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Thanks to Sherry Stultz.

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MYCELIUM RUNNING:
HOW MUSHROOMS CAN HELP SAVE THE WORLD
By Paul Stamets
Ten Speed Press, 352 pages, 2005, $35.00

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580085792/newheavenneweart

Reviewed by Starhawk
Yes Magazine

http://www.yesmagazine.com/article.asp?ID=1495

If humans as a species and complex human culture are to survive the myriad
ecological and social catastrophes looming over our future, we desperately
need to rethink our relationship with the natural world. We need to shift
from a model of controlling nature to one of listening to her and learning
from her. We need to forgo arrogance in favor of humility, a word from the
same root as humus, its core meaning to bend low to the earth.

No one is better equipped to guide us through this process than Paul Stamets
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Stamets>, the shaman of fungi. Over the
last few years, Paul Stamets has been electrifying audiences at Green
Festivals and Bioneers conferences with his research on fungi and their
multiple uses in earth healing. People come away from his slide shows
starry-eyed, their despair about the state of the global ecosystem
temporarily in abeyance. Now he has collected his research into a new book.
We writers like to believe that the words we put on paper will somehow save
the world. Stamet's book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the
World, just might do it. Stamets has turned his vision to the ground, to
contemplate the lowly fungi. In so doing, he has discovered powerful allies
of healing and fertility.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies, the reproductive organs, of mycelia, much
larger, underground webs of threadlike structures. Mycelium plays a hugely
important role in the life of a forest. The hyphae, or threads, hold the
soil, improving its structure and ability to absorb water and nutrients.
Mycelium excretes enzymes that break down decaying matter and wood,
transforming them into soil, recycling nutrients and preparing the ground
for other forms of life. Mycorrhizal fungi are symbiotic with plant roots,
extending their reach and allowing them to transfer nutrients. The e
mycelium that permeates soil is sensitive to information, and Stamets begins
this book with a chapter on mushroom mycelium as "nature's internet."

His experimentation and careful documentation have led him to discover
fungi's astounding capabilities. Mushrooms are a nutritious food, high in
protein, and many are powerful medicinals with antibacterial, antiviral, and
anticancer properties. The enzymes secreted by mycelia can destroy
pathogens, and mushrooms can be used for mycofiltration to treat
contaminated water.

Because mushrooms break down tough, organic compounds like the lignins and
cellulose in wood, they have evolved the ability to split chemical bonds. In
mycoremediation, mushroom mycelium is used to clean up oil spills and break
down toxins in contaminated soil. Heavy metals cannot be broken down,
because they are elements, but they can be taken up in mushroom fruiting
bodies and safely disposed of. Stamets has also discovered mycopesticides.

Many mycelia attract insects, and some have evolved to then kill their
insect hosts. Stamets has developed methods of ant and termite control using
mushroom mycelia that are safe (for everything but the insects), nontoxic,
and enormously effective. He now has research on fungi that can neutralize
smallpox, anthrax, and nerve gas.

The first section of his book details these discoveries and more. The second
section is the how-to part, filled with valuable information on ways to
cultivate mushrooms and grow mycelium.

Stamets' company, Fungi Perfecti, <http://www.fungi.com>, sells mushroom
spawn, spores, and everything related. Nevertheless, Stamets has generously
packed this section with the low-tech methods of propagating mushrooms
without buying spawn. It includes a chapter on gardening with mushrooms. The
final section describes many of the most useful species. The book is
lavishly illustrated, with beautiful photographs of mushrooms, drawings of
the stages of the mushroom life cycle, and electron microscopy of spores and
gills and life processes.

Mycelium Running is an invaluable resource for anyone involved in earth
healing, permaculture, forestry, gardening, or bioremediation. I use it in
the permaculture courses I teach, which now always include a section on the
multiple uses of fungi. And it's a key resource for the work I've been doing
in New Orleans with the Common Ground Bioremediation Project, teaching
methods of healing toxic soil using natural means.

Okay, I admit it -- Paul Stamets is also a friend of mine, and besides being
a genius, he's a really nice guy. But even if he weren't, even if he'd run
off with my lover or fleeced my old grandma in a shady real estate deal, I'd
have to rave about this book. It's expensive, $35, but worth every penny.

For if we succeed in moving through this crisis time, and making the
transformation to a just and balanced world, fungi will play a vital role in
sustaining health and creating abundance. And we'll have Paul Stamets to
thank, for teaching us how to reach out and enlist their aid.

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RELATED ARTICLE:

HOW MUSHROOMS WILL SAVE THE WORLD
By Linda Baker
Salon
November 22, 2002

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/11/25/mushrooms/index.html

Once you've heard "renaissance mycologist" Paul Stamets talk about
mushrooms, you'll never look at the world -- not to mention your backyard --
in the same way again. The author of two seminal textbooks, "The Mushroom
Cultivator" 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 development of 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-site gene libraries.

