S2E3:
Foraging with
Merlin Sheldrake
Dana Thomas: This is Dana Thomas and you're listening to The Green Dream, a podcast about how to green up your life.
Climate change is bearing down on us like a mighty hurricane, and it's scary as hell, but it doesn't have to be. I'm Dana Thomas, a leading voice in the sustainable fashion movement. On The Green Dream, I welcome global experts, creators and change-makers, from politics, business, and the arts for dynamic conversations on how you can green up your life. The Green Dream is the podcast of hope.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency. From farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and at select stores.
Dana Thomas: My guest today on The Green Dream is Merlin Sheldrake, a British biologist and author of a science-driven memoir called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds and Change Our Minds and Shape our Futures, published by Random House in 2020.
Entangled Life examines fungi from all sorts of angles: decomposition, fermentation, nutrient distribution, and the evolutionary role fungi play in plants. And he explains the ways humans relate to the fungal kingdom, which in Western cultures is far less reverent than in Asia. The New York Times described Entangled Life as an “ebullient and ambitious exploration" of fungi, and the Wall Street Journal called it “a gorgeous book of literary nature writing in the tradition of Robert Macfarlane and John Fowles, ripe with insight and erudition.” Entangled Life made many best book lists, and it won several awards, including the 2021 Royal Society Science Books Prize.
Entangled Life surfaces often in our culture. Dutch futurist fashion designer Iris van Herpen, who I profile in my book Fashionopolis, used Entangled Life as the inspiration for her Spring 2021 couture collection. In an episode of the television show “Ted Lasso,” Coach Beard is reading Entangled Life. And as I learned at a Chelsea School of Art exhibition in London last spring, Entangled Life is the spark for a host of young artists’ work.
Merlin became enchanted with fungi during his childhood in the 1990s, growing up near Hampstead Heath in London. As he walked through the park in the autumn, inhaling the fragrant scent of rotting leaves, his father, well-known biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, explained the science of decomposition. Merlin was hooked, and he has dedicated his life to mycology, the study of fungi. He received a Ph. D. in tropical ecology from the University of Cambridge for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama. He also plays the accordion.
I met Merlin in London last summer at an event at Stella McCartney’s Old Bond Street boutique. She was introducing the Frayme Mylo, her new handbag made of mycelium, the underground root system of fungi. Merlin was there to talk about the importance of fungi in our lives. He’ll tell us all about it here today.
I also welcome back to The Green Dream our regular contributor Hannah Elliott, luxury car writer for Bloomberg Pursuits. She’ll tell us about the new Rolls-Royce EV, the Spectre — yes, just like the baddies in a James Bond movie. Hmmmm, is Rolls-Royce giving us a peek at what the villain will be driving in the next installment? Perhaps.
But first the fabulousness of fungi. Merlin Sheldrake, welcome to The Green Dream.
Merlin Sheldrake: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Dana Thomas: Could you begin by explaining what fungi are, because this is not just about mushrooms, right?
Merlin Sheldrake: So fungi are a kingdom of life, which is this broader category as animals or plants, there are lots of ways to be a fungus, just like there are lots of ways to be an animal, lots of ways to be a plant. But when we think of fungi, we normally think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are just the reproductive structures of fungi–the place where they produce spores, which is how they disperse themselves. But most fungi live most of their lives not as mushrooms, but as networks of tubular cells called mycelium.
Dana Thomas: And mycelium and fungi in general are ancient, aren't they? I think you wrote in “Entangled Life" that they've been living on dry land for at least 40 million years, 20 times longer than the genus Homo has existed.
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, more like 500 million years actually. But fungi are a kingdom of life, which is over a billion years old. They are ancient lineage.
Dana Thomas: And they do make up one of life's kingdoms. And you call it a broad and busy category, as busy as animals and plants. Yet they only receive a small fraction of scientific attention. Why is this? Is it because they're invisible?
Merlin Sheldrake: I think there are a few reasons that the fungi kingdom of life that have not had a kingdom's worth of attention. One is that they're hard for us to access. Most fungi live their lives out of reach, immersed in whatever they happen to be eating. Even today, with the most cutting edge tools, their lives are still difficult to reach. So that's one reason. I think another reason is that there's a taxonomic shift that happened in the late sixties when fungi were recognized as a kingdom of life. Before that they were thought of as plants, more usually as lower plants, in this slightly prejudiced turn. While there were departments of plant sciences, departments of animal sciences, there weren't departments of fungal sciences. There were less ways that you could become a student of the fungal sciences, there were fewer professorships on the subject, funding opportunities, all the rest. So there was a disciplinary bias entrenched by this taxonomic arrangement. I think that that's led to lots of different things. For example, fungi being underrepresented in our litany of conservation. But there are other reasons, too, I think. Lots of fungi live lives which are distasteful sometimes in some parts of the world.
