Doug Bierend: Fungi Capitalism & The Extractive Colonialist Mindset

In today's episode we’re honored to host the scintillating yet unassuming Doug Bierend, mycophile and independent journalist extraordinaire. Doug has written with a special interest in science, technology, visual and interactive media, food, sustainability and general subversiveness, for platforms like Wired, Vice, Outside Magazine, and many more.

Doug has also recently been minted a first time author via his sensational debut book titled "In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and The Untapped Potential of Mushrooms"

In the book, which should be required reading for all mycopreneurs, Doug profiles how the emerging mycological vanguard is exploring, innovating and advocating for fungi’s capacity to remediate contaminated landscapes and waterways, provide food and medicine, and demonstrate how humans might live in equitable and sustainable accord with nature, and with one another.

This is a book that for me, like any great work, inspires more questions than it answers - the extraordinary amount of fungi-related innovation, research, development, and corporatization currently happening poses challenging and nuanced, open-ended questions regarding the ethics of patenting and profiting from mushroom technology and indigenous intellectual property.

Is there a sweet spot between anarchomycology, which is a term Doug will shortly unpack for us, and the filthy money tech bro fungi capitalist practices demonstrated in the recent patent grabs and billion dollar IPO’s we’ve seen in the space?

Who is represented at the table and in the corporate board rooms when the fungi pie is being divided into market shares?

Who decides what effective mycoremediation practices look like, and is the urge to solve climate related problems with fungi innovation really just white savior complex and Neo-colonialism masked in eco-altruism?

And perhaps most importantly, how do we know that the virtuosic guitar playing showcased on Doug’s Instagram is actually Doug playing, and not some kind of black magic deep fake technology?

"Mycotopia is already all around us" - Doug Bierend

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