Paul Stamets - How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

8/6/2019 Paul Stamets - How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

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( This torrent consists of revolutionary new information from renaissance mycologist Paul Stamets:

- Please visit the 'Fungi Perfecti' website for more information on Paul Stametsand mycology: http://www.fungi.com/ (Your source for the best in gourmet and medicinal mushrooms) -

- mp3 lecture from 'Bioneers' radio program - "Steven Foster, Jeremy Narby, Jennifer Greene, Paul Stamets, Terry Tempest Williams & Peter Warshall - Gaian Wonders of the Co-Evolutionary Dance"< 0:27:09, 64kbps, 12.4mb https://secure.bioneers.org/product/downloads >

- mp3 interview from 'Living Green' program, 2007< 0:39:10, 64kbps, 17.9mb http://www.personallifemedia.com/podcasts/living-green/living-green-show.html >

- avi video lecture from 'LOHAS Conference', 2006 - "The Mysteries of Mycology"< 0:58:07, 320x240 256kbps xvid, 64kbps mp3, 138mb http://www.lohas.com/forum/vi

deo.html ( re-encoded from .wmv file found on website) >

- avi video trailer from upcoming documentary '11th Hour' featuring Paul Stamets< 320x240 256kbps xvid, 64kbps mp3, 19.0mb > http://www.11thhourfilm.com )

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The 11th Hour, co-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and Leila Conners, is an eco-documentary bringing together the leading researchers and visionaries who collectively share the same voice: the Earth is in trouble, and time is short to reversethe negative impact our species is inflicting on the Biosphere. The film featur

es a host of the world's most prominent thinkers and activists, including reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai and Fungi Perfecti's founder and CEO Paul Stamets, author of "Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World", who offers some of the mycological solutions we have available in our ecological tool box. Premiers August 17. Formore information, visit www.11thhourfilm.com and www.11thhouraction.com

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How mushrooms will save the world

Cleaning up toxic spills, stopping poison-gas attacks, and curing deadly diseases: Fungus king Paul Stamets says there's no limit to what his spores can do.

By Linda Baker

Nov. 25, 2002 Once youve heard renaissance mycologist Paul Stamets talk about mushrooms, youll never look at the world not to mention your backyard in the same way again. The author of three seminal textbooks, "Mycelium Running", The MushroomCultivator and Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, Stamets runs Fungi Perfecti, a family-owned gourmet and medicinal mushroom business in Shelton, Wash. His convictions about the expanding role that mushrooms will play in the developmentof earth-friendly technologies and medicines have led him to collect and clone more than 250 strains of wild mushrooms which he stores in several on- and off-si

te gene libraries.

Until recently, claims Stamets, mushrooms were largely ignored by the mainstream


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medical and environmental establishment. Or, as he puts it, they suffered from biological racism. But Stamets is about to thrust these higher fungi into the 21stcentury. In collaboration with several public and private agencies, he is pioneering the use of mycoremediation and mycofiltration technologies. These involve thecultivation of mushrooms to clean up toxic waste sites, improve ecological and human health, and in a particularly timely bit of experimentation, break down chemical warfare agents possessed by Saddam Hussein.

Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration, says Stamets, who predicts that bioremediation using fungi will soonbe a billion-dollar industry. If we just stay at the crest of the mycelial wave,it will take us into heretofore unknown territories that will be just magnificent in their implications.

A former logger turned scanning-electron microscopist, Stamets is not your typical scientist a role he obviously relishes. Some people think Im a mycological heretic, some people think Im a mycological revolutionary, and some just think Im crazy, he says cheerfully. His discussions of mushroom form and function are sprinkled with wide-ranging and provocative mycological metaphors, among them his belief

thatfungal intelligence

provides a framework for understanding everything from string theory in modern physics to the structure of the Internet.

In a recent interview, Stamets also spoke mysteriously of a yet-to-be-unveiled project he calls the life box, his plan for regreening the planet using fungi. Its tolly fun, totally revolutionary. Its going to put smiles on the faces of grandmothers and young children, he says. And its going to be the biggest story of the decade.

Statements like those make it tempting to dismiss Stamets as either chock-full of hubris or somewhat deluded. But while many academic mycologists tend to question both his style and his methods, Stamets status as an innovative entrepreneur is hard to dispute. Paul has a solid grounding in cultivation and has expanded fro

m that base to show there are other ways of using and cultivating mushrooms thanjust for food, says Gary Lincoff, author of The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms.These are relatively new ideas ... but Pauls got a large spread where he can have experiments going on under his control. And hes getting big-name people to back him.

