Fungi, Ecology, and Bioremediation Technologies.

[00:00:13] [Intro] Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. [00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Howard Sprouse is the CEO of Remediators Inc. and developer of bioremediation technologies since the mid 1990s. Howard previously worked as a consultant to Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Sequim, Washington, assisting with the development of mycoremediation technology. His work assisted projects aimed toward remediation of petroleum hydrocarbons, biological agents, pathogen degradation and biofiltration of agricultural runoff. Howard also worked for the Department of Botany, University of Washington, and with the US Forest Service as a research assistant conducting fungal ecology research in Olympic National Park. Howard Sprouse is recognized in the bioremediation industry for commercializing mycoremediation and is a well known lecturer on the subject at universities across the United States. The Remediators have mentored student interns at Peninsula College in Washington since 2005. It's my pleasure to welcome Howard Sprouse to the Brainforest Café. Welcome Howard. [00:01:42] Howard Sprouse: Thank you, Dennis. [00:01:44] Dennis McKenna: Good to see you. [00:01:45] Howard Sprouse: Oh, it's good to see you too. I'm going to enjoy this. [00:01:50] Dennis McKenna: Well, I don't think we'll have any trouble finding things to talk about. So you mentioned maybe a good place to start is the sort of personal threads that tie us together. What brought us together. I know we have many mutual friends and interests. So what's your take on this history, this background that we share? [00:02:17] Howard Sprouse: Yeah, it's hard to know exactly where to start and so I don't think I'm going to start at either end. I think I'm going to start somewhere in the middle. And I was really reminded the other day about just how long I've been interested in this subject of mycoremediation and certainly of mushrooms and all things fungi for a long time. But anyway, I and some friends had a long, long time friends had a reunion a couple of weeks ago here in Port Angeles, Washington. And these were a couple of fellows that we shared a house together back in 1974 and each of us at that time were doing different things. I was going to school at Peninsula College and Bill, one of the roommates, was operating a flight service out of our airport, flying around the San Juan Islands and Puget Sound. And Gary, my other roommate, he was a brand new fledgling school teacher and the thing that brought us together really was the place. And that's I think, something that has been at the forefront of my own life really and still is, is having this sense of place. And mine has certainly been the Olympics and in northern climes, today it's 55, 60 degrees outside. That's just right. And so anyway, at our reunion, Bill said to me, after we, we got through what we'd been doing recently, what I was up to with the environmental business that I have, the remediators. And he said, gosh, Howard, you were talking about that back in 1974 and I had not remembered that. However, I do remember a lot from that era. And that was owning every book on mushrooms that you could get here. And that was both of them. [00:04:47] Dennis McKenna: They were all two of them at that point. [00:04:50] Howard Sprouse: All two of them. And they, if they weren't sufficient to scare you away from the subject, I don't know what is, because one of them was the common and poisonous mushrooms and plants of British Columbia. And then of course the other one was the savory wild mushroom. And so, you know, kind of fast backwarding from there. [00:05:21] Dennis McKenna: Is that what led you to go into mycology as a specialty? I mean, would you say youre academically. I see your bio says that you taught botany, but you're really a mycologist or would you. Or maybe that's too much of a pigeonhole. How would you characterize your academic training and interests? Is it pretty much focused on mycology or. [00:05:47] Howard Sprouse: Oh, no, no. In fact, in this building here at Peninsula College, I'm in Keegan hall and Professor Keegan was head of the college at one time and in fact was the person that we originally negotiated a deal with for mentoring students in exchange for lab space. But you know, like so many people who are called mycologists or call themselves mycologists, there's a lot of us that are self taught and I think that doesn't mean you've gone or alone at all. This means we've, we've done our homework, but we also have had an awful lot of help along the way. And I'm kind of one of those people. And so, you know, in terms of kind of a. If there's been an academic trend in my life, it has been getting out of school and, it's always been hard to keep me indoors. And you know that my family background, I was adopted into a family of people that worked in academics. I had a cousin who was a Nobel prize winner in genetics who was the chair at the University of Chicago. And he was, George Beadle was his name. [00:07:30] Dennis McKenna: George Beadle, that name would be known to some. I mean, I don't think he has a reputation in the field of genetics. So