Peter McCoy speaks on behalf of the fungi, the most overlooked and misrepresented organisms in the web of life. A self-taught mycologist with over 14 years of accumulated study and experience, Peter is an original founder of Radical Mycology, a grassroots organization and open-source movement that teaches the skills needed to work with mushrooms and other fungi for personal, societal, and ecological resilience. Peter is the lead cultivation expert for the Amazon Mycorenewal Project and Open Source Ecology. Apart from his work with fungi, he is also a community organizer, street medic, zinester, artist, musician, lecturer, and teacher.
Peter’s work has been featured in various news and media outlets such as Grist, Vice’s Motherboard, Permaculture Voices, The Survival Podcast, and The Visionary Activist Show on KUPL. His unique approach to teaching accessible mycology has brought him to present at The Permaculture Voices Conference, The Village Building Convergence, The Northwest Permaculture Convergence, and The Telluride Mushroom Festival, Merritt College, as well as for countless community groups across North America.
Peter has written two publications on mycology and mushroom cultivation and he is the author of the upcoming book, Radical Mycology. His extended section on low-tech mushroom cultivation in the book Earth Repair: A Grassroots Guide to Healing Toxic and Damaged Landscapes by Leila Darwish, has enabled countless community groups and bioremediators to begin practicing mycoremediation with a minimum of cost or complexity.
From his mushroom homestead in Portland, OR, Peter’s daily practice centers on cultivating, researching, and foraging for new intersections between healthy human and fungal relations. Peter is available for consultation on mushroom cultivation and remediation design, site surveys, lectures, informal talks, and teaching assignments. He can be contacted at radmycology [at] gmail [dot] com.