6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World

It is quite obvious from watching the video "6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World" that the speaker Paul Stamets is quite brilliant. His opinions and knowledge of myselium is so extensive that an an 18 minute lecture seems only to graze the surface of his knowledge. In fact, he spoke so quickly it was hard for me to follow his train of though sometimes. I ended up watching the video three times and still didn't feel like I was getting everything he was saying. I did my best to piece together what I thought his 6 ways mushrooms could save the world: 1). myselium can be used as a treatment against consumption 2) myselium can help control pests like carpenter ants and termites 3) they can provide habitat restoration for polluted waterways by treating polluted water 4) they can work against pox viruses and flu viruses because they produce strong antibodies 5) fungi could be used for alternative energy if we used "econol" which uses myselium to convert cellulose into fungal sugars 6) fungi can be used to help absorb our waste and turn things like petroleum waste into a healthy biological community.
I really liked the lecture and I learned so much about the importance of fungi. It was very interesting to learn that the oldest and largest living organism lives in Oregon and is 2000 years old! I also thought his patent was brilliant. I had seen on the documentary Planet Earth that fungus can contaminate entire colonies of insects, but I would have never thought to use it in my home to eradicate insects. It seems there isn't much that mushrooms can't do, from absorbing waste from our water and breaking down petrochemicals to preventing erosion. I especially liked his idea of maintaining our old growth forests as a natural method of national defense. I got a little lost during the section about how the internet is a man-made version of the networking that happens between the extensive system of branches of the myselium, but I thought it was a very intriguing concept.    

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