They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into a spectacular and neglected world, and shows that fungi provide a key to understanding both the planet on which we live, and life itself. The chapters in this volume share a commitment to unraveling the mysteries of this entangled life. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes.

Populations of organisms evolve in response to changing environments bodies and minds depend on a wide array of circumstances for their development cultures create complex relationships with the natural world even as they alter it irrevocably. The third section investigates several new ideas that have the potential to reshape key aspects of the biological and social sciences. Much like a mycelial network, the book’s tendrils extend into the deepest reaches of fungi’s incredible properties, their histories, as well as their innumerable uses in materials, medicine, and ecology. In the second section, a variety of controversial models-from mathematical representations of evolution to model organisms in medical research-are discussed and reframed in light of recent questions about the interplay between organisms and environment. Entangled Life provides a window into the mind-boggling biology and fascinating cultures surrounding fungal life. The first section explores the origins of the modern idea of organism-environment interaction in the mid-nineteenth century and its development by later psychologists and anthropologists. The volume is organized into three main sections: historical perspectives, contested models, and emerging frameworks. It brings together the work and ideas of historians, philosophers, biologists, and social scientists, uniting a range of new perspectives, methods, and frameworks for examining and understanding the ways that organisms and environments interact.

This volume explores the interactions between organisms and their environments and how this “entanglement” is a fundamental aspect of all life.

Entangled life