he was your uncle or. [00:07:39] Howard Sprouse: Oh, no, he was his second cousin. He would be of my mother's generation, but more than willing to help a young kid along the way like me. And he was actually known for the one gene, one protein theory. [00:07:59] Dennis McKenna: Okay. [00:07:59] Howard Sprouse: That was his gig. But more than that, he was called the corn guy and George and, and his wife Muriel, they spent many, many summer seasons back when people that were, were in at that level of academics got to actually take summer off and they go down to the Yucatan in pursuit of hopefully finding the original strain of corn, you know, and that's what he spent his life doing. But you know, I wanted to be like George and then I also wanted to be like my namesake, my Uncle Howard, who was, he had retired as the superintendent of the Grand Canyon when I was in junior high school. But he had gone just about as far as you could go in a National Park Service helping to start parks like the Blue Ridge Parkway and national monuments, stuff like that. [00:09:12] Dennis McKenna: So these, these gentlemen were big influences of you would you mentors in a sense. [00:09:20] Howard Sprouse: Totally, they were complete mentors and we were in touch. And then also I had in grade school, oh gosh, I develop really friendships. I love being around older people and, and ended up babysitting eventually for a lot of my school teachers from grade school and junior high and a friendship with the principal of our school who gave me my first chemistry stat. And, and yeah, so I had these mentors and they were older people. I loved hanging around with older people as a kid and they made a real impact on my life and kind of pushed me in this direction, finally finding home here in the Olympics. And when I started to work in developing a business in mycoremediation, I had already been working some scientifically. Like in my bio is mentioned, I had worked for Tom O'Dell who was doing studies of ectomycorrhizal fungi in Olympic national park. And, and we were looking at a combination of the census of these mushrooms and the correlation between them, the presence micro rises on conifer roots and the abundance of fruit bodies of fungi in the fall. And so this was a five year study. It ended up being run out of my home. And you know, I think as much as for any other good reason, I ended up with the job because of the place that I live that I know you've stayed at before on the beach. Port Angeles. [00:11:27] Dennis McKenna: Yes, in Port Angeles. So you mentioned that you're currently working out of Pacific Northwest University or what's the institution? [00:11:39] Howard Sprouse: This is. I'm at Peninsula College today. [00:11:43] Dennis McKenna: Peninsula College. And that's where you got your start in 1974. [00:11:48] Howard Sprouse: It really, it really is. 73. I came up here, I had a job and when I found out there was a college here, you couldn't get me away from the area. And that was 1973. When I graduated from high school, I pretty quickly ended up making friends who worked in the backcountry around here and people who were interested in picking berries and picking mushrooms and hunting and fishing and all of these things that I yearn to do at the time. And ended up working in the school as a tutor, teaching veterans botany. I really took to botany more than anything at the time. And then I worked as a janitor here, helping to put myself through school. [00:12:49] Dennis McKenna: So that's really remarkable that you've kept this affiliation institutional for all these years. That's a lot of years. I mean, my own experience has been moved through one institution or another. And then finally beyond institutions, which is where I am now, just being an old retired guy. So did you actually study for degrees in botany or mycology at this at. Or did you bring that with you? [00:13:24] Howard Sprouse: No, it kind of carried me along. I ended up going into fisheries and I. And out of that I ended up on a boat, cooking, and eventually working, you know, wrenches fit pretty good in my hands and eventually worked down in the engine room and out on the deck. I became a king crab fisherman, a purse seiner. I eventually became captain. I even ran a research boat conducting salmon research in the Bering Sea. And it was not as a researcher though, it was more as a taxi driver than anything else. But there's always been this common thread and the thread is that there's some bay that I started out in on the land and I have ended up on the, on the beach and on boats and traveled the ocean here between Seattle and. Well, actually I even worked on oil tankers. So between San Pedro and LA and the Arctic. [00:14:35] Dennis McKenna: So all of that. So that's interesting. Your experience is a lot of field experience in the forest, on the ocean. A lot of sort of self taught, you know, research directions that you've gone. So what brought you? Let me ask you before we get too far along, do you have any affiliation or was there ever any connection with the notorious group of mycologists at Evergreen State College? [00:15:10] Howard Sprouse: Yes, there was. [00:15:12] Dennis McKenna: Paul Stamets and a number of other