Last month, Adbusters announced a new phase in state-of-the-art meme warfare. (“Memes” refer to the core images, slogans or ideas that culture jammers manipulate: e.g., a swoosh, or “Just Do It.”) Although the campaign’s targets, Nike and CEO Phil Knight, appear frequently in the magazine’s culture jams, the latest strategy moves Adbusters out of the realm of parody and into the competitive world of global marketing and production.

More specifically, the Adbusters Media Foundation, the nonprofit that brought the world Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, has decided to go into the sneaker manufacturing business. According to Lasn, the plan is to market a “Black Spot sneaker, a shoe that will resemble the retro-style Converse but with one crucial difference. In place of the ubiquitous Nike swoosh, the Adbusters shoe will display a prominent anti-logo “black spot,” the magazine’s anti-corporate trademark.

“Phil Knight had a dream,” reads the, well, ad for the “Unswoosher,” located on the back cover of Adbusters’ October issue. “He’d sell shoes. He’d sell dreams. He’d get rich. He’d use sweatshops if he had to. Then along came a new shoe. Plain. Simple. Cheap. Fair. Designed for only one thing: kicking Phil’s ass.”

By January, the magazine plans to manufacture an initial line of 10,000 sneakers, which will retail globally for about $65 a pair. The release will follow a $500,000 marketing campaign, hyping the sneakers on CNN, in the New York Times, and on the major networks. “One of the many reasons I really love this campaign,” said Lasn. “Is that we are selling a product, not an idea or advocacy. We are selling a sneaker. So those stations that have systematically refused to sell us air time over the past 10 years for our ideas will now have no choice but to sell us air time.”

Since the nonprofit broke the news of the Black Spot late last August, Nike hasn’t exactly been shaking in its shoes. “As a global leader, it doesn’t surprise us that we occasionally get targeted by groups who use the strength of our brand to leverage their agenda,” said Caitlin Morris, senior manager of Nike corporate communications.

Reaction on the anti-corporate-globalization front has been mixed. Some question the wisdom of an anti-advertising magazine going into the advertising business, while others think Lasn would be better off targeting clothing manufacturers that don’t receive as much international scrutiny.

But for some heavy hitters in the no-sweatshop movement, the Black Spot couldn’t have come at a more propitious time — just days after the Converse brand sold out the “Chuck Taylor” shoe to Nike. For years, that was the sneaker of choice for millions opposed to megabrands churning out sneakers in Third World factories.

“The anti-sweatshop forces need a few alternatives in the marketplace,” says Jeff Ballinger, author of the original Harper’s Magazine 1993 exposé on Nike’s labor practices, and now vice president for policy and sourcing at No Sweat. “Kalle’s right to see that. I’ve given ‘sweatshop’ talks to a wide variety of groups for over a decade and one of the first questions is: ‘What can we buy?’”

Lasn admits the “ethical sneaker” may not succeed. Still, employing what appears to be a signature combination of brashness and nostalgia, Lasn said the time has come for a change in how activists deal with “rogue companies.”

“We got tired of all the lefty whining and the boycotting. It wasn’t making any difference,” he said. “Quite apart from how many percentage points in market share the Black Spot sneaker can take away from Phil Knight — that’s of course the ultimate goal but may be a long time coming — in the meantime, we can go a long way toward uncooling the Swoosh, which is losing momentum fast.”

“I have a grandiose plan,” Lasn said. “My dream as a culture jammer is that a small group of people with a limited budget could have the power to choose a megabrand we don’t like for valid reasons and uncool that brand, to show that we the people as a civil society have the power to keep a corporation honest. Now that would be something that would actually redefine capitalism.”

Adbusters, which has a circulation of 120,000, bills itself as the “Journal of the Mental Environment.” The magazine’s philosophy is that advertising encourages people to see themselves primarily as consumers, and its parodies reveal the “truth” behind slick corporate logos: the environmental and human costs of consumption, the abuses of corporate power, and private monopolization of public airwaves.

Lasn, whose descriptions of Knight as “that mind-fucking bastard Philly boy” bear a certain resemblance to the “axis of evil” rhetoric coming out of Washington, D.C., is the former head of a market research company in Tokyo. As a culture critic, his diatribes against Nike don’t focus on the athletic footwear corporation’s labor practices per se, but on the notion of branding in general and the “pseudo-empowerment” brand that Nike attaches to its products in particular. Citing research on the 3000 marketing images most people consume every day, as well as studies linking advertising to an increase in mood disorders, Lasn said rage against the toxic cultural clutter epitomized by Nike ads is going to launch a new kind of revolution.

“Twenty-five years ago we woke up to the fact that the chemicals in our food, water and air, even a few parts of a billion, actually will give you cancer,” he said. “That was when the modern environmental movement was born. Once people make that connection between advertising and their own mental health, that could be the birth of the modern mental health environmental movement.”

When that moment happens, said Lasn, “we will suddenly see the $400 billion worldwide industry collapse to half its size.”

But for some, Lasn’s railing against the Orwellian force of advertising is exactly what makes his decision to market a Black Spot sneaker a bit curious. After all, we live in a world where AIDS, crime and all sorts of global unrest have been turned into fodder for Benetton ads. The medium, as they say, is the message.

This is why people like Naomi Klein, Canadian author of the landmark text “No Logo,” aren’t quite so enthusiastic about the revolutionary potential of the Unswoosher. “Publications that analyze the commercialization of our lives have a responsibility to work to protect spaces where we aren’t constantly being pitched to,” she told the Toronto Globe & Mail. “This can be undermined if they are seen as simply shilling for a different ‘anti-corporate’ brand.” Lasn disagrees.