Dana Thomas: Like what?
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, they associate with death and decay and putrefaction. They're seen as agents of putrefaction. And so, in North Atlantic cultures...
Dana Thomas: Or poisonous, right?
Merlin Sheldrake: Or poisonous, yeah, or poisonous. It's in England, North America, that people tend to hold a suspicion of mushrooms. If you go to East Asian countries like Korea or Japan or China, a very different story, and mushrooms are held in extraordinarily high regard and have been for a very long time. So it's worth pointing out that how we think about mushrooms depends somewhat on where we grow up.
Dana Thomas: And you talked about how they're busy eating. What are they eating? How are they eating? Is this what they do? Are they like my chickens and they just spend the entire day eating? Are there waking moments and sleeping moments?
Merlin Sheldrake: Mycelium networks are fine-tuned for over a billion years of evolution to consume. Animals tend to put food in their bodies where they digest and absorb it, and fungi put their bodies in their food. Mycelium is a really good way to do this. It's a way for fungi to immerse themselves in whatever they want to eat and then digest it from the inside. So they release digestive chemicals like enzymes or acids, digest their surroundings, and then they absorb the products of those digestive processes. It's a slightly different style of consumption, but the consequences of fungal consumption are hugely far-reaching. So many fungi are thought of as decomposing organisms.
Dana Thomas: Like for your compost.
Merlin Sheldrake: Exactly. Like compost or breaking down wood, rotting wood, which can be a real pain for people if they're trying to build wooden ships or stop their house beams from falling down, which is a hugely important thing that happens in the biosphere. If fungi didn't rot wood, then the planet would be piled kilometers deep in unrotted forests. And so decomposition is a hugely overlooked part of life on Earth. Think of it as a superpower in that we have to transform a matter from one state into another. Fungi metabolically ingenious and can digest or decompose all sorts of things from rock to crude oil. There's a fungus called the kerosene fungus, which lives in the fuel tanks of aircraft. You can imagine this causes problems.
Dana Thomas: Yes. And then you talk also about a superpower mushroom, which it's not the bloom of the underground fungi, but it's the fruit of it, right? And it sort of pokes its way up through macadam, that it has like the strength of Superman. What is that fungi?
Merlin Sheldrake: There are a few different mushrooms that can push through asphalt or lift paving stones. A pavement mushroom is one, stinkhorns are another that can crunch through asphalt. And it's because mushrooms grow by inflating with water, it's a hydraulic system. Mycelial networks can absorb water and then rapidly channel water into a precisely focused jet, into the young unexpanded mushroom. And the force of their expansion is enormous, can be enormous.
Dana Thomas: And it's true that they do expand with rain. We collect and hunt for mushrooms in the south of France. We have girolles, we have cèpes, we have trompette de la mort. And for the last two falls, after long hot summers and a drought during the springtime, we've had no mushrooms, because it has not rained. And we always keep saying, we need rain, we need rain if we're going to get any mushrooms. That brings me to the climate change question, because for me, there is a very obvious impact of global warming, which is drought, and therefore no mushrooms in the forest where we used to have mushrooms. How else has the climate crisis attacked fungi? You call fungi the global blind spot of the climate crisis. Why is that?
Merlin Sheldrake: So the first part of the question, how has climate change affected fungi, or indeed you might say, how might it affect fungi in the future? And there are lots of ways to think about this. Fungi are everywhere. They grow wherever plants grow because most plants depend on fungi that live in their roots or in their shoots and leaves. There are fungi that when you have a stressed forest or you have plants that are being destroyed in deforestation, or plants that are unable to migrate because of fragmentation, the fungi that associate with those plants will become threatened just as well as the plants are threatened. You'll also have fungi which are able to thrive in disturbed habitats, that break down wood of dying forests. So if you have a climate change-induced die-off of a large area of forest, that will be a huge opportunity for another set of fungi to come in and do their thing. There are other fungal pathogens that are able to move into new areas because of climate change and find whole new sources of food. And also there are large swathes of the world where desertification is a huge problem where soils are turning to dust through mismanagement. And in those situations then the soil fungi are being routed because their habitats are being destroyed. So there are lots of different ways.
Dana Thomas: And the destruction comes from things like industrial agriculture, and basically like the chemical warfare of industrial agriculture, spreading defoliants and pesticides and herbicides. And then also you talk about logging and deforestation, the clearing of forest for cattle and for grazing. And we need forests in order to have the moisture and the humidity to grow fungi, and nurture this underground network?
