Attack of the Gas-Eating Mushrooms!

The Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University
3301 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 440, Arlington, Virginia 2220
Sam Wardle

If a modern day Jed Clampett were to come across black gold (oil, that is) bubbling up from the ground somewhere on his property, he might be well advised to stick a cork in the leak and go on about his business. Unlike the good times the old Clampett had on ‘The Beverly Hillbillies,' our modern man named Jed would quite possibly face some monster cleanup costs.

That's what happened to Howard Sprouse several years ago. The cleanup costs, that is. A buyer interested in some property that Sprouse was selling in Washington State had the soil assessed, and it turned out to be petroleum contaminated from a previous occupant. The EPA's answer to this common problem was simple, in a cumbersome, regulatory sort of way. They dug up the whole yard, sealed it tight in steel drums, and shipped it to a dump in Oregon that specialized in holding all sorts of potential environmental disasters. And then they shipped in a whole new yard's worth of dirt from somewhere else to fill the empty hole that was Howard Sprouse's yard. In Sprouse's own words, it cost "thousands upon thousands of dollars." Seems like kind of a roundabout way to do things, when there are petrol-eating mushrooms lurking just around the corner.

Sprouse's experience led to a biologist's interest in bioremediation, a naturally occurring phenomenon, though rather difficult to define. Life's celebrated first step from the primordial swamp, for example, was made possible by bioremediation. In fact, even the swamp itself was made possible by it. According to Sam Nugent, Sprouse's business partner, bioremediation is a fairly broad term. "It could mean anything," he says, "from sterilization by hanging out your laundry to dry to the introduction of a new bacterium." It could be, for instance, any of various mushrooms turning petroleum into clean soil. Bioremediation, then, is change. It is happening all the time, everywhere, on a cellular level. So what's that got to do with a man named Jed's oil spill, the EPA, and mushrooms?

Quite a lot, actually. Sprouse and Nugent are currently involved in launching The Remediators, which is neither a synth-pop band nor an early Schwarzenegger action film. What The Remediators do is apply the eternal concept of bioremediation to the rather current issue of brownfields and oil contaminated lawns. And they use ‘shrooms to do it.

( Read full article at ABetterEarth.org)