“Nike’s empowerment is pseudo-empowerment,” he says. “But if we are actually able to launch an anti-brand, then the empowerment around the black spot is actually a real kind of empowerment: the power of us the people to have a business climate that is to our liking. It’s the most beautiful kind of empowerment I can think of.”

Adbusters launched Buy Nothing Day, says Lasn. “But we never said it’s bad to buy something, just bad to buy too much.” What’s more, promoting the Black Spot sneaker will not be Adbusters’ first foray into “real” advertising. The magazine has been raising money to get a Black Spot ad, a series of anti-corporate, anti-U.S. phrases set to Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” on television. Although all the major networks have rejected the ad, CNN has aired the Black Spot promo — during the Crossfire political debate program.

At Adbusters’ offices, located in a Vancouver residential district, the Unswoosher enterprise has something of a Mouse That Roared quality to it. A newly hired business manager is working on locating investors and distributors for the Black Spot. The magazine has already taken preorders for 1,000 pairs, and will use its nest egg of $250,000 to bankroll the initial 10,000 sneakers. According to Lasn, people are “coming out of the woodwork” to offer advice about where the Black Spot should be manufactured — and what kind of labor to use.

Industry watchers are skeptical. “[Adbusters] has absolutely no idea how complicated global production and marketing is,” says John Horan, publisher of Sporting Goods Intelligence. The magazine could save time and money, he suggested, by selling T-shirts emblazoned with “We want to kick Phil Knight’s butt” for $10 each.

Ignoring the naysayers, Adbusters has generated a final list of three possible factories: a factory in Missouri, referred by a former Nike employee who has inspected more than 70 factories worldwide, and two union factories in Asia: one in South Korea, and another in Indonesia. The latter were recommended by Jeff Ballinger, VP for sourcing and policy at No Sweat Apparel, the company Lasn has retained to help Adbusters source a union factory for the Unswoosher.

Lasn obviously relishes the idea of manufacturing the sneaker in Missouri. But just as he rejects the argument that there is something problematic about Adbusters advertising shoes, so he has contrarian things to say about some of the anti-sweatshop rhetoric governing the international workers’ rights debate. In particular, he says, the “go local” movement is overrated, propelled more by trade unions than activists.

“I have a huge amount of disdain for all those people who are trying to keep all the jobs in North America,” he said. “Here we are, the richest part of the world, we’re only 5 percent of people in the world, and all of a sudden we’re losing a few jobs and having a few doldrums in our economy. Let’s give the jobs to the Koreans and Indonesians. They need it more, and if we can find a good factory and if we could promote workers’ rights worldwide, all the better.”

The Estonian-born Lasn recalled a seminal trip he took around the Third World when he was in his 20s. “I know from personal experience that many of those factories that campus people dismiss as sweatshop labor are actually very good factories,” he says, “and that the people who live near those factories are just yearning to work in those factories. A good part of those sweatshop people are seriously misguided.”

If Lasn’s idea of pulling Third World workers up by their bootstraps mimics the language of liberal capitalism — not to mention Phil Knight — it’s also an idea that reverberates across segments of the no-sweatshop apparel movement.

“Globalization is an opportunity to globalize the labor movement,” says Ballinger. “Today, the only way to protect a worker’s job anywhere is to defend worker’s rights everywhere.” The Black Spot sneaker represents a clear step forward in the anti-sweatshop movement, says Ballinger. “If the union-made Black Spot sneaker can kick Phil Knight where he feels it — in the pocketbook, we won’t get more window dressing from Nike and Reebok; we’ll get a real change in policy.”

But Marsha Dickson, director of Educators for Socially Responsible Apparel Business, says the Black Spot campaign is naive in light of efforts that have been made by Nike and other members of the Fair Labor Association, a coalition of industry, university and nongovernmental organizations that issued its first public report in June.

“While the tracking charts clearly show that much work remains to be done,” said Dickson via e-mail, “the bottom line is that Nike, Reebok and Adidas are really acting as leaders. If a campaign such as [the Black Spot sneaker] is needed, it should focus attention to the thousands of clothing manufacturers and retailers that are not participating in the FLA. We know nothing or very little about how these companies treat the workers that make their products.”

The FLA was the recipient of the $1.5 million Kasky vs. Nike settlement in June. In 1998, Marc Kasky, a California anti-globalization activist, sued Nike for allegedly stretching the truth in its statements regarding contract factory labor practices in Asia. The California Supreme Court agreed with Kasky in a 4-3 ruling. Nike then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Corporate interests had paid close attention to the case, in which Nike claimed that what it said — whether or not it was true — was noncommercial speech protected under the First Amendment.

At its Sept. 22 shareholders’ meeting in Portland, Ore., Nike stockholders celebrated their first protester-free gathering in several years. The footwear company registered a record $10.7 billion in revenue in its 2003 fiscal year, and its stock price increased 40 percent, to a high of $62.50 in late September.

Lasn, about to fly off to Indonesia in his newly minted role as factory inspector, is undeterred. The Black Spot sneaker, he says, is part of a larger goal to “tweak the genetic code of corporations”: an anti-corporate-globalization process that ranges from rewriting the rules under which corporate charters are reviewed and revoked, to a general “crusade against bigness.”

“I grew up in a time when cynicism didn’t exist,” says Lasn, “that hidden assumption that nothing can change, that you better get used to capitalism, and that cultural revolution is not even possible.”

“I don’t quite see it that way. I am old enough to have seen a number of cultural revolutions. I believe another one is coming up.”

