7 RADICAL MYCOLOGY

To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.

—URSULA LE GUIN

I LAY NAKED IN a mound of decomposing wood chips and was buried up to my neck by the spadeful. It was hot, and the steam smelled of cedar and the fust of old books. I leaned back, sweating under the damp weight, and closed my eyes.

I was in California, visiting one of the only fermentation baths to be found outside Japan. The wood shavings had been moistened and piled into a heap. After two weeks of rotting they had been shoveled into a large wooden tub and ripened for another week before I arrived. The bath was now cooking, heated by nothing more than the fierce energy of decomposition.

The intense heat made me drowsy, and I thought of the fungi decomposing the wood. How easy it is when one’s not being stewed in a heap of rotting wood to take for granted that everything decays. We live and breathe in the space that decomposition leaves behind. I greedily sucked some cold water through a straw and tried to blink the sweat out of my eyes. If we could pause decomposition, starting now, the planet would pile up kilometers deep in bodies. We would think of it as a crisis, but from a fungal point of view it would be an enormous heap of opportunities.

My torpor deepened. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time fungi have thrived through a period of dramatic global transformation. Fungi are veteran survivors of ecological disruption. Their ability to cling on—and often flourish—through periods of catastrophic change is one of their defining characteristics. They are inventive, flexible, and collaborative. With much of life on Earth threatened by human activity, are there ways we can partner with fungi to help us adapt?

These may sound like the delirious musings of someone buried up to their neck in decomposing wood chips, but a growing number of radical mycologists think exactly this. Many symbioses have formed in times of crisis. The algal partner in a lichen can’t make a living on bare rock without striking up a relationship with a fungus. Might it be that we can’t adjust to life on a damaged planet without cultivating new fungal relationships?

IN THE CARBONIFEROUS period, 290 to 360 million years ago, the earliest wood-producing plants spread across the tropics in swampy forests, supported by their mycorrhizal fungal partners. These forests grew and died, pulling huge quantities of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And for tens of millions of years, much of this plant matter didn’t decompose. Layers of dead and un-rotted forest built up, storing so much carbon that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels crashed, and the planet entered a period of global cooling. Plants had caused the climate crisis, and plants were hit the hardest by it: Huge areas of tropical forest were wiped out in an extinction event known as the Carboniferous rainforest collapse. How had wood become a climate-change-inducing pollutant?

From a plant perspective wood was, and remains, a brilliant structural innovation. As plant life boomed, the jostle for light intensified, and plants grew taller to reach it. The taller they became, the greater their need for structural support. Wood was plants’ answer to this problem. Today, the wood of some three trillion trees—more than fifteen billion of which are cut down every year—accounts for about sixty percent of the total mass of every living organism on Earth, some three hundred gigatons of carbon.

Wood is a hybrid material. Cellulose—a feature of all plant cells, whether woody or not—is one of the ingredients and the most abundant polymer on earth. Lignin is another ingredient, and the second most abundant. Lignin is what makes wood wood. It is stronger than cellulose and more complex. Whereas cellulose is made up of orderly chains of glucose molecules, lignin is a haphazard matrix of molecular rings.

To this day, only a small number of organisms have worked out how to decompose lignin. By far the most prolific group are the white rot fungi—so-called because in decomposition they bleach wood a pale color. Most enzymes—biological catalysts that living organisms use to conduct chemical reactions—lock onto specific molecular shapes. Faced with lignin, this approach is hopeless; its chemical structure is too irregular. White rot fungi work around the problem using nonspecific enzymes that don’t depend on shape. These “peroxidases” release a torrent of highly reactive molecules, known as “free radicals,” which crack open lignin’s tightly bonded structure in a process known as “enzymatic combustion.”

Fungi are prodigious decomposers, but of their many biochemical achievements, one of the most impressive is this ability of white rot fungi to break down the lignin in wood. Based on their ability to release free radicals, the peroxidases produced by white rot fungi perform what is technically known as “radical chemistry.” “Radical” has it right. These enzymes have forever changed the way that carbon journeys through its earthly cycles. Today, fungal decomposition—much of it of woody plant matter—is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, emitting about eighty-five gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. In 2018, the combustion of fossil fuels by humans emitted around ten gigatons.

How did tens of millions of years’ worth of forest go un-rotted over the Carboniferous period? Opinions differ. Some point to climatic factors: Tropical forests were stagnant, waterlogged places. When trees died, they were submerged in anoxic swamps, where white rot fungi were unable to follow. Others suggest that when lignin first evolved in the early Carboniferous period, white rot fungi weren’t yet able to decompose it and required several million more years to upgrade their apparatus of decay.

So what happened to the vast areas of forest that didn’t decompose? It’s an inconceivably large amount of matter to pile up, kilometers deep.

The answer is coal. Human industrialization has been powered on these seams of un-rotted plant matter, somehow kept out of fungal reach. (If given the chance, many types of fungi readily decompose coal, and a species known as the “kerosene fungus” thrives in the fuel tanks of aircraft.) Coal provides a negative of fungal histories: It’s a record of fungal absence, of what fungi did not digest. Rarely since then has so much organic material escaped fungal attention.

I lay buried among white rot fungi for twenty minutes, slow-cooked by their radical chemistry. My skin seemed to dissolve into the heat, and I lost track of where my body started and stopped; a complex cuddle, blissful and unbearable in turn. No wonder coal can give off such heat: It is made from wood that hasn’t yet been burned. When we burn coal, we physically combust the material that fungi were unable to combust enzymatically. We thermally decompose what fungi were unable to decompose chemically.

IT MAY BE rare for wood to escape fungal attention; it is common for fungi to escape ours. In 2009, the mycologist David Hawksworth referred to mycology as “a neglected megascience.” Animal and plant biology have had their own university departments for generations, but the study of fungi has long been lumped in with plant sciences and is seldom recognized as a distinct field, even today.

