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Mushrooms Can Help Solve The Climate Crisis. Why Are They Not Being Researched?

Environment
#1

"The United States has known that greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming for decades, and has chosen to continue increasing those emissions ever since. Now, data shows that the past 7 years have been the hottest ever recorded on planet earth. In fact, according to a recent report, earth’s temperature is 73% of the way to the horrific 1.5 degree threshold that scientists argue we must stay under at all costs.

And there is one powerful player not being utilized in the fight against climate change – the mighty mushroom.

Sign now to demand the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) invest federal research dollars into using mushrooms to clean up oil spills, reduce pollution, and reverse climate change!

The climate crisis is no longer something we can talk about in terms of the “future.” It is already here now. It is time for the United States – a country responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions total over the past century – to start acting like it.

While structural changes to implement climate solutions are clearly necessary, mycelium – found in fungi – provides an easy, risk-free way to reduce many of our worst environmental impacts. First, mushrooms can easily be used to create various building materials and packaging alternatives, reducing plastic waste and offering a biodegradable option for consumer goods. Perhaps most importantly, though, mycelium stores carbon in the soil – meaning it has the potential to be a crucial natural agent of carbon sequestration. Regardless of how much we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we will also have to start sequestering carbon because of how much has been emitted already. Mushrooms can help us do this.

Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause roughly 250,000 additional deaths per year . This is because the climate crisis affects public health in innumerable ways – from increasing heat stress, to decreasing food security through droughts and crop loss, and even making infectious disease spread worse through warmer global temperatures. Why are leaders not taking this simple action to prevent millions of unnecessary deaths?

There is no reason not to invest in research to help understand the many potential benefits of mushrooms on our planet. The EPA should be taking every measure possible to address the looming climate crisis and protect the millions of lives – human and non – that are at risk as a result. Sign the petition now if you agree!" https://www.thepetitionsite.com/en-gb/551/774/349/mushrooms-can-help-solve-the-climate-crisis.-why-are-they-not-being-researched/?taf_id=68948060&cid=twitter

#2

Misleading: the highest temperatures ever recorded isn’t the same as the highest temperatures that have ever happened. In previous eras, well inside the time of fulsome life-cladding of the Earth, mean temperatures have been strikingly higher than they are now; as have been CO2 presence in the atmosphere; and life has thriven nevertheless.

In fact, up until recent times - now reversed thanks to the release of sequestered fossil carbon from the crust by humans - there had been a worrying long-term trend for atmospheric CO2 downwards, until it was getting uncomfortably close to the point where photosynthesis stops altogether, for simple lack of atmospheric CO2; an absolute catastrophe of which we hear very little discussion during the current warming panic.

The sober fact is that in such a complex system as the Earth’s biosphere, predicting exactly what’s going to happen as the atmos-CO2 increases just isn’t possible in simplistic-slogan terms. We don’t know. The hysteria is entirely unsupported by any cast-iron-proven facts.

#3

However, as commercial green-house operators already well know, increasing the CO2 content of the air causes much more fulsome growth of plants within the houses; as happened to the whole planet during former times of higher atmos-CO2. Lush jungles and prairies all over the place…

NASA is already reporting noticeable re-greening of areas of the Earth, in response to increased CO2. And of course, more green-material growth means more soil-steppe-and-forest sequestration of carbon in the ground, from the atmosphere. See what I mean about an unpredictably-complex situation here…?

Mam Gaia is resourceful in her management of planetary homeostasis within life-favourable limits. If we re-postulate the ancient idea - as Rupert Sheldrake has done - that galactic entities like stars, planets, etc., may well possess forms of consciousness, and therefore teleological intention, might it not be feasible to imagine Mam G inventing and promoting a meddlesome ape like hom sap - precisely to reverse and bring back into balance the atmos-CO2…?

