Source: The Times, Ben Spencer https://www.thetimes.com/culture/film/article/fungi-web-of-life-bjork-on-the-magic-of-mushrooms-g2xgwzvvm?region=global
She isn’t just a musician renowned for her eerie mystical sound — she’s fascinated by fungi.
The Icelandic pop star Björk loves to sit barefoot in the woods. In interviews she struggles to contain her delight at removing her shoes and socks and sticking her toes in the soil. “Just mmm,” she once told Pitchfork magazine. “I want to get in contact with the earth… get grounded.”
Yet it is what lies beneath the surface of soil that really interests the singer. Björk, 58, is fascinated by fungi. “Mushrooms are fun, right? They are psychedelic and bubbly and pop up all over the forest.”
Her most recent album, Fossora — made during lockdown — was an ode to the power of fungi, including tracks entitled Mycelia and Fungal City. Now she has gone one better, narrating an entire film on the mysterious fungal kingdom. Fungi: Web of Life is an IMAX documentary exploring how fungus has shaped life on Earth for more than a billion years, and scientists’ efforts to harness its unique attributes to tackle modern problems.
The film opens with Björk explaining in her trademark singsong tones how little we know about fungi.
“The living world is connected by a vast kingdom of life we are only just beginning to discover,” she says. “Sometimes they reveal themselves above ground as mushrooms. Mostly, though, they live out of sight as hidden networks which shape life on land as we know it. Fungi are the miracle workers behind so many of our foods and medicines. Yet we know so little about them.”
She explains that mycelium — the branching network of tubular cells that forms fungi’s underground presence — can stretch for miles beneath the surface. The largest fungus in the world, found in Malheur national forest in the US state of Oregon, covers an estimated 2,200 acres and is thought to be up to 8,650 years old. “If you were to stretch out all of the mycelial networks, it would span half of the width of the Milky Way galaxy,” Björk says.
And this is no static tangle. Fungi are alive: “Despite having no eyes or nose, mycelium can still sense the world, smelling chemicals, seeing light, feeling heat, even detecting electricity.”
The film is presented by the British biologist Merlin Sheldrake, and based on his bestselling book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds. About 90 per cent of plants rely on fungi to survive, he says. “By working with fungi, plants can gain greater access to nutrients for growth. In return, fungi receive food like the sugars that plants produce.”
Science has long neglected these organisms: to date only about 5 per cent of the fungal species on Earth have been scientifically described. But researchers are finally waking up to their importance.
The Björk documentary features interviews with scientists who are exploring fungi’s potential to break down plastic, provide biodegradable packaging and replacement for materials such as leather and provide medicines. After all, penicillin, arguably the most important drug discovered in the previous century, is itself a fungus.
But now innovators are going further. Eben Bayer, a co-founder of the New York tech company Ecovative, tells viewers: “My long-term dream would be to grow organs, or at least the scaffolding for organs, using mycelium.”
For now, though, ecologists are simply trying to stem the loss of these organisms. Deforestation means many species are disappearing before they are even discovered. “We risk losing entire branches of the fungal tree of life to extinction,” Björk explains. And this would have a severe impact. “Each year mycelium draws down more than five billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere which would otherwise drive climate change.”
It is not just Björk and Sheldrake who are fascinated by fungi. This is the latest in a wave of films: in 2019 Netflix released Fantastic Fungi and in 2021 the director Marion Neumann made The Mushroom Speaks. In 2022 the fashion designer Stella McCartney launched a range of bags and clothes inspired by fungi. They may have been ignored for years, but right now interest in fungi is mushrooming.
Fungi: Web of Life premieres at the BFI IMAX, London SE1, on Feb 3 and plays daily from Feb 9.
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