Tag Archive for: biology

ENTANGLED LIFE | MERLIN SHELDRAKE

Neither animal, plant or mineral, fungi are the mysterious underpinning of our world — almost literally so, because 90% of plants depend on fungi and their mycelial networks in order to grow. Sheldrake’s gorgeously-written account teems with mind-altering and perspective-shifting facts. Who knew that the world’s largest living organism is a gigantic fungus that lives underground in Oregon, or that fungi can eat up oil spills and enrich soil for farmers?  But while Sheldrake celebrates the regenerative and restorative properties of fungi, perhaps their most fascinating application is their ability to alter our cognition — and even ourselves.

“These organisms make questions of our categories, and thinking about them makes the world look different,” he writes. The decentralised organisational system of fungi’s mycelial networks is one of humming, constant aliveness, he argues, begging the question: is it really possible to be an individual in ecology? Sheldrake believes that fungi offer us a radical re-understanding of the world —  including new imaginings of embodied interconnectedness. His enthralling and beautifully woven book provides a fresh and inspiring perspective on fungi that will captivate lay readers, and reinvigorate any ecological activist.

  • Cailey Rizzo
,

Garden Physic | Sylvia Legris

Garden Physic is a radical poetic movement through plant life. With her singular line, Sylvia Legris journeys readers through an investigation of how we articulate our ecological surrounds in language through botanical histories.

With a structure that emulates the style of classic manuscripts, Legris’s book deploys humour, deep intellect, and a fanatical obsession with the potential of language, punching through the cliches of contemporary nature writing. A brief snapshot:

‘how to write about flowers without the nauseating sentimental phraseology?
No quaint, no dainty, no winsome. This smells good, that smells bad, my hands
rank with manure. This at least is pure.’

The whole book is a glorious meditation on the garden and the power of plants: how they can heal us, emotionally and physically, and how we communicate with them.

,

The European Eel | Steve Ely

‘These eels were born in a continent of ocean
​and their parents carried into that vastness
​on mindless, reliable, pot-luck currents
​from Iceland, Belgium, Tunisia, Spain.’

​The European Eel is a long poem that imagines the life cycle, ecological contexts and ​enigma of the charismatic and critically endangered fish of the poem’s title. Based on Ely’s in-depth engagement with the scientific literature, discussions with leading eel researchers and conservationists, and hands-on experience with the eel in river systems across the country and abroad, ​The European Eel is unique not only in its sustained birth-to-death focus on the eel, but in the vivid way the eel’s riverine and marine habitats are evoked and articulated—and in its portrayal of the daunting array of anthropogenic threats that are currently threatening this once common species with extinction. Although a poem first and foremost—an Expressionistic epic monology that transforms its natural history into a quasi-gnostic affirmation of the persistence of life in the context of the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction—the poem’s rootedness in research enables it to transcend its status as art to function as a credible piece of informed nature writing capable of shaping ecological debate. Seventeen pages of illustrations by the award-winning artist P.R. Ruby complement and interpret the text, and detailed notes provide context that further opens up the astonishing world of the European eel.

‘Steve’s research of the eel’s complex life history is reflected in this incredible long-form poem – anything shorter would not have done this fish justice.’  ~ Dr Matthew Gollock, Marine and Freshwater Senior Programme Manager, Zoological Society of London.

Source: London Review of Books

Life Without Air | Daisy Lafarge

When Louis Pasteur observed the process of fermentation, he noted that, while most organisms perished from lack of oxygen, some were able to thrive as ‘life without air’. In this capricious, dreamlike collection, characters and scenes traverse states of airlessness, from suffocating relationships and institutions, to toxic environments and ecstatic asphyxiations. Both compassionate and ecologically nuanced, this innovative collection bridges poetry and prose to interrogate the conditions necessary for survival.