Just a thought! I do understand that most of what she does through living vectors happens at the microbial level, of which multi-cellular large creatures are merely an extreme and rather marginal outgrowth. :exploding_head: :laughing:

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#4

Which would lead one not to act…we are not giant dragonflies Rhis…we need to harmonise with our environment…if nothing else rising sea levels are going to be a major, major factor in the next 100 years, Britain will be lucky not to become an archipelago.

#5

A typical frightened, and strictly non-predictable, assertion, G. How do you KNOW? You don’t. It’s all induced panic.

I’ve been watching the weather/climate in Britain for eighty years. It’s changed. I don’t have to theorise that, I’ve observed it. It’s got a tiny bit warmer on average, and the Winters are shorter and less cold. That’s it. That’s what I’ve actually observed. Just as palaeontologists have observed the geological record of much warmer and much lusher times in the past. For the rest, we just don’t know what’s going to happen.

In the sheep/goat dichotomy of response to alleged threats, I prefer the goat response: run a bit, then stop, look, ask your flock mates, and see whether anyone can see a good reason to go on running. The usual answer is - no. Don’t panic! Just watch, wait and see…

#6

So you don’t think that desalination (from the release of fresh water in glaciers etc.), of the Gulf Stream will be an issue for us? Nature confronts us with issues to demonstrate how we grow not stultify. Does the “burn-through” of the industrial revolution mean nothing? Look at the waste of resources of all kinds, in the 20th Century, the worse of which being human, no lessons to be learned?

#7

Nice of them to bold that bit. I would kind of sorta think that maybe agencies like the EPA might care to concentrate on where the “spills” (oops, butter fingers) and “pollution” might be coming from and act on that?

I’ve no idea if our mushroom allies could achieve these marvellous things. I’d agree it definitely sounds worth a try but don’t expect a petition will be needed to kick start this research. Or are the funders being a bit pernickety and need nudging? Maybe the EPA could lay off the innocent industries around Flint, Michigan, hypothetically, and divert part of their enforcement budget to fund a different industry instead. Definitely not one that is part of a dastardly polluting cartel!!

Theres a wincey weenie cynical part of me (Karen! Surely not!) that wonders has Bionic Billy Gates recently started a mushroom enterprise? He certainly advocates feeding us poop and keeping us in the dark.

tl;dr: How is it that certain stories happen to appear online in the first place?

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#8

#Bioremediation https://www.arafel.co.uk/2016/12/the-undiscovered-science-of-myco-magic.html & https://www.arafel.co.uk/2014/10/mycology-and-bio-remediation.html

1 Like
#9

Wow. Like I said: our allies. I love the photos Gerard. thanks for sharing

#10

Theres a wincey weenie cynical part of me (Karen! Surely not!) that wonders has Bionic Billy Gates recently started a mushroom enterprise? He certainly advocates feeding us poop and keeping us in the dark

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
Derek Mahon

Even now there are places where a thought might grow —
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rain barrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong —
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark —
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’

#11

That’s a phrase to conjure with. Do mushroom spores really lay dormant that long?

#12

Isn’t it just…

…apparently so, mycostasis can see spores laying dormant for thousands of years!!

Mahon’s poem is a masterpiece.

1 Like
#13

I do say ; “There is surely a lot of wasted funding going to many Bio-Chemistry Depts. in science “faculties” throughout the world for it is not rocket science and I would have thought that the identification and categorisation of all the moulds, fungi and mushrooms by environment and proclivity (re: toxin accumulation), would have been a perfect excuse for a good old financial (and otherwise), knees-up (but they’re probably channeling all the funding into seeing how mushrooms can inform robotics - as just about every other science is doing at the moment-), after all “cleaning-up” don’t pay (especially when one doesn’t admit to one’s problems in the first place)! Mushrooms offer more elegant solutions surely? Why bother with expensive equipment when you can whip a few specimens into the lab and know immediately how much is where following some simple analysis (and being informed as to what you’re looking for before you see it!)?”