Paul Stamets > Quotes

“I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“I see the mycelium as the Earth's natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“In Oregon, a far larger honey mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) mycelial mat found on a mountaintop covers more than 2,400 acres and is possibly more than 2,200 years old”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“One of the Big Ideas in this book is that fungi, especially fungi from old-growth forests, may be sources of new medicines that are active against a range of germs, including HIV/AIDS and the causative agents of smallpox and anthrax, potential bioterrorist threats.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“NASA considered the possibility of using fungi for interplanetary colonization. Now that we have landed rovers on Mars, NASA takes seriously the unknown consequences that our microbes will have on seeding other planets. Spores have no borders.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“I wonder what would happen if there were a United Organization of Organisms (UOO, pronounced “uh-oh”), where each species gets one vote. Would we be voted off the planet? The answer is pretty clear.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“People want to give up the responsibility of being able to understand and because they can't understand then they have faith, and they put their faith in other people who say they can understand.”
― Paul Stamets

“n the wake of catastrophes, fungal diversity helps restore devastated habitats. Evolutionary trends generally lead to increased bio-diversity. However, due to human activities we are losing many species before we can even identify them. In effect, as we lose species, we are experiencing devolution--turning back the clock on biodiversity, which is a slippery slope toward massive ecological collapse. The interconnectedness of life is an obvious truth that we ignore at our peril.”
― Paul Stamets

“Envisioning fungi as nanoconductors in mycocomputers, Gorman (2003) and his fellow researchers at Northwestern University have manipulated mycelia of Aspergillus niger to organize gold into its DNA, in effect creating mycelial conductors of electrical potentials. NASA reports that microbiologists at the University of Tennessee, led by Gary Sayler, have developed a rugged biological computer chip housing bacteria that glow upon sensing pollutants, from heavy metals to PCBs (Miller 2004). Such innovations hint at new microbiotechnologies on the near horizon. Working together, fungal networks and environmentally responsive bacteria could provide us with data about pH, detect nutrients and toxic waste, and even measure biological populations.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“The cascade of toxins and debris generated by humans destabilizes nutrient return cycles, causing crop failure, global warming, climate change and, in a worst-case scenario, quickening the pace towards ecocatastrophes of our own making. As ecological disrupters, humans challenge the immune systems of our environment beyond their limits. The rule of nature is that when a species exceeds the carrying capacity of its host environment, its food chains collapse and diseases emerge to devastate the population of the threatening organism. I believe we can come into balance with nature using mycelium to regulate the flow of nutrients. The age of mycological medicine is upon us. Now is the time to ensure the future of our planet and our species by partnering, or running, with mycelium.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“Fungi marched onto land more than a billion years ago. Many fungi partnered with plants, which largely lacked these digestive juices. Mycologists believe that this alliance allowed plants to inhabit land around 700 million years ago. Many millions of years later, one evolutionary branch of fungi led to the development of animals”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“I believe that the mycelium operates at a level of complexity that exceeds the computational powers of our most advanced supercomputers. I see the myce-lium as the Earth’s natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape. A new bioneering science could be born, dedicated to programming myconeurological networks to monitor and respond to threats to environments. Mycelial webs could be used as information platforms for mycoengineered ecosystems.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“What a beautiful inspirational model for how human beings might live: In a shared economy based not on greed but on nurturing relationships and mutual cooperation.”
― Paul Stamets, Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet

“The branch of fungi leading to animals evolved to capture nutrients by surrounding their food with cellular sacs, essentially primitive stomachs. As species emerged from aquatic habitats, organisms adapted means to prevent moisture loss. In terrestrial creatures, skin composed of many layers of cells emerged as a barrier against infection. Taking a different evolutionary path, the mycelium retained its netlike form of interweaving chains of cells and went underground, forming a vast food web upon which life flourished.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“Intact forest ecosystems, by comparison, provide more ecological services than just board feet of lumber. They clean the water, provide shade, and give communities plants, insects, and animals. Protecting our forests is essential not only for our survival now, but also for the survival of generations to come.”
― Paul Stamets, Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet

“Toxic fungicides like methyl bromide, once touted, not only harm targeted species but also nontargeted organisms and their food chains and threaten the ozone layer.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“Through the genius of evolution, the Earth has selected fungal networks as a governing force managing ecosystems.”
― Paul Stamets, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms

“If you were a tiny organism in a forest’s soil, you would be enmeshed in a carnival of activity, with mycelium constantly moving through subterranean landscapes like cellular waves, through dancing bacteria and swimming protozoa with nematodes racing like whales through a microcosmic sea of life.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“The cascade of toxins and debris generated by humans destabilizes nutrient return cycles, causing crop failure, global warming, climate change and, in a worst-case scenario, quickening the pace towards ecocatastrophes of our own making. As ecological disrupters, humans challenge the immune systems of our environment beyond their limits. The rule of nature is that when a species exceeds the carrying capacity of its host environment, its food chains collapse and diseases emerge to devastate the population of the threatening organism.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“There are more species of fungi, bacteria, and protozoa in a single scoop of soil than there are species of plants and vertebrate animals in all of North America. And of these, fungi are the grand recyclers of our planet, the mycomagicians disassembling large organic molecules into simpler forms, which in turn nourish other members of the ecological community. Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“Frank went on to tell me that much of the premise of Dune—the magic spice (spores) that allowed the bending of space (tripping), the giant worms (maggots digesting mushrooms), the eyes of the Freman (the cerulean blue of Psilocybe mushrooms), the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors, the Bene Gesserits (influenced by tales of Maria Sabina and the sacred mushroom cults of Mexico)—came from his perception of the fungal life cycle, and his imagination was stimulated through his experiences with the use of magic mushrooms.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“We face the possibility of being rejected by the biosphere as a virulent organism. But”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“I wonder what would happen if there were a United Organization of Organisms (UOO, pronounced “uh-oh”), where each species gets one vote. Would we be voted off the planet? The answer is pretty clear. When we irresponsibly exploit the Earth, disease, famine, and ecological collapse result. We face the possibility of being rejected by the biosphere as a virulent organism. But if we act as a responsible species, nature will not evict us.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“The more complex your biodiversity, the larger your cast of characters, the more opportunities for plants and other creatures to collaborate on providing maximum benefit to all. It’s like anything else: The larger your selection pool, the more likely your successes. True wealth is not measured in material possessions but by the abundance of options and choices.”
― Paul Stamets, Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet

“We’re still very much in kindergarten when it comes to understanding how to cocreate a sustainable future for all beings—and all beings are necessary to make that future possible.”
― Paul Stamets, Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet

“If we needed more energy, we didn’t worry about perfect efficiency, which is fundamental to how nature works—it always uses the least to get the most done—we simply added more fuel. That worked really well for quite a long time until that energy inefficiency, along with a growing scarcity of materials, started creating some very negative consequences, multiplied today by billions of people.”
― Paul Stamets, Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet

“Mycelium steers the course of ecosystems by favoring successions of species. Ultimately, mycelium prepares its immediate environment for its benefit by growing ecosystems that fuel its food chains.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“Humans indulge the idea that we are the highest species, the top of the food chain, and that the main purpose of the biosphere is to support us. But is this “highest species” worth protecting? This illusion of biological grandeur is the cause of our suffering because of the egocentricity it covers up.”
― Paul Stamets, Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet

“NASA reports that microbiologists at the University of Tennessee, led by Gary Sayler, have developed a rugged biological computer chip housing bacteria that glow upon sensing pollutants, from heavy metals to PCBs (Miller 2004). Such innovations hint at new microbiotechnologies on the near horizon. Working together, fungal networks and environmentally responsive bacteria could provide us with data about pH, detect nutrients and toxic waste, and even measure biological populations.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“Biological systems are influenced by the laws of physics, and it may be that mycelium exploits the natural momentum of matter, just like salmon take advantage of the tides.”
― Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World