Neglect is a relative term. In China, fungi have been a major source of food and medicines for thousands of years. Today, seventy-five percent of the global production of mushrooms—almost forty million tons—occurs in China. In central and eastern Europe, too, fungi have long played important cultural roles. If deaths from mushroom poisoning are any metric of national fungal enthusiasm, compare the one or two deaths a year in the United States with the two hundred deaths in Russia and Ukraine in the year 2000.

Nonetheless, for much of the world, Hawksworth’s observations hold true. The first State of the World’s Fungi report published in 2018 reveals that in the Red List of Threatened Species, compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), only fifty-six species of fungi have had their conservation status evaluated, compared with more than twenty-five thousand plants and sixty-eight thousand animals. Hawksworth proposes several possible solutions for this oversight. One stands out: “The resources needed to empower ‘amateur’ mycologists” should be increased. His use of quotation marks speaks volumes. Although many fields of science have networks of dedicated and talented amateur practitioners, they are particularly prominent in the field of mycology. Too often, there has been no other outlet for fungal inquiry.

A grassroots scientific movement may sound improbable, but it emerges from a rich tradition. The “professional” academic study of living organisms only picked up momentum in the nineteenth century. Many major developments in the history of the sciences have been fueled by amateur enthusiasm and taken place outside dedicated university departments. Today, after a long period of specialization and professionalization, there is an explosion of new ways of doing science. “Citizen science projects,” along with “hackerspaces” and “makerspaces,” have grown increasingly popular since the 1990s, providing opportunities for dedicated nonspecialists to carry out research projects. What does one call these practitioners? Do they count as the “public”? Citizen scientists? Lay experts? Or just amateurs?

Peter McCoy is an anarchist, hip-hop artist, self-taught mycologist, and founder of an organization called Radical Mycology, which works to develop fungal solutions to the many technological and ecological problems we face. As he explains in his book Radical Mycology—a hybrid of fungal manifesto, guidebook, and grower’s guide—his goal is to create a “people’s mycological movement” versed in “the cultivation of fungi and the applications of mycology.”

Radical Mycology is part of a larger movement of DIY mycology, which emerged from the psychedelic mushroom-growing scene kickstarted in the 1970s by Terence McKenna and Paul Stamets. The movement took on its modern form as it grew together with hackerspaces, crowdsourced science projects, and online forums. Although its center of gravity remains on the West Coast of North America, grassroots mycological organizations are rapidly spreading to other countries and continents. The word radical derives from the Latin radix, meaning “root.” Interpreted literally, the concerns of radical mycology lie with its mycelial base, or its “grassroots.”

It is for these grassroots fungal enthusiasts that McCoy founded an online mycology school, Mycologos. Knowledge about fungi is often inaccessible and hard to understand. His mission is to reshape human-fungal relations by distributing this information in readily digestible form: “I envisage teams of Radical Mycologists Without Borders traveling the globe, sharing their skills and discovering new means of working with fungi. Where one Radical Mycologist trains ten, those ten can train a hundred, and from them a thousand—so it is that mycelium spreads.”

IN THE AUTUMN of 2018, I traveled to a farm in rural Oregon for the biannual Radical Mycology Convergence. There I found more than five hundred fungal nerds, mushroom growers, artists, budding enthusiasts, and social and ecological activists bustling around a farmyard. Wearing a baseball cap, worn sneakers, and thick-lensed spectacles, McCoy set the scene in a keynote address: “Liberation Mycology.”

To grow mushrooms on any kind of scale, growers have to develop a keen nose for material to satisfy voracious fungal appetites. Most mushroom-producing fungi thrive on the mess that humans make. Growing cash crops on waste is a kind of alchemy. Fungi transform a liability with negative worth into a product with value. A win for the waste-producer, a win for the cultivator, and a win for the fungi. The inefficiency of many industries is a blessing to mushroom growers. Agriculture is particularly wasteful: Palm and coconut oil plantations discard ninety-five percent of the total biomass produced. Sugar plantations discard eighty-three percent. Urban life isn’t much better. In Mexico City, used diapers make up between five and fifteen percent by weight of solid waste. Researchers have found that the omnivorous Pleurotus mycelium—a white rot fungus that fruits into edible oyster mushrooms—can grow happily on a diet of used diapers. Over the course of two months, diapers introduced to Pleurotus lost about eighty-five percent of their starting mass when the plastic covering was removed, compared with a mere five percent in fungus-free controls. What’s more, the mushrooms produced were healthy and free from human diseases. Similar projects are underway in India. By cultivating Pleurotus on agricultural waste—by enzymatically combusting the material—less biomass is thermally combusted and air quality is improved.

Oyster mushrooms, *Pleurotus ostreatus,* growing on agricultural waste

It is no great surprise that the mess humans have made might look like an opportunity from a fungal perspective. Fungi have persisted through Earth’s five major extinction events, each of which eliminated between seventy-five and ninety-five percent of species on the planet. Some fungi even thrived during these calamitous episodes. Following the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, credited with the dispatch of dinosaurs and the mass destruction of forests across the globe, fungal abundance surged, fueled by an abundance of dead woody material to decompose. Radiotrophic fungi—those able to harvest the energy emitted by radioactive particles—flourish in the ruins of Chernobyl and are just the latest players in a longer story of fungi and human nuclear enterprise. After Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb, it is reported that the first living thing to emerge from the devastation was a matsutake mushroom.

Fungal appetites are diverse, but there are some materials they won’t break down unless they have to. In one of his workshops, McCoy explained how he had trained Pleurotus mycelium to digest one of the most commonly littered items in the world, cigarette butts, more than 750 thousand tons of which are thrown away every year. Unused cigarette butts will break down, given time, but used cigarette butts are saturated with toxic residues that impede the process. McCoy had weaned Pleurotus onto a diet of used butts by gradually phasing out the alternatives. Over time, the fungus had “learned” how to use them as its sole food source. A time-lapse video showed the mycelium seeping steadily upward through a jam jar filled with crumpled tar-stained butts. A burly oyster mushroom soon bundled itself up and out of the top.