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Today, Trexler is the president of Trexler and Associates, a pioneering climate-change mitigation services firm in Portland, Ore. He travels the globe locating and developing carbon-offset projects for the private sector. These range from rural solar-electrification projects in India to methane gas recovery efforts in Ohio.

Some of the companies he works with, such as New Hampshire’s Stonyfield Farm Yogurt, are reducing their greenhouse-gas “footprints” as part of a socially responsible business ethic. But the big-time polluters, such as J-Power, one of Trexler’s energy-sector clients, are hoping to capitalize on market opportunities arising out of global climate-change concerns. Their goal is emissions trading, in which companies buy and sell greenhouse-gas emissions reductions (acquired from carbon offset or mitigation projects) on the commodities market.

In an emissions-trading market, a steel refinery in Gary, Ind., could purchase the pollution credits generated by a reforestation project in Guatemala. Theoretically, the incentives provided by such a market would lead to a boom in carbon-offset projects and an overall decrease in the amount of greenhouse gases present in the earth’s atmosphere.

Several recent developments suggest that the global market for greenhouse-gas emissions reductions is heating up. Last December, Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which mandates limits on pollutants that contribute to global warming. The international treaty is now just one vote short of becoming law in 100 countries. The European Union has already adopted plans for full-scale trading in greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, the key market mechanism under Kyoto. And this June, trading begins on the Chicago Climate Exchange, the first CO₂-emissions reductions market in the United States.

“The carbon emissions trading market,” proclaims CO2e.com, a London-based global greenhouse-gas brokerage, “has arrived.”

Not everyone is so optimistic. Trexler, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose scientific assessments helped create the political momentum behind the Kyoto Protocol, is one of the skeptics. For one thing, maintaining the environmental integrity of a global emissions-trading system is an enormously complicated task, he says, prone to all kinds of corruption and sketchy science. But even worse, in 2003 the major roadblock facing the development of a legitimate emissions market is the Bush administration, whose antipathy toward the climate-change issue in general and the Kyoto Protocol in particular means that, so far, U.S. companies have little incentive to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions.

Even if the rest of the world endorses the treaty, says Trexler, it remains to be seen whether an international trading system can get off the ground without the participation of the United States, where most of the demand for emissions reductions would come from.

“To create a successful trading system you have to create a scarce commodity,” he says. “So without the political initiative to regulate greenhouse gases, you can’t have a trading system.” The United States’ failure to endorse the principles of the Kyoto Protocol is exactly why Trexler is hesitant about predicting a “meteoric rise” in market activity. “A couple of years ago, there were expectations that the global greenhouse market would be a $10 billion enterprise by 2010,” he says. “But now whenever I see my broker friends in New York, they say, ‘Jeez, when is anyone going to start making money on this deal?’ Because it hasn’t really materialized.”

There’s a certain irony to the Bush administration’s rejection of the Kyoto global warming treaty. Call it Oedipal. In 1990, President George H. Bush signed into law the Clean Air Act, which led to the creation of an emissions-trading system to limit pollutants responsible for acid rain. Widely considered a political and environmental success story, the law reduced lethal pollutants such as sulphur dioxide for a fraction of what it had cost before.

Sulfur dioxide emissions trading operates according to a “cap and trade” arrangement. Under this system, the government puts a cap on the level of allowed emissions. Polluting industries that can reduce emissions cheaply or efficiently earn pollution “credits” or “permits” (the legal terms for emissions reductions in a regulated system), which they can sell to other companies who can’t make the reductions on their own.

So here’s the paradox. Carbon dioxide emissions trading under the Kyoto Protocol is based on the cap-and-trade system the United States developed under the Clean Air Act. “It’s an American plan, and America’s not playing,” says David Doniger, a former Kyoto treaty negotiator under President Bill Clinton and now policy director of the Climate Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Cap-and-trade was invented in America and sold in Kyoto over the great objections of the Europeans and Japanese. Now they’re going to do it, and we’re going to fall behind.”

In yet another reversal, the Bush administration has seized on the Clean Air Act as a way of justifying its opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. “Kyoto doesn’t have a bearing on emissions trading,” says David Deegan, public affairs officer for the Environmental Protection Agency. “The administration’s position is that CO₂ is not a pollutant under the Clean Air Act and should not be regulated as an air pollutant.” Carbon dioxide, Deegan explained, occurs “naturally” in the atmosphere.

This is not the kind of scientific analysis that makes hope spring eternal among people advocating limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. “After Kyoto,” says Trexler, “the U.S. presidential election is the single most anticipated event in the climate-change community.”

If Kyoto does become international law — the United States and Russia are the key players who have yet to ratify — industrialized countries would have to lower their greenhouse-gas emissions from their 1990 levels by an average of 5 percent beween 2008 and 2012. Developing countries wouldn’t have a cap on their emissions. But under a program called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), industrialized countries would be able to earn credits by investing in emissions-reductions projects in the developing world.

This, in a nutshell, is the Kyoto Protocol. “Without emissions trading,” says Trexler, “the prospect of successful climate-change policy is dead. There is no other way to involve developing countries, where most of the emissions will soon be. Trading is the vehicle for getting them money, unless you’re going to give it to them through foreign aid, which isn’t going to happen.”

Without trading, he adds, polluting industries in the United States will remain “in a coma” on this issue. “Companies will trot out all these studies saying, ‘It’s going to cost us $30, $40 or $80 a ton to do emissions reductions, and it will be financial Armageddon.’ It’s only with the trading component that you can argue it will be $5 or $10 a ton. That’s how you make progress politically.”

