Green Thinking Blog

I was browsing one of my favorite websites, TED.com (Ideas Worth Spreading), and I stumbled on a fascinating video about how mushrooms can clean polluted soil, treat smallpox disease and the flu, act as a natural insecticide, and restore the world’s ecosystems. Sounds crazy huh?

Well, let me know what you think after you watch this video. It’s about 18 minutes long and some parts are pretty scientific, but I was truly dumbfounded…in the best way. Gosh, I really love TED.

This video features Paul Stamets, an entrepreneurial mycologist (a biologist that studies fungi).

Here’s what TED.com had to say about Paul Stamets and why we should listen to him:

“Entrepreneurial mycologist Paul Stamets seeks to rescue the study of mushrooms from forest gourmets and psychedelic warlords. The focus of Stamets’ research is the Northwest’s native fungal genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down the neurotoxins used in nerve gas.

There are cosmic implications as well. Stamets believes we could terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new planet.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Climate Change, Natural. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.