the gulf oiil spill.

  paul stamets experimented using oyster mushrooms to clean up oil, petrol, in ground saturated with it and was very successful. Your ordinary oyster mushroom  gobbles it up and turns it into an ordinary oyster mushroom.

      He does not only say you can use it to clean up petrol gasoline he also includes petrol in a list he has of substrates to grow oyster mushrooms on.Cardboard paper sawdust wood chips the beards of coconuts straw coffee grounds, and petrol.
They convert into hydro carbides into carbo hydrates. If there are heavy metals in the  gasoline than they wont get rid of these,  but they otherwise turn the oil into oyster mushroom body, the gasoline disappears and a good crop of your ordinary everyday oyster mushrooms takes their place.

  The easiest way to get a mat of these that you could take down to the golf coast  as a remediation effort  is perhaps to get spent oyster mushroom substrate from a grower of cultivated mushrooms and put it with some damp saw dust to get it thriving again.

If all permaculturists tried to grow the fungal mats Stamets teaches you to make in his books and a good part of the book “mycelium running” look it up and you will get various entries and go down them till you find the one that publishes a lot of the book on line which is the google one if I remember right.

  If people grow fungal mats then they could be taken to the coast and used to establish the ordinary old oyster mushroom in the marshes. and wherever they are needed so they can eat up the petrol.
For this sort of job you are better of with spent mushroom spawn than with a mushroom kit the life left in the spent mushroom spawn is old -ish and can manage the bacteria present outside, the mushroom growing rooms very new mushroom spawn wont survive outside.
The ways Paul Stamet suggests for making mushroom spawn for the outside are with materials that have not been sterilized. Maybe not a material like straw full of bacteria but cardboard, wood chips in sackcloth and dowels. 
Mushroom spawn will take off more easily on Sterilized substrates than unsterilized
But wont be so hardy and likely to survive beign grown outdoors.

Paul Stamets ways of propagating mushrooms are.
With spores and with the foot of the stalk of the oyster mushroom which will start to grow in a damp place with something to eat, sandwiched between bits of damp cardboard between the wiggly bits in the middle of sheets of cardboard, after you have discarded the outside bits that are flat, or in a box of damp dowels or  wood chips.
    You can get spores from the ventilators of the grow rooms or from the mushrooms placing them down on your substrate. The spores fall out of the cap of your mushroom on to the substrate you have put below the cap.
  If you can persuade the oyster mushrooms to grow, you can take the mass of mycelium you have prorogated on these substrate down to the coast and use it to eat up the petroleum.

  Paul Stamets says that you can put spores and the foot of the stumps in to your substrate. Putting in two forms of growing hypha will increase your chances of success.
    You put these things sandwiched between cardboard and or in dowels soaked for two weeks or in wood chips held in sack cloth and keep your spores and feet of mushrooms in your damp substrate damp, in plastic, with just a hole or two in the plastic you keep it in to keep it breathing if you are in a dry place or in a cardboard box under plants in the shade in your garden if you live where its not to dry, in a damp bit of the country and with any luck it will grow and the mushroom hypha will invade all you substrate cardboard wood straw etc and you will get a plentiful quantity of oyster mushroom spawn to take to the coast to eat petrol.

I don’t know how these mushrooms react to salt.
There are you tube videos on how to grow mushrooms. 
If enough people grow mycelium to take to the golf coast  it could be a big help and mean humans don't have to get affected by cleaning up petrol that affects their lungs, respiratory tracts.  Rose macaskie.
I am tired and going to send this mistakes and all. agri rose macaskie.

Mushrooms do not handle salt well, so you cannot establish them in the marshes.

I can't help but wonder why the Gov doesn't make BP hire a lot of boats to pick up the oil and separate it from the water. Expensive? Hey they caused the problem and all I hear is how far it's spreading.

Could Paul Wheaton make a salt resistent variety. He breeds varieties that are resistant to other things.
    Fungi with just one layer of cells as a skin or as a thickness of hypha would absorb too  much salt or loose to much water in a strong salt solution, i suppose and there is not much to be done about that .
  mushrooms that grow on manure must be used to more salt than fungi that live on wood chips. Do feild musrooms also break up the bonds of the hydro carbide molecules between hydrogren and carbon of the molecules as they do with carbo hydrogen? Who has tried to grow feild mushrooms on petrol?
    Paul Stamets does have photo of a mushroom living in a stream, maybe he could breed a salt resistent variety of oyster mushrooms for living in salt water, mabe we could put sawdust on top of the oil that would absorb it without taking up the salt, a bit complicated, and grow oyster mushrooms on that. 