Market mechanisms are Trexler’s mantra — as well as his livelihood. But he’s also the first to point out that problems with what he calls “environmental integrity” could derail the system — especially under the Clean Development Mechanism, where companies are already banking credits in anticipation of Kyoto. “We have a lot of concern that the market could run into serious environmental credibility problems three or four years in the future,” says Trexler. “You can already see the dissertations being written about how this was all a fraud, how all these projects were bogus.”

To understand how this might happen, start with what Trexler describes as a “massively confusing and contentious area”: the rules defining a legitimate emissions reduction under the CDM.

“If you’re bringing an emissions reduction from a noncapped country into a country with a cap and counting it against that country’s cap,” says Trexler, “how do you ensure the integrity of the transaction? You could have a lot of paper flow and money changing hands, but did you actually reduce emissions at the end of the day?”

To resolve this dilemma, the Kyoto Protocol includes something called the “additionality” rule. The rule states that CDM projects generate legitimate emissions reductions only if they are “additional to any that would occur in the absence of certified project activity.” For example: Compare the emissions from a power plant with the emissions of the same power plant after an energy-efficient upgrade. The difference represents the additionality, and the company that develops the upgrade project gets the credit, literally.

But what if inefficient power plants are an anachronism and the power plant was going to be upgraded as part of standard business practice? In that case, there would be no “certified project activity” specifically aimed at emissions reduction, so there would be no additionality and no credit.

Or what if a company invests in a forest-protection project to sequester carbon in southern Brazil, but it ultimately leads to increased logging activity in northern Brazil? Since there is no net reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, does the company earn the emissions credit?

“The additionality conundrum gives everyone a headache,” says Trexler. “Some people say we’ll never be able to solve this question. But if you drop the additionality requirement, there’s no point in doing any of this.”

Additionality decreases the opportunities for industrialized countries to earn credits for cheap, possibly worthless projects in the developing world. (CDM Watch, a nonprofit based in Indonesia, monitors ongoing emissions-reductions projects for just that reason.) But defining allowable credits in an emissions-trading system is a broader concern, especially when each sector has a different way of reducing its greenhouse-gas footprint.

“The beauty and problem of greenhouse gases is that almost everything you do releases carbon,” says Trexler. For example, Fannie Mae has launched an initiative to aggregate energy efficiency savings from retrofitting homes to trade on the emissions market. In the transportation sector, some people suggest that funding Internet car pools might apply. A cottage industry has sprung up trying to figure out what qualifies as a legitimate pollution credit, says Joe Goffman, director of Air Quality and Climate programs at the Environmental Defense Fund, a major proponent of emissions trading. “It’s a significant intellectual challenge.”

However, Trexler points out that many of the “integrity” issues surrounding emissions trading disappear once you have a political system in place to regulate and monitor transactions. Carbon credits are a unique commodity precisely because their value is determined entirely by public policy. Given the current policy vacuum, questions — and complications — abound.

Last year, a Japanese utility client, J-Power, helped fund the development of Trexler and Associates’ “forward price” modeling software, which predicts the cost of carbon credits under different additionality scenarios, as well as a “sensitivity case” in which the United States ratified the Kyoto accord. “This is a company that faces potentially billions of dollars in risk,” said Trexler. “The big question people want to know is, What is the price of carbon going to be? In five years? In 10 years?”

Today, emissions reductions trade at about $2 to $3 a ton, not enough, Trexler observes, to fund the renewable energy technologies the greenhouse market was supposed to foster. Companies getting into the market now, he says, assume that the cost of pollution permits will go up after Kyoto goes into force, especially if the United States endorses the treaty. He cites the case of another Japanese client, with whom he recently developed a landfill-gas project in Argentina and a methane-recovery project in Uruguay — both carbon-offset projects. “Their goal is to amass actual credit that will count in a future trading system,” he says.

But that brings up another big question: Will pre-Kyoto credits be guaranteed post Kyoto? “There are a lot of things companies could be doing now to reduce their emissions internally,” says Trexler. “But you could build a very strong case that they shouldn’t be doing anything since they might not get credit later on.” What’s more, since the United States has yet to impose a cap on emissions, companies aren’t exactly champing at the bit to buy emissions reductions — the optimistic posturing of CO2e.com brokers notwithstanding. “Trade away,” urges their Web site, “there’s no better time than the present.”

Of the estimated 200 million tons of greenhouse-gas emissions reductions traded on the global market last year, the biggest buyers were funds the World Bank has set up, such as the Carbon Fund or a similar fund set up by the Dutch government. Canada had been buying up large quantities of U.S. reductions, but cut back considerably after a battle last year over U.S. compliancy with Kyoto.

As for the pending Chicago Climate Exchange, 13 companies, including DuPont, Ford Motor Co. and American Electric Power, have voluntarily agreed to cap and trade their emissions by 4 percent over the next few years. “We’re thrilled these companies are making that kind of foray,” says Goffman. But as long as there’s no mandate to decrease their emissions, he says, there’s not much incentive for them to spend money purchasing reductions.

“In the voluntary market,” says Goffman, “everybody’s a seller.”

Ten years after pioneering a successful market approach to sulfur dioxide emissions, the U.S. government is keeping the global greenhouse-gas emissions market from moving forward. In this context, it’s no surprise that the Bush adminstration’s new Clear Skies program would, according to Doniger, “slow and weaken” efforts to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions compared to existing requirements under the Clean Air Act. It’s just one step further away from the made-in-America cap-and-trade system.