In fact, it is just as much “remembering” as “learning.” A fungus won’t produce an enzyme it doesn’t need. Enzymes, or even entire metabolic pathways, can lie dormant in fungal genomes for generations. For the Pleurotus mycelium to digest the used cigarette butts it might have to dust off an unused metabolic move. Or it might deploy an enzyme normally used for something else and press it into the service of a new cause. Many fungal enzymes, like lignin peroxidases, are not specific. This means that a single enzyme can serve as a multitool, allowing the fungus to metabolize different compounds with similar structures. As it happens, many toxic pollutants—including those in cigarette butts—resemble the by-products of lignin breakdown. In this sense, to confront Pleurotus mycelium with used cigarette butts is to offer it a commonplace challenge.

Much of radical mycology is underwritten by the radical chemistry of white rot fungi. However, it isn’t always easy to predict what a given fungal strain will metabolize. McCoy told us about his attempts to grow Pleurotus mycelium on dishes spotted with drops of the herbicide glyphosate. Some of the Pleurotus strains avoided the drops. Some grew straight through them. Some grew up to the edge of a drop and stopped growing. “It took those ones a week to work out how to break it down,” McCoy recalled. He likened fungi to jailers with bunches of enzymatic keys that can unlock certain chemical bonds. Some strains might have the right key ready to go. Others might have it buried somewhere inside their genome but choose to avoid the new substance anyway. Others might take a week to riffle through the bunch of keys, trying different ones until they get lucky.

McCoy, like many in the DIY mycology movement, received his first shot of fungal zeal from Stamets. Since his influential work on psilocybin mushrooms in the 1970s, Stamets has grown into an unlikely hybrid between fungal evangelist and tycoon. His TED Talk—“Six Ways that Mushrooms Can Save the World”—has been viewed millions of times. He runs a multimillion-dollar fungal business, Fungi Perfecti, which does a roaring trade in everything from antiviral throat sprays to fungal dog treats (Mutt-rooms). His books on mushroom identification and cultivation—including the definitive Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World—continue to provide a crucial reference for countless mycologists, grassroots or otherwise.

As a teenager, Stamets suffered from a debilitating stammer. One day, he took a heroic dose of magic mushrooms and climbed to the top of a tall tree, where he was trapped by a lightning storm. When he came down, his stammer was gone. Stamets was converted. He studied mycology at Evergreen State College as an undergraduate and has dedicated his life to fungal matters ever since. Stamets isn’t affiliated with Radical Mycology. However, like McCoy, he is devoted to spreading the fungal message to the widest possible audience. On his website is a letter from a Syrian cultivator who, inspired by Stamets, developed ways to farm oyster mushrooms on agricultural debris. The cultivator taught more than a thousand people how to grow mushrooms in their basements, providing a key foodstuff during six years under siege and bombardment by the Assad regime.

In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that Stamets has done more than anyone else to popularize fungal topics outside university biology departments. However, his relationship with the academic world is not straightforward. From his sensational claims to his speculative theories, Stamets behaves in many ways academic scientists are not supposed to. And yet his maverick approach is undeniably effective. It is a tension that sometimes borders on the absurd. Stamets once described a complaint he received from a university professor he knows. “Paul, you’ve created a huge problem. We want to study yeast and these students want to save the world. What do we do?”

ONE OF THE ways fungi might help save the world is by helping to restore contaminated ecosystems. In mycoremediation, as the field is known, fungi become collaborators in environmental cleanup operations.

We have recruited fungi to break things down for millennia. The diverse microbial populations in our guts remind us that in those moments in our evolutionary history when we haven’t been able to digest something by ourselves, we’ve pulled microbes on board. Where this has proved impossible, we’ve outsourced the process using barrels, jars, compost heaps, and industrial fermenters. Human life hinges on many forms of external digestion using fungi, from alcohol, to soy sauce, to vaccines, to penicillin, to the citric acid used in all fizzy drinks. This sort of partnering—in which different organisms together sing a metabolic “song” neither could sing alone—enacts one of the oldest evolutionary maxims. Mycoremediation is just a special case.

And it shows great promise. Fungi have a remarkable appetite for a range of pollutants besides toxic cigarette butts and the herbicide glyphosate. In his book Mycelium Running, Stamets writes about a collaboration with a research institute in Washington State, which partnered with the US Department of Defense to develop ways to break down a potent neurotoxin. The chemical—dimethyl methylphosphonate, or DMMP—was one of the deadly components of VX gas, manufactured and deployed in the late 1980s by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. Stamets sent his colleagues twenty-eight different fungal species, which were exposed to the compound in gradually increasing concentrations. After six months, two of the species had “learned” to consume DMMP as their primary nutrient source. One was Trametes, or turkey tail, and the other was Psilocybe azurescens, the most potent psilocybin-producing species known, discovered by Stamets several years before and named for the bluish hue on the stems (he later named his son Azureus after the mushroom). Both are white rot fungi.

The mycological literature is filled with hundreds of such examples. Fungi can transform many common pollutants in soil and waterways that endanger lives, whether human or otherwise. They are able to degrade pesticides (such as chlorophenols), synthetic dyes, the explosives TNT and RDX, crude oil, some plastics, and a range of human and veterinary drugs not removed by wastewater treatment plants, from antibiotics to synthetic hormones.

In principle, fungi are some of the best-qualified organisms for environmental remediation. Mycelium has been fine-tuned over a billion years of evolution for one primary purpose: to consume. It is appetite in bodily form. For hundreds of millions of years before the plant boom in the Carboniferous, fungi made a living finding ways to decompose the debris that other organisms left behind. They can even boost decomposition by providing mycelial highways that allow bacteria to travel into otherwise inaccessible sites of decay. And yet decomposition is only part of the story. Heavy metals accumulate within fungal tissues, which can then be removed and disposed of safely. The dense meshwork of mycelium can even be used to filter polluted water. Mycofiltration removes infectious diseases such as E. coli and can sop up heavy metals like a sponge—a company in Finland uses this approach to reclaim gold from electronic waste.

