
This is a summary of the book Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets. To be frank, the core concepts of the book can be found in his Ted talk here (which is why I bought the book), although the book does add some extra details. The book itself is best for people who want to grow fungi or harvest fungi as more than half of the book is dedicated to those two things. I will only go over how mushrooms are useful in this summary, not how to grow them or identify them.
Here are some facts about fungi:
Mushrooms are essentially nature's internet. They connect different plants and communicate with them, even sharing nutrients with other plants that are lacking them.
Fungi break down solid rock which allows it to eventually become soil.
Fungi are intelligent. In a study it consistently chose the shortest path in a maze with oat flakes at the end.
Mycelium, fungal filaments, is one cell wall thick and one cubic inch of topsoil can contain more than 8 miles worth of mycelium if placed from end to end. This matrix of filaments holds the soil together and aerates it.
There are 4 categories of mushrooms:
Saprophytic - Decomposers.
Parasitic - Kill their host.
Mycorrhizal - Symbiotic relationship e.g. nutrient absorption, disease resistance, can even transport nutrients to other organisms.
Endophytic - Repel bacteria, insects, and other fungi. Increase heat resistance in plants.
Here are the facts on how mushrooms and fungi can help save the world:
Helpful mushroom types help plants survive starvation, dehydration, and parasitization.
There are a lot of medicinal mushrooms with a wide variety of uses: antibiotics, anti cancer agents, immunomodulators, antiviral, etc.
Mushrooms also are a great source of nutrients.
Four types of ways that fungi can help the world by mycorestoration (using fungi to restore):
Mycofiltration - Fungi to filter bacteria, viruses, silt, and toxic chemicals.
For farming or other use. The book talks about studies where fungi filtered out viruses from contaminated water sources as well as fecal matter from large animal farms that threaten to enter the water systems. These filtration systems were much cheaper than current methods.
Mycoforestry - Fungi to repopulate forests or aid in farming.
Fungi helps retain moisture, keeps soil together, attracts wildlife and bugs, protects trees from killing agents, and decomposes dead matter.
Leaving wood chips around a plant can greatly help retain moisture, delay release of nutrients, and protect against forest fires.
Fungi were very effective as both natural pesticides for farming.
They could also be combined with plants to make them more heat resistant.
Mycoremediation - Fungi to denature toxic waste.
Some fungi eat diesel, heavy metals, chemical toxins, and toxic waste.
Some fungi can concentrate radioactivity 10,000 times the background levels (some fungi can live off radiation). This could permit fungi to decontaminate an area by means of absorption and the now radioactive mushrooms could be relocated to a more suitable location.
It also opens up the possibility of using mushrooms as possible energy sources in things like space travel as they live off radiation and the possibility that they are already growing on other planets even without sunlight present.
Mycopesticides - Fungi to control insect pests.
Fungi could replace toxic pesticides and thereby protect groundwater and habitats from toxic pesticides.
Fungi that kill insects can be used as more effective in-home pest control agents. The fungi can wipe out entire colonies of insects and its continued presence afterwards keeps the home sustainably bug-free.
Here is a picture of the complete life cycle of mushrooms as imagined by the author.

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