Until recently, claims Stamets, mushrooms were largely ignored by the
mainstream 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 21st century. In collaboration with several public and
private agencies, he is pioneering the use of "mycoremediation" and
"mycofiltration" technologies. These involve the cultivation 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 soon be 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 I'm a
mycological heretic, some people think I'm a mycological revolutionary, and
some just think I'm crazy," he says cheerfully. His discussions of mushroom
form and function are sprinkled with wide-ranging -- and provocative --
mycological metaphors, among them his belief that "fungal 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. "It's totally fun, totally revolutionary. It's
going to put smiles on the faces of grandmothers and young children," he
says. "And it's 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 from that base to show there are
other ways of using and cultivating mushrooms than just for food," says Gary
Lincoff, author of "The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American
Mushrooms." "These are relatively new ideas ... but Paul's got a large
spread where he can have experiments going on under his control. And he's
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 Institute's Bioneers Award, Stamets has made converts out of more
than one researcher in the mainstream medical and environmental communities.

"He's 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
in Sequim, Wash., calls Stamets "a visionary." Stamets takes bigger, faster
leaps than institutional 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."

Although mycoremediation sounds "Brave New World"-ish, the concept behind it
is decidedly low tech: think home composting, not genetic engineering. Most
gardeners know 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 scenario of many a science fiction
novel, not to mention the moldy bread and bath tiles that 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 effective is 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 two main building blocks of plant fiber, which are
formed of long chains of carbon and 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
fungi to 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 on a site owned by the Washington State Department of
Transportation in Bellingham. Diesel oil had contaminated the site, which
the mycoremediation team inoculated with 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 hydrocarbons had broken down, and the soil was deemed
nontoxic and suitable for use in WSDOT highway landscaping.

By contrast, neither of the bioremediated sites showed significant changes.
"It's only hearsay," says Bill Hyde, Stamets' patent attorney, "but the
bacterial remediation folks 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 attracted other insects, which attracted birds, which brought in
seeds.

Call it mycotopia.

"The fruit bodies become environmental plateaus for the attraction and
succession of other biological communities," Stamets says. "Ours was the
only site that became an 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. "My concerns 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 there's the small problem of marketing a product associated in some
people's minds with illegal substances. In the late 1970s, Stamets did
pioneering research at Evergreen State College on psilocybin hallucinogenic
mushrooms; he later published a definitive identification guide: "Psilocybin
Mushrooms of the World."

"I drew the line a long time ago," says Stamets. "But I'll 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 certain toxins and adapting them to new environments. With the
benefit of computer clean-room technology, Stamets introduces samples of
toxins to mycelia growing on 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 Jane's Defence Weekly, one of Stamets' strains was found to
"completely and 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 candidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not
only for the ecosystem but for 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 and pollutants toward stream beds where salmon are reproducing. In a
process Stamets terms "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. It's 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, unlike Asian cultures, think mushrooms are meant
to be eaten, not prescribed. But with the emergence of multiple antibiotic
resistance in hospitals, says Stamets, "a new game 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 up with a mycofiltration approach to combating the disease. "We
know that these fungi use other microorganisms as food sources," he says.
"We know they're 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.

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
examples is John Todd's "Living Machine," which uses estuary ecosystems
powered by sunlight to 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; he's spreading the gospel
about the power of fungi to benefit the world. Issuing a call to mycological
arms, Stamets urges gardeners to inoculate their backyards with mycorrhizae,
fungi that enter into beneficial relationships with plant roots, and to grow
shiitake and other gourmet mushrooms, among the very best decomposers and
builders of soil.

But Stamets' vision doesn't 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 the simple premise of cellular reproduction, which forms a
string, which forms a web, which then cross-hatches, what do you have? You
have a neurological landscape that looks like mycelium. It's no accident
that brain neurons and astrocytes are similarly arranged. It's no accident
that the computer Internet is similarly arranged."

"I believe the earth's natural Internet is the mycelial network," he says.
"That is the way of nature. If there is any destruction of the neurological
landscape, the mycelial network does not die; it's able to adapt, recover
and change. That's 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 New York Times article on self-replicating universes, an article, he
suggested, that reinforced his ideas about matter creating life and the
generative power of mycelium. In describing the way universes might
multiply, the reporter used the following 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 and other 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 that's totally doable."

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RELATED NHNE NEWS LIST ARTICLE:

MUSHROOMS BREAK DOWN PESTICIDE & OIL CONTAMINATION! (11/27/2001):
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nhnenews/message/2325

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Published by David Sunfellow
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