Such political developments are precisely why Trexler and Associates has decided to direct more resources toward the “voluntary market”: companies that probably won’t be regulated should an emissions cap be imposed, but choose to invest in carbon-mitigation projects for public relations or marketing purposes. A prototype client is Stonyfield Farm Yogurt, for whom Trexler has developed a carbon-offset portfolio of straw-bale house construction projects in China and methane-recovery projects in Ohio. Other companies are developing products that appeal to environmentally conscious consumers. For example, Trexler is currently in discussion with a foreign car manufacturer that wants to bundle four years of carbon offsets into cars it sells on the North American market. Car buyers could appease their sense of environmental guilt by paying extra for their gas-guzzling SUVs — the premium would go toward funding the establishment of offset projects.

“If one car company does that, then maybe another will, until companies bundling offsets become business as usual. The question in these kinds of cases is whether you can get a consumer response.”

Not that Trexler has abandoned all hope of working in a government-created marketplace. Reflecting increased activity on the international front, Sumitomo Corp., a major Japanese trading house, bought 20 percent of Trexler and Associates last year, positioning Trexler for new strategic alliances in Asia. And his generally dour assessment of the emissions-trading situation brightens considerably when he discusses the prospect of the Democrats taking the White House in 2004. Under that scenario, he says, the price models show that “radically different things could happen: The junk disappears, you’re dealing with real projects, real prices and real reductions.”

Should Bush retain his high popularity ratings, there are some backup plans. One Senate bill, the Clean Power Act, would put a cap on carbon dioxide; and another, the McCain-Lieberman bill, would put a cap on a basket of six greenhouse gases.

“The market is poised around some very important issues, and so are we,” says Trexler. “I’ve said for years that if the world ultimately decides to take climate change seriously, we’ll look back on today’s efforts as badly misdirected — as opposed, for example, to simply agreeing to a global emissions cap of some sort. For political reasons, we’re stuck using some very imperfect solutions to get the ball rolling. The question is whether we’re careening in the wrong direction … and whether we’re going to be able to get things back on track.”

“Global warming remains the single most important environmental problem facing the world community. The science on this issue continues to improve, not dissipate. So do you give up? No, we’re not going to make that decision.”

Until recently, claims Stamets, mushrooms were largely ignored by the mainstream medical and environmental establishment. Or, as he puts it, “they suffered from biological racism.” But Stamets is about to thrust these higher fungi into the 21st century. In collaboration with several public and private agencies, he is pioneering the use of “mycoremediation” and “mycofiltration” technologies. These involve the cultivation of mushrooms to clean up toxic waste sites, improve ecological and human health, and in a particularly timely bit of experimentation, break down chemical warfare agents possessed by Saddam Hussein.

“Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration,” says Stamets, who predicts that bioremediation using fungi will soon be a billion-dollar industry. “If we just stay at the crest of the mycelial wave, it will take us into heretofore unknown territories that will be just magnificent in their implications.”

A former logger turned scanning-electron microscopist, Stamets is not your typical scientist — a role he obviously relishes. “Some people think I’m a mycological heretic, some people think I’m a mycological revolutionary, and some just think I’m crazy,” he says cheerfully. His discussions of mushroom form and function are sprinkled with wide-ranging — and provocative — mycological metaphors, among them his belief that “fungal intelligence” provides a framework for understanding everything from string theory in modern physics to the structure of the Internet.

In a recent interview, Stamets also spoke mysteriously of a yet-to-be-unveiled project he calls the “life box,” his plan for “regreening the planet” using fungi. “It’s totally fun, totally revolutionary. It’s going to put smiles on the faces of grandmothers and young children,” he says. “And it’s going to be the biggest story of the decade.”

Statements like those make it tempting to dismiss Stamets as either chock-full of hubris or somewhat deluded. But while many academic mycologists tend to question both his style and his methods, Stamets’ status as an innovative entrepreneur is hard to dispute. “Paul has a solid grounding in cultivation and has expanded from that base to show there are other ways of using and cultivating mushrooms than just for food,” says Gary Lincoff, author of “The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms.” “These are relatively new ideas … but Paul’s got a large spread where he can have experiments going on under his control. And he’s getting big-name people to back him.”

An advisor and consultant to the Program for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical School and a 1998 recipient of the Collective Heritage Institute’s Bioneers Award, Stamets has made converts out of more than one researcher in the mainstream medical and environmental communities.

“He’s the most creative thinker I know,” says Dr. Donald Abrams, the assistant director of the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital and a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Abrams says he became interested in the medicinal properties of mushrooms after hearing one of Stamets’ lectures. Stamets is now a co-investigator on a grant proposal Abrams is authoring on the anti-HIV properties of oyster mushrooms.

Jack Word, former manager of the marine science lab at Battelle Laboratories in Sequim, Wash., calls Stamets “a visionary.” Stamets takes bigger, faster leaps than institutional science, acknowledges Word, who, along with Stamets and several other Battelle researchers, is an applicant on a pending mycoremediation patent. “But most of what Paul sees has eventually been accepted by outside groups. He definitely points us in the right direction.”

Although mycoremediation sounds “Brave New World”-ish, the concept behind it is decidedly low tech: think home composting, not genetic engineering. Most gardeners know that a host of microorganisms convert organic material such as rotting vegetables, decaying leaves and coffee grounds into the nutrient-rich soil required for plant growth. Fungi play a key role in this process. In fact, one of their primary roles in the ecosystem is decomposition. (Hence the killer-fungus scenario of many a science fiction novel, not to mention the moldy bread and bath tiles that are the bane of modern existence.)

The same principle is at work in mycoremediation. “We just have a more targeted approach,” says Stamets. “And choosing the species [of fungi] that are most effective is absolutely critical to the success of the project.”

