( This torrent consists of revolutionary new information from renaissance mycolo gist Paul Stamets: - Please visit the

'Fungi Perfecti' website for more information on Paul Stamets and mycology: http://www.fungi.com/ (Your source for the best in gourmet and me dicinal mushrooms) - mp3 lecture from 'Bioneers' radio program - "Steven Foster, Jeremy Narby, Jenn ifer Greene, Paul Stamets, Terry Tempest Williams & Peter Warshall - Gaian Wonde rs of the Co-Evolutionary Dance" < 0:27:09, 64kbps, 12.4mb https://secure.bioneers.org/product/downloads > - mp3 interview from 'Living Green' program, 2007 < 0:39:10, 64kbps, 17.9mb http://www.personallifemedia.com/podcasts/living-green /living-green-show.html > - avi video lecture from 'LOHAS Conference', 2006 - "The Mysteries of Mycology" < 0:58:07, 320x240 256kbps xvid, 64kbps mp3, 138mb http://www.lohas.com/forum/vi deo.html ( re-encoded from .wmv file found on website) > - avi video trailer from upcoming documentary '11th Hour' featuring Paul Stamets < 320x240 256kbps xvid, 64kbps mp3, 19.0mb > http://www.11thhourfilm.com ) -------------------------------------------------------------------------The 11th Hour, co-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and Leila Conners, is an eco-doc umentary bringing together the leading researchers and visionaries who collectiv ely share the same voice: the Earth is in trouble, and time is short to reverse the negative impact our species is inflicting on the Biosphere. The film featur es a host of the world's most prominent thinkers and activists, including reform er Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maat hai and Fungi Perfecti's founder and CEO Paul Stamets, author of "Mycelium Runni ng: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World", who offers some of the mycological s olutions we have available in our ecological tool box. Premiers August 17. For more information, visit www.11thhourfilm.com and www.11thhouraction.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------How mushrooms will save the world Cleaning up toxic spills, stopping poison-gas attacks, and curing deadly disease s: Fungus king Paul Stamets says there's no limit to what his spores can do. By Linda Baker Nov. 25, 2002 Once you ve heard renaissance mycologist Paul Stamets talk about mus hrooms, you ll never look at the world not to mention your backyard in the same wa y again. The author of three seminal textbooks, "Mycelium Running", 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 c onvictions about the expanding role that mushrooms will play in the development of earth-friendly technologies and medicines have led him to collect and clone m ore than 250 strains of wild mushrooms which he stores in several on- and off-si te 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 b iological racism. But Stamets is about to thrust these higher fungi into the 21st century. In collaboration with several public and private agencies, he is pione ering the use of mycoremediation and mycofiltration technologies. These involve the cultivation of mushrooms to clean up toxic waste sites, improve ecological and h uman health, and in a particularly timely bit of experimentation, break down che mical warfare agents possessed by Saddam Hussein. Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat r estoration, 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 magnificen t in their implications. A former logger turned scanning-electron microscopist, Stamets is not your typic al scientist a role he obviously relishes. Some people think I m a mycological here tic, some people think I m a mycological revolutionary, and some just think I m craz y, he says cheerfully. His discussions of mushroom form and function are sprinkle d with wide-ranging and provocative mycological metaphors, among them his belief that fungal intelligence provides a framework for understanding everything from s tring theory in modern physics to the structure of the Internet.

In a recent interview, Stamets also spoke mysteriously of a yet-to-be-unveiled p roject he calls the life box, his plan for regreening the planet using fungi. It s tot lly fun, totally revolutionary. It s going to put smiles on the faces of grandmoth ers and young children, he says. And it s going to be the biggest story of the decad e. Statements like those make it tempting to dismiss Stamets as either chock-full o f hubris or somewhat deluded. But while many academic mycologists tend to questi on both his style and his methods, Stamets status as an innovative entrepreneur i s hard to dispute. Paul has a solid grounding in cultivation and has expanded fro m 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 No rth American Mushrooms. These are relatively new ideas ... but Paul s got a large sp read where he can have experiments going on under his control. And he s getting bi g-name people to back him. An advisor and consultant to the Program for Integrative Medicine at the Univers ity of Arizona Medical School and a 1998 recipient of the Collective Heritage In stitute s Bioneers Award, Stamets has made converts out of more than one researche r in the mainstream medical and environmental communities. He s the most creative thinker I know, says Dr. Donald Abrams, the assistant directo r of the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital and a professor of clini cal medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Abrams says he be came interested in the medicinal properties of mushrooms after hearing one of St amets lectures. Stamets is now a co-investigator on a grant proposal Abrams is au thoring 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 ot her Battelle researchers, is an applicant on a pending mycoremediation patent. Bu t most of what Paul sees has eventually been accepted by outside groups. He defi nitely points us in the right direction. The mycotopian future is no psilocybin fantasy Although mycoremediation sounds Brave New World -ish, the concept behind it is deci dedly low tech: think home composting, not genetic engineering. Most gardeners k

