How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

is the subtitle of "Mycelium Running", by Paul Stamets, 2005, 343 pages.

Stamets is the founder and guiding light of Fungi Perfecti (fungi.com) in Washington State. In 2012, I grew shitakes in my basement with a kit (spore infused wood chip block) from Fungi Perfecti - a gift from my wife. I grew a couple other shitake blocks and a oyster mushroom block with blocks that came from Billy Webb's Sheltowee Farm in Eastern KY. Here's a shitake block growing:

Here's the oysters growing:

Here's Billy Webb, the mushroom man himself, in 2013 with a fine selection of mushrooms. Blocks are on the right.

Billy quit coming to that farmer's market, and I haven't seen him for a few years. He still delivers to restaurants in Lexington, Louisville, and Cincinnati. He was supposed to take me out foraging the forest around his farm down in the Danial Boone National Forest some autumn, but that never happened. I should prolly track him down - maybe I'll just text him a link to this post.

The book was an xmas gift from my middle daughter, soon to be a landscape architect. I think this book has a lot of useful information for her field, so I think it will go back to her - but my friend Fuzzy wants to borrow it first.

Part 1 (4 chapters) is titled "The Mycelial Mind". It introduces us to fungal networks. Stamets points out that these networks, which can become huge, can resemble the large scale structure of the universe, as shown below. I don't know that this means much, but I had already used this pic in the blog, and it's a neat pic, so here it is again ;->

Stamets reviews the many medical uses of mushrooms. A lot of these were early stage research, and I don't remember hearing about any new mushroom-based cancer cures in the 14 years since the book's publication. It would be nice to have an update, maybe I'll check their website.

Part II (4 chapters) is titled "Mycorestoration". This is really interesting stuff. Stamets divides this topic into 4 subtopics:

1. Mycofiltration. Mushrooms are particularly effective at filtering farm waste before it gets back into the watershed.
2. Mycoforestry. He favors chipping waste wood in forests such that it makes contact with the ground where the mycelia can infuse and digest it - particularly as an alternative to burning the waste wood. The right mycelia act as an extension to a tree's root system, providing it with increased water, nutrients, and hence growth. Stamets states that with conventional logging practices, after 3-4 harvests of trees, the forest topsoil is largely gone. His techniques would combat this - the mycelia create new topsoil.
3. Mycomediation. Wow, oyster mushrooms will eat oil spills! Some mushrooms are also hyper-accumulators of heavy metals. So you have to harvest the mushrooms and then get the metal removed - no eating. You should also not eat mushrooms growing by roadways because most are excellent at absorbing the arsenic in auto exhaust.
   Unfortunately, no mushrooms do anything with lead.
   I wonder if they can do anything with coal ash? There's lot of that nasty stuff around.
4. Mycopesticides.

Part III (6 chapters) is titled "Growing Mycelia and Mushrooms". It includes various techniques for growing mushrooms; a chapter on the "Nutritional Properties of Mushrooms", and a long final chapter "Magnificent Mushrooms: The Cast of Species" detailing the most useful kinds of mushrooms.

I love mushrooms; my wife likes them too. When I was a kid, my dad had a fishing buddy, John Svengali, who owned a mushroom farm in eastern Jefferson County (KY), just east of the Shelby County line. He grew white button mushrooms, and whenever my dad fished with John, he always brought home a big bag of mushrooms. So I grew up eating these on a regular basis, prepared in several ways.

I use mushrooms wherever possible when cooking: shitake, portobella, porcini, oyster (in the "gourmet mushroom blend" must supermarkets sell), and white buttons. So I think I am going to try to grow some in the back part of our yard. The trees back there provide so much shade that the main thing growing there now is moss. My wife has also lately been introducing some hostas. Maybe we get enough mycelia back there, they will eat the leaves to I don't have to rake them.

From the book, the best candidates for growing from the ground with some scrap wood down look like parasol, garden giant, and oysters. OK, ordering from fungi.com "The Garden Giant Mushroom Patch™" for $25 and "The Mycelium Running Oyster Mushroom Patch™" for $24. $19.17 shipping.