Merlin Sheldrake: That's right. When we destroy forest, we destroy the habitat for all sorts of organisms, fungi included. And industrial agricultural practices are hugely damaging to all sorts of aspects of the biosphere, not just for fungi, but fungi are disrupted by these huge applications of synthetic fertilizers, by herbicides, by various different types of pesticide and, of course, by fungicides which were applied liberally and wreak all sorts of havoc. So by plowing through mismanagement of soil so that the soil erosion and much of modern industrial agriculture arose in the mid 20th century without really thinking much about the life in the soil. And that was a terrible mistake, it turns out.
Dana Thomas: Does regenerative farming help the fungi underground, the ones that we don't see? Is it helping build back these broken networks, like we're building back the coral in the seas?
Merlin Sheldrake: On the whole, yes. Because you are disturbing the soil much less. And much of the regenerative agricultural shift is concerned with life in the soil and has a set of practices which are designed to minimize disruption to the networks of organisms, to the soil food webs, which support so much of the life around us.
Dana Thomas: And then fungi can also do good things in helping us fight climate change and the poisoning of the planet. Like, it breaks down pollutants from crude oil spills or — I think you even wrote in your book that it can help clean up nuclear waste sites like Chernobyl, right?
Merlin Sheldrake: So fungi are hugely important allies for humans in this time of transformation and crisis in so many ways. Whether we are harnessing their metabolisms to help us remediate the toxic oversights, like pollution as you say, or oil spills or other types of pollution, it's not straightforward though, because fungi, they may be able to break down some pollutant or they might be able to bind to a heavy metal in a way that stops it from continuing its journey through the ecosystem, but it's not that you can't just drop a parachute of fungus into a polluted site and expect it just to solve the problem. Fungi participate in ecosystems, and you need to take an ecosystem approach when you are doing this kind of remediation. It remains very underfunded, but a field of huge potential. Cause we've recruited fungi to break things down for us for an unknowably long time.
Merlin Sheldrake: When we make alcohol, we are recruiting yeast, which are fungi, to break down sugar and turn into alcohol. When we are making miso or soy sauce, we're recruiting another type of fungus to break down pulses or grains. And so we are used to this concept. The question is, can we expand and deepen it to deal with some of these more modern challenges. And so that's one way. Of course, whenever we grow plants, we are also cultivating fungi. And there are lots of ways, as we discussed it, you can think more about fungal relationships when cultivating plants, which brings all sorts of benefits. But there are also new materials we can make from fungi.
Dana Thomas: Well, that's the next thing I was gonna ask you about. Let's talk about fashion for a moment. I've written a lot for British Vogue and in my book Fashionopolis about my mycelium being used to make a leather-like material. And I just went to an exhibition last week at Saint Martins in London where Bolt Threads, the Silicon Valley startup tech firm was displaying pieces that they have made with mycelium leather-like material for Stella McCartney, and for Ganni, and for Lululemon. And I know that other brands like Balenciaga and Hermès are doing the same with other mycelium tech firms. First of all, can you explain how this works, that we're taking mycelium, which is, I mean they describe it to me as the root structure of mushrooms. Is that a simplistic way of describing it? Or what's the best way to describe mycelium for those of us who don't have our PhDs in fungi?
Merlin Sheldrake: I personally wouldn't say root.
Dana Thomas: It's a network.
Merlin Sheldrake: It's a plant word that I can see why one would use it if one wants to communicate the idea very quickly. But I think mycelium is more like a tree. Mushrooms are more like fruits on that tree. But these are all vegetal metaphors and it can only get us so far. Mycelium is just the way that most fungi live most of their lives.
Dana Thomas: So how does this leather-like material work? Do you know how they make it with the fungi? With mycelium?
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, I think there are different approaches, but broadly speaking, mycelial networks, fungi and their mycelial state, they're weaving themselves into relation with themselves. So you can think about them as felting themselves, as weaving themselves. So can you persuade the mycelium to grow into a kind of tangle, in sheets? And then can you treat that tangle in certain ways that make it into a good material? Some companies, they just get the sheets of mycelium and treat them as a whole sheet of mycelium and tan them and do downstream processing to them, and others, they grind them up like how you make paper, you use these wood fibers, which you then re-aggregate into a paper. Other approaches to do that with these mycelial networks, both of them harness the ability of fungi to weave themselves into relation with themselves.
Dana Thomas: And it's biodegradable?
Merlin Sheldrake: Absolutely. It's one of the great advantages, and also grows quickly and grows quickly on agricultural waste. So you are harnessing a waste stream. You are growing your leather-like material in a matter of weeks on stuff that would otherwise be thrown away.
Dana Thomas: Trash.
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah. There's so many wins here. It's a win for the waste producer because they have someone who can take the waste off their hand. It's a win for the mycelial leather producer. That's also a win for the fungus because in yet another way, they've persuaded humans to divert vast quantities of food into their hungry, waiting appetites.
