Creating something like Stamets' Life Box

[MerryPrankster]

Paul Stamets did a TED talk ages ago in which he discussed a "life box". Essentially a box containing everything bar substrate to grow mycelium and then plants and other things. The video explains better than I can. Anyway, I looked online and couldn't find them available and got to thinking, why don't I create my own sort of thing?

I have been interested in "innoculating" outdoor places with mycelium, this is just kind of taking it to the next step.

I'm looking for ideas as to how we could use the ideas in this video to improve the world we live in. (Not trying to start a cult or anything)

[shruman]

http://www.lifeboxcompany.com/products.html

[MerryPrankster]

What about Australian native plant/mycorizzorial relationships?

[shruman]

"When will the Life Box™ be available internationally?

At this point in time, we are evaluating what it will take to create native tree seed mixes specific to various regions of the world. This is a very large project that we hope to tackle as we move along with Life Box™ development. Please keep checking our website as we are frequently updating it. If you would like to be notified of updates regarding the Life Box project, as well as other interesting and related information, please subscribe to our RSS feed. If you would like to receive notifications and updates via email, please create an account on our website and be sure to list your email address when registering. Creating an account will automatically add you to our email list."

http://www.lifeboxcompany.com/faq.html

[Distracted]

I think Merry wants ideas on how to do our own australian life box independently of stamet's plan.

Would we need to have a different life box for each state? Simply introducing different state's flora around could prove worse than it is beneficial.

[MerryPrankster]

Thanks, Distracted. I've read the website, posting bits from the faq and the product page is simply googling and copy-pasting, not really helping with any sort of dialogue.

Definitely thinking about creating something myself. A few questions:

What sort of tree seeds would go in an "Australian" lifebox?

Do we know anything about the native tree/mycorizorial relationships in this country?

Would it be a good idea to include rare acacias in this box?

I'd like to get some dialogue going about this sort of thing, not ripping stuff from Stamets' website. It is a brilliant idea, but for it to work properly, each country should develop it to spread the things that need to be grown.

I hear what you're saying, Distracted. A box for each state would be amazing, but I'm sure we can find species that are ubiquitous for a first attempt.

[CβL]

I don't think there's such an "Australian lifebox" would work very well. Australia has absolutely huge variations in plant species and terrain - tropical rainforest, arid desert, cold mountains, coastal scrubland - etc, and there is no way that a single box can contain the optimum precursors to life at every location (unless they're very hardcore, which is basically the alternate definition for a weed ). IIRC, even some Acacias are treated as weeds in some of the states those species don't call home.

I think a good approach would be to roughly classify all the plant species in an area based on their 'roles' and lifespan. The seed of long-living forest ancients of an area could be collected. These would need to be interspersed with the transitional plant species (such as Acacias, and other shrubs and smaller plants that nurse these giants to maturity), and this then matched to the local micro-climate. As far as I understand it, many plant species cannot survive without established forest - so they won't succeed by putting them into the box. So in this respect, a single, simple box cannot contain the ingredients for re-growing the entire ecosystem at a certain point. In my opinion, the way that skin grafting is done is a lot closer to the best way to regenerate a forest than many people realize - I think we can learn a lot from skin grafting and apply the concepts to ecology.

[whitewind]

A lifebox seems an incredibly simplistic idea of how to regenerate ecosystems. Including rare species that only exist in extremely limited areas is almost guaranteed failure for a start. Micchorhizza may die and so might some seeds before they have the chance to grow let alone become established. Some seeds have short viability whereas some may take some time to grow. The interconnectedness is what is missing. Some species won't grow without and established ecosystem, requiring shade, possibly mutually beneficial organisms already well established, including bacteria and fungi for soil action and so on.

The best thing we can do is to protect existing environments and help them to grow from the edges, provide connections between them so they can explore, and stop destroying them willfully simply for short term profit. We can destroy in a decade or less what has taken millennia to develop. Why we think we can save that with a box full of seeds is utterly beyond me.