Doom and Gloom VS da Shroom

Have you ever noticed that everything environmental is doom and gloom?  Every evening news has details of some new evil mankind is visiting upon the innocent fluffy earth creatures.  You can't watch the last half of a wildlife show without a big voiceover declaiming how much evil mankind is doing to (insert species here) and (species) will soon be dead, dead, dead.  There are even instances where journalists go on record with "I can't understand why the entire Western World is not up in arms about (my cause)!  It's awful!  It's terrible!  Why the apathy?"  Well, folks, it's because normal people are served up a daily diet of horrible pitiful things and you can't care 100% about them all... or even a few. 

Let's bring up good things, shall we?  Please?

Mushrooms are fantastic things.  Did you know they can fix oil spills?  Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti completely fixed a big ol' diesel spill that was in front of the Washington State Department of Transportation in 1998 (more info in his book Mycelium Running, p. 91).  There were four piles in total - one was innoculated with mushroom mycelium, one was treated with bacteria, another was treated with chemicals, and the other was a control pile.  Here's the dead toxic pile:

The Mycelium (mushroom roots) were very happy with these environments and sprouted big ol mushrooms.

Even after cleaning up the oil, the mycelium (mushroom roots) are so good at changing the chemical components that their mushrooms are perfectly edible and safe.  In 6 weeks, the soil went from 20,000ppm of hydrocarbons to less than 200ppm and the mycelium kick-started an ecosystem. 

And it gets cooler: when oil is spilled on the high seas, like the Cosco-Busan spill in SF Bay, Phil McCrory found that human hair's unparalleled ability to hold oil can be harnessed to remove the oil and take it to a place it can be composted.  Here are some great pictures from a study which used hairmats and used motor oil.  Bleackh, that stuff is nasty.  Here is the process, from Matter Of Trust:

Part I: "You shampoo your hair because it gets greasy. Hair is very efficient at collecting oil out of the air, off surfaces like your skin and out of the water, even petroleum oil. Hair is adsorbent (as in "clings to" unlike absorbent which is to "soak up.") There are over 320,000 hair salons in the US and each collects about 1 pound of hair a day. Right now, most of that goes into the waste stream, but it should all be made into hair mats." Phil McCrory, inventor and barber.

Part II: Fungus (mushrooms):

"The roots of mushrooms, called mycelium (http://www.fungi.com/info/sems/index.html), produce enzymes that unlock wood fibers, which are composed of strings of carbon-hydrogen molecules in the form of cellulose and lignin. Similarly oil and most petroleum products are held together by similar molecular bonds. This studies if mushroom mycelium breaks these bonds, and then re-constructs the oil into carbohydrates, fungal sugars, that make up the mushroom's physical structures." Paul Stamets, Fungi.com

Once the mushrooms have had their oily feast, the whole thing is composted. Different methods are being trialed to find the most effective. The last step is vermicomposting everything -- worms are amazing remediators and can break down anything.  No wonder Darwin devoted the last book of his works to them. The excess human hair swept off barbershop floors and toxic petroleum are transformed by oil-munching oyster mushrooms and hardworking worms to become lovely sweet compost.

How cool is that.


Fun Fact for this post: The oldest mushrooms found in amber at 90 to 95 million years old.