Dana Thomas: And I guess the animals that are usually killed for their skins think it's a win too?
Merlin Sheldrake: Oh yeah, of course. It's a win for all of the animals which should otherwise be killed. And then a win for all of those ecosystems which would have been grazed by those animals or rather save the forest that might have been cut down to those animals to graze.
Dana Thomas: So it's a win all the way around.
Merlin Sheldrake: So far, humans have a knack for creating problems. I can't speak to the chemical processing that might happen to these products before they come to market, and all the rest. So there's opportunities to make problems, of course. I'm not saying that those opportunities are being taken.
Dana Thomas: Of course.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency, from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and its select stores.
If you are enjoying this episode, check out my interview with Willow Defebaugh, the editor-in-chief of Atmos, a luxurious biannual magazine and engaging website dedicated to the intersection of climate and culture.
Willow Defebaugh: I did this interview with the musician Grimes recently, and we were talking about her album, Miss Anthropocene, and the whole concept behind the album was turning climate change into a villain. And I didn't understand the whole concept behind it completely until this conversation, but what she shared was that she thinks that climate is so difficult for us to surmount because we don't have visibility around the villain. People love to have a clear villain, right? We love in stories where there's these iconic figures, superhero films, all of those things. But most of the villains when we talk about the climate crisis are men in suits, who we can't necessarily name. And so that invisibility is like part of their superpower, that's kind of how she put it.
Dana Thomas: Let’s return to my interview with Merlin Sheldrake, a British biologist and author of a science-driven memoir called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds and Change Our Minds and Shape our Futures.
Now, how did you get into the fungal world? What drew you into it? At what age did you start studying or playing around with or hunting for fungi? And why?
Merlin Sheldrake: My father's a biologist, and me and my brother were always encouraged to take an interest in the other lives unfolding around us. And fungi were something that erupted into my life in the form of mushrooms, which I've always found compelling. And also a concern that I had from a relatively young age with decomposition, because of composting, I would take out buckets of food waste into the compost heap, and after a few months that would turn into soil. And this always struck me as amazing. I would watch logs turn into soil over time. And it was explained to me that this was a process called decomposition, which was overseen by invisibly small organisms. And I became concerned with those invisibly small organisms, which seemed to have such vast power, and yet remain out of sight, and that seemed to me like a strange thing. That's when I was younger. These were sort of things that would preoccupy me in my goings about. But I didn't study fungi formally until much later when I was at university and I started to study mycorrhizal fungi, the fungi that live in and around plant roots.
Dana Thomas: And you were a trailblazer in this area, right? Was this a major already at the school or were you kind of helping create the curriculum?
Merlin Sheldrake: The field is full of wonderful gifted researchers who I've ever learned a huge amount from. And so I apprenticed myself with those who are older and wiser and have been doing this for some time. And I really started this when I was doing my PhD, and when I was at that stage, it was touched on in undergraduate degrees, but in a fairly transient way. And so I really could sink my teeth in when I was doing research on this as a graduate student.
Dana Thomas: And you went to Panama for your research? Why?
Merlin Sheldrake: I was interested in tropical ecology, and there are so many more ways to be alive in the tropics than there are in temperate systems, generally speaking. They're fascinating places to be a biologist. And in Panama, there's a research institute, rather, called the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. It's a branch of the Smithsonian. And they have amazing facilities where you can be in the forest, in a tropical forest and you can be back to a lab with liquid nitrogen, with minus 80 freezers, with microscopes, within half an hour. And so there's lots of work that you can do there that you just can't do in other more remote parts of the tropics. And so I was there primarily for that reason. But also, one of the other amazing things about this place was the community of researchers there, the people who had passed through all sorts of wild and fascinating field biologists and ecologists, studying every aspect of the forest and of the waters around there indeed.
Dana Thomas: And you dug around in the earth with your trowel and you dug up and sniffed and snuffled and got all dirty, and what did you find?
Merlin Sheldrake: So I was really interested in the way that these fungal networks, these mycelial networks that have symbiotic trading relationships with plants, mycorrhizal networks, that you can have one network that connects more than one plant together. This is sometimes affectionately called the wood wide web.
Dana Thomas: I love that. The wood wide web.
Merlin Sheldrake: I was fascinated by this and particularly by some plants which had lost the ability to photosynthesize. Most plants are green, they have leaves, they photosynthesize, which is a way of making energy from light and carbon dioxide in the air. But the plants that I was looking at, they'd lost their green color. They were a pale white, very spindly little stalks with bright blue compelling flowers. They were form of gentian, and they had no leaves.
Dana Thomas: Almost like they were anemic.