crazy people emerged. [00:15:16] Howard Sprouse: Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, in fact, I had started an oil Tanker repair business. And I had a friend that I was visiting down in Denver and flying down there in an airplane one day, and lady sitting next to me said, what do you do for a living? And I said, oh, I work on oil tankers and I run gangs of guys with welders and wrenches and we fix them and. But what I really like to do is to work with mushrooms. And I told her about the thing that I was doing with Tom O'Dell. And this guy turns around in the seat in front of me and he hands me his business card. He says, hello, my name's Dr. Pete Becker. I work for Battelle and Sequin, and we have a laboratory that's doing mycoremediation research. I think you should come visit us. [00:16:23] Dennis McKenna: Oh, so that's how it happened. [00:16:26] Howard Sprouse: So I did, I did. And, and I was no stranger to the petri dish at that point because at Peninsula College, my favorite class was microbiology, which was the only class I'd ever gone to at any school. Or the other students there were ones that were crying and they were, they were nursing students. They didn't even. [00:16:54] Dennis McKenna: Oh, yes, well, those nursing students.. [00:16:56] Howard Sprouse: Didn't want to be there. [00:16:57] Dennis McKenna: They're for the sensitive bunch. [00:17:00] Howard Sprouse: But anyway, Art Ferro was the guy who taught that class and he really taught it, and he really taught us good lab skills and what to do with your sterile loop and some bacteria and a petri dish. And so by the time I got to Batelle and did visit Peter Becker, I said, you know, I can help you guys. Yeah, we, I know how to do this stuff. And, and they hired me to clone fungi in Yellowstone national park that was associated with the buffalo there. And it was supposedly on a grant that was looking at relationships between buffalo brucellosis and the concern that the brucellosis, which causes ungulates that get it to lose their firstborn, can be a severe hit. If you're a cattleman, they're running an elk hunting ranch or whatever they do over there. And so we were looking at fungi that would have the, perhaps the capacity to degrade brucellosis bacteria. This is right up my alley. And so Peter and I went there and I was hooked. And that time, Paul Stamets had been working for them for Battelle for about a year. And I took his position after he left. And, and then not really, not too long after that, Paul and I and the former head of Battelle, we, we worked together on projects from time to time we, we did a Michael remediation bench trial with the out of Fort Bragg. And this is something I'd like to get into that relates to psychedelic fungi, fairly quickly here. Anyway, like I said, I was hooked by then and ended up actually being kind of the perfect guy for the job because we ended up with projects for, like one was Pacific Northwest National Natural Gas down in Oregon. We went there at end of October one year and we had a big roll off dumpster of muck that was from the old spoils that were in adjacent to an old petroleum refinery that was on the property down there. And you can imagine what they dumped there over the years, before they had any regulations. [00:20:00] Howard Sprouse: It was all there. [00:20:03] Howard Sprouse: Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. And so I remember looking at that and saying this doesn't have a chance of a ghost working. It was cold, it was horrible time of the year. Well, it worked and it worked really good. And we did, we used an overabundance of oyster mushroom spawn, because largely because that's what the study that Paul had done and it worked so well for him. And we kind of started out with that and then over the years of course I've developed a library and tested hundreds of different strains of fungi for their capacity to degrade all kinds of things. And we can kind of get into how we do that because it's interesting. It's interesting when you start a business like this on the cheap because that's what we had to do. [00:21:03] Dennis McKenna: That's what you have to do. Yeah. So this was really your first sort of exploration of the concept of Mycoremediation. [00:21:14] Howard Sprouse: It was, it was. And I just am one of those people that, I'm real adaptable and kind of a hack at different things. [00:21:28] Dennis McKenna: I lost the thread though. What's the psychedelic connection? [00:21:32] Howard Sprouse: Well, you know that for those of you listeners here that, as we start looking at fungi that rots wood and we start cutting the deck of different kinds of mushrooms, you know, people are batting around the word mycorrhizal and all of these other words now and they don't really have meaning until you start working with these organisms. But of the mushrooms that can rot wood, that first cut of the deck are white rot and brown rot fungi. White rot fungi turns, it eats the brown, which is the lignin portion of wood and it leaves it turns it white. And these are the ones we've largely focused on, though not exclusively, but largely focused on that are useful for mycoremediation. Well, within that group of white rot fungi, a