MYCELIUM RUNNING,
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World
By Paul Stamets
Ten Speed Press, 2005
Category: Nonfiction for Grown-ups
About a month ago, I picked a book that had been sitting on my desk for more than a year, MYCELIUM RUNNING, and finally started reading. Within days, the Deepwater Horizon exploded and oil from below the Earth’s crust began pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. Serendipitous, that, because while my mind has since grappled with the enormity of the disaster in the Gulf—massive amounts of oil and massive amounts of dispersants pouring and shooting into our oceans—I have been saved from complete despair by the calm and practiced thoughts of a mushroom man.
Paul Stamets is a mycologist, a mushroom scientist. He hunts them around the world, cultures them for fun and profit, and slowly, over the course of thirty years, has come to realize that mushrooms—more specifically, the network of cells that grow underground beneath them, called a mycelium—can help us save and restore the planet. How? By filtering contaminants from groundwater (a process called mycofiltration), restoring old growth forests (mycoforestry), cleaning up pollutants, including oil, from the environment (mycoremediation), and controlling insect pests (mycopesticides). In MYCELIUM RUNNING, Stamets explores all these topics, collectively called mycorestoration, and shares convincing experiments that indicate he just might be onto something.
I’ll admit to being unsettled by Stamets’ claim that mushrooms (and their mycelium) are sentient organisms … but I also have to admit to feelings of complete elation when a flush of mushrooms appeared in my front yard after a rainstorm last week (I posted a photo of these lovelies yesterday). I recommend MYCELIUM RUNNING to anyone up for an in-depth look at the world of mushrooms and environmental restoration. If you’d rather a brief overview of Stamets work and ideas, check out:
his TED lecture;
his thoughts on the Gulf oil spill;
and his Fungi Perfecti website.
I’d love to hear what you think. Or see pictures of the mushrooms in your backyard. Or know how YOU are dealing with news from the Gulf …
