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For millions of years, fungi and their fruiting bodies, mushrooms, have helped return destroyed environments to healthy baselines. Now the emerging field of mycoremediation seeks to harness fungi as nature’s ally as the first responder in rehabilitating polluted environments. “Fungi play the role of primary decomposers in many environments,” says Brendan O’Brien, executive director of nonprofit CoRenewal. “They are in the best position to degrade a lot of the persistent organic pollutants that we’ve been shipping off site, into our air, into our oceans, into our natural systems, into our soil.” Due to droughts and fire, the Pacific Northwest and the west coast has become a living lab, with encouraging results from introducing fungi into a burn area rather than scraping away the affected soil and trucking it off site. In the UK, government-funded research will install modular water filters filled with local saprotrophic fungi on agricultural land to neutralize pollutants from farming.
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