huge number of them happen to also comprise the wood rotting psilocybes. And so these would be now the one that is referred to as Psilocybe azurescens, that when I first learned about it back in those days, we were calling that Astoriensis. I believe John Allen was the person that had done the most work on the Northwest wood rotting psychedelics at that moment. [00:23:08] Dennis McKenna: So are these wood rotting psilocybes potentially applicable to mycoremediation or. [00:23:17] Howard Sprouse: They absolutely are. And the reason is that as we look at that group of the genera of fungi that are white rot fungi, Psilocybes land kind of in the middle of ones that are that the Latin name is Hyphaloma, nematoloma. They're very similar. There's, there's a lot of both physical and biological traits that they share. And so you know, we, we of course wanted to work with, with potentially psychedelic fungi and, and so it was technically illegal to do this and in fact in the, the work that that Paul and I and, and the people that the fellow that used to run Battelle did at Fort Bragg, one of the, the pieces of that down to collect fungi that was growing on site to see it may not be better enabled to handle the decomposition of the toxins that we were looking at treating. And he named them what they were and they never made it through the airport and all the way back to Seattle from there that whoever was checking them at the airport saw that name Psilocybe and they wouldn't let them go through. And so what we did is we started using archaic names like Saliota hortense, some of these other names and nonsensical names when we would write them down on the petri dishes to avoid these problems. And, and, and in fact back then the problem is about half resolved now. But, but back at that time we're talking through almost three decades ago,, I had rented a room out at my house and my roommate there brought a mushroom up that he'd found in the salt marsh below the house. And he says God, Howard, this looks like a psilocybin mushroom. And it did. And so I picked a bunch of these. They were ones that I would have characterized as being a collieboid form. They look more like Colybias, they look more like the Astoria cyanescens than they do say, a liberty cap. So I took it down to that was when I first met Paul Stamets and I And I took these things to him and he said yeah, he said these are, these are psilocybies for sure. He said. It's funny thing is he said I think you're the only person that's has brought a, an undescribed local species of psilocybe to me at that time. [00:26:38] Dennis McKenna: Well, did he named it after you? [00:26:40] Howard Sprouse: He. No, nobody did the taxonomy but he did give me the advice about how many he would take. He said he would take like it was 12 or 24 or something. Whatever it was, I took half of them and they didn't do anything. And so either in the processing I had dried them first and it's possible they had lost something in the drying. But I suspect today they would be placed into the genera of Decanica, which are the non-bluing ones that we formerly all called psilocybes back then. [00:27:21] Dennis McKenna: Oh yeah. So it was potentially not psilocybium. [00:27:26] Howard Sprouse: That's correct, yeah. Yeah. [00:27:29] Dennis McKenna: Well you probably wouldn't want to use psychedelic mushrooms for bioremediation because somebody might eat those things and get, I mean the bio, the fungi sequesters some of these toxins, right? [00:27:42] Howard Sprouse: They can. And that's the thing about the kind of the evolving system that we get is you know that the way that mushrooms remediate, the way that mycoremediation works is that going back to this lignin thing with wood. Lignin is nature's plastic, if you look closely enough at it and compare the way it looks to a molecule of hydrocarbon. And that could be what you dip your fence post into and something heavy like that, or it could also be diesel or gasoline. It all looks the same at that level. And the way that fungi break it down is that the enzymes in them, they break those molecules apart. And in fact going back to this project that we did down in Oregon at the old refinery site, we actually found that there was a rise in lighter, more volatile petroleum compounds partway into the remediation process. And what was happening was that these mushrooms were breaking apart the heavy longer chain hydrocarbons, making them into smaller ones, the equivalent of chewing your food, but you haven't swallowed it yet. And then these, these smaller ones showed up in the analyses that we had done as a increased amount of these other toxic hydrocarbons. And then they came back and started degrading those. But along this whole path the, the way that they do that are that the, the suite of enzymes and these things have. Oh, probably the most common one. We talk about is LaCase that they start chopping these molecules up and they're. They do that routinely. They don't care about what they're going to eat. They just put out these enzymes. And the way that they do it, they have two sort of metabolic systems that they operate on, constitutive ones, and these are the ones that are creating all of the things that