Back in the mushroom growing business again. Yay!

Doughnut Economics Way #8

[Updated April 15, 2019]

The most excellent folks associated with "Doughnut Economics" are having a competition to determine "What’s the 8th Way to Think Like a 21st Century Economist?". I thought about not entering - let the young people do it, plus, I am totally a dilettante - but decided I needed to go on and put my $0.02 worth in. I put up these 5 thoughts a few weeks ago, and, after some more thought, have decided to go with #5 - with #4 thrown in as well.

1. Abundance, not economy.
2. Needs, not wants.
3. There's not enough to go around - false.
4. Who's going to pay for it?
5. Money is software.

---

MONEY IS SOFTWARE, so never worry about money; worry about real resources, both sources and sinks.

The world went from the gold standard to fiat currencies in the 1970s. Central banks like the Federal Reserve System in the US create money as directed by their governments via the funding bills passed by their legislatures.

The principles of monetarism are increasingly being replaced by those of modern monetary theory (MMT). One of the most important of these is that the only thing that drives inflation - the bugaboo of expansionary monetary policies - is a lack of real resources, aka supply-side shortages. [1] Inflation, a bad thing in large quantities, is not normally connected to the amount of money in circulation. [2]

When you are writing software, everything is possible. I worked in software development for 40 years and 1 of my mantras was, "Don't ever let anyone tell you it can't be done." It may be too expensive or time-consuming (the 24 hour weather forecasting program that runs in 48 hours) now, but Moore's Law will eventually have its way, and sooner than you might think. [3]

Software, like language, is generative. You can always add another adjective or clause to a sentence; you can always add a new feature to your software package, or write another program to monitor the (monitor) programs you already have running.

Money appears to be generative in a completely analogous manner: you can always create another derivative financial instrument. The study referenced below [4] estimates that the value of derivatives is 5-10x the value of ALL other forms of money put together. MONEY IS SOFTWARE.

So the eternal conservative question of "who is going to pay for it" is completely irrelevant. If we really want to do something, the money can be created.

The question that should be asked instead is, "do we have the real resources, both sources and sinks, to do this?" This, of course, assumes we have the knowledge and technology needed to reach our goal - or the real resources to develop the needed knowledge and technology. Resources are real, finances are imaginary [5].

Smaller countries with their own currencies might have to worry about currency devaluation if they attempted aggressive money supply creation. It is then up to the larger countries like the US to prop these currencies up. Central bank purchases of bonds in these currencies seem like a simple way to do this.

Alternatively, the larger countries could create the money in their own currency and transfer it to the smaller countries as foreign aid. Either way, the developed world shares the wealth.

MONEY IS SOFTWARE. The design goal of this software should not be about keeping score. [6] It should be about creating a safe and just space for all.

---

[1] In my lifetime, the only instance of real inflation came following the Arab Oil Embargo of 1974, when the price of oil grew by 3x, creating an artificial supply-side shortage. It took 10 years for this price jump to ripple through the world economy. Tragically, this black swan event gave credence to Friedman's "Stagflation" theory, which helped to promote the disaster of Thatcher-Reagan austerity economic policies.

[2] This was demonstrated when the Fed's 2009 QE program increased the money supply by 3x, and, in direct contradiction to "an open letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke signed by several economists, along with investors and political strategists, most of them close to Republicans" in the WSJ issuing dire warnings of "currency debasement and inflation", 0 inflation occurred. In fact, deflation continued to be the more pressing concern.

[3] It looks like weather forecasting might be plateauing at a 2 week forecast. Too much chaos theory after that.

[4] http://money.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-visualization-2017/

[5] This statement started as a complex numbers joke. Then I wondered, could there be any useful math treating economic quantities as complex numbers, with the real resources the real part and money the imaginary part? Sorry, physics degree ;->

[6] Current score (estimated): 1%, +$1,000,000,000,000,000 ($1Q); the rest of humanity, -$100,000 (-$100K) per capita. Can we each get our $100K back, please?

