Wildfire season is in full swing. Air quality in the Northeast U.S. plummeted in June as smoke from Canadian fires choked the skies; parts of the Mediterranean spent weeks this summer ablaze; and most recently, unprecedented fires devastated Maui. With the planet heating up, such wildfires are expected to intensify over time, and many parts of the US are believed to be as vulnerable as Hawaii to mass destruction. The problem is multifaceted, but some experts think 'shrooms can help solve it. 

Because wildfires threaten lives and property, a lot of work has been done over decades to stomp them out as quickly as possible. However, these fire suppression efforts have had unintended consequences. Fire is a natural part of a healthy ecosystem; among other benefits, it can help to thin out foliage that otherwise serves as wildfire fuel. Preventing naturally occurring fires has resulted in dense forests that now, perversely, pose an even greater fire risk. 

To remedy this, the government has committed billions of dollars to thinning forests in the western U.S., where the risk is greatest. This includes money for prescribed (read: intentional) burns, but since any blaze is risky, some foresters have instead chosen to selectively saw certain trees and break them down into what are known as slash piles. These piles are then burned, mulched, or hauled off, which can be ecologically and economically problematic. This is where mushrooms could come in. Experts say fungi can be used to transform this felled fuel into healthy and innocuous soil at a relatively fast pace. 

“You don’t have to burn it or haul it out. You’re using that biomass, keeping it in place, and recycling it,” says biologist Lisa O’Donnell, who uses mycelium, the root-like structure of fungi, to decompose slash piles created from invasive trees that have to be eradicated from the environment. “You’re turning a negative into a positive.”

'Shrooms may be the most sustainable solution to this problem and the most cost effective. Standard forest thinning costs about $3,000 an acre, one-third of which is used to haul out slash piles. Jeffrey Ravage, a forester with the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, works on hundreds of thousands of acres of fire mitigation annually. “[With the right kind of fungi], we can do in five years what nature could take 50 years to a century to do: create organic soil,” he says. 

At present, it’s not possible to scale this process enough to actually prevent forest fires, but some scientists are working on solutions. Denver-based mycologist Zach Hedstrom, for example, is experimenting with brewing mycelium into a liquid that can be sprayed across vast distances. “It’s a novel biotech solution that has great promise but is in the early stages,” he says. 

Only time will tell if technology will allow mushrooms to play a pivotal role in fire prevention, but if so, there could be a huge market for 'shroom farms aimed at fire prevention in the future. Ravage currently grows one ton of spawn annually at his lab in the Rockies but says that 12 tons would need to be produced weekly in order to meet current fire-mitigation requirements. That’s a lot of 'shrooms, and further proof that mushrooms will be a must in the economy of tomorrow!