Fungal decomposition is the job of the mycelium, a vast network of underground cells that permeate the soil. (The mushroom itself is the fruit of the mycelium.) Now recognized as the largest biological entities on the planet, with some individual mycelial mats covering more than 20,000 acres, these fungal masses secrete extra cellular enzymes and acids that break down lignin and cellulose, the two main building blocks of plant fiber, which are formed of long chains of carbon and hydrogen.

As it turns out, such chains are similar enough to the base structure of all petroleum products, pesticides, and herbicides so as to make it possible for fungi to break them down as well. A couple of years ago Stamets partnered with Battelle, a major player in the bioremediation industry, on an experiment conducted on a site owned by the Washington State Department of Transportation in Bellingham. Diesel oil had contaminated the site, which the mycoremediation team inoculated with strains of oyster mycelia that Stamets had collected from old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Two other bioremediation teams, one using bacteria, the other using engineered bacteria, were also given sections of the contaminated soil to test.

Lo and behold. After four weeks, oyster mushrooms up to 12 inches in diameter had formed on the mycoremediated soil. After eight weeks, 95 percent of the hydrocarbons had broken down, and the soil was deemed nontoxic and suitable for use in WSDOT highway landscaping.

By contrast, neither of the bioremediated sites showed significant changes. “It’s only hearsay,” says Bill Hyde, Stamets’ patent attorney, “but the bacterial remediation folks were crying because the [mycoremediation] worked so fast.”

And that, says Stamets, was just the beginning of the end of the story. As the mushrooms rotted away, “fungus gnats” moved in to eat the spores. The gnats attracted other insects, which attracted birds, which brought in seeds.

Call it mycotopia.

“The fruit bodies become environmental plateaus for the attraction and succession of other biological communities,” Stamets says. “Ours was the only site that became an oasis of life, leading to ecological restoration. That story is probably repeated all over the planet.”

At Fungi Perfecti, a rural compound not far from Aberdeen, Wash., signs warn visitors not to enter without an appointment, and security cameras equipped with motion sensors guard several free-standing laboratories and a mushroom “grow” room. “My concerns are personal safety and commercial espionage,” says Stamets, explaining that competitors and mycological hangers-on (not always a stable lot, apparently) have a tendency to show up unannounced.

Then there’s the small problem of marketing a product associated in some people’s minds with illegal substances. In the late 1970s, Stamets did pioneering research at Evergreen State College on psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms; he later published a definitive identification guide: “Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World.”

“I drew the line a long time ago,” says Stamets. “But I’ll never be an apologist for that work. Everything I did was covered by a DEA license.”

Today, Stamets spends much of his time cloning wild mushrooms. One of his innovations has been identifying strains of mushrooms with the ability to decompose certain toxins and adapting them to new environments. With the benefit of computer clean-room technology, Stamets introduces samples of toxins to mycelia growing on agar culture, then screens the samples to see if the mycelia are actually metabolizing the toxin. You can actually train the mycelia to grow on different media, he says.

As reported in Jane’s Defence Weekly, one of Stamets’ strains was found to “completely and efficiently degrade” chemical surrogates of VX and sarin, the potent nerve gases Saddam Hussein loaded into his warheads.

“We have a fungal genome that is diverse and present in the old-growth forests,” says Stamets. “Hussein does not. If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier candidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not only for the ecosystem but for our population … we should be saving our old-growth forests as a matter of national defense.”

Stamets recently collaborated with WSDOT on another mycoremediation project designed to prevent erosion on decommissioned logging roads, which channel silt and pollutants toward stream beds where salmon are reproducing. In a process Stamets terms “mycofiltration,” bark and wood chips were placed onto road surfaces and inoculated with fungi. The mycelial networks not only helped to build and retain soil but also filtered out pollutants and sediments and thus mitigated negative impacts on the watershed.

Stamets envisions myriad uses of mycofiltration, one of which involves bridging the gap between ecological and human health. It’s been more than 70 years since Alexander Fleming discovered that the mold fungus penicillium was effective against bacteria. And yet, complains Stamets, nobody has paid much attention to the antiviral and antibiotic properties of mushrooms — partly because Americans, unlike Asian cultures, think mushrooms are meant to be eaten, not prescribed. But with the emergence of multiple antibiotic resistance in hospitals, says Stamets, “a new game is afoot. The cognoscenti of the pharmaceuticals are now actively, and some secretly, looking at mushrooms for novel medicines.”

Based on a recent study documenting the ability of a mushroom, Polyporus umbellatus, to completely inhibit the parasite that causes malaria, Stamets has come up with a mycofiltration approach to combating the disease. “We know that these fungi use other microorganisms as food sources,” he says. “We know they’re producing extracellular antibiotics that are effective against a pantheon of disease microorganisms. We can establish sheet composting using fungi that are specific against the malarial parasites. We can then go far in working with developing countries, in articulating mycelial mats specific to the disease vectors in which these things are being bred.”

Stamets is currently shopping this idea around to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a front-runner in the effort to provide vaccinations in developing nations.

Mycotechnology is part of a larger trend toward the use of living systems to solve environmental problems and restore ecosystems. One of the best-known examples is John Todd’s “Living Machine,” which uses estuary ecosystems powered by sunlight to purify wastewater. “The idea that a total community is more efficient against contaminants than a single Pac Man bug is gaining acceptance,” says Jack Word, now with MEC Analytical Systems, an environmental consulting firm. The key challenge facing mycotechnologies, he says, is securing funding to demonstrate their large-scale commercial feasibility.

Stamets is the Johnny Appleseed of mushrooms; he’s spreading the gospel about the power of fungi to benefit the world. Issuing a call to mycological arms, Stamets urges gardeners to inoculate their backyards with mycorrhizae, fungi that enter into beneficial relationships with plant roots, and to grow shiitake and other gourmet mushrooms, among the very best decomposers and builders of soil.

