| Picture a bright blue ball just spinning, spinning free Dizzy with eternity Paint it with a skin of sky, brush in some clouds and sea Call it home for you and me A peaceful place, or so it looks from space A closer look reveals the human race Full of hope, full of grace, is the human face But afraid we may lay our home to waste - John Barlow / Robert Hall Weir Chapter 26: Planet Mushroom Mushrooms Can Fix the Environment Paul Stamets is a speaker, author, mycologist, medical researcher and entrepreneur. He has written several books and received numerous awards for his work with mushrooms and the ecosystem as well as medicine and health applications. He has a passion for the earth, humanity and healing that is unsurpassed. I consider him to be a true hero. He has written a book titled Mycelium Running, which explains how we can save the world with mushrooms. One of Paul’s ideas is called mycoremediation, which involves the use of mushrooms to clean up oil spills. Various strains of mycelium can be selected and used in different ways to detoxify the environment and this includes land contaminated by chemical warfare agents and even radiation. Paul writes: “The activities of mycelium help heal and steer ecosystems on their evolutionary path, cycling nutrients through the food chain. As land masses and mountain ranges form, successive generations of plants and animals are born, live and die. Fungi are keystone species that create ever thickening layers of soil, which allow future plant and animal generations to flourish. Without fungi, all ecosystems would fail.” … “Humans collaborate with these cellular networks, using fungi, specifically using mushroom mycelium in spawn, for both short and long-term benefits. Mushroom spawn lets us recycle garden waste, wood, and yard debris, thereby creating mycological membranes that heal habitats suffering from poor nutrition, stress and toxic waste. In this sense, mushrooms emerge as environmental guardians in a time critical to our mutual evolutionary survival.” (1) The 19th-century German biologist Albert Bernard Frank coined the word “mycorrhiza” to describe the relationship between the roots of trees and soil and the threads of mycelium that ran through them both. The movie Avatar played on this theme by introducing the idea to the public that the trees communicate with each other through a neural network in their roots. This movie was a very good analogy to what is happening in our world today. Paul says that we are “stressing the fungal recycling systems of nature” and we are “challenging the immune systems of our environment beyond its limits.” |
Stamets refers to the mycelium mats as “nature’s internet.” In his chapter by this same title, Stamets writes: “Mycelium steers the course of ecosystems by favoring successions of species. Ultimately, mycelium prepares its immediate environment for its benefit by growing ecosystems that fuel its food chain.” Continuing, Paul continues: “I see mycelium as the living network that manifests the natural intelligence imagined by Gaia theorists. The mycelium is an exposed sentient membrane, aware and responsive to changes in its environment.” (2) Paul then goes on to explain the similarity of the neural networks in the brain, and the shape and makeup of mycelium networks as compared to the internet, all of which have the distinctive “neural network” array shape. In the same way the internet is becoming like the global hive mind, the mycelium networks share information among all forms of plant life throughout the planet and in the same way our DNA strands can hold millions of times more information than our biggest supercomputers, the earth’s mycelium internet can share much more information than we are currently aware of. Stamets even suggests that whole galaxies are made up of mycelium like matrices. As the mushroom feeds the plants through their roots, the mushroom is also a food source for other organisms including other parasitic fungi, worms, birds, and people and this knowledge led Stamets to conclude that the occurrence and population of mushrooms in one location determines the nature and composition of its downstream populations. Essentially, we can control our environment better with knowledge of the use of individual species of fungi. Some fungi, saprophytic, are good at decomposing, taking dead plants and insects and rebuilding the soil, by recycling the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and minerals into nutrients that can then be used by the natives of that environment. There are also parasitic fungi which may either kill off the host as it’s in the stage of dying, or it can live along with it, contributing to the environment of various species of plants and insects, while also feeding off of its host. Mycorrhizal fungi form mutually beneficial relationships with their fellow organisms and either form an exterior sheath around the roots of partner plants or they invade the interior root cells of host plants. These plants develop a stronger resistance to disease than plants without these fungal partners. Mycorrhizal fungi can detect imbalances in the micronutrient constituents of all connected trees within its mycelial complex and, as shown in experiments, when shade is provided to one tree, in one case, a Douglas fir, which lowered its ability to photosynthesize sugars, the mycorrhizal fungi then transferred sugars it was sending to the birch trees over to the fir trees. (1) Mycelium Running – Stamets, Paul, Ten Speed Press, 2005, p. 1 (2) ibid, p. 3 |