---

[Added April 15, 2019]

I read in an interview with Kate Raworth where she emphasized the importance of the before and after images for each of the 7 ways. I had no images, oops. So I added them. I was going to update my entry, but the submission deadline was April 12. Oh well no worries. Here are the images.

Old money. This icon comes from the Noun Project.

New, 21st century money. I could not figure out how to do this in Gimp or Inkscape, so I went old school cut & paste - scissors & Elmer's. Ha ha, Luddite!

I explicitly did not include the euro (€). It is not a good currency - ask the Greeks about that.

[/Added April 15, 2019]

All Over The Place

Three more novels read, kind of all over the place.

1st, "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell" by Susanna Clarke, 2004, 1024 pages. Somehow this got recommended to me; I thought it was more recent. It was a fun, amusing read. After I was done, I immediately watched the 7 episode BBC 2015 mini-series adaptation on Netflix. They did a good job compressing the narrative. This book could definitely use sequels, but I read that Clarke suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome.

2nd, "A Short Sharp Shock" by Kim Stanley Robinson, 1990, 154 pages. I think BookBub offered me a cheap version of this. As a big KSR fan, I was surprised I had never heard of it. It is an odd book, very surreal. Science fiction based, but far enough advanced that it feels more like fantasy. Actually more like post both, more like - shudder - literature. There were some images in the book that will stay with me for a while.

3rd, "The City in the Middle of the Night" by Charlie Jane Anders, 2019, 368 pages. I liked Anders' 1st award winning work, this one not very much. The plot is really meandering. Several plans are made which, when executed, result in the deaths of most of the participants - that gets old. The mostly female cast somehow reminded me of the female cast of "The Magicians" on SyFy, which I got tired of and quit watching. The emotional interactions seem so immature - but these characters are mostly college age, so maybe OK? Maybe just annoying to an old man? There was a development reminiscent of Octavia Butler that I liked.

This book reminded me of another recent book that I didn't like - "Autonomous", by Annalee Newitz. I think it was the same cavalier, flat affect attitude towards deaths and murders, and thuggish characters being presented sympathetically. This one is not as bad as the other. Then reading the acknowledgements, it states that Anders and Newitz are partners - so maybe their writing styles are affecting each other?

So, disappointing, I was glad when it was (somewhat abruptly) over. I will try Anders' next work tho.

MMT

In studying economics/abundance, I seem to be coming back to 2 concepts that I believe about how to move forward towards a post-scarcity utopia (tagged as "economy of plenty" in this blog):

1. The Federal Reserve can create money and spend it to make life better for anyone without having to worry about hyperinflation because
2. Inflation is caused only by supply-side shortages, not the amount of money in circulation (monetarism). I mentioned this here and here.

I've been very pleasantly surprised to find that this is indeed part of a rapidly growing, heterodox economics theory: Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT.

The Wikipedia article linked to above I don't think is very good. A couple of months ago I watched this video, which probably came up in an article in my RSS feed. I think it's very good and easy to understand.

Here's a quote from a slide from the 19:32 mark:

If Congress does not spend more money into the economy than our real resources, our productive capacity (our capacity to produce) can handle, then there is no inflationary risk.

So I think their "real resources" are my "supply-side". Yay, FTW!

I think maybe MMT may be passing somewhat of a tipping point. Here's my hero Paul Krugman arguing with MMT proponents - and disappointingly, worrying about inflation - a few weeks ago. Here's Larry Summers doing the same maybe a week later but in even stronger terms - "a recipe for disaster".

The old school just really doesn't seem to want to think outside their boxes. I guess that's business/academia as usual.

Studying economics/abundance has been really frustrating. So much of modern, orthodox economic theory seems bogus, as is detailed in, say, "Doughnut Economics". The microeconomics-based DSGE modeling seems to be a bad case of physics envy, and has so many simplifying assumptions baked in that its conclusions are worthless. It sure seems to me like it would not be that hard to write a good simulation of the economy, but I think that there is just not enough understanding of what the real underlying principles are. Well, I think the ideas of MMT are definitely an encouraging breath of fresh air. Now just need to convince Krugman.