Fungus Eating Radiation

I'm ready to jump on whatever ecological holocaust bandwagon drives by, because I've been trained to expect the worst. Yet, I'm also an unaggressive contrarian, which has the upside-down benefit of making me a quiet optimist. My wife doesn't understand it either.

When ecologists say that nuclear waste will pollute the Earth for 10,000 years, I think, "Really? I think nature's more resilient than that." A couple hundred years I can buy, but 10k seems like somebody did some envelope math and then issued a press release with a lot of exclamation points.

Sublime mathematical models can only tell you what you tell them. And you don't know jack to tell them about large-scale ecological consequences.

For instance, global warming: I'm ready to believe that something scary is going on, but what exactly? And is it really all that irreversible? And is it so terrible if it isn't? Maybe. But nobody knows. Nobody knows how to know.

I bring this up because Cosmos Magazine is reporting that inside the busted Chernobyl reactor, fungi are converting radiation to biomass. A reactor exploded and nuked the town in 1986. The place isn't pristine, but in only 22 years, wildlife has started the cleanup job without our help.

Among the many things that we live with every day and barely even begin to pretend to understand are fungi. For something so common, so edible, so vital to nearly every ecosystem on Earth, we don't know exactly where they will grow in the wild, or when, or how. There is historical data and best guesses. But what we don't know could fill a book...mobile. They are pretty much the garbagemen of Earth, but nobody saw this coming?

Maybe we're not so screwed after all.