Health Hotline Magazine | February 2022

Do Mushrooms Hold the Power TO HEAL THE EARTH?

By Charity Isely

When you walk through the forest, buried beneath every step you take, there are likely hundreds of miles of mycelium—tiny thread-like filaments intertwined throughout the roots of plants and trees. It's the communication network of Kingdom Fungi, exchanging nutrients and sending chemical messages vital to survival for plants, trees, and the entire ecosystem. Now, as the planet's survival hangs in the balance, does the fungal kingdom o er a message of hope? mediums in search of nutrients. And a growing body of evidence underscores their potential for cleaning up contaminated soil, water, and ecosystems—it’s called mycoremediation. From methane capture to oil spills to wildfire cleanup, let's explore the solutions the Kingdom Fungi may o er to a planet in crisis. Methane capture Fungi are excellent decomposers, equipped with enzymes that allow them to break down a variety of

“Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration.” Paul Stamets

day treatment period, the success rate was 87.45 percent removal of TPHs in the soil samples, and the results “clearly suggest” to the study’s authors that such a mixture could be “e ectively used for large-scale bioremediation of sites contaminated with crude oil.” Wildfire cleanup

In the aftermath of the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in California, area resident, Cheetah Tchudi, launched the non-profit Butte Remediation, providing no-cost fungal bioremediation services to those who weren’t eligible for the state’s cleanup services. During Butte Remediation’s cleanup of properties devastated by the fire, Tchudi measured toxins in the ash at several sites, testing (among other things) for heavy metals, dioxins, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a persistent environmental pollutant with a range of potentially adverse human health e ects. He then incorporated oyster mushroom spawn bags into the debris and tested again after approximately six months. Although the results on heavy metal decontamination were mixed, after six months of oyster mushroom treatment, the PAHs at one test site, which had persisted for a year after the fire, were eliminated. And at another test site there was a reduction in the Toxic Equivalency Value (TEQ) of dioxins and dioxin-like compounds from 8.02 to 1.62. The World Health Organization’s safe and allowable threshold for TEQs is 1.0. Soil brought back to life Perhaps one of the most vivid snapshots of mycoremediation’s potential is an experiment in Washington state, conducted several decades ago in partnership with renowned mycologist Paul Stamets. It consisted of diesel contaminated mounds of soil treated with either enzymes, bacteria, oyster mushroommycelium, or left untreated as a control. After sixteen weeks, the PAHs in the oyster mushroom treatment had been reduced from 10,000 ppm to less than 200 ppm, allowing for plant life, worms, and other species to thrive again on this previously toxic mound of soil, while the soil treated by other methods showed little or no improvement.

A recent study from the University of Minnesota concluded there may be "an overlooked, potentially large role" for the reishi mushroom ( Ganoderma lucidum) to capture methane from the atmosphere. In lab tests, researchers found that G. lucidum had a 79 percent e ectiveness rate of removing methane from the air compared to activated carbon, another compound commonly used for capturing methane. However, when they tested reishi’s e ectiveness when it was placed directly in soil, it couldn't sustain the e ectiveness. Theorizing that native soil organisms were outcompeting the fungi, they replaced the live reishi with dead, with the idea that the dead fungi wouldn’t complete for nutrients, and the result was an even greater e ciency of methane capture—84 percent relative to activated carbon. Because dead fungi are plentiful in soil around the world, the researchers propose that these dead fungi could already be filtering methane from the atmosphere. Crude oil decontamination In 2016, a team of researchers published results from a field study in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They were testing for the total petroleumhydrocarbon degradation potential (TPH) of crude-oil contaminated soil treated with a combination of two bacterial and two fungal strains (the fungi were from the Geomyces genus, commonly found in cold environments). After a 90-

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