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah, I mean you could say anemic. I thought they were hugely charismatic myself. But some of my friends would tease me for studying these anemic, small flowers. And in some sense they are. They lack a crucial pigmented substance that allows them to conduct a basic metabolic process, as those with anemia or so they're in the similar position in an animal context. The way that they survive, they can't photosynthesize, they can't acquire their own nutrients. So the way they survive is by plugging into mycorrhizal fungal networks and obtaining their energy and their nutrition through the fungal network from other plants. So whatever comes into the body of one of these plants, most of it's come from another plant, through a fungal network and then into it. And so they're fascinating. I would think of them as periscopes into the underground as indicators that could tell me something about what was going on underground. And if I could look at where they did grow, where they didn't grow, who else was growing there, what their nutrient conditions were like in the soil, I hoped to be able to build up some kind of understanding about how these mycorrhizal networks were behaving.
Dana Thomas: While you discovered all sorts of things, you did get stuck on some of your research and you just couldn't unknot some of the things you wanted to figure out. So you took part in a clinical trial for LSD, the idea of it was to unlock your mind to solve fungi questions that you had. Tell us about that.
Merlin Sheldrake: It was was a clinical study taking place in hospitals in England. And it had been set up to see if LSD could improve the problem-solving abilities of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. And so I brought to it, as a fungal scientist, I brought to it my fungal problems. And...
Dana Thomas: Because fungus help create LSD as well, right? There's fungi in LSD?
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, it's more like the LSD was isolated from a compound, which itself had been isolated from a fungus. Albert Hoffman had been studying the compounds produced by ergot fungi, which is an infection of serial crops. And he was trying to find new obstetric drugs because ergot had been used by midwives and herb wives for a very, very long time to stop postpartum bleeding and to induce uterine contractions. So in the search for an obstetric drug, he stumbled across LSD. These days, LSD isn't made from a fungus, but it has its origin there in human culture. But it was a fascinating experience. I can't say that I solved my fungal problems, but I certainly learned to imagine–I certainly learned to imagine the problems in new ways, to approach a familiar problem from a new angle. When the familiar can be rendered unfamiliar again, all sorts of, I find, helpful things happen to the way we think and perceive.
Dana Thomas: And tell us about the process. You took the LSD in this very controlled setting, in a hospital or a clinic of some sort, right? And then you had somebody saying, "Okay, now think about fungi"?
Merlin Sheldrake: I was in a hospital room which had been decorated to make it less clinical. There were questionnaires I had to complete, psychometric questionnaires which tried to quantify my subjective state. And it's obviously an impossible task. Now, how can you look as a scientist from the outside, objectively at a subjective experience? There's a wonderful paradox in there. And these questionnaires were very funny. I mean these psychedelic experiences can be unruly. But then I'd be confronted with a questionnaire that would ask me, one of the questions was, "How do you rate your experience of infinity?" And I found myself in fits of hysterical laughter at this question, which I had to contend with multiple times over the course. Presumably I gave some number, but it never stopped being preposterous.
Dana Thomas: Then you had somebody say, after you took the LSD in this non-clinical hospital room: "Now think about fungi."
Merlin Sheldrake: So I was invited to think about what they call the work-related problem.
Dana Thomas: And you heard it, you were aware and clicked in and said, "Right, let's get to work."
Merlin Sheldrake: Oh yeah, exactly. So then I thought, well maybe I should now think about my work-related problem. And so I did; a rather powerful experience of thinking about life in the soil, and this hugely busy place and really taking on board and experiencing some kind of hecticness, a Wild West or alternative, some kind of wild party of all these different organisms going about their business, doing their things in the states of incredible flux. And all these creatures being such weirdos from our perspective. These are highly unusual beings, from tiny animals to fungi of all sorts, to bacteria, to endless other single-cell beings that if we could see blown up to our size, it would shock us to say the least. So I had an experience with the soil, it was this very busy place, and it felt a bit like being a fungus, at least what I thought being a fungus might be like. Because of course I don't know what it's like to be a fungus. But it was very helpful for the soil to be animated in this way. Because normally as soil scientists, we talk about the soil quite clinical, remote terms full of numbers and measurements. And we forget that this place is heaving with uncountable lives that we still struggle to understand.
Dana Thomas: Merlin, I want see the animated version of this, sort of your fungi "Fantasia" eventually, I want you to put this up on the screen for us cause it sounds fantastic. Now, since we are deep in the season of truffles, let's talk about truffles, which are fungi as well, right?
Merlin Sheldrake: Yeah. So truffles are the reproductive structures, the equivalent of mushrooms produced by a range of different fungi. So there are all sorts of fungal lineages that produce truffles. But the thing that really defines truffles is that they're kind of lumpy-looking things. They live underground.