Despite its promise, however, mycoremediation is no simple fix. Just because a given fungal strain behaves in a certain way in a dish doesn’t mean it will do the same thing when introduced to the rumpus of a contaminated ecosystem. Fungi have needs—such as oxygen or additional food sources—that must be taken into account. Moreover, decomposition takes place in stages, achieved by a succession of fungi and bacteria, each able to pick up where the previous ones left off. It is naïve to imagine that a lab-trained fungal strain will be able to hustle effectively in a new environment and remediate a site by itself. The challenges faced by mycoremediators are analogous to those faced by brewers—without suitable conditions, yeast will struggle to remediate the sugar in a barrel of grape juice into alcohol—except that the wine barrel is a contaminated ecosystem, and we’re inside it.

McCoy advocated a radical approach based on grassroots empiricism. I had been skeptical. The field of mycoremediation, it struck me, needs a big institutional boost. Funky homegrown solutions are all very well, but surely large-scale studies are required. How could the field progress without flagship projects, big grants, and institutional attention? I found it hard to imagine that an army of grassroots hobbyists, no matter how dedicated, could be equipped or credible enough to move things forward.

I soon realized that McCoy was advocating this approach not because of a disregard for institutional research but because of its scarcity. Many factors contribute. Ecosystems are complex, and there is no single fungal solution that will work in all sites and conditions. To develop scalable off-the-shelf mycoremediation protocols would require a large investment, which is uncommon in the remediation sector: On the whole, remediation is undertaken by reluctant companies under pressure to fulfill a legal obligation. Few are interested in solutions seen to be experimental or alternative. Moreover, there is a conventional remediation industry in full swing, which scrapes up polluted soil by the ton, transports it elsewhere, and burns it. Despite the expense and ecological disruption this causes, it is an industry in no hurry to be replaced.

Radical mycologists have little choice but to take matters into their own hands. And since the early 2000s, inspired in part by Stamets’s evangelism, a number of projects have been set up to test fungal solutions. One of the older organizations, CoRenewal, has been conducting research into the ability of fungi to detoxify the poisonous by-products of crude oil extraction left behind by Chevron’s twenty-six-year operation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In an alliance with partners in polluted areas, researchers are investigating the microbial communities and local “petrophilic” fungal strains found in contaminated soils. It is classic radical mycology—local mycologists learning how to partner with local fungal strains to solve local problems. There are other examples. A grassroots organization in California has laid out miles of straw-filled tubes full of Pleurotus mycelium in the hope that they will remediate the toxic runoff from houses destroyed in the 2017 wildfires. In 2018, floating booms filled with Pleurotus mycelium were installed in a Danish harbor to help mop up fuel spills. Most of these projects have only just begun, others are underway. None has reached maturity.

Will mycoremediation take off? It’s too early to say. But it’s clear that now, as we fret at the edge of a toxic puddle of our own making, radical mycological solutions based on the ability of certain fungi to decompose wood offer some hope. Our favored method of accessing the energy in wood has been to burn it. This, too, is a radical solution. And it is this energy—the fossilized remnants of a wood boom in the Carboniferous—that has helped get us into trouble. Could the radical chemistry of white rot fungi—an evolutionary response to the very same wood boom—now help to pull us through?

FOR MCCOY, RADICAL Mycology means more than just solving particular problems in particular places. A distributed network of grassroots practitioners is also capable of advancing the state of fungal knowledge as a whole. One way this can happen is through the discovery and isolation of potent fungal strains. Fungi isolated from a contaminated environment may have already learned how to digest a given pollutant and, as locals, be able to remediate a problem and thrive. This was the approach used by a team of researchers in Pakistan who screened soil from a city landfill site in Islamabad and found a novel fungal strain that could degrade polyurethane plastic.

Crowdsourcing fungal strains may sound implausible, but it has resulted in some major discoveries. The industrial production of the antibiotic penicillin was only possible because of the discovery of a high-yielding strain of Penicillium fungus. In 1941, this “pretty golden mold” was found on a rotting cantaloupe in an Illinois market by Mary Hunt, a laboratory assistant, after the lab put out a call for civilians to submit molds. Before this point, penicillin had been expensive to produce and remained largely unavailable.

Finding fungal strains is one thing. Isolating them and testing their activity is more difficult. Hunt may have found the mold, but it had to be taken into the lab to be examined. This was my main doubt about McCoy’s approach. How could radical mycologists isolate and grow new strains without access to well-provisioned facilities? Sterile benches pumping clean air, ultra-pure chemicals, expensive machines whirring away in equipment rooms—surely this was all needed to make any kind of real progress?

I wanted to find out more, so I attended one of McCoy’s weekend mushroom-cultivation courses in Brooklyn, New York. The class was an eclectic mix: artists, educators, community planners, computer programmers, a university lecturer, entrepreneurs, and chefs. McCoy stood behind a table piled high with dishes, plastic bags filled with grain, and boxes stacked with syringes and scalpels—staple tackle of the modern mushroom cultivator. A large pot of water simmered on the stove, filled with gelatinous wood ear mushrooms that we ladled into mugs during the tea break. This was Radical Mycology at its growing tip. Or rather, at one of its growing tips.

Over the course of the weekend, it became clear that the field of amateur fungal cultivation is in a state of wild proliferation. A well-connected, actively experimenting network of fungal enthusiasts are already accelerating the production of fungal knowledge. Techniques like DNA sequencing remain out of reach for most, but recent advances make it possible to perform operations that would have been impossible for amateurs even ten years ago. Most are ingenious low-tech solutions developed by kitchen-sink magic mushroom growers. Many are improvements and tweaks on methods developed and published by Terence McKenna and Paul Stamets in their grower’s guides. Although McCoy’s vision of mycological transformation includes community lab spaces, a lot can be done without them.

