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http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/29/ted-2008-paul-stamet.html
TED 2008: Paul Stamets on how mushrooms can help the world
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, February 29, 2008 12:28 PM | permalink
(I'm liveblogging from TED 2008, in Monterey, CA)

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TED: Ideas worth speading
http://www.ted.com/index.php
Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers
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Chris Anderson: If someone takes an obscure area of nature and spends a lifetime studying it, it can be applied to the 
world at large in interesting ways. Case in point, mycologist and author Paul Stamets, who believes mushrooms can save 
the world.

Img 0308

1.3 billion years ago, fungi were the first plants to come on land, other plants followed hundreds of millions years 
later. We have more in common with fungi than other plants. Mycelium breathes oxygen like us.

Stamets says he loves a challenge and saving the Earth is a good one. He will 
present a suite of six mycological solutions.

Mycelium holds 30x its mass. They are soil magicians. Creates a spongey soil. It is earth's natural internet, a 
biologically successful model. It's highly branched. If a path gets broken, their are redundant paths. It is sentient, 
leaping up in aftermath of your footprints, trying to grab debris. They generate humus soils, and provide a 
multi-directional transfer of nutrients to trees. The sequence of microbes that occur of rotting mushrooms are an 
important part of natural cycle of the forest. I'm in love with old growth forests and I'm a patriotic American because 
of them.

Fungi uses radiation as a source of energy, so the possibility of fungi existing on 
other planets is a "forgone conclusion."

Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics. Work well against flu. We should save the old growth forests as a mater of 
national defense.

Here's a Salon article from 2002 about Stamets, titled "How Mushrooms can Save the 
World."

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/11/25/mushrooms/index.html
RSS Feed:  http://feeds.salon.com/salon/ent
How mushrooms will save the world   By Linda Baker
Cleaning up toxic spills, stopping poison-gas attacks and curing deadly 
diseases:
Fungus king Paul Stamets says there's no limit to what his spores can do.
Nov 25, 2002 | Once you've heard "renaissance mycologist" Paul Stamets talk about mushrooms, you'll never look at the 
world -- not to mention your backyard -- in the same way again. The author of two seminal textbooks, "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 convictions about the expanding role that mushrooms will play in the 
development of earth-friendly technologies and medicines have led him to collect and clone more than 250 strains of wild 
mushrooms -- which he stores in several on- and off-site gene libraries.
Fungi Perfecti   http://www.fungi.com/
THIS JUST IN: Paul Stamets has been selected as the Green-Novator in the "Go Green: Ethics+Action" section of the 
February 2008 National Geographic Adventure Magazine!
RSS Feed:  http://feeds.salon.com/salon/ent
        




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