Sha Boom, Shroom Boom

Picture of Turkey Tail Mushrooms.

Last night I was reading about stem butt inoculation. Sounds kinky, but it’s just one way to grow mushrooms.

I’m not growing mushrooms myself, but I have started taking mushroom extracts to see if they have any positive effect on me. I’m also reading Mycelium Running – How Mushrooms can help save the Earth. Many mushrooms eat wood and leaves that are on the forest floor and turn it into fertile soil, but I’ve learned that some mushrooms can actually eat rocks and digest their minerals.  Some mushrooms can even munch away at minerals that are poisonous to humans, stuff like lead, mercury, and radioactive Cesium.  So, at places like Chernobyl there are mushrooms growing today that are eating up the leftover radioactive Cesium that was spilled in the catastrophe back there in 1986.  You can’t eat these mushrooms, simply because they have consumed so much poison.  However, we can pick them.  Since they have absorbed radioactive material, when we pick them, we are, in effect, removing a little bit of the radioactivity from the area.  More mushrooms will grow.  Then, we can pick them and clean up even more of the radioactivity.

Then we can take the truckloads of these poison-munching mushrooms to a place that manufactures or uses whatever heavy metal they were eating. They can extract those heavy metals from the mushrooms.  The result is that the area where the mushrooms got picked gets cleaned up and the poisons that were in the ground are safely recycled.

Some mushrooms eat cow shit and are still edible.  (You’d probably want to wash them first, of course).  There must be a mushroom growing someplace that likes human waste. Mushrooms can help us to clean up the planet.  That’s just one of the amazing things that they do.

So, my point, which I got from a statement by Neil De Grasse Tyson is, we know how to “terraform” planets like Mars to make them more habitable to Earthlings.  Wouldn’t it make more sense, he said, to invest the time and resources into just making Earth more habitable, first? That makes way more sense than just trashing this planet, like we’re doing, discarding it, and moving on to the next one.

Instead of tossing tons and tons of plastic into the ocean, maybe we can find a mushroom that eats plastic.  Plastic is a petroleum product, and there are mushrooms that eat petroleum and can be used to clean up oil spills.

Last night during his State of the Union address, President Biden outlined many of the problems we face in the days ahead. Solving the problems won’t be easy, but it reminded me of something Henry J. Kaiser said, “Problems are only opportunities wearing work clothes.” We have the technology and the opportunity to use nature to help us greatly improve the habitability and health of our own planet. Our planet has been around for billions of years and it’s not right that our generation is just trashing it with no consideration for future generations.

Like the Joni Mitchell song that the late David Crosby sang at Woodstock:

… We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

We’ve got to get back to the garden, and using mushrooms can be one way to help us become better gardeners.

Peace & Love, and all of the above,

Earl