68: Mycelium Man

Photo credit: Tim Girvin, art: Gerhard Hillman Experiential journalist Rak Razam chats with the world's premier mycologist,Paul Stamets, at the Uplift festival, Dec 22, 2012, about the whole systems theory of nature that the mycelium networks of the mushrooms point towards. Stamets describes his pioneering work with fungi and how that has affected his own worldview, from his own shamanic-style initiation as a teenager, to his work with bio-remediation and introducing fungi as bio-tools for corporate and government scientific use, and the cultural clashes that has engendered. Can Western culture drop it's mycophobic reaction towards mushrooms and embrace the healing benefits of these substances? Can we integrate the psychedelic benefits as well as the physical ones? Is the mushroom "earth's natural internet" as Stamens describes, and what does that mean to our scientific worldview, and a network-based future? Click here for more information on Paul Stamets and his Ted Talk. Proudly supporting the Psychedelic Science 2013 conference. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.