Meet Rita Lamsal.
She is one of our many wonderful ladies working on site in Nepal. Giving us a brief look into her life and her work with Sacred Rivers Climate Project.
Sacred Rivers Climate Project has three core beliefs;
1) Mitigation of local air and water pollution
2) Preservation and extension of habitat and biodiversity
3) Empowerment of women in developing worlds
What is mycelium? 🍄
How come I haven’t heard about it (if it’s so special)?🍄
Is it the same as mushrooms?🍄
Mycelium brings about equal measures of talk-all-night-about-the-ultimate-fate-of-Earth and confused-bemused-with-shoulder-shrug depending on the audience. It’s understandable as people use “mycelium” to talk about very different things and oftentimes the claims for mycelium saving the planet aren’t tied to real life examples and specially outside of the lab/experimental farm and at scale on projects large enough to make a significant dent in the biodiversity/climate crisis.🍄
Let’s consider the Wikipedia definition of mycelium.🍄
Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. The mass of hyphae is sometimes called shiro. Fungal colonies composed of mycelium are found in and on soil and many other substrates.🍄
So, mycelium always refers to fungus or members of the fungi kingdom; one of the five kingdoms of life. Fungi are actually closer to animals/humans than plants when looked at on a cellular level and unlike plants cannot photosynthesize energy or food so rely on plants to do so for them.🍄
The types of mycelium that NetZero deploys, ectomycorrhizal and endomycorrhizal, only exist under the soil, never forming mushrooms, and form a symbiotic relationship with plants extending their root system a thousand-fold giving the plant access to water, nutrients, and even communication and transference under the soil to reach other creating a wood wide web.🍄
In return, the mycelium receives 40-70% of the plants’ carbon which it uses for structure unfolding miles worth of hyphae per square inch of soil. This carbon is bio-chemically bound so cannot be released back into the atmosphere even with mechanical disturbance, great heat such as wildfires, and/or the plants themselves dying.🍄
The confusion about mushrooms comes in because many fungi do create mushrooms as part of their life cycle. A mushroom is the fruiting body of some forms of fungi; the same way an apple is the fruiting body of an apple tree.🍄
#ClimateTipTuesday
There is no one magic bullet to solve the climate crisis and there are exciting initiatives being launched every day in spite of the climate crisis from Idaho to Istanbul. On Tuesdays, we want to stop talking about NetZero and feature some of the exciting and innovative climate and sustainability projects from all over the world.
Project Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming is exactly as ambitious, riveting, and useful as its title suggests.
A key point to understand is the difference between carbon offsets and carbon drawdowns. Offsets pay to install technology like solar plants that prevent carbon or CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere. Completely valid and useful though they haven’t really caught on with the public over the last twenty years. One issue is its hard to know if your investment actually prevented the carbon from going into the atmosphere or if the solar plant would have been built anyways, if the building of the plant stopped a coal plant, etc. Essentially, it’s impossible to prove a counter factual.
Drawdowns actually account for a ton, or often a metric ton, of CO2 being pulled out of the atmosphere. Back to the Drawdown book. Published in 2017, with over two hundred contributors, this was the first time all the top one hundred drawdown solutions were ranked in order of impact at scale. Mind blowing and mission critical for anyone in the climate space.
3 Hot Takes:
1.) Plant Rich Diets is number #4 drawing down 66.11 Gigatons which is problem solved for the climate. Okay, not everyone is going to go vegan, I’m not, but even cutting meat consumption in half goes a long way.
2.) The number one solution is…fixing refrigeration leaks. 89.7 Gigatons, not sexy, but impactful.
3.) Educating girls is # 6 and providing family planning is #7, but if you combine the two they are number one with a total impact of 120 Gigatons.
Capturing your eco footprint is easy!
Phase 1 - Put your Mycelium orb in water and spray it on your plants. 🌱
Phase 2 - Read the carbon manifesto to learn how you can sequester your full carbon footprint to become netzero while empowering communities in Nepal, Bali and Uganda 🙌
Phase 3 - Become an ambassador and help your family, school, business and/or place your of worship become netzero 🌎
Learn more at our website (Link in bio)
This is Melvin the mushroom 🍄
He’s one of many shapes and sizes our Mycelium orbs come in.
Let us know in the comments what iconic themes you’d love to see us recreate and we might just bring it to our lineup!
A support for NetZero goes beyond reducing your individual carbon impact, but helps support our mission to bring cleaner air, soil and water to developing countries, like Nepal, Uganda and Bali!
Discover more about what change we’re bringing to these key sites through our website (Link in bio)
NetZero is a living orb of Mycelium, a natural fungi that’s the equivalent to plant steroids. Once dissolved in water it can be administered through the soil, where it adheres to the plant’s roots to form a web of fibrous tissue, increasing the root system a thousand fold. This symbiotic relationship allows the exchange of key nutrients, the most important of which, is carbon. Plants share up to half of their carbon with the mycelium, sequestering it underground and out of our atmosphere helping to fuel future generations of plant life.
Mycelium and plants have a symbiotic relationship, existing better together than without. The mycorrhizal network created amongst the roots works much like a neurological network, allowing a wider variety of species to not just communicate, but share nutrients with one another. In addition, the carbon sequestered by mycelium works to fuel future generations across the entire network.
Our effort to enact change goes beyond the planet. Revenues generated through NetZero support our efforts to empower women in the developing world through education, safe working conditions and fair wage jobs.
