So what did the residents of Fort Bragg do — to help figure out a new way to clean up their dioxin problem? They invited Paul Stamets to speak.

I first encountered Stamets at the 2006 Bioneers gathering in Marin County. This annual event gathers all sorts of amazing scientists, social justice activists, and forward-thinking folks. Through plenary speeches and workshops and panels and dance parties, people share their ideas and success stories about healing the planet.

Stamets may not be the most dynamic speaker ever, but in his plenary speech, he presented a host of ways that mycoremediation can help heal the planet. Mycoremediation — a new word to me at the time — is remediation through the use of mushrooms.

Some of it is so fanciful you think you’ve fallen down the rabbit hole with Dorothy, to mix a cultural metaphor. In fact, he delivered his speech sporting a cool looking hat made entirely from mushrooms.

Check all the great ideas and books that Stamets offers at http://www.fungi.com

And check out www.bioneers.org

This year’s Bioneers conference is Oct. 17-19. Maybe see you there.

Jim

I’ve fallen in love with the story of Easter Island. You know, the story of this remote piece of land in the Pacific Ocean whose inhabitants willfully deforested their entire island. From a peak population of 7000, the population had deteriorated by the late 1800s — to the point where the island was taken over by Chile and turned into a giant sheep ranch.

What were they using their trees for? Turns out, the timber was the only means of transporting the massive stone platforms, along with the statues of male heads and torsos, across the island to their sacred sites. Different clans on the island were competing for the biggest, most elaborate statues, and you can bet these works of stone, once sculpted, required ever more timber to roll to their destination.

I love this story because this society destroyed itself trying to out-icon each other. They cut down all their trees for cultural frivolities. Sure, it felt important to them, but imagine the “d’oh!” coming from the dude who cut down the last tree. Especially as these stone heads didn’t provide any real – flesh and bone – sustenance.

A fitting metaphor, especially here in the land of the Couch Potatoes.

Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” was my first encounter with the Easter Island story (okay there was maybe something in high school, but I had forgotten)… A perfect companion for “Collapse” is Clive Ponting’s “A New Green History of the World” (Penguin; 2007). First published in 1991, Ponting has painstakingly gone over everything – only the Easter Island chapter is pretty much the same.

This book is an ApocoDoc’s dream come true as it looks at the civilizations who have allowed themselves to be destroyed by their senseless environmental practices. Just the chapter entitled “The Rape of the World” is enough to make one weep.

From extinction to invasive species to deforestation to desertification to overpopulation to pollution to pandemic disease, Ponting’s book is a chilling accounting of what horror humans can wreak.

C.S. Goldsmith’s “Uninhabitable” (Goldstar Publications; 2007) doesn’t sugarcoat the problem, either, though there is friction between his Apocalyptic-looking book cover image – a red, dying sun hovering above a blighted cityscape – juxtaposed with his subtitle “A case for caution.” To me, one look at the cover, and I say the hell with caution, let’s party while we still have a few months left.

The rest of the book is much the same: Chilling, terrifying facts are followed by a sentence such as “We simply don’t have a lot more time to waste.”

Goldsmith’s big point here is the vast deposits of methane that will likely be unleashed by global warming, and these deposits are tantamount to every fart ever farted by every animal that ever existed multiplied by 1000 times. That’s my equation by the way, and I don’t claim it’s by any means scientific.

Punctuation problems and snarled syntax mars this read, but you gotta love Goldsmith’s mettle. Here’s a guy who graduated from Harvard with a business degree, was a CEO for 32 years and then decided he had to do SOMETHING about this planet’s peril. So he wrote a book.

I, along with Michael, created this web site. This is, I suppose the Age of DIY.

Speaking of, one of the leaders of the DIY movement, Ed Begley, Jr., has a new book, “Living Like Ed: A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life” (Potter; $18; www.LivingLikeEd.com) . You can distract yourself from the doom/gloom and certain destruction of Ponting’s and Goldsmith’s books by DOING something, whether it’s changing a light bulb or buying an electric car.

That’s right. Ed makes you feel like you’re accomplishing something good, which of course you are, when you decide to take your own canvas bags to the store (from $5) to installing your own solar panels (from $30,000). That’s right, Ed’s got all this money-coded, so you can figure out what you can afford vs. what you might be able to try later when you’ve saved a bunch of money being green in simpler ways.

It’s got the feel of a book created by a man who’s been trying out the green life for 30 years. There are lots of homey looking photos of Ed doing this and that green thing in his house – and far too photos of his wife Rachel Carson-Begley who adds her own tips throughout the book.

