I just finished reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book on mycelia. I didn’t read it for months because my daughter (a PhD in biology) kept recommending it and I kept saying, “I knew him, I don’t need to read it.” I was wrong. I knew his father in hippy days as everyone did, Rupert Sheldrake.
The book is excellent and easy to read. Merlin, like his father, is a little grandiose and has a slight tendency to exaggerate. I’m not complaining, I do it myself. Mycelium are terribly under appreciated.
I am a mycelia fanatic. I love an organism that was not recognized as its own phyla until I was 25 years old and still doesn’t fit into the Linnaean categories. Like I love pointing out that medicine was mostly wives’ tales until I was born before WWII when penicillin was first used. Penicillin comes from mycelia so the two issues are related.
Merlin Sheldrake likes to focus on many of the problems in our understanding and thinking about mycelia. I enjoy that about his book.
The whole biological sphere has a problem. Fungi can’t get energy directly from the sun, and green plants that do so through photosynthesis, can’t get many vital chemicals such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the air or the soil. The relationship between mycelia and plants that allows the plants to get the vital chemicals to exist and the mycelia to get the energy (sugars) to exist has the wrong name.
The name for this exchange is generally called parasitism. But that is definitely wrong because there is a symbiosis, both giant categories need the other. There is a mutually beneficial exchange that takes place. Sheldrake makes that clear; he also points out that biology is deficient in words to explain the mutual dependence that takes place.
This is where the word ‘commerce’ is needed. What takes place between the mycelia and plants is a mutually beneficial exchange. The very definition of ‘commerce.’ It is biological commerce.
Commerce is the right word but most people don’t understand the common use of the word. Commerce is always mutually beneficial. One of the few human endeavors that is mutually beneficial.
Commerce is 99.4% cooperation. Go to any commercial establishment and see that it only works because everyone cooperates. Not just everyone who is visible, but also the suppliers, the whole supply chain, the advisors, the consultants, the outside workers and the landlords. The 0.6% consists of the government agencies that represent all the present and past hostile forces to the healthy thriving of the commerce and to some extent people who believe they are more suited to supply the clients, often called competitors.
When we truly understand the unique attributes of commerce, what it really is, we will appreciate this greatest of all god’s gifts and we will be able to apply it to biology.