00:38:34.420scale looking at mycorrhizal networks imaging the flows of material inside these networks to
00:38:42.320try and understand how these fungi are communicating with themselves and with plants, how they're able
00:38:46.860to move material around their rambling networks of bodies, their bodies which are really bodies
00:38:53.920without a body plan, subject to continual revision, remodeling. There's a wild kind of intelligence
00:39:00.480there, and we know too little about it. So we're trying to try and understand on this very small
00:39:04.560scale how they're coordinating their lives. And then we're also, through Society for the Protection
00:39:10.580of underground networks are spun, trying to look at the very, very big scale, trying to
00:39:15.380map the mycorrhizal communities of the planet, to look at this global scale, to try and understand
00:39:22.220who lives where and what everyone's doing. And the reason why these maps
00:39:29.540could be really important is because there's lots of people who understand that these fungal
00:39:35.520relationships are key and fundamental to life as we know it. But anyone who wants to take this
00:39:42.800information into account, it's very difficult for them to do so because you don't really know
00:39:49.200who's in the soil under your feet. We have maps of ocean currents, we have maps of global
00:39:53.860vegetation, we have maps of climatic maps, but we don't have maps of who's living where
00:39:59.240underground. Part of the purpose of making these maps is to enable decision makers to
00:40:04.040to take these lives into account when making their decisions.
00:40:08.800So the research is very small, the research is very big.
00:40:12.100And then really embarking on this project,
00:40:14.840together with my wonderful collaborators,
00:40:17.120Toby Kears is one, Juliana Furchi is one,
00:40:20.220and to try and turn this amazing data,
00:43:19.360to get into the weeds a bit with both the research for mapping by diversity of fungi
00:43:47.080And then the legal aspect, what would one do with these tools? In the project I'm working on
00:43:56.020up here in Alaska to stop or halt this proposed mine under a glacier on one of the last rivers
00:44:04.920that hold all five species of wild salmon, there's many ways of halting a project like that. And some
00:44:11.920of it is definitely legal. Some of it is research based on ecological biodiversity. There's so
00:44:18.700many ways to, I don't want to say skin a cat, but that's what came to me. So yeah, I'm fascinated to
00:44:28.140hear how you would take fungi through the process of protecting a place and the power of that place
00:44:36.660coming through these different tools of, I guess, society and modernity.
00:44:44.680I think there are lots of ways to do it. I mean, one example, there's a collaboration I'm working
00:44:48.840on at the moment with SPUN, with Juliana Fucci and the Funky Foundation, and with the Moth
00:44:55.960Collective, and with the Sarayaku people and indigenous people in Ecuador. And what we're
00:45:01.480doing is, together with the Sarayaku, Sarayaku have been involved in all sorts of battles about
00:45:07.580their land and have won and been very successful in their battles to defend their land from
00:45:14.040mining and from oil drilling. One of the things that's going on right now is that they've just
00:45:21.280won a case very recently in the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court. They have a huge amount
00:45:27.940of dynamite that's been buried on their territory by a mining company but never detonated and there's
00:45:32.060this question of how they get rid of it the government has a legal obligation to to remove it
00:45:36.000in consultation with the seriaku and so the seriaku really uh fighting for this not to be0.94
00:45:41.600detonated because to do so would be to blow up a whole portion of the forest and in their world0.79
00:45:45.880view of the living forest kawasak satcha um is in the forest is a living hole and um and their home
00:45:54.260part of them. And so where our project comes in together is that by describing fungal communities
00:46:02.500underground, we'll be able to go provide data sets for the Suryaku can then take to the Ecuadorian
00:46:08.260government and say, look, there's untold diversity underground. That doesn't feature in our wranglings
00:46:15.300usually because we don't have ways to describe it. We've now got ways to describe it and we've
00:46:18.580described it and here it is. And these are some of the many, many, many lives that you will destroy
00:46:22.660by blowing up this dynamite or by installing another mine somewhere and so on.
00:46:30.060So being armed with the data to describe the life in the depths of the soil,
00:46:34.460which until this point has been pretty much a black box,
00:46:38.480gives one quite a lot of power in negotiation and in any conversation about land
00:46:45.760because we're talking about what's living in the land.
00:46:47.780You know, this isn't just some place, you know, a container for water and nutrients.
00:46:53.060This is home to a quarter of the world's species live underground.
00:46:57.540And so the way that Fung can describe that diversity, there's all sorts of ways that the conversation can change.
00:47:04.300And so we're very interested in this particular collaboration about the way that Fungi can support indigenous land rights fights and lead us into a more interconnected view of a forest.
00:47:17.420You know, fungi lead us there because they are networks.