But Stamets’ vision doesn’t stop there. In the conference room at Fungi Perfecti, with a 2,000-year-old carved mushroom stone from Guatemala hovering, shamanlike, over him, he explains his far-reaching theory of mycelial structure.

“Life exists throughout the cosmos and is a consequence of matter in the universe,” he says. “Given that premise, when you look at the consequence of matter, and the simple premise of cellular reproduction, which forms a string, which forms a web, which then cross-hatches, what do you have? You have a neurological landscape that looks like mycelium. It’s no accident that brain neurons and astrocytes are similarly arranged. It’s no accident that the computer Internet is similarly arranged.”

“I believe the earth’s natural Internet is the mycelial network,” he says. “That is the way of nature. If there is any destruction of the neurological landscape, the mycelial network does not die; it’s able to adapt, recover and change. That’s the whole basis of the computer Internet. The whole design patterns something that has been reproduced through nature and has been evolutionarily successful over millions of years.”

The day after being interviewed in late October, Stamets called to point out a New York Times article on self-replicating universes, an article, he suggested, that reinforced his ideas about matter creating life and the generative power of mycelium. In describing the way universes might multiply, the reporter used the following felicitous metaphor: “For some cosmologists, that means universes sprouting from one another in an endless geometric progression, like mushrooms upon mushrooms upon mushrooms.”

Where is Stamets going with all this? “I have a strategy for creating ecological footprints on other planets,” he says. “By using a consortium of fungi and seeds and other microorganisms, you could actually seed other planets with little plops. You could actually start keystone species and go to creating vegetation on planets.”

“I think that’s totally doable.”

But organic farming in the 21st century is turning out to be a little more complicated than its advocates originally expected. For example, there was the time a few years ago that Gould was sent by Eco-Cert, a German certification agency, to oversee the company’s first certification project in Japan.

“I was inspecting a Japanese food processor who was importing soybeans from China to process into goods for export to Europe,” said Gould. “I said to Eco-Cert: ‘We’re circling the globe with organic. Isn’t this a little bizarre, a little … unsustainable?’”

If anyone’s living out the ironies of the post-utopian world of organic agriculture, it’s Gould. An independent contractor and consultant who works for public and private certifying agencies, Gould buys many of his own groceries from local non-certified family farms. He refers to himself as simultaneously living both on the “ideal extreme” of the organic spectrum and as an “agent of the USDA.” As such, Gould embodies the conflicted attitude many greener growers, processors and certifiers are taking toward the increasingly industrialized field of organic farming.

Once the lowly stepchild of conventional farming, organic is poised for a family takeover. In 2001, global sales of organic foods reached $26 billion; by 2008, that figure is expected to reach $80 billion. Leading the push toward organic is the European Union, where Belgium, the Netherlands and Wales have set government goals to make 10 percent of all arable land organic by the year 2010. (In Germany, that figure is 20 percent).

The U.S., which has set no such goals, has almost doubled its acres of organic farmland since 1997. And on Oct. 21, 2002, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) will implement the nation’s first federal labeling standards for organically grown and processed foods. The new USDA seal will apply to U.S. growers who, for the most part, produce food without the use of genetic engineering, growth hormones or pesticides.

But dig a little deeper into this world where more crops are being rotated and fewer poisons are being used, and the contradictions begin to sprout. As Gould points out, there’s something, well, ironic about using massive amounts of non-renewable energy to ship organically grown food — not to mention the inspectors themselves — halfway around the planet. That most organically grown food is packaged and processed — “until it’s a stretch to call it food, much less organic,” he says — further undercuts much vaunted organic claims to benefit human health and the environment. And then there’s the nasty little problem that the very act of certification itself puts constraints on small farmers who want to push organic farming even further ahead.

The original vision of organic farming as ecologically sustainable agriculture practiced by small farmers is giving way to big business. Organic’s success is sowing the seeds of its own co-optation.

“Certification used to favor the small farmer,” says Gould, who holds a life sciences degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and claims a lifelong interest in the ways communities form around food supplies. Now, he contends, the mass market is rewriting the grass-roots story, turning organically grown food into a global brand (the National Organic Program, notes Gould, is part of the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service) rather than a social, economic and ecological alternative to conventional farming.

“Organic is becoming one tool that people interested in sustainable production can use,” he says. “But you don’t have to be sustainable to use organic as a label.” The real future of sustainability, he says, hinges on local production and support of local economies. “‘Know your farmer,’” says Gould. “That was one of the keys of the organic mission that has been lost.”

Twenty years ago, inspectors and certifiers of organic foods were part of a regional, insular profession characterized by a powerful streak of political activism and ethical conviction. Developed in 1982, the organic standards issued by Oregon Tilth, one of the country’s original certifying organizations, were a simple, one page description of farm production practices that would galvanize the earth

Today, the National Organic Rule is a bureaucratic product, a 63-page list of allowed and prohibited substances, land management practices, livestock standards, and labeling requirements for processed foods. (Destined to confuse even the most vigilant of consumers, product labels will read either “100 percent Organic,” “Organic,” for products that are 95 percent organic, or “Made with Organic,” for products that are less than 95 percent organic).

As for Gould’s job, it’s become a combination of the exotic, the ecological and the administrative. He harvests allspice with the natives in the Guatemalan jungle, is feted by village elders in Mongolia (inspections of mungbean crops), and slogs through the massive amounts of paperwork involved in creating and maintaining macro-policies for food production and handling. There are now 56 countries that have implemented or initiated the drafting of organic regulations, each with its own spin on what it means to be organic. Gould’s recent inspection of a fertilizer company in Northeastern China, for example, involved verifying that the manure came from non-factory farm chickens — a European regulation that U.S. standards don’t mention.