they need to do just to keep alive all the time. They're always doing this. And then there are the adaptive enzyme structures that they have or systems rather. And these are the ones that, that we had hoped by finding mushrooms that are growing in an area where there are specific toxins would be more apt to be able to degrade them or to challenge mushrooms as we grow them with the toxins themselves so that they have a chance to respond and start creating and ordering up specific enzymes for doing the job we want them to do. [00:31:09] Dennis McKenna: Or you can. Let me see if I understand. In one sense there are fungi that you can inoculate into these toxic environments. They don't have to be trained or adapted. They'll just take to it. They have inherently the enzymatic machinery to break these things down. In other cases, you can challenge the fungi with these toxins and they will respond. They will develop adaptive adapt. They'll develop adaptive mechanisms in the form of enzymes that could break down these toxins that they may have never encountered in nature. Is that correct? [00:31:51] Howard Sprouse: Yeah, it is that they have maybe never encountered or just encountered and depending on who you learned from and the era that you learned from. I'm kind of old school at this point, that my probably my greatest critic and at the same time became my greatest mentor was Bill Chalmers in, in Canada, who would not bar from where you live. [00:32:21] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. So tell me about him. What were your. [00:32:25] Howard Sprouse: He was a great skeptic and he, he did not believe in any of this stuff. And one of the things that he hammered into me early on was he said, well, Howard, these constitutive and adaptive enzyme systems says, as far as I know, the adaptive ones, they get ordered up and they do it within the first minute or so and they change and they start ordering up and producing what they need to produce to get a job done. And I trusted anything Bill ever said to me. Like I said, he was my greatest critic and he was very critical over the years and it forced me to really, to learn and to try things out and run them by him and get his feedback. And so today we have a different view of this and today I think that, that we can say, make simple statements like, fungi can be trialed and they're going to order things up, enzymes to do a special job. I'll take it a few steps beyond that. And that is that as, as the thing that got me so excited about calling you up and begging you for a microphone here on the Brainforest is that, you know, we have a lot of analytical tools today that we didn't have last year and the year before. And we also are thinking in a cross disciplinary way today that we didn't have to do 30, 40 years ago, by and large. You were a plumber or you were a carpenter, you were a scientist. If you were a scientist, you were locked into a discipline. And if you happen to be a mycologist and a scientist of 40 years ago, Chances are you were involved in the pharmaceutical industry and chances are you didn't know anything about mushrooms. [00:34:39] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. But you obviously know a lot about mushrooms. And something you said a little while back in this conversation, you said lignans are the plastics of nature. And so naturally that leads to the question, I don't have to tell you this, some of our readers may not be aware of it, but plastic plants pollution is a huge problem. You know, these micro and nanoplastics that are literally permeating the biosphere and poisoning the biosphere is myco. I think the holy grail of people that are concerned with this is to find that magical organism that will break down plastics but not only will break them down, but are capable of being scaled up and it would have to be a massive scale up because we basically poisoned this planet. What are your thoughts on plastic pollution and is there a role for mycoremediation? [00:35:45] Howard Sprouse: Oh yes, yeah, yeah, there certainly is. [00:35:49] Dennis McKenna: For another three hours on this, I'm sure. [00:35:52] Howard Sprouse: But yeah, this and PFOS, PFOA, these compounds, these are in the R&D area of our company. These are where we're focused. In fact, we're working right now on a national science, off of a National Science foundation grant with the project partners back on the Great Lakes to come up with solutions for degrading PFAS. But you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kick, kick a word that you just said back to you and you use the word organism, the magic organism. Are we going to find a mushroom that can do this? And I would like us to start thinking more broadly about that term organism and that it's. We live in a world of relationships. You and I are relating now and we're relating with the people who are going to be listening to this and the state of the art of what we are doing now, ourselves and some of our, with our, our project partners are combining fungi, bacteria and plants. And then, and then biochar is another thing that we use in what I'm calling the integrated biological approach. And we kind of backed into this and we ended up, you know, we