32: The Secret Lives of Plants and Fungi with Merlin Sheldrake and Zoë Schlanger

If we understood the true complexity of the natural world, would we call it conscious? Would we begin to question the boundaries we put between ourselves and everything around us?

We explore these questions with biologist Merlin Sheldrake and science journalist Zoë Schlanger. Their bestselling books, "Entangled Life" and "The Light Eaters", required monk-like study and deep immersion in the natural world. What they discovered quietly dismantles some of our most basic assumptions about intelligence, memory, and what individuality really means.

Recorded during Harvard Divinity School's "Thinking with Plants and Fungi" conference, this special episode brings together Merlin, Zoë, host Elizabeth Rovere, and guest co-host Rachael Peterson, the "Thinking with Plants and Fungi" Initiative Program Lead at Harvard, to explore:

✦ Whether plants have personalities and why they might be kinder to kin

✦ How a brainless slime mold can navigate its way out of an IKEA faster than a human

✦ How flatworms put into question where memory actually lives

✦ Whether it's possible to ferment a book and drink it

When we stop centering the individual and truly reckon with the entangled nature of all living things, something shifts. The question stops being how do we include more-than-human perspectives… it starts being whether that separation even makes sense to begin with.

Chapters:

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:10 How to Write About the Hidden World

00:04:45 The Myth of the Individual