Scientists are using mushrooms as low-carbon building blocks for construction, a vegan replacement for leather, and even an environmentally friendly way to dispose of dead bodies.
In 1864, Jules Verne's sci-fi novel"Journey to the Centre of the Earth" imagined explorers walking beneath a forest of 30-foot mushrooms"crowded together like the round roofs of an African city." Lewis Carol's"Alice in Wonderland" and H.G. Wells'"The First Men in the Moon" followed, employing towering fungal forests as literary allusions to Victorians' experimentations with opium.
With trunks growing to more than 20 feet tall, these fungi, known as Prototaxites, covered the land around 400 million years ago. The exhibition goes on to explore the works of over 40 artists, designers and musicians, as well as spotlighting new uses for fungi, like the potential design applications of mycelium, the long fibers that make up mushrooms' underground"roots."
"'Alice in Wonderland,' I think, is the gateway moment where things really shifted, reflecting the rise of amateur botany, in particular, in this post-enlightenment culture."
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