The Fungal Kingdom
The Hidden Network Beneath the World's Forests - and Why Scientists Are Racing to Understand ItBy K. Balachander
Length8h 19m
About this audiobook
The organism that built every forest on Earth is finally getting the science it deserves.
For four centuries, we looked down at the forest floor and saw nothing worth understanding. We were wrong.
Beneath every tree you have ever walked beneath, a network older than vertebrates is running - trading nutrients, routing carbon, dismantling the molecules nothing else can touch. Fungi built the soil civilizations farm. They may be the only organisms capable of repairing what those civilizations are now breaking.
The forest doesn't begin at the roots. It begins six inches below them.
This is the story of the scientists who found that out. From isotope-traced carbon flows through old-growth Douglas firs, to underground marketplace experiments revealing fungal economies that follow supply and demand, to satellite-mapped mycelium networks threading the Amazon floor - the science assembled over the last three decades has forced a complete reclassification of what fungi are and what they do.
Audiobook details
GenreScience and Nature
Length8 hrs 19 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateMay 17, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Dedication
2Acknowledgments
3Chapter 1: The Demoted Kingdom
4Chapter 2: The Wood Wide Web
5Chapter 3: Mother Trees and Their Critics
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6Chapter 4: Reading the Soil
7Chapter 5: The Marketplace Underground
8Chapter 6: Entangled Life
9Chapter 7: The Old Decomposers
10Chapter 8: Symbionts All the Way Down
11Chapter 9: The Mycoremediator
12Chapter 10: Pharmacy of the Forest
13Chapter 11: The Lichen Argument
14Chapter 12: Mapping the Underground
15Chapter 13: Fungi That Hunt
16Chapter 14: The Fungal Future of Materials
17Chapter 15: Psilocybin and the Mind
18Chapter 16: The Atmosphere’s Engineers
19Chapter 17: Fungi in the Field
20Chapter 18: The Indigenous Mycologists
21Chapter 19: The Question of Mind
22Chapter 20: Threats to the Kingdom
23Chapter 21: The Kingdom Recognized
24Chapter 22: The Reciprocity Question
25Chapter 23: The Planet’s Fungal Future
26Chapter 24: What We Choose to See
27Character Guide
28References & Bibliography
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