Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Mushrooms have helped remove petroleum from soil everywhere from Orleans, California, where they cleaned up a small motor-oil-and-diesel-fuel spill at a community center, to the Ecuadorian Amazon, where they’re being used to clean up the largest land-based oil spill in history.
Tradd Cotter and his mushrooms are stepping up as pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer and Merck abandon the responsibility to test and develop new antibiotics to keep up with new, dangerous bacteria.
Yesterday I went on a quest for the fabled fungus that’s been mopping up petrochemicals from a food co-op’s parking lot.
Fungi feature among Nature’s most vigorous agents for the decomposition of waste matter, and are an essential component of the soil food web, providing nourishment for the other biota that live in the soil.