The most revolutionary innovation emerged in 2009. The founder of the magic mushroom-growing forum mycotopia.net, known only by the handle hippie3, devised a method to grow fungi without fear of contamination. This changed everything. Contamination is the menace of all fungal cultivators. Freshly sterilized material is a biological vacuum; if exposed to the busy world of the open air, life rushes in. Using hippie3’s “injection port” method, amateur mushroom cultivators can ditch the most expensive kit and fiddly procedures. All one needs is a syringe and a modified jam jar. The knowledge spread quickly. In McCoy’s view this was one of the most important developments in the history of mycology—“lab results without the lab”—and has changed the cultivation of mushrooms forever. He grinned and expelled a small libation from the syringe he held. “A squirt for hippie3.”

I laughed at the thought of teams of mycohackers tinkering around at the edge of problems, just as McCoy’s Pleurotus mycelium had hovered at the edge of the puddle of glyphosate, experimenting with different enzymes until it found a way through. McCoy was training radical mycologists to cultivate fungi at home, so they could then train fungal strains to make an opportunity out of yet another toxic human oversight. Even with relatively small incentives, the field could advance rapidly. I pictured crowds of enthusiasts gathering to race their homegrown fungal strains through fiendish cocktails of toxic waste, competing for an annual award of $1 million.

So much remains to be seen. Mycology, whether radical or not, is in its infancy. Humans have been cultivating and domesticating plants for more than twelve thousand years. But fungi? The earliest records of mushroom cultivation date from around two thousand years ago in China. Wu San Kwung, who is credited with working out how to grow shiitake mushrooms—another white rot fungus—in China around AD 1000, is commemorated with an annual feast day, and temples throughout the country are dedicated to his achievements. By the late nineteenth century, in the limestone catacombs that riddle the subsurface of Paris, hundreds of mushroom farmers produced more than a thousand tons of “Paris” mushrooms every year. Yet lab-based techniques only arose around a hundred years ago. Many of the techniques that McCoy teaches, including hippie3’s injection port method, are only about a decade old.

McCoy’s course ended in a flutter of excitement, ideas flying around. “There’s lots of ways to play,” he grinned, a quiet blend of incitement and encouragement. “There’s a lot we just don’t know.”

FOR AS LONG as fungi have existed, they have been bringing about a “change from the roots.” Humans are latecomers to the story. Over hundreds of millions of years, many organisms have formed radical partnerships with fungi. Many—such as plants’ relationships with mycorrhizal fungi—have been blockbuster moments in the history of life, with world-changing consequences. Today there are plenty of nonhumans cultivating fungi in sophisticated ways, with radical outcomes. Can these relationships be thought of as ancient precursors to radical mycology?

African Macrotermes termites are some of the more striking examples. Macrotermes, like most termites, spend much of their lives foraging for wood, although they aren’t able to eat it. Instead, the termites cultivate a white rot fungus—Termitomyces—that digests it for them. The termites chew wood into a slurry that they regurgitate in fungal gardens, known as the “fungus comb,” by contrast with bees’ honeycomb. The fungus uses radical chemistry to decompose the wood. The termites consume the compost that remains. To house the fungus, Macrotermes build towering mounds that reach heights of nine meters, some of which are more than two thousand years old. Societies of Macrotermes termites, like those of leaf-cutter ants, are some of the most complex formed by any insect group.

Macrotermes mounds are giant, externalized guts—prosthetic metabolisms that allow the termites to decompose complex materials they can’t break down themselves. Like the fungi they cultivate, Macrotermes muddle the concept of individuality. An individual termite can’t survive apart from its society. A termite society can’t survive separate from the cultures of fungi and other microbes that feed them, and that they feed. The partnership is prolific: A substantial proportion of the wood decomposed in the African tropics passes through Macrotermes mounds.

Whereas humans access the energy bound up in lignin by physically burning it, Macrotermes help a white rot fungus to burn it chemically. Termites deploy white rot fungi just as a radical mycologist might enlist Pleurotus to break down crude oil or cigarette butts. Or in the way that a no less radical mycologist might outsource their metabolism to fungi in the barrels and jars used to ferment wine, miso, or cheese. However, there’s no question who got there first. Macrotermes had been cultivating fungi for more than twenty million years by the time the genus Homo evolved. And indeed, when it comes to Termitomyces fungi, termites’ cultivation techniques far outstrip those of humans. Termitomyces mushrooms are a delicacy (and can grow to a meter across, making them some of the largest mushrooms in the world). But despite prolonged effort, humans have not found a way to cultivate them. The fungus requires the finely balanced conditions furnished by the termites through a combination of their bacterial symbionts and the architecture of their mounds.

The expertise of termites has not been lost on the humans who live around them. The radical chemistry of white rot fungi—and its astonishing force—has long been wrapped into human lives. Termites are reported to consume between $1.5 and $20 billion of property in the United States every year. (As Lisa Margonelli observes in Underbug, North American termites are most commonly described as eating “private” property, as if they had some intentional anarchist or anticapitalist sentiment.) In 2011 termites found their way into a bank in India and ate ten million rupees in banknotes—around $225,000. In a twist on the theme of radical fungal partnerships, one of Stamets’s “six ways that fungi can save the world” involves tweaking the biology of certain disease-causing fungi so they are able to bypass termites’ defenses and exterminate their colonies (this is the same fungus—the mold Metarhizium—that shows promise in eliminating populations of malarial mosquitoes).

