Winding through questions of philosophy, science, and meaning making, this week’s episode brings together vital thoughts on what it means to live an embodied life in an entangled world. Guest Merlin Sheldrake shares the motivations that drew him to study fungi and the complex ways this study has shaped his life and thought.
As Merlin shares, “an account of life that doesn't include fungi is an account of a living world that doesn’t exist.” Our relationship with fungi is non-negotiable. Merlin invites listeners to pay attention to what this relationship means and how it shapes not only our lives, but the entanglement of life across the world. With this, Merlin also shares the ways fungal life offers a diversity of expressions and possibilities – offering up the perspective that the diversity and complexity of relationship and expression is what makes life fertile.
Across the episode, Merlin and Ayana contemplate the history and meaning of science, and come to see life as a process and a relationship. The meaning we make does not come out of a vacuum, but rather out of relationship. Life itself, in its many forms, is improvisational. Understanding this, we are left with the provocation: How might we speak to the world, rather than about it?
Merlin is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. (merlinsheldrake.com)
Music by Matthewdavid. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.
CHUCK COLLINS on Wealth Hoarding and Capitalist Capture /340
DIANA FRIEDRICH on The Beauty and Promise of Rewilding/ 339
DR. BÁYÒ AKÓMOLÁFÉ on Ontological Mutiny /338
ABENA OFFEH-GYIMAH on Sacred Seed and Soil /337
The Edges in the Middle, IV: Báyò Akómoláfé and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
SAMANTHA ZIPPORAH on The Womb Continuum /336
ISMAIL LOURIDO ALI on Building Informed Drug Culture /335
The Edges in the Middle, III: Báyò Akómoláfé and Indy Johar
AMY WESTERVELT on Uncovering Extraction /334
ANN ARMBRECHT on Sacredness in Supply Chains /333
RACHEL CARGLE on a Renaissance of Our Own /332
KIMBERLY ANN JOHNSON on Pleasure as Pathway /331
The Edges in the Middle, II: Báyò Akómoláfé and V
JENNY ODELL on the Attention Economy [ENCORE] /330
john a. powell on Institutions of Othering and Radical Belonging [ENCORE] /329
The Edges in the Middle, I: Báyò Akómoláfé and john a. powell
TYSON YUNKAPORTA on Unbranding Our Mind [ENCORE] /328
MORGAN CURTIS on Transmuting Ancestries of Exploitation /327
GABES TORRES on Journeying Together /326
ROSEMARY GLADSTAR on Thriving Where Planted /325
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Modern West
Voices of Misery Podcast
House of Whimsical Terror
Dairyland Frights
Stuff You Should Know
Timcast IRL