        I suppose as far as what can Obama do with BP, that a big international company is like a country, it is a question of them offering you some things and threatening you with others, like threatening to take away american jobs if you get tough on them. Getting what you want is not as straight forward as it seems from outside.

        With a democracy there is always a public responsability, the government is your government  you vote for them, if you protest hard enough they will do something about it, it is you who has the power to vote for them or not.  Can you get the masses interested or not. If you can then the day is yours or rather your interests or missions wil be won. It seems to be easier to raise interest about something nebulouse like the tea party interests or their degrees of discomfort. Than something concrete like, can't they really pull out all the stops on cleaning up the oil spill.
      In one report on CNN news a trawler man said that BP had offered the fisherman jobs cleaning up if they would sign papers renouncing all right to renumeration for their losses caused by the oil spill from BP. I think BP should have been smashed to smitherines for such a manouver unless what they offered made up and well, for what their losses occasioned by the oil spill  might be supposed to be.  No wonder there aren't many boats out there, they only take on the fishermen  if they are willing to hang their own interests, to do for themselves, maybe BP don't want lookers on.  I don't know if lots of boats could do anything or not.  agri rose macaskie.

      I saw a bit of news on CNN about cleaning up a site that was used for cleaning up different types of toxic waste and they pump into the soil a sugar solution with some other component i don't remember what it was to get the bacteria in the soil jumping and super alive and kicking and clearing up the toxic waste that ended up in the soilwhile the site has been used as a toxic clean up site.
      Can we pump the gulf with sugar, all the soft drinks that would otherwise fatten people and get the sea microscopic life buzzing and working hard at breaking up the oil.
        Maybe all sewage could be diverted to the golf to get the microrganisms jigging, to get them truly busy. agri rose macaskie.

America is a constitutional repermies, not a democracy. But there is a finite limit to how effective those boats can be, with out calm weather it's very tricky.

politics aside, it is unlikely that anyone will breed an oyster mushroom that can resist that kind of hydraulic pressure any time soon, especially in the next few weeks when it is needed. There are marine Fungi, but they don't have the suite of genes needed to break down crude oil.

  In a battle it is always good to prepare for what you can do three months from now, in case things go on longer then you expected them to. I would think it was as well to try to grow lots of fugal mats for the oil spill as possible and if they aren't needed well a lot of people wil know how to make them, if i understood right they are what is needed for soil with all types of  herbicide and pesticide in it.  The minute I have the money to buy the wood chips or saw dust or straw on which they can feed to spread on the land I want cured, I will buy spent oyster mushroom substrate or make fungal mats to inoculate the material with and try to better the soil on the bit of garden some crazy neighbor put herbicide on.  
         It is worth growing fungal mats for the oil that gets carried high up beyond the beaches the normal tide line where maybe there is not too much salt.
 
  If oyster mushrooms, ostreatus pleurotus fungi, break down petrol because hydrocarbon is made up of the same molecules as their normal food carbohydrates, so they can break down the bonds between hydrogen and carbon atoms, then they would not be the only living organisms with that could break down hydrocarbons.
     

   Hydrocarbons are  more corrosive than carbohydrate, as I see it, I am not  a scientist and petroleum having a low boiling point gives off lots of gases, fungi will have to be able to put up with the presence of hydrocarbons and their gases if they are to feast on them. In order to secrete digestive juices acids and enzymes on to the oil and take up the atoms they need from the resulting heap of broken down hydro carbon molecules. So you need living organisms that don't mind being in contact with the oil if you are to find things that will eat it and that does not sound so easy. I wonder how oyster mushrooms survive it.

 
     If BP had pulled out all the stops they would have made the second bell shape to lower over the leaking pipe and a big one, at the same time as the first one, they would have made a lot of back up possibilities to use if the first did not work with a lot of workers all at the same time. They are not like us they are a big company they can bring in a lot of people and the situation is such that there is too much of a hurry for them to wait to see if the first thing works before getting to work on the back up possibilities.  
     
