Mushrooms are only the fruiting bodies of fungi: for the most part, they live their lives as branching, fusing networks of tubular cells known as mycelium. But just as worrying is the critical underrepresentation of fungi in our litanies of preservation. Of course, we should be deeply concerned that a lethal combination of unsustainable agricultural practices and habitat destruction driven by ecocidal government policies and corporate greed now threatens 40% of all plant species with extinction. This is just one of the bleak findings of Kew’s 2020 report State of the World’s Plants and Fungi, the outcome of a collaboration between 210 researchers in 42 countries. Fungi, in other words, represent a meagre 0.2% of our global conservation priorities. Of these, only 358 have had their conservation priority assessed on the IUCN red list of threatened species, compared with 76,000 species of animal and 44,000 species of plant. The best estimate suggests that there are between 2.2m and 3.8m species of fungi on the Earth – as many as 10 times the estimated number of plant species – meaning that, at most, a mere 8% of all fungal species have been described.

Yet fungi have received only a small fraction of the attention they deserve. They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behaviour, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.įungi make up one of life’s kingdoms – as broad and busy a category as “animals” or “plants” – and provide a key to understanding our planet. A s you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years.

Entangled life merlin sheldrake