An advisor and consultant to the Program for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical School and a 1998 recipient of the Collective Heritage Institutes Bioneers Award, Stamets has made converts out of more than one researcher in the mainstream medical and environmental communities.

Hes the most creative thinker I know, says Dr. Donald Abrams, the assistant director of the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital and a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Abrams says he became interested in the medicinal properties of mushrooms after hearing one of Stamets lectures. Stamets is now a co-investigator on a grant proposal Abrams is authoring on the anti-HIV properties of oyster mushrooms.

Jack Word, former manager of the marine science lab at Battelle Laboratories inSequim, Wash., calls Stamets a visionary. Stamets takes bigger, faster leaps thaninstitutional science, acknowledges Word, who, along with Stamets and several other Battelle researchers, is an applicant on a pending mycoremediation patent. But most of what Paul sees has eventually been accepted by outside groups. He definitely points us in the right direction.

The mycotopian future is no psilocybin fantasyAlthough mycoremediation sounds Brave New World-ish, the concept behind it is decidedly low tech: think home composting, not genetic engineering. Most gardeners k


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now that a host of microorganisms convert organic material such as rotting vegetables, decaying leaves and coffee grounds into the nutrient-rich soil required for plant growth. Fungi play a key role in this process. In fact, one of their primary roles in the ecosystem is decomposition. (Hence the killer-fungus scenarioof many a science fiction novel, not to mention the moldy bread and bath tilesthat are the bane of modern existence.)

The same principle is at work in mycoremediation. We just have a more targeted approach, says Stamets. And choosing the species [of fungi] that are most effectiveis absolutely critical to the success of the project.

Fungal decomposition is the job of the mycelium, a vast network of underground cells that permeate the soil. (The mushroom itself is the fruit of the mycelium.)Now recognized as the largest biological entities on the planet, with some individual mycelial mats covering more than 20,000 acres, these fungal masses secrete extra cellular enzymes and acids that break down lignin and cellulose, the twomain building blocks of plant fiber, which are formed of long chains of carbonand hydrogen.

As it turns out, such chains are similar enough to the base structure of all petroleum products, pesticides, and herbicides so as to make it possible for fungito break them down as well. A couple of years ago Stamets partnered with Battelle, a major player in the bioremediation industry, on an experiment conducted ona site owned by the Washington State Department of Transportation in Bellingham.Diesel oil had contaminated the site, which the mycoremediation team inoculatedwith strains of oyster mycelia that Stamets had collected from old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Two other bioremediation teams, one using bacteria,the other using engineered bacteria, were also given sections of the contaminated soil to test.

Lo and behold. After four weeks, oyster mushrooms up to 12 inches in diameter had formed on the mycoremediated soil. After eight weeks, 95 percent of the hydroc

arbons had broken down, and the soil was deemed nontoxic and suitable for use inWSDOT highway landscaping.

By contrast, neither of the bioremediated sites showed significant changes. Its only hearsay, says Bill Hyde, Stamets patent attorney, but the bacterial remediationfolks were crying because the [mycoremediation] worked so fast.

And that, says Stamets, was just the beginning of the end of the story. As the mushrooms rotted away, fungus gnats moved in to eat the spores. The gnats attractedother insects, which attracted birds, which brought in seeds.

Call it mycotopia.

The fruit bodies become environmental plateaus for the attraction and successionof other biological communities, Stamets says. Ours was the only site that becamean oasis of life, leading to ecological restoration. That story is probably repeated all over the planet.

At Fungi Perfecti, a rural compound not far from Aberdeen, Wash., signs warn visitors not to enter without an appointment, and security cameras equipped with motion sensors guard several free-standing laboratories and a mushroom grow room. Myconcerns are personal safety and commercial espionage, says Stamets, explaining that competitors and mycological hangers-on (not always a stable lot, apparently)have a tendency to show up unannounced.

Then theres the small problem of marketing a product associated in some peoples minds with illegal substances. In the late 1970s, Stamets did pioneering researchat Evergreen State College on psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms; he later publ


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ished a definitive identification guide: Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World.

I drew the line a long time ago, says Stamets. But Ill never be an apologist for that work. Everything I did was covered by a DEA license.

Today, Stamets spends much of his time cloning wild mushrooms. One of his innovations has been identifying strains of mushrooms with the ability to decompose ce

rtain toxins and adapting them to new environments. With the benefit of computerclean-room technology, Stamets introduces samples of toxins to mycelia growingon agar culture, then screens the samples to see if the mycelia are actually metabolizing the toxin. You can actually train the mycelia to grow on different media, he says.

