Before any plants were taller than three feet, and before any animal with a backbone had made it out of the water, the earth was dotted with two-story-tall, silo-like fungi.
In 1957, a man from New York named R. Gordon Wasson published an article inabout two trips he had taken, three decades apart. The first was to the Catskills, in New York, where his wife, Valentina, took a rambling walk in the woods and became enamored of some wild mushrooms. “She caressed the toadstools,” Wasson recalled, “savored their earthy perfume.” She brought them home to cook, and soon he, too, was enchanted.
The fact that Wasson was an otherwise straitlaced, politically conservative bank executive at J. P. Morgan lent this adventure a serious and respectable air. He began to wonder if he had unlocked a mystery uniting all of humanity: “Was it not probable that, long ago, long before the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshipped a divine mushroom?” Wasson’s discovery turned, briefly, into a movement.
Sheldrake was drawn to fungi because they are humble yet astonishingly versatile organisms, “eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere.” Plants make their own food, converting the world around them into nutrients. Animals must find their food.
Stamets is an advocate of what he calls mycoremediation—the use of fungi to remove toxic substances from the environment. Fungi have helped clean up diesel-contaminated soil; they’ve broken down pesticide residues, crude oil, and plastics. Disposable diapers can linger in a landfill for hundreds of years, but in 2014 scientists reported that they had grown oyster mushrooms on a substance made from used diapers, reducing their weight and volume by eighty per cent.
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