Building A World That Works

She had a giant puffball, a fungus from the woods, fully ten inches in diameter, white with traces of brown, on a platter. She had opened the door of Hilltop House to our knock. It was midmorning, but she was in her nightgown, absorbed in admiration for her find, which she announced was on its way to The Cafe Budapest, her Boston restaurant. There was no question. Livia Hedda Rev-Kury had one of the world’s wonders on a platter, a product of the forested eight-acre tract we had just arranged to buy as the new campus of the Woods Hole Research Center. I could not but admire her knowledge that there are no poisonous puffballs and her confidence that this monster was at that early, meaty, edible stage, well before the spores that are the puffball’s real business had started to form. Spores make poor eating but a wonderful display as they emerge in an explosive cloud for a reproductive celebration that justifies the puffball name and spreads the fungus around the world. We admired the puffball, a saprophyte, slow growing, expanding toward the moment that is difficult to ignore when its millions of spores flood the world. It was an apt analogy as we set out in 1998 on a new phase in our mission of seeding the world with the new insights into the science of ecology and the political support for the massive transition from a fossil-fueled and failing world to a solar-powered and infinitely renewable world that can serve indefinitely as a human habitat.