The anthropologist James Fairhead describes how farmers in many parts of West Africa encourage Macrotermes termites because of the way they “wake up” the soil. Earth from inside termite mounds is sometimes eaten by humans or smeared on wounds, and has been found to have a number of benefits—as a mineral supplement, or an antidote to toxins, or an antibiotic. Macrotermes cultivate an antibiotic-producing bacteria, Streptomyces, within their mounds. The partnership between Macrotermes and their fungi has even been weaponized by humans for radical political causes. In the early twentieth century in coastal West Africa, locals secretly released termites in the military outpost of a colonizing French army. Driven by the voracious appetites of their fungal partners, the termites destroyed the buildings and chewed up the bureaucrats’ papers. The French garrison quickly abandoned their post.

In a number of West African cultures, termites lie above humans in spiritual hierarchies. In some, Macrotermes are portrayed as messengers between humans and gods. In others, it was only with the help of a termite assistant that God was able to create the universe in the first place. In these myths, Macrotermes are not just portrayed as breaking things down. They are builders on the largest possible scale.

AROUND THE WORLD, the idea that fungi can be used to build things as well as break them down is starting to catch on. A material made from the outer layers of portabello mushrooms shows promise in replacing graphite in lithium batteries. The mycelium of some species makes an effective skin substitute, used by surgeons to help wounds to heal. And in the United States, a company called Ecovative Design is growing building materials out of mycelium.

I went to visit Ecovative’s research and manufacturing facility in an industrial park in upstate New York. Stepping into the lobby, I found myself surrounded by mycelial products. There were boards, bricks, acoustic tiles, and molded packaging for wine bottles. All were light gray with a rough texture and looked like cardboard. Next to a mycelium lampshade and stool was a box filled with white cubes of squishy mycelial foam. Next to this was a piece of fungal leather. I felt as if I’d stumbled into an elaborate prank, the set of a satirical TV show making fun of people with big claims about how fungi can save the world.

Eben Bayer, the young CEO of Ecovative, found me prodding a piece of mycelium. “Dell ships their servers in packaging like that. We send them about half a million pieces a year.” He gestured to a stool. “Safe, healthy, sustainably grown furniture.” Its seat was covered with mycelium leather and padded with mycelium foam. If you ordered one, it would arrive in mycelial packaging. Whereas mycoremediation is all about decomposing the consequences of our actions, “mycofabrication” is all about recomposing the types of material we choose to use in the first place. It is the yang to the yin of decomposition.

Like the radical mycologists I had met in Oregon and Brooklyn, Ecovative reroutes agricultural waste streams to feed its fungi. Out of sawdust or corn stalks grew a valuable commodity. It was the familiar fungal win-win-win: for waste producer, cultivator, and fungus. However, in the case of Ecovative there were some additional wins. One of Bayer’s long-standing ambitions has been to disrupt polluting industries. The packaging materials that Ecovative grows are designed to replace plastics. Their construction materials are designed to replace brick, concrete, and particle board. Their leather-like textile replaces animal leather. Hundreds of square feet of mycelial leather can be grown in less than a week on materials that would otherwise be disposed of. At the end of their life, mycelial products can be composted. Ecovative’s materials are lightweight, water resistant, and fire retardant. They are stronger than concrete when subjected to bending forces and resist compression better than wood framing. They have a better insulation value than expanded polystyrene and can be grown in a matter of days into an unlimited number of forms (researchers in Australia are working to create a termite-resistant brick by combining Trametes mycelium with crushed glass—a product that would avoid the need for Stamets’s termite-killing fungi).

The potential of mycelial materials has not gone unnoticed. The designer Stella McCartney is working with fungal leather grown using Ecovative’s methods. Ecovative has a close relationship with IKEA, who are developing ways to replace their polystyrene packaging with a mycelial alternative. Researchers at NASA have taken an interest in “mycotecture” and its potential role in growing structures on the moon. Ecovative has just received a $10 million research and development contract from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a wing of the US military. DARPA is interested in growing barracks out of mycelium that repair themselves when damaged and decompose when their job is done. Growing housing for soldiers hadn’t been part of Bayer’s original vision, but these are adaptable techniques. “We can use these methods to grow relief shelters in disaster zones,” Bayer pointed out. “Using mycelium, you can grow a lot of housing for a lot of people at really low cost.”

The basic idea is simple. Mycelium weaves itself into a dense fabric. The living mycelium is then dried into a dead material. The final product depends on how the mycelium is encouraged to grow. The bricks and packaging material are formed as mycelium “runs” through a slurry of damp sawdust packed into molds. The flexible materials are made from pure mycelium. Tan it, and you get leather. Dry it, and you get a foam that can be used to make anything from insoles for sports shoes to dock floats. Whereas McCoy and Stamets tempt fungi into new metabolic behaviors, Bayer tempts them into new growth forms. Mycelium can always be trusted to pour itself into its environment, whether it be a puddle of neurotoxin or a mold shaped like a lampshade.

Bayer and I pushed our way through a set of doors and entered a hangar large enough to build an airplane in. Wood chips and other raw materials slithered down chutes into mixing drums where they were combined in ratios digitally controlled via banks of computer screens. Twenty-foot-long Archimedes’ screws trammeled streams of sawdust through heating and cooling chambers at rates of half a ton an hour. Towering stacks of plastic molds were wheeled between growth chambers and ten-meter-high drying racks. The chambers were digitally controlled microclimates—light, humidity, temperature, oxygen, and carbon dioxide levels all varied in carefully programmed cycles. It was the industrial human equivalent of a Macrotermes termite mound.

Like Ecovative’s growth facility, Macrotermes mounds are carefully regulated microclimates, built around the requirements of the fungus. By opening and closing tunnels within a system of chimneys and galleries, termites are able to regulate temperature, moisture, and levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide. In the middle of the Sahara, termites can create the cool, damp conditions that allow the fungus to thrive.

