Reflections on the 2024 Telluride Mushroom Festival
By Phil Ross
Open Fung is advancing a deeper engagement with mushrooms through a marriage of the arts and sciences. The Telluride Mushroom Festival, the oldest one of its kind in the US, claims that blending the arts and sciences together is its superpower. I visited this remote town nestled in the Colorado mountains to learn more about this particular group of mushroom people and what they are doing.
While the festival has a particular focus on Magic Mushrooms, it offers a wide range of family friendly activities. It included guided forays out into the abundant surrounding forests to collect and learn to identify wild mushrooms from world experts, classes led by leading mushroom scientists on ecology and taxonomy, workshops on how to cook nutritious and delicious mushrooms foods, how to make medicines and dyes, and many other varied and interesting mushroom focused crafts. There are many technical workshops and demonstrations on how to grow mushrooms, and you can also learn how to do DNA barcoding in a mobile mushroom lab. You can also learn the latest on how mushrooms are being used to remediate polluted soils and landfill. The end of the week is capped by joyous and carnivalesque parades, in which people, children, elders (and many dogs) dress up as the mushroom they feel the greatest affinity for or need to represent. It is one of those parades in which there are more people in it than watching from the sidelines. This makes sense as being inside the outsiders is the most mushroom way to throw a party.
Many psychedelic mushrooms grow on steamed wood chips and have a very similar biological life cycle as those we are doing research on at Open Fung. While we are trying to figure out how to better grow things like Styrofoam, wood or textiles, there are many lessons to be learned from the informally organized constellation of experts who are pursuing the cultivation of mushrooms as a gourmet ingredient, as a medicine, or for commercial or purely gonzo aspirations.
The Festival first started in 1981 as a conference, and was organized as a forum for.. ”addressing issues concerning the taxonomy, pharmacology, ingestion and safety issues surrounding psychoactive fungi.” As incontrovertible evidence has mounted over the decades, psychoactive fungi are now understood to be a breakthrough drug therapy to help cure people with lifelong substance addictions, for helping soldiers and others with PTSD overcome their traumas, and to help terminally ill patients come to peace with their families and friends. As the ideas and proposals from earlier conferences became manifest as research, advocacy and legal policies, the Telluride Institute intentionally decided to transform itself from a conference to a festival and celebration. And with the recent decriminalization of these mushrooms in many parts of the US, there is a growing ambition of the festival to broadcast the significance of mushrooms as they relate to all of our senses.
There is a great charge that comes from spending time with a vibrant and dedicated group of mushroom scientists who are having a lot of fun being creative. They are fostering a place where the mind, body and all elements of being human can find a relationship or meaning to their immediate environment, with people from near and far, and many ramps onto greater knowledge by educated and excited people. At Open Fung we believe that rapid adoption and scaling of fungal utilities are needed for us to thrive with the planet and all living beings, and that we will need to first change our minds about how we want to engage with fungi in order to do this.