would clean up like we cleaned up a gas station site and we're easily able to get rid of the gasoline hydrocarbons. The fungi ate it. And what's left over are all of these inorganic things like lead. Well, even though, even though the amount that was in there is from a legal standpoint, not so high that it wouldn't be considered clean, after following the evaluations that you have to jump through to be able to certify that a site has been cleaned up, it left these other things. And so we ended up using vegetative caps, something as simple starting out as clover that we planted on our treatment piles because I wouldn't use black plastic and I wanted something that would manage it there. And so eventually the College of Forestry at the University of Washington, Dr. Sharon Doty, who runs a lab there, got a hold of us and asked if we were interested in working with her, seeing if we could combine phytoremediation and mycoremediation technologies and see how they work together. And eventually we never did directly with her, but, but eventually the company that they had licensed some of the microbes that they found that were capable of degrading different toxins, we started working with them and, and they hail out of NASA Ames and some of the most successful treatments of toxic sites were done when we combined our technologies. And this is stepping back now and I'm going to get over here to plastic in a second. Is this word organism that the organism are these relationships that are enduring if we can foster them, if we can foster them in a site that we're going to do a cleanup on and keep them growing long enough and producing enough of these enzymes and working on the toxic environment, which there isn't a toxic environment anywhere that doesn't contain multiple toxins. [00:40:27] Dennis McKenna: Right. [00:40:27] Howard Sprouse: The idea that you're going after one is absurd. [00:40:32] Dennis McKenna: Right. So what I'm taking away from this is the idea that there is no magic organism. What you're doing, you're effectively creating, kind of tailored ecosystems for these environments that include fungi, bacteria, plants and whatever else might. But you're effectively engineering an ecosystems approach to this, where you can deploy these into these toxic sites and they will adapt to it or they're pre adapted to it, and then that will take care of the toxic load, no matter what, of a variety of toxins contaminating the site. [00:41:20] Howard Sprouse: Absolutely. And it isn't that when we talk about detoxifying something, you think about getting rid of it. [00:41:30] Dennis McKenna: Right. [00:41:30] Howard Sprouse: It may not be, it may not go that way. And so, you know, getting back to the attractive nuisance aspect of putting a mushroom into soil that somebody would pick and want to eat, whether it's one for food or psychedelic perhaps, we have to be cautious about that. And so we tend to work with non-edibles, although not exclusively. And we tend to the edible ones that we do work with, we, we look at the ones that maybe don't fruit that well, or we, we create this environment that they're probably not going to fruit anyway. And so, you know, back to this idea of plastics. Gosh, Dennis, this morning I was looking at an advertisement that popped up for a new kind of cutting board. And they said that, like, by the way, do you know that when you drag your knife across that plastic cutting board that you have to slice your ripe tomato, that you're introducing plastics into your body? And so, you know, I'm a butcher. I used to, I used to own a butcher shop and a smokehouse. It's another thing that I did at one point that the cutting board that they were trying to sell was made out of titanium. And I thought, oh my God, you know, now there's a good thing for your knife. [00:43:02] Dennis McKenna: Right. [00:43:04] Howard Sprouse: But the stuff is everywhere. [00:43:06] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. [00:43:07] Howard Sprouse: So what mycoremediation and the integrated biological approach do, is, they have the capacity to break down and detoxify certain contaminants, like petroleum contaminants, completely gone. And they'll turn them basically into CO2 and water. And then of the ones that are like fluorinated and chlorinated halogens, these ones, PFAS is one, you can't destroy an element. And so it's possible, though, that we can, with this system, break things down enough in the soil or in the water to be able to draw them up into plant tissues and sequester them in plants and then remove that from the ground. Then at least they're concentrated. [00:44:05] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. So aren't fungi rather good at taking up heavy metals? Are they? [00:44:13] Howard Sprouse: They are. And in fact, one of our more recent [00:44:16] Dennis McKenna: Its a problem, if you're intending to eat them, but maybe if you're trying to clean up a toxic wayside that's, that's a good thing. [00:44:24] Howard Sprouse: Oh, absolutely. And in fact, down the road here, you know that these metals come from our rocks and soil anyway, that's right where we had them. And unless they, they happen to be like what is that Unamua, an asteroid that comes