A massively diverse group of organisms, fungi support and sustain nearly all living systems. Fungi throw our concepts of individuality, and even intelligence, into question. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disasters. By examining fungi on their own terms, we are changing our understanding of how life works.
Join Merlin Sheldrake, biologist and author of the bestselling book Entangled Life, for an illuminating conversation with CIIS professor of Ecology and Religion Elizabeth Allison. Merlin shares the ways these extraordinary organisms, and our relationships with them, change our understanding of the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel, and behave.
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist, speaker, and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. Entangled Life, a New York Times and Sunday Times best-seller, has been translated into 26 languages, and was named a TIME Must-Read Book.
Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. By examining fungi on their own terms, he reveals how these extraordinary organisms – and our relationships with them – are changing our understanding of how life works. Entangled Life was described by The Wall Street Journal as “food for the soul”; by The Guardian as “brilliant” and “entrancing”; by The Observer as “wondrous,” and by The Spectator as “truly astounding.” It won the Wainwright Prize and the Royal Society Science Book Prize. It was nominated for several other accolades, including the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2021 and the Rathbones Folio Prize.
Merlin received a PhD in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation.
A keen brewer and fermenter, Merlin is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. He is a musician and performs on the piano and accordion.
Elizabeth Allison, PhD, is professor of Ecology and Religion at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, USA, where she founded and chairs the graduate program in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion and created the Religion & Ecology Summit conference series. She is a member of the Advisory Group for the Yale Forum on Religion & Ecology; an editorial board member for the journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology; and the Secretary of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. Her current research projects address socio-spiritual implications of glacial extinction in high mountain regions; the expansion of care ethics to nonhuman nature; and the implications of Buddhism and indigenous mountain religions for biodiversity conservation and climate adaptation. Her scholarly articles appear in journals including Ecology & Society, WIREs Climate Change, Religions, Mountain Research and Development, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, and in numerous edited volumes on Bhutan, religion, nature, and geography. She is co-editor of After the Death of Nature: Carolyn Merchant and the Future of Human-Nature Relations. Her current book project is Thunder Dragon Ecology: Religion, Environment, and Development in Modernizing Bhutan.