     It must be easier to put down a bigger bell than the one they made, on top of the jet of oil, if the escaping jet of oil is not too confined it won’t push the bell placed over it over, the out flow will have less push in a bigger space.  
     They could make a lot of other things. a tube down which to pour stones and concrete cover the leak. Would the petrol then seep into the sand and get out into the ocean underneath the rubble and the concrete that had been poured on top of it? They should put down a concrete floor first and then throw concrete on it. Are they thinking big enough?
       There was a time when i would not have offered crazy ideas but when you are already a long way into adult life, you learn that sometimes even professional people have not even thought of the most obvious and it is always worth putting out stupid and unprofessional ideas, you never know what will work.
 If Paul Stamets had not been willing to do way out things he would not have tried to feed fungi on petrol. Agri rose macaskie.

      Emerson White, is not america a democratic constitutional repermies, aren't you democratic if you vote for your leader.
    I had better not talk my memory of history is usefull to me but does not include a strict unserstanding of historic and political terminology.
      Anyway, same differents, if you get to vote for them you get to ask them to back up what interests you unless you are to lackadasical to say what you want. Thats why the universal sufrage was so important, maybe the voteres can't understand latin but they know which party takes care of their needs and which one does not give a damn, which is what you need to know to vote if you are poor. The nobility may just do whats good for others i am not sure that the poor can afford to be noble, though they are just that. Doing the the best for the nation should be the part of the role of those who can afford it.
    It seems that conservatives are conservative about spending more than you have sort of responsible people. Being responsibl means not spending more than you have got but would not that sort of responsible attitude include knowing when you had to pay your bit. Like knowing that you had to borrow money to keep the business and the people you employ afloat. Taking risks for the good of your people or your country if need be.  agri rose macaskie.
   

We don't actually vote for our leader, we vote for electors, which is why Gore won the popular vote but lost the election.

      In England we vote for a person to speak for our district and represent us in the houses of parliament, there were reforms of the voting system in the nineteenth century because some towns had disappeared, their populations had dwindled to nothing but they still voted in a member of parliament.
towns have a high population and the number of representatives they have in the house depends on how big their population is while in the country things are divided in to areas that represent a county or a proportion of the county.
    That we vote in England for the person who will represent our district in the houses of parliament means that if in each district the population give a twenty percent vote to some outsider party like the liberals they will across the whole country get an enormous number of votes a fifth of the votes but they wont have any members of parliament.
    You vote for them one way or another and they obey you unless they can pull the wool over your eyes because it is you who will return them to parliament next year but for this to work well you need a population that is alert and fighting. It is their responsibility to make a noise.
    The tea -partiers are liberal and conservative they are as strange mix?
      Was it not the Americans who prided themselves on reading the papers rich poor and middling because they were the owners of their country unlike the English who were in the hands of a elite, in those days the elite was noble or at any rate the well to do.
     I know about America from reading Francis Hodgkin’s Burnets books such as Little Lord Fauntleroy. Burnet is one of those writers that does talk about the state of the poor and the responsibility of the rich towards them. The whole argument of the book is Americans introducing fairer ideas to the English. The little lords American mother brings in a better era for the poor who depend on the grandfather earl.
     Is not the American pride about every person taking an interest in politics why Cedrics friend the greengrocer is always reading the newspaper and commenting on politics to Cedric in the first chapters of  Little Lord Fauntleroy when he and his mother are poor and live in amerca. Mind you they go on being poor throughout the book, she lives off her own small pension in England, apart from that they are  totally at the mercy of the grandfather.
     