and lands and maybe we can get some fancy nettle out of that. But by and large they're in our soils and in our rocks and here in this part of the Olympics, the background level that you naturally find lead at here can be around 24 parts per million. And at a site that we recently did that was a petroleum cleanup, we were able to reduce the amount of lead in the soil down to, I think it ended up about 15 parts per million. And that went into the plant tissues that we used as part of that remediation. And so, you know, no matter what the law says that we allow for these different toxic metals, certain ones like lead, are bad for us at any level. And so this integrated system gives us the capacity to remove these dangerous toxins in a way that's never been done before. [00:45:57] Dennis McKenna: What is the, what is considered a, say a toxic level of lead? What, how many? I mean you mentioned 24 and 15 parts per million obviously is bad, but what's considered a quote, safe level, for something like lead or some of these toxic metals? [00:46:18] Howard Sprouse: You know, I can't remember what, what it is here now, but I know it varies from state to state and I think that we're looking at, if memory serves me, it's over, over 100 parts per million. Between 100 and 200 something parts per million is still considered safe. But I was part of a seminar that was put on by a group called the Toxic Cities Coalition. I've worked with them on and off for over a decade now and, and recently we had one a few years ago and a medical doctor from up in Vancouver B.C. was there and talking about lead and about the potential effect that is, has been having on human children for as long as we've been exposed to it and that any level of it is potentially bad for the developing mind of a human being. [00:47:31] Dennis McKenna: Right. So another thing that occurs to be out of this conversation. So you do these test sites, you know, you create these tailored ecosystems and you deploy them out there. What do you, what is the practical implication for scale up? Because the problem seems so massive and so global and so widespread. Are you, I mean, I guess my question is, are you looking toward developing technologies that can be massively deployed on a global scale, because that's what it's going to take. Right? I think, which I'm not convinced there is, but I'm certainly not an expert on any of that. [00:48:25] Howard Sprouse: I think we chip away at it and like, you know, that Washington State has, has been leaders in trying to do something about this stuff. And so we have a program that started out, it's called the 10,000 Rain Garden Program, implemented in King county and in Pierce county and that. And it starts out it. One of the big polluters around here was the Asarco smelter that was down there by Tacoma. And that, you know, the wind blows and it would carry these toxins via the wind from plumes from the factory wherever the wind blew. And so you have this plume that dispersed throughout Puget Sound. Oh, you have that. And then certainly, you know, you experience the traffic here, you have that and everything that drips out of the bottom of our cars. And then more recently we found that this thing that is really killing salmon is what's coming off of our tires. And so we look at stopping point source pollution and we look at, for instance, where water runs off a roadway, capturing that and then allowing that to percolate through a bed of plantings and re-infiltrate into the groundwater. So one of the things that they had not done in this program is to actually test if the implementation of these features, these rain gardens and so forth, were really getting the job done. And so I talked to the city of Seattle into allowing us to install a bunch of monitoring wells on 15 of their sites in the downtown Seattle area. And so we're, we're beginning to, to look at how these things are actually what are they helping us or not? And what we can do to improve upon them. And so like, what we're working on now coincidental to these sorts of efforts is to be able to deploy these in what they're now referring to as green infrastructure. And these green infrastructure programs are designed to allow us to come into the future to deal with problems like climate change, to deal with problems like stormwater pollution and so forth. And then getting to your point of, well, how can we take on this Goliath that we've created? And I think that, you know, I'm a real optimist, you know, me, Dennis, and, and to a fault, perhaps that we do what we can do. And I, and, and I think that in dealing now with sites that are on hazardous site lists, we could deal with every one of those. Like, I'll give you a couple of examples, one of fellows who visited our fungi festival here last year, he lives in Wenatchee and he's in a four story building with knobs in front of his desks and he controls the output of the dams and the power generators that supply the major power buyers for this part of the Northwest. As part of what he does, he lives in Wenatchee. Well, Natchee is this apple orchard kingdom of this part of the Northwest. And what did they do back in the 50s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s as