As reported in Janes Defence Weekly, one of Stamets strains was found to completelyand efficiently degrade chemical surrogates of VX and sarin, the potent nerve gases Saddam Hussein loaded into his warheads.

We have a fungal genome that is diverse and present in the old-growth forests, says Stamets. Hussein does not. If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier ca

ndidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not only for the ecosystem butfor our population ... we should be saving our old-growth forests as a matter of national defense.

Stamets recently collaborated with WSDOT on another mycoremediation project designed to prevent erosion on decommissioned logging roads, which channel silt andpollutants toward stream beds where salmon are reproducing. In a process Stametsterms mycofiltration, bark and wood chips were placed onto road surfaces and inoculated with fungi. The mycelial networks not only helped to build and retain soil but also filtered out pollutants and sediments and thus mitigated negative impacts on the watershed.

Stamets envisions myriad uses of mycofiltration, one of which involves bridging

the gap between ecological and human health. Its been more than 70 years since Alexander Fleming discovered that the mold fungus penicillium was effective against bacteria. And yet, complains Stamets, nobody has paid much attention to the antiviral and antibiotic properties of mushrooms partly because Americans, unlikeAsian cultures, think mushrooms are meant to be eaten, not prescribed. But withthe emergence of multiple antibiotic resistance in hospitals, says Stamets, a newgame is afoot. The cognoscenti of the pharmaceuticals are now actively, and some secretly, looking at mushrooms for novel medicines.

Based on a recent study documenting the ability of a mushroom, Polyporus umbellatus, to completely inhibit the parasite that causes malaria, Stamets has come upwith a mycofiltration approach to combating the disease. We know that these fungi use other microorganisms as food sources, he says. We know theyre producing extracellular antibiotics that are effective against a pantheon of disease microorganisms. We can establish sheet composting using fungi that are specific against the malarial parasites. We can then go far in working with developing countries, in articulating mycelial mats specific to the disease vectors in which these things are being bred.

Stamets is currently shopping this idea around to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a front-runner in the effort to provide vaccinations in developing nations.

Mushrooms, the Internet, and universes sprouting from universes: Theyre all connected

Mycotechnology is part of a larger trend toward the use of living systems to solve environmental problems and restore ecosystems. One of the best-known examplesis John Todds Living Machine, which uses estuary ecosystems powered by sunlight to


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purify wastewater. The idea that a total community is more efficient against contaminants than a single Pac Man bug is gaining acceptance, says Jack Word, now with MEC Analytical Systems, an environmental consulting firm. The key challenge facing mycotechnologies, he says, is securing funding to demonstrate their large-scale commercial feasibility.

Stamets is the Johnny Appleseed of mushrooms; hes spreading the gospel about the

power of fungi to benefit the world. Issuing a call to mycological arms, Stametsurges gardeners to inoculate their backyards with mycorrhizae, fungi that enterinto beneficial relationships with plant roots, and to grow shiitake and othergourmet mushrooms, among the very best decomposers and builders of soil.

But Stamets vision doesnt stop there. In the conference room at Fungi Perfecti, with a 2,000-year-old carved mushroom stone from Guatemala hovering, shamanlike, over him, he explains his far-reaching theory of mycelial structure.

Life exists throughout the cosmos and is a consequence of matter in the universe,he says. Given that premise, when you look at the consequence of matter, and thesimple premise of cellular reproduction, which forms a string, which forms a web

, which then cross-hatches, what do you have? You have a neurological landscapethat looks like mycelium. Its no accident that brain neurons and astrocytes are similarly arranged. Its no accident that the computer Internet is similarly arranged.

I believe the earths natural Internet is the mycelial network, he says. That is theway of nature. If there is any destruction of the neurological landscape, the mycelial network does not die; its able to adapt, recover and change. Thats the whole basis of the computer Internet. The whole design patterns something that has been reproduced through nature and has been evolutionarily successful over millions of years.

The day after being interviewed in late October, Stamets called to point out a N

ew York Times article on self-replicating universes, an article, he suggested, that reinforced his ideas about matter creating life and the generative power ofmycelium. In describing the way universes might multiply, the reporter used thefollowing felicitous metaphor: For some cosmologists, that means universes sprouting from one another in an endless geometric progression, like mushrooms upon mushrooms upon mushrooms.

Where is Stamets going with all this? I have a strategy for creating ecological footprints on other planets, he says. By using a consortium of fungi and seeds andother microorganisms, you could actually seed other planets with little plops. You could actually start keystone species and go to creating vegetation on planets.

I think thats totally doable.

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Paul Stamets - How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World