From humanity’s earliest steps, fungi have been a source of trouble: they caused diseases in crops, harmed animals, and spoiled harvested food. But the problems of early agrarian civilization turned out to be child’s play compared with the powerful, seemingly invincible front fungi mounted once civilization became industrial and the world’s population began to be counted in the billions.
Thanks to advances in medicine and agriculture — and to the climate change we ourselves have driven — we have cultivated in fungi an adversary so formidable that we may have finally answered the ancient question of whether God could create a stone too heavy for Him to lift. We managed it. Today fungi not only damage agriculture and ruin harvests but have become one of the most aggressive “devourers” of human beings, claiming around 4 million lives a year.
Among other things, it has recently emerged that some pathogenic fungi are associated with cancer, attack us alongside COVID-19, disrupt brain function — even being implicated in autism — have developed resistance to every known class of drug, have learned to infect even fully immunocompetent people, and have evolved mechanisms of accelerated evolution that other organisms could never dream of. Fungi destroy everything humankind creates, poison our food, critically affect the economy, and are beginning to be used as biological weapons.
How we got here, why the WHO has begun to sound the alarm, why bananas, coffee, and amphibians may soon disappear, and what we must do to survive in the new “fungal” world — all of this is told in detail across the pages of this book by the renowned Russian mycologist Mikhail Vishnevsky. Written for the widest possible readership, it will also be of genuine interest and use to mycologists, physicians, ecologists, agronomists, and other specialists who encounter fungi in their work.
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