Dana Thomas: They're deeply underground. I was amazed when I read the book how deep underground they are. That's not like my tulip bulbs. You have to go down, right?
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, it depends on the truffles. Some of them are quite close to the surface. But others you definitely have to dig down to find. So there's a place where the fungus produces spores, the things that the fungus uses to disperse itself, the things a bit like seeds. And it's a funny way to do so because underground they're unavailable to wind, other kinds of current, or flows of water. They're not immediately obvious to animals either. So how are those spores going to travel from one place to another? It's a kind of riddle when you think about it like that. But it stops being a riddle when you realize that these truffle fungi have evolved a brilliant way to deal with the problem, and which is to produce pungent odors. These pungent odors are so penetrating that they can rise up through 20 centimeters of damp soil, enter the air, travel through the air in a forest, and stand out against the olfactory, hubbub, the chemical babel of a forest to catch the attention of an animal and persuade the animal to drop whatever it's doing and to follow the scent trail, and then go and dig up this fungus.
Merlin Sheldrake: So they've evolved to be totally ingenious producers of irresistible smells from an animal point of view.
Dana Thomas: Now, hunters have long used pigs, but I read in your book that they prefer to use dogs instead of pigs. And why is that? I'd love the reasoning, tell us.
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, pigs are very good at finding truffles, but they're a little harder to train, and they tend to eat what they find. There are hilarious pictures...
Dana Thomas: Which is probably the most maddening thing you've seen, right?
Merlin Sheldrake: I mean, you can imagine if...
Dana Thomas: You found the mama of all truffles and *gulp*, down it went.
Merlin Sheldrake: Exactly. I guess you have a happy pig then might want to go and find more truffles. But there are great pictures of paintings, engravings of truffle pigs on the hunt in France in the 19th century, wearing muzzles, so they can smell through the muzzle, but they can't eat the truffle. So dogs are easier to train, although the hungry dog would also eat the truffle. So, depending on how you train your dogs, you will encounter the same problem. But I think it's easier to avoid the problem when you have a dog.
Dana Thomas: Right? And they really dig, they dig deep to find them. I saw in the book, there was one point where the truffle hunter said, "Oh, I should really put little mittens on the dog's paws. He's destroying his paws by digging so deep." And a lot of times there fakeouts, aren't there? Where they dig and dig and dig, where the dog is sure they found a truffle and then there's nothing.
Merlin Sheldrake: Well sometimes there are dogs who are attracted to other things, other compelling odors in the forest and sometimes they dig and they can't find it. Maybe it's too deep. Sometimes they dig and maybe there's just a very small truffle, or sometimes it's where a truffle might have been. Or sometimes the human truffle hunter is misreading or unable to read the dog's body language correctly. So there are all sorts of ways that it can not lead to the discovery of a fine truffle as well.
Dana Thomas: Well, we have loads of wild pigs, wild boar around our place in the south of France and they do dig under trees. Should I be paying attention where they're digging?
Merlin Sheldrake: You could do. I think they like to rootle around...
Dana Thomas: Because I hear we have truffles in our forest, so I should just, instead of cursing the pigs, I should be studying the pigs.
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, that's one way to think about it. And they rootle around for all sorts of food or there are other things they're digging out besides truffles. But at this time of year, there would be a decent chance if you followed the pigs and dug where they dug. Although by the time you got there, they might have eaten all the truffles.
Dana Thomas: They might have scarfed it all down. So tell us, what are your favorite fungi?
Merlin Sheldrake: I'm so bad with favorites, I always have been. But I love mycorrhizal fungi. There's so many ways to be a mycorrhizal fungus
Dana Thomas: Because?
Merlin Sheldrake: Well, they just underpin so much of life on Earth. The green vegetation around you is a visible outgrowth of mycorrhizal relationships. And these are fungi which enabled the ancestors of plants to move onto the land in the first place. They hold the soil together. They are such enormously important creatures and it's such a key to understanding the planet on which we live.
Dana Thomas: And if I take you to the market in Paris, which mushrooms will you pick out for our supper?
Merlin Sheldrake: Probably mycorrhizal mushrooms. So truffles, porcini, chanterelle. These are, mycorrhizal fungi, reproductive structures of mycorrhizal fungi.
Dana Thomas: The yummy ones.
Merlin Sheldrake: Um humm. Difficult to cultivate.
Dana Thomas: You say that conservation groups often call for saving flora and fauna, but you believe there should be a third f in the mix—fungi. So why do you say that? And do you think you're going to get that to happen?
