Over the years, we’ve found ourselves at some of the same conferences,
so I’ve had several opportunities to hear his talks, which consist of a
beguiling (often brilliant) mash-up of hard science and visionary
speculation, with the line between the two often impossible to discern.
His 2008 TED talk, which is representative, has been viewed online more
than four million times.
Stamets, who was born in 1955 in Salem, Ohio, is a big hairy man with
a beard and a bearish mien; I was not surprised to learn he once worked
as a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest. Onstage, he usually wears what
appears to be a felt hat in the alpine style but which, as he’ll explain, is in
fact made in Transylvania from something called amadou, the spongy
inner layer of the horse’s hoof fungus (Fomes fomentarius), a polypore
that grows on several species of dead or dying trees. Amadou is
flammable and in ancient times was used to start and transport fires.
Ötzi, the five-thousand-year-old “Ice Man” found mummified in an alpine
glacier in 1991, was carrying a pouch in which he had a piece of amadou.
Because of its antimicrobial properties, Fomes fomentarius was also used
to dress wounds and preserve food. Stamets is so deep into the world of
fungi there’s frequently one perched on top of his head.
Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated
kingdom of life on earth. Though indispensable to the health of the planet
(as recyclers of organic matter and builders of soil), they are the victims
not only of our disregard but of a deep-seated ill will, a mycophobia that
Stamets deems a form of “biological racism.” Leaving aside their
reputation for poisoning us, this is surprising in that we are closer,
genetically speaking, to the fungal kingdom than to that of the plants.
Like us, they live off the energy that plants harvest from the sun. Stamets
has made it his life’s work to right this wrong, by speaking out on their
behalf and by demonstrating the potential of mushrooms to solve a great
many of the world’s problems. Indeed, the title of his most popular
lecture, and the subtitle of his 2005 book, Mycelium Running, is “How
Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.” By the end of his presentation,
this claim no longer sounds hyperbolic.
I can remember the first time I heard Stamets talk about
“mycoremediation”—his term for the use of mushrooms to clean up
pollution and industrial waste. One of the jobs of fungi in nature is to
break down complex organic molecules; without them, the earth would
frankie
(Frankie)
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