      The other book of hers that writes on the poor is "The Little Princess"  a book that writes about the rich and exposes the situation of the poor and powerless. it the heroine Sarah Crewe actual becomes poor and with no body to speak for her through in a great part of that book though her position is still more fortunate than that of other even poorer girls she meets a beggar girl and the maid who does not even have the option of teaching that Sarah has only of scrubbing pots. Changing the fate of the heroin so drags the reader into living, through her, the sorrows of a drudge made to work too hard for no pay and so drags you into more truly understand the plight of those with no money. It is clever to make the rich imagine one of their own living as a poor girl often had to live, open to all criticism and with a boss who was mercilessly unreal about the probable strength of her tweenies or of their emotional needs.
     Francis Hodgkin’s Burnet had as big an influence in shaping me as ever the bible did. and the writers were one of the forces that paved the way for the well fare state. I don’t think the religions like the welfare state they get most of their money on the pretext that they will help the poor, with no poor they are nearly done for greatly reduced and entities have a psychology the members of them as people would if you cut off all their possibilities for inheritance they will fight for the survival of their group and that it should prosper as if it was for their own life. That is why evangelist in America and Catholics in Spain try to get people to vote the right though they find other excuses for doing so. It is known that poverty causes more abortion than the ideas of the materialist rich do, so that is no excuse for voting for the right who anyway don’t change that law my opinion is like that of Mrs book I am torn both ways on the subject I am enough pro abortion for catholics to want to do for me and not enough to make very  pro abortionists like me. agri rose macaskie

  I have been talking to a freind about BP and the leaky oil pipe and his reaction was that it was like the Monty Python sketch of the dead parrot, the sketch that is based on the behavior of the second hand car sales man on of the group used to use, a salesman who always had an excuse for why the car he had just sold did not work. The sketch in which they take the dead parrot back to the shop the day after they have bought it to complain that it is dead and the man who sold it to him says its only sleeping.
 If this friend says this, then i wonder if BP is dreaming that they can go on using the well, that they can find a way to use the oil coming up again. I wonder how much money it takes for them to drill a new one. Are they playing with fire, are they hoping the mess their leaky pipe makes does not really matter and they have time to try and make their geyser useful to them again instead of accepting its loss and blocking it forever because the mess they are making is more important than the oil they are to lose? agri rose macaskie.

Rather than trying to grow mushrooms on the coast maybe filtering water with straw could still make a workable substrate for mushrooms that will break down the oil?  I don't know what kind of salt concentrations or other considerations might be involved but straw is capable of at least getting the oil out of the water.  Regardless of method it will be a huge undertaking to even start any kind of cleanup.

EDIT: For anyone who hasn't seen the live feeds of the ongoing leak: http://www.youtube.com/pbsnewshour?feature=ticker

  The oyster mushrooms will eat the oil acording to Paul Stamets and there will be no trace of oil left the trouble is how will eat like salt. if the oil has traces of metals in it like lead well the mushrooms wont get rid of that so they might not be eatable.
  Paul Stamets doesn't only mention them cleaning up on oil in a effort to clean up an site with oil filled earth, he also mentions it as a substrate when he gives a list of possible substrates you can use if you want to grow mushrooms.
If the oil stays on top of the salt water and you put the mushrooms on top of that, maybe they wont come into contact with much salt. agri rose macaskie.

"The build up of toxic chemicals and heavy metals in the environment is an ever increasing and serious problem. These toxins threaten humans, animals, and the present ecosystem. Mycroremediation is the use of fungi to break down or remove toxins from the environment"

http://www.appropedia.org/Mycoremediation

Ben _h dont we need the names of those who have out a patent that makes it hard to use the muchrooms that the country need for mico-remediation, then we can complain about them.

Also it would be good to have an instance of a situation in detail that one could apply fungal mats to, or detailed discussion of variouse situation you can apply tthem to
  Maybe you should just do a bit of mico remediation in the gulf of mecico as an example of what you can do .
    Can private people make fungal mats to put down, wha twoudl they do put them down and then cover them with cardboard they should not dry out should they.
      I have tried to make in madrid and feel the flat is too hot in winter for making fungal mats  but i am always scared of doing things i have never done before, i just  have to try again. I am sure there are oother people who would be very efficient at it.
      I have to try to buy things from fungi perfecti i begin to feel its possible to buy things on the internet, agri rose macaskie.

The gov't didn't have time before the season to develop a plan to cultivate myc to ingest the oil or sift it any other way... they used emergency measures to apply coorexit (a chemcial to attach to the oil and bring it down to the bottom) as a way to keep from some serious acidification problems if the hurricane hit... not to say it doesnt generate its own problems and now were losing all our bottom feeders in the gulf... its going to get worst