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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/paul-stamets-granddaddy-of-all-things-mushroom/>
"Paul Stamets might never have found his life topic if he hadn’t been a
painfully shy boy. As a child, he had a severe stutter and dreaded social
interactions, spending much of his time staring at the ground. What he found
there would come to define his life: Mushrooms. Today, at 70, Stamets is
arguably the world’s most famous mycologist, a man whose evangelism for fungi
has turned him into both a scientific innovator and a pop-culture icon.
His path to this unlikely role was far from conventional. In his teens, he
experimented with psychedelic mushrooms. After eating an entire bag of them,
the 17-year-old became so intoxicated that he climbed a tree and couldn’t come
down until the effects wore off. As a thunderstorm broke open the sky, he
experienced a profound connection with the forest and the universe. “Mushrooms
have been central and important to my life ever since,” he later said in an
interview, crediting psychedelics with curing his stutter and fear of speaking.
From those chaotic forays grew a disciplined fascination. After studying
mycology at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, he became a
logger in Washington State, then an author, inventor, entrepreneur and
visionary whose work has convinced many that fungi may hold answers to some of
humanity’s biggest challenges: Cancer, pollution, even climate change. While
most think of mushrooms as dinner ingredients, in his 2005 book
Mycelium
Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, Stamets lays out how fungi
can be game-changers in medicine, environmental cleanups and the future of the
planet."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