they sprayed apples with arsenic and lead, you know, to keep them looking pretty and to keep the late blight off or whatever? Well, we can do something about that. We don't, we're not taking on something that is so giant that we can't start chiseling away at it. And so that's what we're, this is the angle that we're taking is, we can do that. And the thing about the Brainforest that, that really I, I could hardly wake through the episode of listening to one of the interviews. I'm sorry, I don't remember the lady's name, but right now, but in talking, everybody brings up mycoremediation. And we've been doing this and we've been, we've been doing it quietly and this was kind of as we were taught and had to because we can't be talking about the toxic problems of our clients publicly. And so we tend to be working quietly in the background. Well, that's changing now. And we have opportunities now to start working together. We have monies available through governmental agencies, through insurance, through all kinds of programs that are designed not just to embrace this green revolution that is reignited now again in the world, but also the job creation that is good for business. We gotta have something to do and this is something we could do together. [00:54:26] Dennis McKenna: Well, that's fantastic. So it's really good to hear you're optimistic about this. Any massive project like this, first of all, you have to have adequate funding. You never have, there's never adequate funding, there's always a need for more. But it's really good to hear that these agencies are waking up to this. They're waking up to the potential of bioremediation. And over time maybe this will make a difference. As you say, you've just got to start someplace. You start chipping it away and if enough people see results then it will be like mycelial spreading. There will be nodes in different parts of the world, and people want to adopt these technologies and adapt these technologies to their particular situation. So this has been a fantastic. We're about at the top of the hour here. I'm sorry for the recording staff ooze, but this may be a good place to stop. Or what do you think? Is there something we didn't cover that you really wanted too? [00:55:41] Howard Sprouse: I think in terms of connection and, and in terms of visibility and, you know, you have to choose the group. You have to choose your people. And we know this, you know, we've. This is, this is something that is really driving our lives and that, you know, the time is now and we're the people. And I think that we can work together on this, and I think that we need to work together on this. And so we each have things that we bring to the table. And I would suggest to the viewers here, let's mix it up and let's pick some high visibility problems and we'll give you an honest assessment of what we think the risks and potential are of it and take it from there. [00:56:51] Dennis McKenna: Well, exactly. That's a good suggestion because there are problems all over the place. On the other hand, there are solutions all over the place. And the trick is to bring these together. And you and your group are definitely part of that process, bringing the solutions to the forefront. And that's fantastic. It must be good to be working in something where you feel like you're making a difference. You may not even live to see most of the benefits, but at least you can say, I have a part in this. So that's fantastic. If people want to get in touch with you, well, we'll have all your information posted on our podcast site. But if they want to look at your website, It's the mycoremediators.com ? [00:57:48] Howard Sprouse: Its theremediators.com. It's perpetually under construction. [00:57:52] Dennis McKenna: Like life itself. [00:57:53] Howard Sprouse: Yes, life. [00:57:54] Dennis McKenna: My life itself. Well, thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation. I've learned a lot. And one of the things I've learned is how little I know, which is often how these conversations turn out, but also an understanding of how much there is to know and how much you know about this. So that's great. I really appreciate your coming on. And we'll let you know when we're going to drop the podcast. [00:58:23] Howard Sprouse: Well, yeah, well, thank you, Dennis. And as always, it's always great to see you. Love you, brother. And I hope we get to see each other in person again one of these days. [00:58:34] Dennis McKenna: I think we will. We're not that far from each other. Maybe I'll come down to Port Angeles and pay you a visit one weekend. [00:58:41] Howard Sprouse: Yeah, that would be just great. Or I was thinking we'll go out onto the west side of Vancouver island, visit the rest of the family there. [00:58:51] Dennis McKenna: I'd be up for that, too. [00:58:53] Howard Sprouse: Yeah. [00:58:54] Dennis McKenna: Okay. Have a wonderful day. [00:58:56] Howard Sprouse: Yeah, you too. Thanks, Dennis. [00:58:58] Dennis McKenna: Talking soon. Bye. Bye. [00:59:04] [Outro]: Join our mission to harmonize with the natural world. Support the McKenna Academy by donating today. Thank you for listening to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at McKenna.Academy.