Merlin Sheldrake: From a policy or decision-maker point-of-view, if something's not threatened, then there's nothing to protect. And so if we don't start to include fungi within our conservation frameworks, they won't get the protection that they need. And so there'll be another blind spot, another way for us to bring about a destruction and extinction. There are lots of good reasons for thinking about fungi from a conservation point-of-view. If you are conserving the fungi of a given area, given region, then the chances are you'll also be conserving the vegetation and the animals of that given region too, because it's the fungi that...
Dana Thomas: It's all of a piece.
Merlin Sheldrake: It's all of a piece. It also is very important in unlocking funds for education and for research. There are lots of knock-on effects. And the second part of your question, yes, I think there are lots of wins to be had here. I work on this project with my friend and colleague, Giuliana Furci, who started the Fungi Foundation, based out of Chile and has now gone international. And they had extraordinary success in Chile with now the Chilean government, they passed a law, which means that when anyone's doing an environmental impact assessment, so when anyone's doing a development, they have to assess the fungi of a given area. They have to include fungi within their environmental impact assessments, which is a big win.
Dana Thomas: That's definitely a move forward. Yeah, absolutely.
Merlin Sheldrake: I'm optimistic, in short.
Dana Thomas: We always try to give listeners something that they can do because we want to not just be lecturing, but involve people in any way. We call this the Podcast of Hope and part of the hope is that we all get involved somehow and do our own little thing. And it adds up to big, big conservation and progress. So what can listeners do on the fungal front as individuals?
Merlin Sheldrake: You can let things rot. You can not be so tidy in your garden. Leave piles of wood, piles of leaves, not need to clean everything up all the time, because in these rotting zones all sorts of life takes place and very busy, exciting places, if one chooses to see it like that, one can cultivate one's garden or whatever you are cultivating, using fewer chemical inputs, you can...
Dana Thomas: And use compost.
Merlin Sheldrake: Do composting, exactly. You can start get into composting, which is an exciting and very satisfying thing to do. You can grow mushrooms in your home using mushroom grow kits. That's a really exciting way into fungal life. Something I'd recommend, and delicious. And also try new types of gourmet mushrooms. Go to markets or supermarkets and taste some ones that you haven't tasted before, and explore them in their wild flavors and textures. And from a gastronomic point of view, that's something which is always exciting.
Dana Thomas: Though, if you do go mushrooming, do be careful and take your guide with you and ... One mushroomer explained to me, always keep your mushrooms that you collect separate from the others in case one is poisonous. Because if one's poisonous, it will poison all of them and you have to throw them all away. So compartmentalize your fungi when you are mushrooming. That's the one thing I learned.
Merlin Sheldrake: I think the main thing is just to never eat anything that you haven't identified. It's called a positive identification—that you know it's species X rather than, "Well it's not species A and it's not species B, so it might be species X." That's what you call negative identification. But a positive identification is when you, "No, I know that. It's that species and I know that species is safe."
Dana Thomas: Well, thank you so much Merlin for joining us. This is fantastic and great advice as well. So much information, so much knowledge about fungi you have, it's fantastic. I can't recommend enough your book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds and Change Our Minds and Shape our Futures. Is there another one coming? Should we be looking for a follow-up?
Merlin Sheldrake: Not anytime soon.
Dana Thomas: You're just gonna keep studying the fungi instead.
Merlin Sheldrake: There's so many other things to do for the time being.
Dana Thomas: Thank you so much.
Merlin Sheldrake: Of course. Thanks for having me.
Dana Thomas: Rolls-Royce has always been known for its hefty design, from its voluminous body to its 12-cylinder engine. It’s a real gas guzzler. Or at least it was. As our regular contributor Hannah Elliott, luxury car writer for Bloomberg Pursuits, tells us, a new environmentally conscious era is beginning at Rolls-Royce with the debut of the Spectre EV.
Hannah Elliott: Rolls-Royce has completed the first step toward fulfilling its promise to sell only electric vehicles by 2030. On Oct. 18, it unveiled the all-electric Spectre at company headquarters in Goodwood, England
“This is not a kind of one-hit wonder and then we go back to the 12-cylinder, that’s not the idea,” says Torsten Müller-Ötvös, the CEO of Rolls-Royce. “The idea is we go electric by the end of 2030, step by step by step by step.”
Müller-Ötvös declined to specify how much money the company has plunged into the all-new production iteration of the EV that it began testing as far back as 2011, though he says the Spectre would provide as healthy a profit margin as those amply generated by Rolls-Royce’s Phantom and Ghost sedans.
“We want to stay in that league of profitability we are in, and we are nicely profitable,” he says. “That’s the way forward.”
The announcement gives Rolls-Royce a strong first statement among the ultra-luxury set. In January, Bentley announced it would spend $3.4 billion to produce five all-electric vehicles beginning in 2025 and switch to an entirely electric portfolio by 2030. With the Spectre, Rolls-Royce beats its archrival in bringing the first all-electric ultra-luxury model to market.