As in Macrotermes mounds, the fungi grown at Ecovative are species of white rot fungi. Most products are grown from Ganoderma mycelium, the species that fruits into reishi mushrooms. Some use Pleurotus, and others Trametes, which fruits into turkey tail mushrooms. It was Pleurotus that McCoy had trained to digest glyphosate and cigarette butts. It was Trametes that Stamets’s collaborators had trained to digest the toxic precursor to VX gas. Just as different fungal strains vary in their willingness to break down toxic nerve agents or glyphosate, different strains vary in how fast they grow and what sort of material their mycelium will make.

Ecovative holds a patent on its process and grows more than four hundred tons of furniture and packaging every year, but its business model does not depend on it being the primary producer of mycelial materials. There are people and organizations licensed to use Ecovative’s Grow It Yourself (GIY) kits in thirty-one countries, producing everything from furniture to surfboards. Lighting is popular (the MushLume lamp has recently launched). A designer in the Netherlands is making mycelial slippers. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration replaced the plastic foam in the buoyant rings used to float tsunami-detection devices with a mycelial alternative.

One of the more ambitious visions for building with mycelium is Fungal Architectures, or FUNGAR. FUNGAR is an international consortium of scientists and designers who intend to create a building made entirely of fungus, combining mycelial composites with fungal “computing circuits” that will detect and respond to light levels, temperature, and pollution. One of the lead researchers is Andrew Adamatzky, of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory, the researcher who proposes that mycelial networks can be harnessed to compute information using electrical impulses that pass along their hyphae. Mycelial networks only generate electrical impulses when they are alive, a problem Adamatzky hopes to overcome by encouraging living mycelium to absorb electrically conductive particles. Once killed and preserved, these mycelial networks will create electrical circuits consisting of mycelial wires, transistors, and capacitors—“a computing network that will fill every cubic millimeter of the building.”

Walking around Ecovative’s production facility, it’s hard to escape the feeling that a handful of white rot fungal species are doing very well out of this arrangement. Sure, they are killed before the materials are used. But only after their appetites have been fulfilled. And after they have been introduced, for yet another time, into hundreds of pounds of freshly pasteurized sawdust. Like McCoy and the radical mycologists, who literally—and figuratively—spread spores around the world, Ecovative serves as a global dispersal system for a number of fungal species. The fungi are at once a “technology” and partners with humans in a new type of relationship.

It’s too early to say where the relationships being forged at Ecovative will end up. Confronted with the problem of how to access the energy in plant matter, Macrotermes termites have been cultivating huge quantities of white rot fungi in purpose-built production facilities for thirty million years. Macrotermes and Termitomyces have lived with one another for so long that neither can survive without the other. Whether or not mycofabrication will draw humans into a codependent symbiosis remains to be seen, but already it’s clear that once more, a global crisis is turning into a suite of fungal opportunities. Yet again, human waste streams are being reimagined in terms of fungal appetites. Some trends go viral. I started to reflect on what it would mean to go fungal.

IF ANYONE KNOWS about going fungal, it’s Paul Stamets. I have often wondered whether he has been infected with a fungus that fills him with mycological zeal—and an irrepressible urge to persuade humans that fungi are keen to partner with us in new and peculiar ways. I went to visit him at his home on the west coast of Canada. The house is balanced on a granite bluff, looking out to sea. The roof is suspended on beams that look like mushroom gills. A Star Trek fan since the age of twelve, Stamets christened his new house Starship Agarikon—agarikon is another name for Laricifomes officinalis, a medicinal wood-rotting fungus that grows in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve known Stamets since I was a teenager, and he has done a lot to inspire my own interest in fungi. Every time I see him I’m met with a flurry of electrifying fungal news flashes. Within minutes his mycological patter picks up speed, and he leaps between bulletins almost faster than he can talk, a ceaseless torrent of fungal enthusiasm. In his world, fungal solutions run amok. Give him an insoluble problem and he’ll toss you a new way it can be decomposed, poisoned, or healed by a fungus. Much of the time, he wears a hat made from amadou—a feltlike material produced from the fruiting body of the tinder fungus, or Fomes fomentarius, another white rot fungus. It carries fitting associations. Amadou has been used by humans as a firestarter for thousands of years—it was carried by the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old corpse preserved in glacial ice. As a tool of —thermal—combustion, it is one of the most ancient examples of human radical mycology currently known.

Not long before I arrived, Stamets had been contacted by the creative team behind the TV series Star Trek: Discovery, who wanted to know more about his work. He had agreed to brief them on the ways that fungi could be used to save worlds. Sure enough, Star Trek: Discovery, which premiered the next year, was laced with mycological themes. A new character was introduced, a brilliant astromycologist called Lieutenant Paul Stamets, who uses fungi to develop powerful technologies that can be deployed to save humanity in a fight against a series of terminal threats. The Star Trek team has taken plenty of license, though they hardly needed to. By tapping into intergalactic mycelial networks—“an infinite number of roads, leading everywhere”—(the fictional) Stamets and his team work out how to travel in the “mycelial plane” faster than the speed of light. Following his first mycelial immersion, Stamets comes to, dazed and transformed. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to grasp the essence of mycelium. And now I do. I saw the network. An entire universe of possibilities I never dreamed existed.”

One of the problems (the real) Stamets hoped to address by collaborating with the Star Trek team is the neglected state of mycology. Art imitates life and life imitates art. Fictional astromycologist heroes might be able to shape the nonfictional future of fungal knowledge by inspiring a generation of young people to get excited by fungi. For (the real) Stamets, a surge of interest in fungi could fuel the development of mycological technologies that might “help save the planet that’s in jeopardy.”

When I showed up at Starship Agarikon, I found Stamets sitting on the deck fiddling around with a mason jar and a blue plastic dish. It was the prototype for a bee feeder he had invented. The jar dribbled sugar water laced with fungal extracts into the dish, and bees crawled through a chute to get to it. It was his latest venture; a seventh way that mushrooms could help save the world. Even by Stamets’s standards, this project was a big headline. His latest study, co-authored with entomologists at the Washington State University bee lab, had been accepted by the prestigious journal Nature Scientific Reports. He and his team had shown that extracts of certain white rot fungi could be used to reduce bee mortality dramatically.

