In 1967, John Lennon sang, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” It turns out the “we are all together” part is more than a feel-good metaphor.

Merlin Sheldrake is a British biologist who studies fungi and the relationships they form with other living things. His research has led him to a big question: Where does one organism end and another begin?

His book Entangled Life is full of reasons to wonder. Take a mushroom. What we see poking out of the ground is only the fruiting body. Most of the fungus exists elsewhere, often as a branching network threaded through soil and among the roots of plants. Fungi break down dead matter, help make soil, exchange nutrients with plants, and participate in ecosystems we depend upon every day.

Or take a lichen. It looks for all the world like a single thing growing on a rock. Look more closely and that “thing” turns out to be a relationship—a fungus living together with photosynthetic partners, along with other microorganisms.

Even you and I aren’t quite as singular as we appear. Our bodies are inhabited by vast communities of microorganisms that participate in digestion, immunity, and other processes necessary to keep us alive.

After a while, the categories start getting slippery. Individual or community? Cooperation or competition? One organism or many? Sheldrake doesn’t try to clean up the mess. That’s part of what makes Entangled Life so intriguing. Fungi keep leading him—and us—into places where the familiar boundaries don’t work very well.

“We are all together,” indeed.

BOOK: Entangled Life‍

VIDEO: Merlin Sheldrake on BBC Breakfast talking about the film Fungi: Web of Life