Hey all,
Here is an amazing interview that Derrick Jensen just did with Paul Stamets about his work with fungi.
Excerpt from interview:
For several years people from different places and backgrounds kept recommending the same oddly titled book to me: Paul Stamets’s Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (Ten Speed Press). Everyone told me it was one of the most mind-bending texts they’d ever read. With so many recommendations, I perversely hesitated to pick the book up, and when I finally did, I prepared myself to be disappointed.I wasn’t. Stamets fundamentally changed my view of nature — in particular, fungi: yeasts, mushrooms, molds, the whole lot of them.
When we think of fungi, most of us picture mushrooms, those slightly mysterious, potentially poisonous denizens of dark, damp places. But a mushroom is just the fruit of the mycelium, which is an underground network of rootlike fibers that can stretch for miles. Stamets calls mycelia the “grand disassemblers of nature†because they break down complex substances into simpler components. For example, some fungi can take apart the hydrogen-carbon bonds that hold petroleum products together. Others have shown the potential to clean up nerve-gas agents, dioxins, and plastics. They may even be skilled enough to undo the ecological damage pollution has wrought.
Since reading Mycelium Running, I’ve begun to consider the possibility that mycelia know something we don’t. Stamets believes they have not just the ability to protect the environment but the intelligence to do so on purpose. His theory stems in part from the fact that mycelia transmit information across their huge networks using the same neurotransmitters that our brains do: the chemicals that allow us to think. In fact, recent discoveries suggest that humans are more closely related to fungi than we are to plants.
Almost since life began on earth, mycelia have performed important ecological roles: nourishing ecosystems, repairing them, and sometimes even helping create them. The fungi’s exquisitely fine filaments absorb nutrients from the soil and then trade them with the roots of plants for some of the energy that the plants produce through photosynthesis. No plant community could exist without mycelia. I’ve long been a resident and defender of forests, but Stamets helped me understand that I’ve been misperceiving my home. I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.
Stamets became interested in biology in kindergarten, when he planted a sunflower seed in a paper cup and watched it sprout and lift itself toward the light. Somewhere along the way, he developed a fascination with life forms that grow not toward the sun but away from it. In the late seventies he got a Drug Enforcement Administration permit to research hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms at Evergreen State College in Washington. Stamets is now fifty-two and has studied mycelia for more than thirty years, naming five new species and authoring or coauthoring six books, including Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms (Ten Speed Press) and The Mushroom Cultivator (Agarikon Press). He’s the founder and director of Fungi Perfecti (www.fungi.com), a company based outside Olympia, Washington, that provides mushroom research, information, classes, and spawn — the mushroom farmer’s equivalent of seed. Much of the company’s profits go to help protect endangered strains of fungi in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. I interviewed Stamets in June 2007.
Jensen: How many different types of mushrooms are there?
Stamets: There are an estimated one to two million species of fungi, of which about 150,000 form mushrooms. A mushroom is the fruit body — the reproductive structure — of the mycelium, which is the network of thin, cobweblike cells that infuses all soil. The spores in the mushroom are somewhat analogous to seeds. Because mushrooms are fleshy, succulent, fragrant, and rich in nutrients, they attract animals — including humans — who eat them and thereby participate in spreading the spores through their feces.
Our knowledge of fungi is far exceeded by our ignorance. To date, we’ve identified approximately 14,000 of the 150,000 species of mushroom-forming fungi estimated to exist, which means that more than 90 percent have not yet been identified. Fungi are essential for ecological health, and losing any of these species would be like losing rivets in an airplane. Flying squirrels and voles, for example, are dependent upon truffles, and in old-growth forests, the main predator of flying squirrels and voles is the spotted owl. This means that killing off truffles would kill off flying squirrels and voles, which would kill off spotted owls.
That’s just one food chain that we can identify; there are many thousands more we cannot. Biological systems are so complex that they far exceed our cognitive abilities and our linear logic. We are essentially children when it comes to our understanding of the natural world.
Take care,
Curt