Weekly newsletter - Monday 12th of July 2010
Mushrooms can save the world - Video
Entrepreneurial mycologist Paul Stamets seeks to rescue the
study of mushrooms from forest gourmets and psychedelic warlords.
The focus of Stamets' research is the Northwest's native fungal
genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for
mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that
trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down
the neurotoxins used in nerve gas.
There are cosmic implications as well. Stamets believes we could
terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal
spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new
planet.
Watch this interesting video
here.
Ghost Forest - Exhibition
After London, the Ghost Forest arrived in Oxford last week.
Ghost Forest is a major art installation consisting of 10 primary
rainforest tree stumps which were brought to Europe from a
commercially logged forest in Western Africa by the artist Angela
Palmer. The work is intended to highlight the alarming depletion of
the world's natural resources, and in particular the continued rate
of deforestation.
Today, a tropical forest the size of a football pitch is destroyed
every four seconds, impacting on climate, biodiversity and the
livelihoods of indigenous people. The trees in Ghost Forest - most
of which fell naturally in storms - are intended to represent
rainforest trees worldwide; the absence of their trunks is
presented as a metaphor for the removal of the world's lungs caused
through the loss of our forests.
The tree stumps were exhibited as a “ghost forest” in
Trafalgar Square in London last November, and then in Copenhagen in
December during the UN's Climate Change Conference. Ghost Forest is
now exhibited for a year on the lawn of Oxford University's Museum
of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum. The exhibition
coincides with the Museum of Natural History's 150th anniversary
this year, and the UN's International Year of Biodiversity. 2011
will be the UN's International Year of Forests.
More on the project here.