Similar in look and size to the two-door Rolls-Royce Wraith but larger, and on the same all-aluminum architecture that underpins the flagship Phantom sedan and midsize Ghost sedan, the Spectre produces 577 horsepower and 664 pound-feet of torque. It has a zero-to-60 mph sprint time of 4.4 seconds and a top speed of 155 mph, roughly equal to that of the Ghost but far slower than the roughly three seconds claimed by the faster—and far less luxurious—variants of the Porsche Taycan or Tesla Model S. Total driving range under electric power is 260 miles, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates; Spectre will be able to charge from 10-80% full in 34 minutes. Müller-Ötvös noted that the vast majority of Rolls-Royce owners will never use a public charging station.
“Most of our clients have an electric car in the garage,” he says. “On average, they have seven cars, and many have charging at home. They also have charging in their offices."
The two-door coupe uses a highly sensitive suspension system that can decouple the car’s anti-roll bars to allow each wheel to act independently, preventing the rocking motion that occurs when one side of a vehicle hits an undulation in the road. This also reduces high-frequency sounds caused by poor road-surface quality and it helps preserve the marque’s reputation for producing the quietest, smoothest vehicles on the market. All told, more than 1,500 pounds’ worth of sound-deadening equipment helps push the car’s total weight to 6,559 pounds.
Set on 23-inch wheels and with a fastback body style, the Spectre is longer and heavier than the Wraith and it harkens back to the Phantom coupe that Rolls-Royce produced from 2008 to 2016. (It doesn’t have a trunk in the front, as do many lesser EVs, such as those from Lucid and Tesla. The space under the hood is occupied by battery-electric systems and fluid containers for the windshield wipers.)
It has the widest grille ever bestowed on a Rolls-Royce, illuminated with 22 LEDs lighting up the sandblasted rear side of each of its vanes. A redesigned Spirit of Ecstasy figurehead on the hood comes crouched, yoga-like, lower than its predecessor, with her head tilted higher and wings flattened into a more active pose. The cabin comes with doors newly illuminated by 5,876 tiny light points made to resemble the starry sky — a continuation of the signature effect that Rolls-Royce has long produced on its vehicles’ ceilings. All-new front seats are inspired by British tailoring; they offer lapel sections that can be rendered in contrasting or matching colors to the main base. In the debut model, a chartreuse-and-black two-tone paint job follows the top hood of the car over the roofline to the rear trunk, completing the new coupe’s bolder look. The dual-color effect is optional among more than 44,000 available color combinations — but it is recommended by Rolls-Royce brass, since it accentuates the seamless curves that run the length of the vehicle.
The Spectre takes its name from the deep recesses of Rolls-Royce history. In 1910 the brand built a demonstration car called the Silver Spectre. By 1936 it had made nine experimental cars code-named Spectre before the model entered production under the official name of Phantom III. This is the first time the moniker has been given to a series production Rolls-Royce.
It’s been a long time coming. Rolls-Royce had for years approached the electric-vehicle proposition with some trepidation, even though co-founder Charles Rolls predicted in 1900 that the new motorized carriages of the day would eventually run under electric power, according to company records.
But parent group BMW AG has left no doubt where all of its brands must go. Last year the company introduced its first-ever all-electric iX SUV and all-electric i4 sedan. The manufacturer has reported that its battery cell orders have exceeded $24 billion to keep pace with surging demand for electric cars. During the first half of 2021, EVs contributed 11% of deliveries across BMW Group. In a roundtable discussion Oct. 17, BMW AG Chairman Oliver Zipse said he anticipated that by 2030, half00 of all vehicles sold across the group would be electric.
Pricing for the Spectre will be roughly $400,000. More than 300 clients have already been specially invited to see the car, with overwhelmingly positive results.
“The order intake so far is very, very delightful — and very encouraging,” Müller-Ötvös says.
Deliveries begin in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Dana Thomas: The Green Dream returns in two weeks with American chef and farmer Dan Barber. He’ll talk about his New York Times-bestselling book, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, as well as his eco-revolution at the nonprofit farm Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture in upstate New York, where good farming and good food intersect. And he’ll share with us some tips on how to cook a green-minded Thanksgiving dinner. I hope you’ll join us.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency, from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City and its select stores.
This episode of The Green Dream was written by Dana Thomas. From Talkbox Productions, with executive producer Tavia Gilbert, with mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Music performed by Eric Brace of Red Beet Records in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Dana Thomas, the European sustainability editor for British Vogue. You can read my monthly column, also called The Green Dream, in the magazine or online at vogue.co.uk. You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter where my handle for both is @Danathomasparis. Thank you for listening.