Thinking (and learning) with Plants and Fungi

Long summer days offer more time for reading, and the newest addition to our summer reading list is Thinking with Plants and Fungi - Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World (2026).

With the warm weather bringing us increasingly outdoors, we’re sure to have more encounters with vegetative life: close encounters with a fragrant rose, scratches from tall blades of grass, gusts of wind carrying clouds of pollen. With such lush summer surroundings, vegetative life easily evokes ideas of beauty and nourishment, like a fruit-bearing tree teaching us that sacrifice is a law of life. The profound lessons of the vegetal world bring a sense of wonder at the mere idea of a plant cell feeding on rays of light to grow organic form.

Thinking with Plants and Fungi asks us to look to our natural surroundings for even deeper teachings, inviting us to examine vegetal and fungal life as entities that can challenge dominant models of consciousness, community, and ecological care. Building on a landmark 2025 conference and years of interdisciplinary collaboration at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, this newly published volume examines the entanglements of mind and matter, nature and culture, human and more-than-human. Essays investigate topics including plant neurobiology, philosophy, decolonial botany, fungal ethics, and the poetics of sessility. Thinking with Plants and Fungi models a transformative form of inquiry for an age of ecological crisis.

The publication serves as a collective effort to help us rethink the nature of mind and matter, and to reassess our relationship to the more-than-human world. Intelligence is a weedy wild topic to understand, but there is no greater teacher than the roots and fungal webs beneath our feet.

The book is edited by Rachael Petersen, Natalia Schwien Scott, and Russell C. Powell

With essays by Giovanni Aloi, Elaine Ayers, Emanuele Coccia, Rande Cook, Jamie Cross, Abigail Culpepper, Samira Daneshvar, Jacob J. Erickson, William (Ned) Friedman, Giuliana Furci, Monica Gagliano, Ernesto Gianoli, Joela Jacobs, Lacey Jones, Elitza Koeva, Jessica J. Lee, Michael Marder, Rebecca McMackin, Rebecca Mendoza, Sabina Cruz de la Cruz, Sión Parkinson, Zoë Schlanger, Charles M. Stang, Banu Subramaniam, Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh.