Paul Stamets on How Mushrooms Can Save Us from Ourselves

our easy first question we're brining to the study of mushrooms what brought me into the study of mushrooms well first I would have my first memories are when my parents told me not to step on puff balls because the spores would make my twin brother blind telling a five-year-old son that gave me ready ammunition to Pelt my twin brother with puff balls at every opportunity we both suffer from bad eyesight is not related to puff balls but when parents tell children that something's forbidden then it increases the mystery and because I was mischievous and interested and spent a lot of times in the woods and outside putting that information to good use was was very appropriate for my brother and I ii didn't airily i mean i really became a passionate about mushrooms because I have a stuttering habit and I went through six or seven years speech therapy and I literally could not speak a single sentence in a minute my stammering habit was just incredibly profound and as an advice to people who are around stutterers don't finish their sentences oftentimes stutterers they're thinking many sentences downstream and so when I was about 17 or 18 years of age I took a massive dose of psilocybin mushrooms magic mushrooms and guys by myself and there was a storm approaching and I climbed up this large tree and doing this wind and lightning storm and it was a terrifying experience because I had never done mushrooms before and I was up in this tree at 40 50 mile-an-hour winds and rain and lightning cackling all over around me and I was terrified I mean literally this tree was going back four or five feet back and forth in the wind and there's lots of lots of lightning strikes all around me I was really scared but I thought since I'm up there and I can't get down I wasn't safe what am I going to do and I thought to myself I should really focus on that which I have the biggest problem personally and that was my inability to communicate and so even though six or seven years of speech therapy didn't be no-hit I gave me no advantage I'm actually they want to put me in a special education class which was devastating to my ego and so doing this mushroom experience I thought to myself why don't I just stop stuttering now and that became my mantra for about four or five hours and the storm passed and I kept on repeating that to myself and I came down out of the tree and the next day I stopped stuttering so that was my empowerment and I realized that mushrooms were my sort of what nature has given me to empower my ability to communicate I still do stutter occasionally but it's nothing like it was before which was a major handicap that I had so our next question is the one you prepared for which is what are what are mushrooms because when I read your book it became very apparent to me that I really didn't know really what a mushroom was you know how do they grow and what constitutes the organism has it worked well this is an example of a subject that the more you study it the more you realize there is to know and that you did not know and science is rapidly evolving and it's understanding the earth is going through its sixth major extinction this is the sixth great extinction that's been identified thus far and I'd like to talk about two of the prior extinctions we're in the middle of the sixth extinction we are probably the people or the organisms that are responsible for it the forces that are causing it 465 million years ago we shared a common ancestry with fungi basically life hit the beach from the ocean land masses had virtually no life whatsoever our fungal ancestors came to the beach and then there's a divergence we actually are mushroom people we came from fungi fungi are our ancestors our fungal ancestors that went overland in order to protect us the cells from dehydration and exposure to sunlight became multicellular and then our animal ancestors or the lineage that gave rise to animals encapsulated this nutrients by encircling food with a cellular sac basically a stomach and produces enzymes and acids that would digest the food the fungi became filamentous and produce these long linear chains late look like cobwebs there only one cell wall thick but they're linear and they diverge and they form this matrix of cells and they went underground and so 465 million years ago as life evolved on land then the the there's a tremendous species diversification 250 million years ago at the boundary of the premium in the Triassic period a giant asteroid or comet some people postulate there are volcanoes that that blew up in Siberia the two may be related we don't know but we do know the entire Earth was shrouded in a layer of dust and this can be seen in the geologic record that was the third mass extinction of species on the planet and the most significant over 90% of the species and the planet became extinct at the border of the premium and the Triassic periods when the meteor or comet or asteroid hit the earth then the the massive explosion occurred and the earth became shrouded and dust mostly some all sunlight was cut off we don't know if it was for months or for years or for decades but in any event because there was no light that was reaching to the ground there's a massive die-off of plants and the fungi of course required no light the plants that associated with fungi were able to get sugars and nutrients with the fungi so there's a natural Selective pressure from that catastrophic event for symbiosis between fungi and plants then we march forward after the the sky is cleared then there's more speciation plants were reborn symbiosis were rewarded and we marched forward into a very diverse species land landscape until 65 million years ago as most people know we had another impact another catastrophic event which caused another massive extinction and again fungi inherited the earth the earth was shrouded in darkness and dust and then from these fungal fragments and these microbial communities and plant communities after the 65 million years ago from that impact and the largest animals that serve I were small voles which are very Michael philic they actually consume fungi as a food source fungi respire a carbon dioxide and inhale oxygen just like we do we have a more common ancestry with fungi than we do with any other Kingdom as speciation then occurred then a as the life systems were reborn then the species diversity of fungi just blossomed today we know there's one to two million species of fungi in the world in the kingdom about ten percent are mushrooms these are producing the the visible fleshy fungi which most people are familiar with we know about 10% of the kingdom or mushrooms about 150,000 species we've only identified 14,000 species to date which means our ignorance exceeds our knowledge by at least one order of magnitude in the recent article in the Journal of eukaryotic biology 27 eukaryotic evolutionary biologists have created a new map basically of the kingdoms and they've erected a new super Kingdom and fungi and animals are in the same Kingdom and the kin indicating Kingdom is called Oh pesto Compton and applies to Kanta is the super Kingdom that unifies animals and fungi because animals literally came from fungi these vast and cellular networks are massive the largest organism the world now is identified as mycelial mat this is the fine cobwebby like filaments that you see just go to any piece of wood on the ground and kick it over you can see it everywhere and the largest organism is in eastern oregon is 2200 acres in size over 2400 years old it has climax the forest many times over ten fifteen thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age as the glaciers receded the scraped off the soil and flush it into the ocean as the glaciers melted anyone have been a bit been around glaciers you know there's lots of moraine beds and there's gravel bars and there's basically rock without soil small lenses survived and these small lenses became islands diversity and the plant communities would grow up and they'll climax and the fungi would rot them and then soil would be created fungi are the grand molecular disassemblers in nature that the interphase organisms between life and death they generate soil as these lenses of soil expanded then they had a greater carrying capacity for more biodiversity and more species proliferate and then they would climax the plants and animals they would die fungi would recycle them more soil would be produced the soil would be good thicker the lens would become larger indeed the entire food web of nature is based on these fungal filaments the mycelium network that infuses all land masses in the world is a supportive membrane upon which life philippa rates in it and for the diversifies i've often thought that if there was a united organization of organisms otherwise known as uh-oh and every organism had a vote will we be voted off the planet and I think there is a chorus of voices from the microbial world and from the natural world that is voting right now and the rule of nature is that when species exceeds the carrying capacity of this environment diseases proliferate populations that are gone gone become too large that climax and famine disease may be war occur in order to knock down the population back to end to a level where the environment can carry that population without devastating the underlying biological community we are here today because of a series of evolutionary successes but that doesn't mean that we're going to be here tomorrow and if you look in the crystal ball of this planet we may well have the future that looks like Mars and that as the ecosystems collapse because of of our disrespect or not being a responsible citizen and this biological community on this planet then the ecosystem can unravel what we don't know is at what point that we when we lose biodiversity that the system will start to fall apart now I believe in the resilience of nature so I think that once the human species becomes extinct and many species have become extinct before us many species will come become a thing after us that the or the earth may well spin on us access happily without humans and the microbes in the insects will inherit the world unless we cause such a dramatic climate shift that we become an arid cold planet like Mars if you look at the number of stars in our galaxy and mathematicians have already postulated this and is a mathematical proof at this point there will be hundreds of planets the size of Earth at a distance equal to our Earth's distance to our Sun there'll be hundreds of planets the size of Earth of a similar distance to a star like our Sun which means that liquid water is likely to occur I have no doubt that life is proliferating throughout the universe and that our time now may be recorded in the history of the universe as a small footnote of an evolutionary experiment that's gone awry well did you know that you were you came from fungus No I hope I don't have to repeat that because I don't think I could now can I put on my hat without entering the light there are many things about mushrooms that are fascinating one of the things that I found to be really fascinating is that mushrooms can make hats and this is a hat that is made from this mushroom this mushroom the latin name is called foamies momentariness it is a tinder mushroom this mushroom is literally why the migration from Africa and there's no doubt that where we all originated in Africa we are all Africans and as we migrated into Europe we discovered something new called winter and if your clan that could not have fire available the clan would die out obviously so the fire keeper even today and many tribes is a very revered and important position well this mushroom allowed for the portability of fire and you can hollow this mushroom out put embers of a fire or coals in it and then you can carry fire literally literally for days and you can blow into this after you uncork it and rekindle it well our ancestors found that this mushroom and I think it's true with many plants and when when they have a multiplicity of useful attributes then they become shamanistic aliy important not just because of one this mushroom has very strong antimicrobial properties when you boil this mushroom and you pound it then you separates into fibers so this hat came from this mushroom if this mushroom is called foamies moment areas and our ancestors realize that when you boil this mushroom it gives an anti microbial or a preservative effect to foods especially in soups if there's meats involved etc if you pound this mushroom after has been boiled in water it separates into a fabric and actually this fabric is mycelium and so the mycelium generates a mushroom the mushroom grows into mycelium is just the revolving sort of circle our ancestors having the portability of fire allowed us to be migrated into Europe and of course as winter set in we tried to find Caves well unfortunately cave bears were there for millions of years and so you know caves became a sort of battleground between humans and cave bears the cave bears we being effective predators in order to fight the cave bears and get them out of the caves then communities had to develop in sort of preventing the Bears from either entering the cave or keeping the Bears are getting the Bears out of the caves so this mushroom is one example of many that is actually has been instrumental to the survival of humans as we've migrated across the landmasses ten thousand years ago we were forced people forest people we had intimate contact with nature today we're in cars on freeways we're in buildings that are artificial and way back when we had an intimate knowledge of nature and I dare say that even though our scientific knowledge quote-unquote has been is more event advanced in many ways we've lost a lot of the ancestral knowledge that was instrumental to our very survival when you consider the size of the mycelium and these mushrooms this is called a wood conch and they grow on trees they're called shell fungi or hoof fungi they're really hard they're hard like wood and so they're not easily that digestible but because of their usefulness and carrying fire and it was found when you boil these mushrooms you would preserve food and of course souring food meant you would have to go out and hunt more and gather more so having food that be preserved what's really important there are other wood mushrooms that are that are equally as fascinating and this is one that I'm particularly excited about is called a gerakan the Latin name is foaming thompson's officinalis the two thousand years ago deities first described it in the very first materia medica as a treatment against consumption later to be known as tuberculosis it was it was associated primarily with women and women herbalist and this mushroom is now thought to be extinct in Europe or nearly extinct it's illegal to pick it in most countries it is exclusive to the old-growth forests and since Europe doesn't have very few old-growth forests now or if any this is why it's not there we still have it in Washington Oregon Northern California and in British Columbia two and a half years ago I in response to the bio shield program the US Defense Department we started sending in our strains of mushrooms we have over 250 strains and culture we submitted over 150 strains for analysis in the bio shield program specifically to see if there is activity against viruses in particular smallpox the single most threat that the US Defense Department is identified is bioterrorism as bad as it sounds if a nuclear weapon will explode it in Boston it would not shut down airplane travel between Seattle and Los Angeles a bio a terrorist attack would and we began to receive research results and lo and behold this mushroom has found out they'd been found by the bio shield program the US Defense Department or our culture's of it to be highly effective against poxviruses cow pox vaccine eeeh and the word vaccine comes from vaccinia because milk maidens it was discovered in Europe when smallpox was sweeping through Europe the milk maidens who were exposed to cow's would get cow pox these little sort of black blisters on their hands but they were immune it was found out from smallpox and so that knowledge was observed was it was carried forth and one good physician made the observation and I'm sure the ladies did too and so they found that if he they take the cow pox scabs they could actually confer an immunity against smallpox now the we must not forget the US government and British government were actively involved in bioterrorism against indigenous peoples and Native Americans in the northwest and North America in general have no history of raising cattle so they had no exposure to cow pox so those of us from European backgrounds if there was a smallpox epidemic 30 percent of us would die 30 percent of us would become blind 30 percent of us be horribly maimed maimed and scarred and 10 percent of us would survive without any any effect with Native Americans over 90 percent of them would and so as the militarization of the West Coast occurred in there Brits in the United States were in competition but they both held in common the secret biological weapon oftentimes carried with blankets and unfortunately at the time of signing of treaties they realized that this warrior elite of Native Americans there are oftentimes positioned at military strategic ports of entrance where rivers would flow into the ocean that's where the settlements were that's where the salmon was coming that's where the Bears would come down who is lowlands and so the winters were not as severe it was rich and all sorts of food well the military realized the US and British governments that they could not they would lose a lot of their soldiers if they fought the Indians and hand-to-hand combat the Indians were experts at guerrilla warfare they lived and grew up in the old-growth forest they knew how to use the old growth forests whereas the Brits and the Americans did not so they found that at the sent in smallpox contaminated blankets or individuals into these communities and a year's time they could walk into the villages and not have to fight a good friend of mine is gujo who's the president of the height of people of the Haida Gwaii formally known as the Queen Charlotte Islands Haida Gwaii and the height of people don't like to call it the Queen Charlotte Islands the Charlotte Islands because that was the name of the ship that brought in the smallpox google people also revered this mushroom again it was associated primarily not exclusively but with women shamans and grave guardians would be carved from this mushroom and placed on these on the shamans graves and they would help them carry into the afterlife to fight evil spirits and so Google's people did not know that this mushrooms active against smallpox and he told me if they did they wouldn't have lost fifty thousand their population of the Haida Gwaii Islands would not have gone from fifty thousand less than five hundred three years as it turns out when we boil this mushroom what's in the same way that we boil this mushroom the anti pox properties are lost but when we take a piece of tissue from the mushroom and grow it in a petri dish and using a specialized technique the anti pox properties are preserved we have now tested this against a number of other viruses and now we have found that this mushroom is active against at least six viruses three poxviruses and three other viruses that many people are aware of and so I believe this is one example where Nature has within it remedies heretofore undiscovered that even live in the 2000 years of use by humans we are still discovering new things about things that we already thought that we knew all about and I believe that we should save the old growth forests as a matter of national defense it's a unifying argument and when I presented this to some conservative friends and my family is very conservative they cheer they go oh my gosh this makes perfect sense Osama bin Laden does not have an old-growth forest but we do and now we're down to less than 4% of the original old-growth forest and this species is at the brink of extinction it's so important that we get this in the culture and we preserve the genome because we lose the biodiversity within the species we may be losing the very strains that are essential for protecting millions of humans to put it in perspective in 1942 a lady and Peoria Illinois housewife sent in a moldy cantaloupe to a US Defense Department Army Hospital upon the request the US government to Americans to send in your moldy fruit an odd request you know I admit but she her moldy cantaloupe gave rise to the strain of fungus that produced the most potent form of penicillin heretofore seen Penicillium Christ genom strains which were already known could not be industrialized but her moldy cantaloupe strain gave dried to a strain that was 200 times more potent than anything they've seen and allowed the US and the British to produce penicillin as the antibiotic for treating battlefield wounds the Germans and the Japanese did not have penicillin the Americans and British did one class of battlefield battlefield wounds 90% of the soldiers would die from infection after the introduction of penicillin 90 percent of them survived a huge influence and it speaks to the importance of biodiversity now this mushroom does not enjoy the Widespread plasticity of the distribution of a cantaloupe it is limited in the old-growth forest what else is out there and I think this is the tip of the iceberg and speaks to the importance of biodiversity and that these fungi have evolved for billions of years now and being in direct molecular communication with this environment and producing antibiotics and strategies of survival that we can for lack of a better word capitalize upon so I mentioned that this mushroom it all is not active directly against viruses but the mycelium is and the mycelium is only one cell wall thick and it forms these fibrous membranes like cobwebs and they're all around you all the time and a single cubic inch of soil there's more than eight miles of these cells every time you take a step in a woodlands you're stepping on 300 miles of mycelium it's everywhere and it's decomposing wood and as it decomposes the wood it liberates gases and it forms micro cavities where all these other organisms live and these micro cavities become Wells for storing water and so when mycelium infuses through a substrate it has the ability of holding water longer which course benefits all there are other organisms the biological community prevents the erosion so it what's so amazing is that after hundreds of millions of years of evolution you know we are multicellular I have six skin layers before you get to the inside approximately the mycelium has one and yet on the very opposite side of that cell wall are hundreds of millions of microbes trying to eat it how does the mycelium with one skin layer prevent these microbes from eating into the mycelium achieve is the largest mass of any organism in the world how does it do that it's because it's a very sophisticated and yet unknown properties of this membrane that's in constant biomolecular communication with the outside environment developing strategies and producing antibiotics antivirals antiprotozoal compounds preventing microbial parasites from in the same time creates this mantle this fabric this mycelial matrix that becomes a foundation of the food web so the mycelium as is producing these antibiotics we can benefit from them it is well known that if you get a fungal infection the antifungal antibiotics that we have at our disposal tend to be toxic to you and the reason why they're toxic to you is you have a more common answer to fungi than you do with other organisms like bacteria we have very excellent antibacterial antibiotics coming from fungi that are not harmful to us because of that same relationship we share the more common ancestor with fungi so how does this work in the environment then this means that you can project mycelial membranes and customize them to the microbial contaminants that are may be present in the environment whether it is a West Nile virus or malaria being transported by insects but thriving in swamp lands you can create mycelial membranes that become micro filtration filters that then are exuding these natural antibiotics keeping the populations of these viruses of bacteria in check and so i espouse or i'm a voice for the concept of micro filtration and using my silikal membranes in the environment in order to influence downstream health of habitats by mitigating these disease vectors now it goes much further than that because the mycelium producing enzymes and acids that break down plant cell walls and these plant cell walls are held together by carbon hydrogen bonds well the exudates from the mycelium the sweat this produces this dye jet these digestive enzymes also break down hydrocarbons and so my work and my experimentation and that of other people around the world have confirmed that the mycelium from these mushrooms can break down diesel pesticides PCBs dioxins and what's unique about mushroom mycelium that's very different than mold mycelium as mushroom mycelium is primarily forests fungi forest mushrooms they become vast in size mold mycelium tends to be very small the colonies being epicenter Don an insect for instance the locality of evolution is relatively small forests are thousands of acres and so fungi that produce mushrooms grow to thousands of acres in size this gives us a ready ability to tap into this powerful inherent resource that mushroom mycelium has to remediate environments prevent downstream pollution from microbes from viruses including including bacteria protozoa and also for breaking down a wide assortment of polluted pollutants and this is one of the pedestals of micro restoration using mushroom mycelium in order to heal environments because these are truly healing membranes and we walk upon these membranes daily but their structure and the ability these membranes to survive is largely unexplored we do know symbiosis is absolutely critical and these fungi that grow in these environments have all sorts of other microbial plant and animal allies that will hold this whole fabric together and again we don't know what happens if we lose in this some of these citizens in this biological community before the whole system unravels just the mycelium 100 let's say asphalt like this example if there's a map let's say here in this house in this backyard is it running under all these houses and maybe crossing the street underneath in the ground is it health it can't do that it can't survive these kinds of urban zones or that only in the course there's much more fungal diversity in ecosystems which have a lot more plant debris so if you go to desert ecosystems versus a Northwest oak growth forest there's a lot more fungal mycelium in the Duff of the old-growth forest then there is no sand in a desert but the mycelium has an amazing ability in that it can be running diffusely and it's a water transport mechanism that can move water over great distances so they can be as single threads of mycelium that can channel hundreds of gallons of water over hundreds of feet as the mycelium does grow under roads and there's great examples of shaggy mane mushrooms breaking asphalt in several highways the United States have be rebuilt because shaggy mane mushrooms which you can crush in your hand but because of a helical explosion and this polysaccharide matrix as a mushroom forms it explodes over four or five days and in doing so produces so much force it will crack asphalt and concrete this is just one of the many examples these are they're not you know there we move very quickly a plants don't seem to grow that quickly but mycelium is somewhere in between the mycelium is moving anywhere from one to four inches per day it can be less than that it can be more than that but these are mycelial mats that are projecting all the time infusing landscapes and as a result there is this merging and through a through pudding of mycelial mats going in between each other and there's alliances and associations after the great asteroid or comet strikes of the fungi that paired up with plants many of those became mycorrhizal fungi and the mycorrhizal fungi and indeed now you cannot define any plant without its fungal associates plants do not exist on this planet alone plants are always in sociation with fungi and the FIDIC fungi that infused through the stems and the leaves that prevent insects from parasitizing them mycorrhizal fungi that are associated with the root zones that extend the root zones by more than 100 fold in main cases and also gives a host defense to the plant preventing parasites fungal parasites bacterial insects etc but as a result by capillary action and it's basically as an extended root system it brings in a lot more nutrients the parasitic fungi will thought to be the bane of foresters well indeed it climaxes forests that don't have good host defense systems and what does it do it builds more soil for the next generation and through this learning process of natural selection that plants in a sense develop a smarter methods of being able to prevent parasites and so parasitic fungi once thought to be you know bad diseases of the forest now by the most advanced eco foresters and forestry scientists are looked upon a larger picture as being the partial part of the natural cycle of being eat bringing ecosystems back into equilibrium you talk about how much vx gas was one of our arts easements as chemical sarin sarin and how we can use mushrooms to get rid of chemical weapons okay I was involved with Patel laboratories for five or six years and they surveyed my strains for their effects against a wide variety of toxins I did not know it at the time but they were also contracted by the Defense Department and they challenged that as they call it my strains against a number of toxins and including nerve toxins one is called DM MP dimethyl methyl phosphonate which is the core constituent in VX and Solman and sarin and VX is a potent neurotoxin as summonin sarin is and Saddam Hussein did use it and killed over 20,000 Kurds in matter of three days through aerial bombardment of this of the of this very potent nerve toxin one of the strains again from the old-growth forest D phosphorylated VX and heretofore unprecedented fashion this got a lot of attention that was published in jane's defence weekly a number of internal papers were also produced it actually became kind of a black box but the fungi produced a unique enzymatic system this one stranded i had heretofore unseen in the degradation of a toxin that otherwise with very recalcitrant and that could not be broken down once these fungi unravel these big molecular complexes and to their subunits then all sorts of other organisms such sorts of enzymatic systems can come into play to further break them down so they're otherwise very very resistant to rot or decomposition same thing and the fungi do is begin to break those essential molecular bonds especially phosphorus ponds in this case with VX and by doing so the rest of the VX of molecule just begin to disintegrate mushrooms also have a very bizarre property they have hyper cumulating heavy metals this came up after Chernobyl when the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred and a spew of radioactive gas and fallout covered a large swath of Western Europe Geiger counters went off all over Europe and the Ukrainians were immediately identified as having a nuclear disaster because the Ukrainians and Europeans are avid mushroom hunters the question became are these mushrooms safe to eat very valid question so analysis we began were done in soil samples and then mushrooms were analyzed and lo and behold what was discovered was something that was totally unexpected there are some mushrooms a hyper accumulate caesium-137 over 10,000 times the background contamination in the ecosystem this is a phenomenal concentration from far away of these heavy-metal radioactive isotopes which are toxic to almost all forms of life and they'll concentrate them into by the by via the mycelium which is everywhere so when you find a mushroom that could be sorted by mycelial mat that's acres in size the mushroom is just the tip of the iceberg the radioactive seed in this case cesium 137 with a mushroom called the hideous come Phineas come Phineas glutton gnosis actually the mushroom becomes radioactive and it detoxifies the ecosystem now why would nature design something like that and this I think is that is the real point is these fungal systems have a long term view of population sustainability and health and they want the community of the forest to survive so more trees can be produced more debris trails more gum phidias gluten doses can grow by detoxifying the ecosystem so the other plant communities and animals can survive is in its own best interest and I think this is a model of how we should behave what I hear in my dreams is generations in the future screaming back to us in time saying what are you doing don't you see we are at this critical point in time and we've evolved to be the leaders of our biological community and we are misleading we are we are causing the devastation to our very foundation of our life system that has given us birth and we are ultimately committing suicide one spectacular and unfortunate example my wife does did I went to China to Shanghai last March and I was in China 1984 this is last Marxist um you know to over 20 years later and I came back with immediately the the impression and the concept that China is committing ecological suicide Shanghai is incredibly anemic biologically now the sudden interest in owning automobiles personally and the amount of pollution and air pollution there is just out of control so I'd like you to read something that an ecologist wrote me just recently after seeing my book and he wrote me something that I think really puts this into focus so I like to read it just for a second this is very very potent and I just shivers went up and down my spine when this person written right I wrote this to me so this one nucular mushroom basically so out of the small michael feeley old math is basically one washer mess no there's now the hundreds of them that we know that but but in this one things yes there's like in a small area maybe a couple of mushrooms that are basically highly nuclear reactive and they're just sitting that editors groan okay you don't add some incredible do you have a picture yeah i have photographs of it not glow-in-the-dark but me the idea would be what why would that be advantageous another thing well a deer could come along pick up the mushroom go four or five miles away you know poop it out the environments been detoxified to a large degree now you repeat that over generations and generations of ecosystems in maturing and climaxing than what happens eventually is that the environment is detoxifying so I think these fungi take a long-term view um this email comes to me from an ecological habitat restaurateur employed by international agency and received an award actually in habitat design and he is over there trying to develop ecological parks in Asian culture is in love with with nature and unfortunately capitalism in China and elsewhere in the world has now trespassed upon natural systems to the point that is having a devastating effect and so here's what he wrote this is this is around Shanghai as where he's located despite China's wonderful soil profile from glaciation and alluvial deposits the central and eastern regions of the country appeared to be devoid of fungi devoid of worms in the soil devoid of frogs in the creeks and insects in the air only this deep mountainous wilderness areas where it is too steep to farm you will find such biodiversity let's amplify this over the entire planet this takes Shanghai could be New Jersey this is a growing disease that's expanding over the surface mass of the planet if you put a glass bubble over Shanghai would it be sustainable no it is not outputting of nutrients and oxygen it's not sustainable so an artificially supported this unfortunately humans are literally becoming a disease blight on the ecosystem of the planet unless we rein in and start looking downstream you have a responsibility for your grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren's future are you being responsible with the heritage that you're supposed to pass downstream or are you taking it all for yourself in your lifetime because you think Armageddon is going to come in it doesn't matter anyhow so why don't you talk about I have a couple of questions but want to talk about how are you are you I mean where are we in in sort of this trajectory the way we do business here on this planet and how concerned are you with what may happen to us you know paranoia is a good thing when to help guide you when you don't know of the threats that are around you and you can't discern exactly what they are but I think we have a very clear understanding now that there's a tremendous loss of biodiversity and the losses species in our biological community is the foundation of the food web that will begin to unravel and is unraveling how concerned and I have two different circuits schizophrenic on this I have two different attitudes well what the heck the human species has had its time in history it'll be a footnote you know and in the Galactic encyclopedia and the human species didn't get sacked together so it became extinct onward and upwards with other communities that would become smarter over time that's that's kind of the big view the short view is I have a grandson I want to make sure that he grows up in a healthy and happy life and I think we have responsibility for future generations the loss of biodiversity is something that we can't even estimate and the difficulty that we face now is any estimations that we have probably totally inadequate to the problems that we cannot yet see and that's what I fear and I'm not going to be an alarmist but you take the example of Shanghai and you see it spreading you take the example of anywhere the industrialized world and as the deforestation hey folks we're getting rid of the oxygen producers on the planet by cutting down the forest and you need oxygen so I often thought maybe in the future there'll be an export tax I live in Washington State Washington State should be charging Arizona for us oxygen because oxygen is not being produced in Arizona it's overpopulated as exceeded the carrying capacity of its environment now obviously that's that's I'm not being serious but but there is this balance in checks and there is a spreadsheet and we are on the debit side a lot more than on the credit side and as the ecosystems do become more imbalanced then there's going to be a catastrophic loss of species and this is what many ecologists not just myself but a voice of people highly concerned highly skilled very knowledgeable and their specialties are all be unified in their expression of concern how long do you think we have what do we need to do to turn this around how long do we have before we have catastrophic failure since shamans have already stated they think it's too late I'm not going to go there I think with the power of mycelium and I understand how these fungal networks work they move very quickly they respond very quickly to catastrophic they've been designed by nature to do so so I think they can repair these ecosystems very very quickly provided the world gets involved and you know you know I don't harp on my own book but I wrote this book mycelium running how mushrooms can help save the world it is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet it is how to engage fungal systems to heal ecosystems from pollutants and it is my most significant work and I hope it will open up doors for generations downstream how much longer do we have depends on the ecosystem China is trying to replant trees well you know I praise that I think that's a wonderful thing and to the extent that they can replant trees versus the devastation that is growing I don't think it is even a drop in the ocean in terms of what's needed to be done the ecosystems are are fragile and in many areas of the world and may have been devastated beyond immediate repair I think ultimately over hundreds of years the ecosystems can be repaired but the only way that we can save this planet or save ourselves from extinction and I think will go extinct before the planet well is to get communities of individuals together and we need to empower environmental scientists and power biologists environmental sciences should be taught at kindergarten from the very beginning and students need to be taught from the very beginning that every action every footprint they make on this planet has an effect on nature and without that knowledge I don't have much hope for the human species I do have the hope of the fact the nature will rebel and then exclude us as a member of the biological community if necessary if we don't get our act together why you think committing a suicide why what what is it about human that prevents us as a general collective from acting sustainably in our environment what do you think are the prime motivators that can help us conduct our behavior this right I have to be careful but my mother's a charismatic Christian and she's a Christian leader so no she's not but she all watch this I'm sure so hi mom she'll be supportive um I think we have a a we were forest people and we worship in the woods and we relished and celebrated nature we all have a sense of our own mortality and the idea of an afterlife is something that most cultures share in common so with the rise of monotheism the belief in one God and other gods are evil and this materialistic system of churches requiring the parishioners to give money to the church so the church can build bigger buildings and bigger you know congregations and and and then that politicization of the religious movement by the right is really causing us a lot of harm we need to celebrate our diversity diversity and religious beliefs our diversity in biological systems my mother's a charismatic Christian and I love her dearly and she's a good woman and I think most everybody on this planet I would say 98% of the people in this planet believe in their virtue of what is good what you know is we want things that make us happier and healthier we want our children to be happier and healthier I think that's almost a universal but putting those into practice is I think where we fail and my I have this epiphany and I was this whole thing about about the teaching evolution in the school and whether evolution or intelligent design should be taught as on equal footing and I this epiphany well it makes perfect sense evolution is God's intelligent design there's two things that we can accept I think most religions will accept we are incapable of comprehending the enormity of the concept of God whatever it is we know that we're incomplete and we can't even imagine the enormity of the concept and two we have evolved and were born from nature and if we claim that we are intelligent how could nature not be intelligent and yet if we acknowledge that our intelligence is an adequate inadequate to the concept of God then we are still children on the on in the ecosystem and we should be extremely careful because as we move forward in time and with our technologies we are truly Neanderthals with nuclear weapons we better step back take a breath look around and consult with our microbial allies we have to come into alliance with the microbes that are given us life can you go into the spirit the forest people and the mushrooms that we ate to expand our yeah see now we have to trespass in the end as some private stuff that I'm not sure if I really want to go too far okay you know I mean I'm I could talk about things that all really really really blow your mind I wrote the book on this but I my my sensitivity right now is well we have ceremony and ritual for helping us understand you know religious concepts and native peoples in particular you know my limited familiarity with Native Americans I would use that model and expand upon their knowledge base one of the best things that I've ever heard the Native American community is the concept of seven generations if we could you know they should get the Nobel Prize for communication if there was such a one because this is something that I think that we all need to pay attention to I hear nature screaming out to me saying wake up don't you see you know we are your allies we have your friends but you have been given a position of honor which is being abused and I sense that we have become deafened to the voices of nature because of our technology the immediacy of personal gratification because of the fog of politics and war and the media and that is time for us to go back to nature how many people how many Americans have spent a night in the old growth forest and then policies being dictated by people who have never spent a night in the old-growth forest you're supposed to be experts on subjects that you make decisions about and if you aren't experts your decisions are obviously inadequate to the task I sense that the environment and with that has given us birth so many of us need to go back you know to experience that which are our ancestors were very much a part of and the disconnect that we have now is that we're speeding you know into obliviously into our own demise mushrooms have engaged us as vectors for transport we transport spores every time that we shake hands every time that we get an automobile home every time we mail a letter we're sending spore mass you know over great distances mushrooms realize that insects which are animals and animals are good ways of carrying spores to different locations the spores are like dust or like pollen you know they can go over great distances but often times to spores have to come together before there's a mating before there's a successful mushroom colony remote from the source of the parent mushroom well something I discovered and other people discovered as well which is fabulously interesting and fun that anyone can do is if you go into the woods and you find a mushroom that you like you know and obviously don't ever eat a mushroom without an expert identifying it now let's go to about saying I think but if you find a mushroom that you really want to cultivate you I found that when you pick the mushroom up at the bassist mo all these roots and its are miraculous a property of these mushrooms that if you cut the stems the stem base the bottom of the mushroom which everyone does before they eat them they throw the stem base away and guess what the stem base regrows into mycelium and so I thought about how is this into this is very interesting it's like a proximity method for for spreading the the colony not using spores well then I thought you know deer and bear and and all sorts of other animals you know raccoons and squirrels and voles lots of animals eat mushrooms let's take the deer example the deer come along they see a mushroom they remember they love mushrooms they bite the mushroom they pulled up and they chomp on it but they won't eat the dirt what do they do the base the stem drops off as they walk away follow them to the ground and it Reece Prout's and so stem but inoculation methods which is what we call them is taken to the butts of the base of the stem is an excellent way of propagating mushrooms and then allowing you to carry natural spawn from the woods and plant it in your backyard and the books full of that the book has all the visuals and with you giving us a vision for how we should live provision which would instead of being angry now what does that look like alright for us okay what I see as the solution and I'm speaking from a micro centric point of view obviously I'm specialized in fungi but from what I know thus far with my limited knowledge is I really believe that mushroom farms should be reinvented as healing arts centers for the communities they are recycling all sorts of waste material for producing a medicinal or a food product that has great properties but the enzymes that are present inside the straw and the sawdust and the other material they use the compost those enzymes are extremely powerful for breaking down toxic waste we need to harvest those enzymes and those the substrates that are fully my ciliated with different species and then replant them and the outside ecosystems surrounding communities that need attention that need to be healed and by then integrating mushroom farms and cultivation facilities and this is the from micro cultivation facilities of a home grower in their backyard you can customize and orchestrate mycological communities communities of mushrooms that are specific to the needs of your family of your community of the ecosystem whether the issues are health related cancer and to virals to anti microbials or whether you just need to build soil preventing erosion you know you can take these mycelial mats and these mushroom farms are producing hundreds of tons of this material per week and they can't give it away and it's right centered oftentimes around population communities communities the populations that aren't Sorley of need of things so I think in integrating these into permaculture systems into these internet integrating these into Christian communities Buddhist communities this is an essential piece of a puzzle that is missing and this essential piece of the puzzle can be a catalyst for a paradigm shifting change for benefiting the future and they work quickly and they can work now okay right and it's 20 20 100 and okay what do you want to tell those people okay given what you know that okay I'm speaking what two generations way beyond my own lifetime and I like to say that we tried many of us tried what I would like to tell future generations is to always remain children and your scientific curiosity and to explore nature to its greatest depths because we are part of a natural system we are children of nature and in order for us to sustain ourselves in the future we need to stay in that in that state of bewilderment of amazement of curiosity of passion of sensitivity to the health needs of everyone around us so my path has been the mycelial path and I know it fairly well there's so much more that I need to know and I'm hoping that future generations can pick up the torch and pass it on

Channel: Tree Media

Views: 306,369

Keywords: mycelium, mushrooms, Paul Stamets, environment, decontamination, toxics

Id: T-9zzXuZ2h4

Length: 57min 27sec (3447 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2016