Once you’ve heard “renaissance mycologist” Paul Stamets talk about mushrooms, you’ll never look at the world—not to mention your backyard—the same way again. Stamets runs Fungi Perfecti, a family-owned gourmet and medicinal mushroom business in Shelton, Washington. His convictions about the role that mushrooms can play in the development of earth-friendly technologies and medicines have led him to collect and clone more than 250 strains of wild mushrooms—which he stores in several on- and off-site gene libraries.

Until recently, claims Stamets, mushrooms “suffered from biological racism.” But he is about to bring these fungi to the attention of the medical and environmental establishments. 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. “Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet,” says Stamets, who predicts that bioremediation using fungi will soon be a billion-dollar industry.

A former logger, Stamets is not your typical scientist. “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 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 spoke 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.

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.