Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

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Clear introduction to the major groups of fungi - saprophytic, endophytic, and parasitic, as well as brown rot vs white rot. I also liked that he went over general fungal structure and life cycles, which is important for understanding the rest of the book. This is the kind of book I love: highly factual and practical and mixed with the spiritual content that sets the great writers apart from all the rest.“ Although I do not agree 100% with some of his premises, his approach seems new and enriching to me. The overall impression and story that Stamets tells about fungi, mycelium and the role they have to play in the world.

A paradigm-changing book. Stamets’s visionary insights are leading to a whole new understanding of how mushrooms, scarcely seen and rarely appreciated, regulate the earth’s ecosystems.“ Repeated rhapsodizing, mostly in the first third of the book. I don't know about the rest of the audience, but when I'm reading anything marketed as scientific nonfiction, I expect science every step of the way. Phrases like "mushrooms are shamanic souls, spiritually tuned into their homelands," "mushrooms are forest guardians," "ancient mycological wisdom," "collective fungal consciousness," and, inexplicably, "chi power" take away from the overall message. I get it, the guy is passionate about (and may worship) mushrooms; I'm passionate about birds; someone else is passionate about cats. Maybe this is his attempt to connect with the general public. But language like the above is more suited to an everyday conversation than a scientific text. There isn't a study out there that can prove the "shamanic soul" or "chi power" of a mushroom, and at the end of the day I don't want to know how much you love the mushroom, just why it should matter to me and humanity - which is the point, right? From a purely scientific perspective, I enjoyed what this book had to offer. From a literary perspective, however, I ran into some serious stylistic problems. This book, from my understanding, is scientific literature meant for the general public, to pique their interest in mycology and hopefully spur more dialogue about its importance. But such scientific literature has a threefold job - it has to be accessible, persuasive, and authoritative all at once. It can't bog down the reader with excess terminology, nor can it dumb things down too much or become overzealous; otherwise it loses credibility. I hate to say it, but Mycelium Running falls into the latter categories. The first 1/3 suffers from these common science-writing traps, while the rest read better though still with occasional flaws. Overall, this book could have been better written, edited, and organized. But to be fair I'll review it separately on what I did and didn't like.Mycelium Running is a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet. That’s right: growing more mushrooms may be the best thing we can do to save the environment, and in this groundbreaking text from mushroom expert Paul Stamets, you’ll find out how. Mushrooms are in many ways the earths largest organism. They can spread a network of communicating spores over many miles. If you look at mega-colony of mushroom spores, it is strikingly similar to images of cosmic nebula and galaxies. Thank you fractal mathematics. However! If I someday have a home in a mountain forest (as I often fantasize), I would definitely try to cultivate multiple mushrooms in various contexts, mostly in food production and soil improvement. Maybe some magic stuff, too? The second part of the book is a manual of how to grow mushrooms and mycelium in various habitats and for various uses. It seemed to be targeted primarily to organizations and governmental entities that might be interested in one or more of the remedial uses of mushrooms, but there was some information that would be useful for the small private grower. I skimmed most of this, since I'm not planning to go into mushroom production. But you should at least skim it to get a flavor of the different ways it can be handled.

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World is the sixth book written by American mycologist Paul Stamets. How valid some of these frustrations are definitely depend on the idea of where legitimate knowledge comes from. Does the only source of truth come from peer-reviewed journals and establishment sources, or are there equally valid forms of knowledge creation that run in parallel with the scientific establishment? Notwithstanding that it's not a simple binary, I found there was often not enough substance to validate some of Stamets' bolder claims, even though I think pretty much everything he's doing should be more heavily researched and tested (and I think in the years since first publication, there's been some vindication of his initial ideas and experiments). The role of oxalic acid and calcium oxalates in sequestering carbon dioxide and building the carbon bankI forgot I was on a waiting list for almost a year to receive this one from the library, unfortunately my interest in fungi and mushrooms has somewhat waned since reading a similar book last year. The Fermentation Edition at Why is this interesting? brought up an twist that I wanted to add in here.