About 500 million years ago, when aquatic plants began to inch toward land, they couldn’t live there on their own. They enlisted fungal mycelium networks, which served as their root systems for a few tens of millions of years before they developed their own and could live independently. Still, about 90 percent of plants depend on symbiotic fungi.
But during that time, the planet was transformed: Early plants and their fungal networks helped lower the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 90 percent, enabling the conditions for life on Earth as we know it.
These days, human activities are sending atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soaring (though not quite as high as during the pre-fungal period), and scientists and other fungal enthusiasts recognize that fungi might be able to help draw down some of that carbon once again.
To Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist and author of “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures,” that is really just one of the amazing things fungi of all kinds do: as “ecosystem engineers,” and as the enablers of our very lives on this planet, whose centrality we ignore “at our peril,” he said.
