We tend to think of nature loss as something we can see — a forest cleared, a coral reef bleached, a species vanishing from a field guide. But the deeper crisis is happening in places human eyes don't reach: in the tangle of genes inside a single seed, in the fungal threads beneath a forest floor, in the 90 percent of species on Earth that no scientist has yet named. Two books, written a few years apart, make the same argument from different angles: we are losing worlds we haven't discovered yet.
This is the most unsettling version of the biodiversity crisis — not the loss of things we love, but the loss of things we don't even know exist. Both Alexandre Antonelli and Merlin Sheldrake are scientists who have spent careers in the field, and both arrive at the same conclusion through very different doors.
The Scale We’re Missing
The Hidden Universe: Adventures in Biodiversity — Alexandre Antonelli (2022)
Antonelli, Director of Science at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, opens with a provocation: biodiversity is not a count of species. It is a five-pointed star — Species, Genes, Ecosystems, Functions, and Evolution — and losing any one point destabilises the rest. A world where half the animal species survive but their ecosystems have collapsed is not a biodiverse world. A world where crop plants still grow but their genetic diversity has been narrowed to a few commercial varieties is not a biodiverse world.
What makes this book useful alongside any conversation about nature is its precision. Antonelli gives us the vocabulary to describe what is actually being lost, not just a sense that something important is disappearing. The chapters on genetic diversity and functional biodiversity — what organisms do, not just what they are — are quietly revelatory. They make the case that biodiversity is not an environmental cause sitting beside climate change, but the substrate beneath it.
Read the full review →The World Beneath Every Step
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures — Merlin Sheldrake (2020)
Fungi are neither plant nor animal. They decompose, they connect, they digest rock and plastic and crude oil. The mycorrhizal networks that link plant roots underground — the so-called Wood Wide Web — redistribute nutrients across entire forests, allowing trees to share resources across species lines. Sheldrake, a Cambridge-trained mycologist who literally grew mushrooms on pages of his own book to prove fungi can digest almost anything, makes the case that we have been misreading life on Earth because we have been ignoring the kingdom that runs most of it.
Where Antonelli maps the crisis from above — giving us the overview, the numbers, the policy — Sheldrake digs underneath and refuses to come back up. Over 90 percent of fungal species remain undocumented. We are clearing forests laced with networks we have never studied, losing relationships between organisms we have never observed. Entangled Life is the specific, visceral version of the argument Antonelli makes in the abstract: the hidden universe is not a metaphor. It is under every footstep.
Read the full review →What They Add Up To
Read together, these two books reframe the standard conservation conversation. The usual argument runs: species are disappearing, this is sad, here is what we should do. Antonelli and Sheldrake make a harder argument: the losses are happening at a level of complexity that our institutions — and our minds — are not equipped to comprehend. We are not losing individual species. We are losing entire grammars of life, entire systems of relationship, entire dimensions of biological possibility that we are only beginning to have the tools to detect.
The good news — and both books insist on ending with it — is that this is not fixed. Ecosystems recover. Fungal networks regrow. Genetic diversity can be preserved in seed banks and protected areas. The direction of loss is not inevitable. But reversing it requires first being able to see what is there.
That is what these books do. They train the eye.
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