Gould’s position in the global economy, working mostly for U.S. or European clients who want to import certified organic products from the developing world, embodies one of the central conundrums for the organic movement: How does an eco-friendly, community-based food movement reconcile the environmental costs of transporting massive amounts of food around the world? The fact that the global organic economy is reproducing neocolonial structures is, as it were, another pest in the corn. Currently, cheaper production costs mean that the bulk of organic production in developing countries is exported to Europe or the U.S. Imposed by the West, certification standards and processes often have little to do with the preservation of local practices — another irony, Gould observes, since many traditional cultures had been farming organically for thousands of years until multinational corporations encroached upon them with agrochemicals and, now, GMOs.

“The key challenge facing developing countries,” says Gould, “is building local awareness and domestic markets.” Giving small farmers “value added” opportunities, says Gould, are ways he tries to grow the local along with the global — in his case, helping small producers in China grow organic green tea and medicinal herbs, or their Tahitian counterparts market organic mango and star fruit to the foreign owned luxury hotels lining the lagoons. “But no one’s figured out a way to make the global economy sustainable,” he says, noting he avoids buying grown fruits and vegetables that had to be flown in from the Southern Hemisphere.

To unpack Gould’s arguments about the disintegration of the organic ideal, go back ten or fifteen years, when organic farmers in the U.S. pushed for national organic standards to clarify the label, win recognition for organic as a viable, even superior kind of farming and gain access to land grant and extension office money and research funds. “Well, we got what we asked for,” says Gould. Today, he says, the problem turns on the twin specters of government standardization and corporate consolidation.

In California, five giant farms control half of the state’s $400 million organic produce market. Horizon Organic, a publicly traded Colorado-based company, controls more than 70 percent of the nation’s organic milk market. More than 30 percent of its milk is produced at two industrial-size dairies, one of which milks close to 5,000 cows. Corporate food giant General Mills now owns leading organic manufacturer Cascadia Farms, Kraft Foods owns Boca Burgers, and Heinz, reported the Wall Street Journal this June, is seeking to develop an organic ketchup to sell at Whole Foods and Wild Oats, the nation’s biggest natural foods supermarkets.

“One of the grossest problems is the food distribution system is totally screwed up,” says Gould. “If you want to supply the big supermarket, you have to have a lot of product.” Coopted by big business, he says, the organic movement has shifted away from the small farmer — and its corresponding focus on community food production — toward the techniques and problems of conventional and factory farming: “Big companies like General Mills tend to process huge amounts of food, which results in huge demand for food,” he says. “This puts small farmers at a disadvantage and results in the ecologically indefensible practice of monoculture… because you need to feed this machinery at an insane rate.”

Further derailing the organic mission, says Gould, are the increasing costs of certification, which disproportionately harm small growers, and the inherent conflict of interest that occurs in a system where certifiers are paid by the companies they certify. “It opens the door for certifiers to grant exceptions to standards, make things conditions for improvement, when really they should have stopped things in their tracks,” he said.

Government subsidy of organic farming, he says would alleviate both of these problems. Gould also singles out a provision of the new USDA rule that prevents farmers who want to use the organic label from certifying to a more stringent standard than the federal government requires. This kind of unwavering standard, he says, favors corporate producers who can dominate the marketplace by buying and selling organic products cheaply and en masse. Prohibited from advertising higher ecological performance, smaller “best practice” farmers will be locked out of the competition. “It’s unconscionable,” he says. “It’s a power play by the government.”

Gould is not the only sustainable food advocate to express concern about the industrialization of organic production. “The current trend,” says Robert Simmons, international team leader for the private certifying agency, Farm Verified Organic, “seems to be a race to the bottom for standards.” Last month, for example, Fieldale Farms, a Georgia chicken processor that slaughters several hundred thousand organic chickens a month, sought a waiver from USDA regulations requiring organically grown chickens be fed 100 percent organically grown feed. Not enough organic feed was available to meet company demands, a Fieldale spokesperson told The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

For Josh Volk, field manager for Sauvie Island Organics, a seven acre farm outside of Portland that sells its products directly to 200 Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members (individual households that own a piece of the farms production), the key to survival, of both the farm and the mission, is clear: don’t get certified.

“When you’re making less than minimum wage for long weeks it’s difficult to justify spending the money on an organic label that will probably not make any difference in sales,” he says. After the USDA law takes effect, the non certified SIA won’t be able to label its produce organic or even say they use organic practices. “But since we have direct contact with our customers every day,” says Volk, “we can explain to people that we do not use synthetics and that we try to farm as sustainably as possible.”

So here’s the final paradox. Mass production and government standards mean more organic production and consumption, which means fewer chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers are going into the air, soil, water, and, of course, our bodies. But just as U.S. regulations for certified organic foods are about to be put into place, the label “organic” may become obsolete — or, at the very least, lose its cachet. This is why Gould, who grinds his own flour, sprouts his own sprouts and buys chicken from a non-certified Portland-area farmer, says the future of sustainability depends on linking producers and consumers via regional production and networks of farmers’ markets, food coops, and CSAs.

“The story in this country is that wealth concentrates,” he says. “That’s unstable. We need smaller operations, local processors, more evenly spread out capitalism.”

As for his own role in the system, it’s telling that Gould — the globetrotting inspector par excellence — is now contemplating a career change. “I see my job as evolving toward more local work,” he says. “And if that means getting out of the certification business, so be it.”