About a third of global agricultural output depends on pollination from animals, particularly honeybees, and the precipitous decline in bee populations is one of the many pressing threats to humanity. A number of factors contribute to the syndrome known as colony collapse disorder. Widespread use of insecticides is one. Habitat loss is another. The most insidious problem, however, is the varroa mite, appropriately named Varroa destructor. Varroa mites are parasites that suck fluid from bees’ bodies and are vectors for a range of deadly viruses.

Wood-rotting fungi are a rich source of antiviral compounds, many of which have long been used as medicines, particularly in China. After 9/11, Stamets collaborated with the US National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense in Project BioShield, a search for compounds that could be used to fight viral storms unleashed by biological terrorists. Of the thousands of compounds tested, some of Stamets’s extracts from wood-rotting fungi had the strongest activity against a number of deadly viruses, including smallpox, herpes, and flu. He had been producing these extracts for human consumption for several years—it is largely these products that have made Fungi Perfecti into a multimillion-dollar business. But the idea of using them to treat bees was a more recent brain wave.

The effects of the fungal extracts on the bees’ viral infections were unambiguous. Adding a one percent extract of amadou (or Fomes) and reishi (Ganoderma, the species used to grow materials at Ecovative) to bees’ sugar water reduced deformed wing virus eighty-fold. Fomes extracts reduced levels of Lake Sinai virus nearly ninety-fold, and Ganoderma extracts reduced it forty-five-thousand-fold. Steve Sheppard, a professor of entomology at Washington State University and one of Stamets’s collaborators on the study, observed that he had not encountered any other substance that could extend the life of bees to this extent.

Stamets told me how he had come up with the idea. He was daydreaming. All of a sudden, separate lines of thought came together and hit him “like a lightning bolt.” If fungal extracts had antiviral properties, then maybe they’d help reduce the viral load of bees—and yes, in fact, he remembered that in the late 1980s, he had watched bees from his hives visiting a pile of rotting wood chips in his garden, moving the chips aside to feed on the mycelium underneath. “Oh my god.” Stamets woke up. “I think I know how to save the bees.” It was a big moment, even for someone who has spent decades dreaming up fungal solutions to obstinate problems.

It is easy to see why Star Trek borrowed Stamets. His narrative style is straight out of an American blockbuster movie. Many of his accounts feature fungal heroes, poised to save the planet from almost certain doom. Viral storms of unprecedented proportions threaten global food security. Critical pollinators struggle on under grave threat from the virus-bearing parasites, poised to inflict global famine. The future of the world hangs in the balance. But wait. Is that…? Yes! Once again, fungi come to the rescue with the help of their human accomplice, Stamets.

Will antiviral compounds produced by wood-rotting fungi really save the bees? Stamets’s findings are promising, but it’s too early to say whether the fungal extracts will translate into fewer collapsed colonies in the long term. Viruses are just one of many problems that bees face. Whether the fungal antivirals perform equally well in other countries and contexts isn’t known. More important, to save bee populations, Stamets’s solution has to be widely adopted, a feat he hopes to accomplish by recruiting the efforts of millions of citizen scientists.

I TRAVELED DOWN to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State to visit Stamets’s production facility. Headquarters is a cluster of large hangar-like sheds, surrounded by woods, several kilometers off the beaten track. This was where Stamets grew and extracted the fungi used in the study. It was where production was soon to be ramped up to bring a product to market for widespread use. In the few months after the bee study had been published, he had received tens of thousands of requests for the BeeMushroomed Feeder. Unable to keep up with demand, Stamets plans to open source the 3-D printed design in the hope that others will start to manufacture them.

I met one of Stamets’s directors of operations who had agreed to show me around. There was a strict dress code: no shoes, a lab coat, and a hairnet—beard nets were also provided. We kitted up and passed through a special set of double doors designed to reduce the inflow of contaminant-filled air from outside.

We entered the fruiting rooms, which were warm and damp, the air thick and cloying. There were ranks of shelves lined with clear plastic growing bags stitched solid with mycelium sporting all sorts of startling protrusions, from woody reishi mushrooms with their shiny chestnut scalps, to lion’s mane tumbling out of the bags like delicate cream-colored corals. In the reishi fruiting room, the air was so thick with spores I could taste their soft, damp bitterness. After just a couple of minutes my hands were dusted a cappuccino brown.

Once again, humans were going out of their way to divert tons of food into fungal networks. Once again, a global crisis was turning into a set of fungal opportunities. Like the challenge faced by Pleurotus mycelium paused at the edge of a puddle of toxic waste, radical mycological solutions are less about inventing than remembering. Somewhere in the Pleurotus genome there is probably an enzyme that will do the job. Perhaps it has done the job before. Perhaps it hasn’t but can be repurposed to serve a new cause. Similarly, somewhere in the history of life there may be a fungal ability or relationship that can inspire a new old solution to one of our many dire problems. I thought of the bee story. Stamets’s eureka moment happened when he remembered something that he had seen decades earlier—bees appearing to medicate themselves using fungi. Stamets didn’t discover the idea of curing bees using fungi. Bees did, we presume, during a biochemical squabble with viruses in a damp corner of their shared history. Somewhere deep in the psycho-spiritual compost heap of his dream world, Stamets metabolized an old radical mycological solution into a new one.

I walked into the growing rooms, packed with shelving units three meters tall. This was the fungus comb. Thousands of bags charged with soft blocks of furry mycelium filled the space. Some were white, some off-yellow, some a pale orange. If the fans filtering the air had stopped, I felt that I might have heard the crackling of millions of miles of mycelium running through its food. Upon harvest, the bags of mycelium were extracted in large barrels full of alcohol to produce the cure for the bees. Like so many radical mycological solutions, it is still uncertain; the first tender steps toward the possibility of mutually assured survival, symbiosis in its earliest infancy.