“Living Like Ed,” unlike the other two books mentioned here, is published on recycled paper, so that’s another plus in its column. At this point, Ed only takes on the projects he likes. Somebody out there want to pitch him a TLC or HGTV cable show, “This Green House”? Somebody’s gonna make a lot of green off that idea.

Either that, or he can make “Easter Island,” the movie, complete with an all-star cast. Unless Mel Gibson would rather make it. Apocalypto-a-go-go.

Happy Earth Day Week,

Jim

We’d love to hear what you have to say.

And don’t forget to sign up for the weekly PANIQuiz!

Michael and Jim

I’ve been following the bat die-off in the Northeast US this winter — first in New York state, then in MA, then in VT, and now in CT. The scientists studying the 80-90% fatality rate in affected “hiberniums” (read: caves and abandoned mines) are desperately searching for understanding of what has been coined “White Nose Syndrome (WNS),” after a symptom of these starving, dehydrated, dying bats flying out into the winter daylight, certain to die.

And now, it’s showing up in Connecticut.

From the Litchfield County Times:

The state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) first announced the presence in Connecticut of bats affected with WNS last Friday and the second location was discovered Tuesday….

“The presence of WNS could have a major impact on biodiversity in Connecticut, and we are taking this discovery very seriously,” she continued. “Bats are our single largest predator of night flying insects and provide an important form of natural insect control. Any significant depletion in their numbers will also result in a significant effect in other parts of our ecosystem.”

Dr. R. Laurence Davis, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of New Haven, explained further. “Bats will eat 4,000 to 7,000 mosquitoes each night, per bat. Those mosquitoes won’t be eaten if the bats die. Mosquitoes have a major impact on the environment, carrying diseases such as West Nile Fever. Bats also eat moths — you could say that’s just a few more moths around the light at night, but adult moths make baby moths and those are caterpillars that defoliate things. We have the potential for — I am trying not to use the word ‘disaster’….’

“Typically, they have only one pup a year,” the professor said, “It’s not like it’s a population of mice that crashed, where they have three and four litters a year — you would have mice again in a hurry — but bats are going to take a long time to come back. Normally, you would expect bats from other colonies to come in and scarf up the bugs — no food source goes wasted — but with 80 to 90 percent of the New York bats dying off, you are beginning to test the limits of bat migration.”

The reason for the die-off — which may be wiping out the majority of bats in these states — is still unknown. They’ve found no specific virus, bacteria, or other pathogen to explain it — and the “white nose” fungus seems a symptom, not a cause.

Dr. Davis said that there is little data available on bats, which is making it difficult for scientists to determine cause and effect. “They don’t normally do bat surveys every year in every cave,” he said, “mainly because when you go in, you wake them up and they burn up fat with nothing to eat. This syndrome could have started earlier than two years ago — we just don’t know. The real problem is there are no in-depth studies of bat biology. There are several labs working as hard as they can and they find parasites, they find bacteria on the fur or skin — but no one knows if this is normal because there is no data on a healthy population. We haven’t found any toxins; we haven’t found any smoking gun. Everything is so inter-connected. There are so many different elements that could be attributed to something else. No one knows for sure.”

My own armchair theorizing leads me to conclude that it has more to do with pesticide-resistent (but still sick) insects being eaten by the “prime predator” of the air. These resistent bugs have been sprayed with pesticides in apple orchards, croplands, and elsewhere. The bats then are poisoned, sickened, and their hibernation disturbed by these now-flushed toxins.

But then, I’m just watching from the sidelines, worried. I’m not an expert in this field.

The Lakota tribe has a saying that’s part of sweatlodge rituals: “O mitak uyasin,” which translates loosely to “all are my relatives.” It’s used to remind that someone else’s troubles are also mine; that we are all connected, inextricably, and are all — humans, animals, plants, soil — related.

In the bat die-off we see another example of what we’re doing to the natural world, to our relatives. Scoffers might say “there’s no proof that we are the cause of this problem” — just like they say there’s no “proof” that climate chaos is a humanly-generated problem. It seems better than likely, if not obvious.

We are all related. Our world is in trouble. We are doing damage of unspeakable magnitude in ways both hidden and evident. We are thoughtlessly presuming that if we can do it, it’s ok to do, regardless of the impacts on other living creatures.

The bats are an example of what I’m seeing as a frightening trend (viz. the bee colony collapse, the bird collapses, the amphibian collapse) — generalized species collapse, leading to newly chaotic, unbalanced ecosystems. It will likely be very depressing, on many levels — financial, psychological, systemic.

O mitak uyasin. All beings are my relatives. When my relatives are sick, so am I.