All mushrooms are magic

The first rays of light of day caress the parasols, these mushrooms with slender stems have caps that can reach 40 centimetres in diameter when they ‘stretch’. Paul Stamets watches them with the same pride like that of a father watching his daughters grow up. He would then descend from where he stands, without removing his hat made of Transylvanian mushrooms, with the healthy intention of kissing his ‘creatures’. 

            Although the parasols will likely end up sauteed in a pan the same night and feeding the most ‘revolutionary’ mycologist on the planet: ‘We eat mushrooms, which are their fruits, but what is important is the network of life that extends through the subsurface and connects all the elements of the forest. Mushrooms are the internet of nature’.

            It is an ordinary day in the forest of Fungi Perfecti, the magical kingdom of the Lord of the Mushrooms. From his abode at the foot of the Olympic Mountains, a stone’s throw from Seattle and in one of the most untouched places in the Northwest of the United States, Paul Stamets has been able to rewrite the little-known history of the most misunderstood inhabitants of the planet.

            ‘The time has come to put an end to its bad reputation. Fungi are the true guardians of the exosystem, the invisible substrate of life on this planet. They are the natural intelligence of the Earth, our last great hope. The solutions are literally under our feet, and we don’t even know it’.

            We walk stealthily through the forest, and Stamets introduces us to the hidden connections through which tree and plants communicate. Mycelium propagates with the subsurface as if it were an underground galaxy, as he demonstrates in his talks with successive images from a microscope and telescope (it is not surprising that the scriptwriters of Star Trek decided to contact one of Stamets’ interstellar crewmembers, who left everyone speechless with his knowledge of the mushroom world.

            ‘Mycelium Running’ is precisely the title of the exciting compendium that ties in all the wisdom of the incredible Stamets, who entered the world of mushrooms feeling a powerful attraction to the forbidden. In the 70s, in the middle of the psychedelic era and with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), he carried out a study on the properties of psilocybin (better known as hallucinogenic mushrooms).

            ‘They were possibly the first psychoactive drugs that humanity used, and they are present in almost all cultures, from Siberia to Mesoamerica, before the ‘conquistadors’ arrived,’ recalls Stamets. ‘There are abut 200 species with hallucinogenic properties, but it is estimated that there may be up to two million species of fungi and 150,000 of what we call mushrooms. We have barely been able to record 14,000 species. We still have to identify 90%, that’s nothing’.

            ‘All mushrooms are magic,’ he concludes after decades of study and from his own experience. ‘Some have healing and antiviral properties and can be very effective in strengthening the immune system, or can contribute to cures against degenerative diseases. Other are powerful agents for biocontrol of pests and others are priceless, acting as ‘bioremediation’ by ‘eating’ toxic waste’.

            ‘The truth is, we are going to need a lot of ‘magic’ to get out of the mess we are in,’ says Paul Stamets, who rose to world game from his TED talk: ‘Six ways mushrooms can save the planet’. Climate change, he assures, will greatly accentuate environmental problems and we are going to need help now more than ever.

            ‘We know from the remains of fossils that the Earth has suffered at least five mass extinctions,’ Stamets emphasises. ‘The sixth extinction we are in is human-made, but we can still freeze the clock and undertake the arduous task of ecological restoration. As happened with the great extinction 250 million years ago, or that of 65 million years ago (when dinosaurs disappeared), fungi may hold the key to the renewal of life, thanks to their capacity for symbiosis with other organisms’.

            The potential of fungi to regenerate soil, cleanse the lands or ‘eat’ oil can testify to Stamets’ claims, who proposed them as a natural alternative to chemical dispersants during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill. The Pentagon has resorted to him on several occasions. For that, it is better not to detail the reasons for security measures that Fungi Perfecti has in place to prevent industrial espionage (By the way, Stamets is a black belt in taekwondo and an expert in Japanese poetry).

            In its testing laboratory, assisted by a team of more than 40 biologists, chemists and scientists, Stamets investigates the medicinal properties of mushrooms, and markets a range of products for ‘gourmet’ (such as cream of ‘porcini’ with white truffles) and provides everything necessary so that amateurs can start with domestic crops and have a mycological garden of shiitake, reishi, chanterelles, boletus, oyster mushrooms or champignons on their balconies.

            A qualitative leap, beyond fungi, was made by Stamets in 2010 with the ‘box of life’, with the idea of turning anyone into a tree planter and a ‘rescuer’ of the planet… ‘It is a simple box made of recycled cardboard, containing the seeds of a hundred trees (fir, redwood, ash, cedar, elm) mixed with mycorrhizal fungal spores. Each box has the potential to create a small continental climate forest and capture at least one ton of CO2 over 30 years’. 

‘The world does not behave like a machine, rather like a complex and prodigious network. The idea of the world as pure matter, or as a solid block, is outdated. What we have is a complex web of relationships between elementary particles. And all this now has added value in this networked world that we are creating.’

            That is the lesson that Fritjof Capra, author of ‘The Plot of Life’ and ‘The Tao of Physics’ has been teaching for more than four decades. The ideas of this physicist, philosopher and ‘total thinker’, born in Austria 71 years ago and settled in California, take on an extraordinary significance in these critical times, especially in the world of science. Capra warns that all branches of knowledge must be open-minded towards this concept of the world, and they are. The ‘Tao of Physics’, his first book, was published in 1975, as a ‘Copernican’ turn took place in his branch of expertise: ‘The success of the book was a surprise to me. I think it’s publication coincided with the change in modern physics perception when it began discussing quantum physics and chaos theory’.

            According to Capra, the economy is still the most reticent of all the sciences. It works basically within the exact parameters of a century ago: ‘The economy has to recognise that you cannot grow indefinitely in a finite world sooner or later. The only unlimited growth is that of cancer, which ends up killing the organism. In nature, everything through periods of growth, decline, and recycling allows ecosystems to renew themselves. This is the process that economics should emulate, applying the concept of living systems’. 

            ‘A living system is above all the relationship ‘that is established between the parts it is comprised of,’ says the physicist and thinker, who also broke barriers when building the bridge between science and spiritualism. ‘Admitting this complexity leads us to change the approach in all sciences radically. The key is within the interconnections and processes, and that also happens through how we view the Earth. We just begin to see the planet as a living system that is organised and self-regulated: we are part of that interrelated whole’.

            ‘Another rooster would crow if Leonardo’s ideas had been imposed on the mechanistic vision of Galileo, Newton or Descartes,’ says Capra, one of the world’s leading experts on the life and work of Da Vinci. ‘Leonardo eagerly searched for and drew patterns, patterns and shapes that are reflected in nature. And he discovered that everything is interconnected, that the importance is not in matter, but rather the relationships. Leonardo is not only the first ‘eco-designer’ but also the first ‘systemic’ thinker. To those who divided the world into parts or blocks, to the ‘reductionists’ of his time, (even with disdain) he would call ‘abbreviations.’