Can mushrooms save the world?
'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 75 and 95 per cent 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, fuelled 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 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.'
––Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
The road to Eleusis and amanita muscaria, the divine mushroom of the mystery schools.
Honey mushrooms of Oregon.
Soma, the elixir of life.
Living walls made from mycellium bricks.