Thursday, March 28, 2024

Could Mushrooms Help Us Fight the Climate Crisis?

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Mushrooms have a remarkable ability to absorb carbon amongst their many other industrial, nutritional and pharmaceutical benefits.

Just recently, a student in Nebraska built a fully functional canoe out of mycelium, the dense, fibrous roots of the mushroom that typically live beneath the soil. Katy Ayers, who built the canoe, is part of a growing movement of people who are raising awareness that mushrooms and their many complex parts may hold some of the solutions to the world’s most intractable environmental problems, as NBC News reported.

“Mushrooms are here to help us — they’re a gift,” Ayers said to NBC News. “There’s so much we can do with them beyond just food; it’s so limitless. They’re our biggest ally for helping the environment.”

She noted that mushrooms can break down harmful pollutants and chemicals and “be used for everything from household insulation to furniture to packaging, replacing plastics, Styrofoam and other materials that are hard to recycle and harmful to the environment,” as NBC News reported.

There’s a growing body of evidence of how mushrooms can help the environment. In a 2008 TED talk, Paul Stamets discussed six ways the mycelium fungus can help save the planet, including cleaning polluted soil, making insecticides, treating smallpox and even flu viruses. In the talk, Stamets discusses an experiment where mycelium spores were put on diesel and petroleum waste spill. The spores absorbed the pollution and sprouted oyster mushrooms, which attracted insects, which brought birds that dropped seeds, and “our pile became an oasis of life,” Stamets said. “These are gateway species, vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities.” Read more…

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