In the misty mizzle of February on the Oregon coast, Merlin Sheldrake feels at home. Though he was born and raised in London, the biologist and award-winning author of “Entangled Life” toddled his first steps in the Pacific Northwest, forest-bathing, huffing petrichor, humidified by the sea air.

For Sheldrake, observing the natural world is a complete sensory experience; when your subject matter is the mycosphere beneath our feet, there is far more there than the eye can see.

“When we talk about fungi, we’re talking about much more than mushrooms,” said Sheldrake. “Mushrooms are just the reproductive structures of some types of fungi.”

So there are lots of ways to be a fungus, just like there are lots of ways to be a plant and lots of ways to be an animal. Fungi are a kingdom, distinct from animals or plants. In fact, molecular evidence posits that fungi are more closely related to us than to plants.

What if that fungus is a truffle? Last February, Sheldrake was a special guest for the Oregon Truffle Festival at Camp Westwind in Otis.

“Truffles are underground fruiting structures. When they make a truffle under maybe 10, 20 centimeters of soil, it’s not visible to any animals. It’s not available to air currents that could help the spores to disperse,” Sheldrake said. “So truffles produce volatile, smelly, pungent chemicals that animals can smell and are drawn to — and some truffles are really delicious for humans, so humans seek them out with the help of dogs or other animals.”

Smelling a truffle, it’s easy to believe that the fungi might exist solely for indulging our hedonism, but all fungi perform a crucial role in the ecosystems they occupy, especially forests. They aid decomposition, enrich soil and improve nutrient availability through their mycorrhizal connections to the roots of the plants. Fungi even play a role in creating new land.

Sheldrake explained: “You have a lot of lichens here. They’re symbiotic organisms, which means that there’s different partners that come together to form a lichen: fungi, algae, bacteria in all sorts of combinations. And lichen can live on bare rocks. So along the coastal cliffs here, you can see lichens are some of the first things to start growing above the high tide mark.

“And these lichens are able to eat rock and they’re able to produce energy like plants do from that, from carbon dioxide and sunlight and photosynthesis. And then as these lichens start to die, they form organic material, they form young soils in which other plants can start to take root. You can think of them as real pioneer species and you can see a lot of them here in the process of doing that.”

Related: Oregon's culinary superabundance is rooted in soils that formed over billions of years 🌱

In forest ecosystems, fungi aren’t necessarily the most obvious colonizers after a disturbance like fire or logging, but their role is nonetheless significant. They colonize the roots of r-selected species like foxglove and fireweed to kick off the early stages of ecological succession. Beneath the surface, fungi sequester carbon and moisture, helping maintain the microclimate to nurture young forests as they develop. Fungi can also transform the lignin in the wood into a form other living things can digest.

When a tree falls in the woods, it doesn’t matter if it makes a sound — the cacophony of life that emerges from it will be evident for centuries after it toppled. It also doesn’t matter that it’s dead.

“In some ways, it’s more living than it ever was,” said Sheldrake, pausing to lay his hand on the mossy bark of a Sitka spruce nurse log.

Like some type of wizardry, fungi are central to the cycle of turning death into life, and Sheldrake wants the world to know — and care — more about that. Indeed, our lives are as entangled with those of fungi as the mycelial networks themselves.

Portions of the interview have been edited for clarity.

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