now that a host of microorganisms convert organic material such as rotting veget ables, decaying leaves and coffee grounds into the nutrient-rich soil required f or plant growth. Fungi play a key role in this process. In fact, one of their pr imary 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 ap proach, 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 c ells 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 indi vidual mycelial mats covering more than 20,000 acres, these fungal masses secret e 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 pet roleum 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 Battell e, 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 fores ts in the Pacific Northwest. Two other bioremediation teams, one using bacteria, the other using engineered bacteria, were also given sections of the contaminat ed soil to test. Lo and behold. After four weeks, oyster mushrooms up to 12 inches in diameter ha d formed on the mycoremediated soil. After eight weeks, 95 percent of the hydroc arbons 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 on ly 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 m ushrooms 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 repe ated all over the planet. At Fungi Perfecti, a rural compound not far from Aberdeen, Wash., signs warn vis itors not to enter without an appointment, and security cameras equipped with mo tion sensors guard several free-standing laboratories and a mushroom grow room. My concerns are personal safety and commercial espionage, says Stamets, explaining t hat 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 mi nds with illegal substances. In the late 1970s, Stamets did pioneering research at Evergreen State College on psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms; he later publ

ished 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 tha t work. Everything I did was covered by a DEA license. Today, Stamets spends much of his time cloning wild mushrooms. One of his innova tions has been identifying strains of mushrooms with the ability to decompose ce rtain 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 met abolizing the toxin. You can actually train the mycelia to grow on different med ia, 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 ga ses Saddam Hussein loaded into his warheads. We have a fungal genome that is diverse and present in the old-growth forests, say s Stamets. Hussein does not. If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier ca ndidates 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 o f national defense. Stamets recently collaborated with WSDOT on another mycoremediation project desi gned 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 inoc ulated with fungi. The mycelial networks not only helped to build and retain soi l but also filtered out pollutants and sediments and thus mitigated negative imp acts 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 Al exander Fleming discovered that the mold fungus penicillium was effective agains t bacteria. And yet, complains Stamets, nobody has paid much attention to the an tiviral 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 som e secretly, looking at mushrooms for novel medicines. Based on a recent study documenting the ability of a mushroom, Polyporus umbella tus, to completely inhibit the parasite that causes malaria, Stamets has come up with a mycofiltration approach to combating the disease. We know that these fung i use other microorganisms as food sources, he says. We know they re producing extra cellular antibiotics that are effective against a pantheon of disease microorgan isms. We can establish sheet composting using fungi that are specific against th e malarial parasites. We can then go far in working with developing countries, i n articulating mycelial mats specific to the disease vectors in which these thin gs are being bred. Stamets is currently shopping this idea around to the Bill and Melinda Gates Fou ndation, a front-runner in the effort to provide vaccinations in developing nati ons. Mushrooms, the Internet, and universes sprouting from universes: They re all conne cted Mycotechnology is part of a larger trend toward the use of living systems to sol ve 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 con taminants than a single Pac Man bug is gaining acceptance, says Jack Word, now wi th MEC Analytical Systems, an environmental consulting firm. The key challenge f acing mycotechnologies, he says, is securing funding to demonstrate their largescale 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, wi th a 2,000-year-old carved mushroom stone from Guatemala hovering, shamanlike, o ver 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 s imilarly arranged. It s no accident that the computer Internet is similarly arrang ed. I believe the way of nature. celial network e basis of the een reproduced ns of years. earth s natural Internet is the mycelial network, he says. That is the If there is any destruction of the neurological landscape, the my does not die; it s able to adapt, recover and change. That s the whol computer Internet. The whole design patterns something that has b through nature and has been evolutionarily successful over millio

The day after being interviewed in late October, Stamets called to point out a N ew York Times article on self-replicating universes, an article, he suggested, t hat 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 sprout ing from one another in an endless geometric progression, like mushrooms upon mu shrooms upon mushrooms. Where is Stamets going with all this? I have a strategy for creating ecological f ootprints 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. Y ou could actually start keystone species and go to creating vegetation on planet s. I think that s totally doable.