Conscious Choice: Air Today, Grass Tomorrow

March 2008 | Conversations

Air Today, Grass Tomorrow

A conversation with surplus savant, Lisa Gautier

Interview By Alastair Bland

If nature could talk, she’d be speechless at the sight of a landfill. Such a thing would make no sense to her, for in nature, there is no waste. Things never die. They remain always, perhaps taking on new and unrecognizable forms — air today, grass tomorrow, petroleum later and soil after — but never really leaving. It’s a subtle sort of reincarnation, but once you grasp it, you believe it — and a garbage truck suddenly seems like the greatest case of fraud the world has ever known.

One local activist has understood this for years. Lisa Gautier, founder and executive director of the non-profit Matter of Trust (.org), has spent more than a decade utilizing “surplus materials” — both natural and man-made — through innovative, practical and even profitable means. Matter of Trust bravely embraces such icky leftovers as used vegetable oil, fungus, algae and even human hair, employing them in new ways that frequently mimick the subtle quirks of nature.

The 10-year-old non-profit’s most recent innovation-slash-triumph came in the wake of the November oil spill in San Francisco Bay. When it takes an ecological disaster to spark progress, it may feel like the world is turning the wrong way, but the oil spill resulted in some remarkable science. It also revealed two surprisingly handy forms of natural surplus materials: human hair and fungus.

Immediately after the spill, Gautier hit the beaches just south of the Golden Gate Bridge with hundreds of volunteers and a basement’s worth of human hair mats, produced by a Florida-based gardening supplies company as soil insulators. Oil, by some odd chance, happens to magically cling to hair — especially human hair. Matter of Trust used the doormat-sized pads to sop up several thousand pounds of the crude black goop.

Subsequently, Gautier and several West Coast fungus experts — including the famed Paul Stamets of Olympia, Washington — devised and executed an experiment in the Presidio forest in which they fed the oil-soaked hair mats to oyster mushrooms, renowned by mycologists for their ability to devour and metabolize toxins. The results are still being… err… digested: organic compost derived from carcinogenic ship fuel.

Between picking up her three daughters from school, scheduling nannies, arranging for surplus material deliveries from various sources around the nation and sleeping occasionally, Lisa Gautier allotted a window of time last month for a conversation with us about her peculiar, essential line of work.

How did you get started with Matter of Trust?
It was the beginning of the dot-com boom, around 1997. We’d just moved into an apartment that had all these perfectly good items left in it, so I took this nice rug to donate to a nearby school, John Muir. It’s a really great school, but it’s got some of the poorest kids in the city. They took the rugs and I asked if they needed anything else, and they ended up writing a wish list. So I went around to all my friends asking if there was anything they wanted to give away. I couldn’t believe how much stuff was piling up in their basements. It was the first time I really connected in my mind surplus items to society’s needs, and it was evident someone needed to connect the two. That became my job.

What is the driving force that keeps your non- profit running?
That there’s a use for everything, even if it’s already been used. Even if it’s been used ten times, there’s still another use for it, and it’s so much better for everything to find that use and not just bury the things we’re done with. As I keep saying, nature does not believe in waste. Things may sit around for a long time, but they always enter a new cycle eventually. So throwing things away doesn’t even make sense. There is no “away.” Even if you threw something into outer space, it would not go away. You can burn stuff, but that just puts toxins into the air. The trick is to give it a new life.

What’s the story behind the famous hair mats that you used to help clean up after the Cosco Busan oil spill?
This [Alabama] hairdresser Phil McCrory invented them. He got the idea from watching CNN after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in ’89. He saw otters in the water on TV. They were covered in oil and the water around them was clean, so he picked up on the idea that hair collects oil. And it’s true: We shampoo every day to clean our oily hair, because oil clings to it. He started making hair mats for gardeners. The hair mats allow growers to use half the water because they slow down evaporation. They don’t need herbicides because the hair keeps the weeds down. They also don’t need fertilizer because hair is a nitrogen releaser, so the mats save the growers a lot of money. But most of all, they save us a lot of toxins in our environment and keep hair out of our landfill. They say there are over 300,000 hair salons in the United States, and each produces a pound of hair per day. This is a huge surplus — and a huge resource.

When did your interest in hair mats begin?
For us, it was about seven years ago when we met Phil McCrory. He had already gotten a lot of press after the Exxon Valdez spill, since that inspired him to make them. We eventually contacted him and began talking, since we liked surplus and he had plenty of hair, as a hairdresser. But the Galapagos Islands oil spill was where it really hit home. That was in 2001. We asked the people out there if they were using hair mats to clean up the oil. They said they’d never heard of them, so we got in touch with this barber and eventually got a hold of some of the hair mats for ourselves. This November they happened to come in really handy.

How did you connect with Paul Stamets and his work with mycoremediation*?
It was at least four years ago. We were already into the hair mat thing, and because Paul was looking at how mushrooms eat oil and we were looking at how hair soaks up oil, I guess we were fated to meet eventually. [* Editors Note:* Mycoremediation is a form of bioremediation, the process of using mushrooms to return an environment (usually soil) contaminated by pollutants to a less contaminated state. The term mycoremediation was coined by Paul Stamets and refers specifically to the use of fungal mycelia in bioremediation.]

After the Cosco Busan oil spill business, what’s next for hair mats? Will other people use them to clean up spilled oil?
We sent some hair mats to Russia for the spill in the Black Sea, but it’s in Korea where we seem to be really getting somewhere with the hair mats and the mushrooms. Their situation is interesting, because the spill is affecting a disenfranchised population. It’s hit this low profile area, and it’s kind of like how Katrina hit Mississippi, but we barely heard about it compared to New Orleans. There’s oil everywhere, all along the shore, so I think there will be lots of opportunities there for the mycoremediation. We’re talking to their department of the environment in Seoul. They’re getting hair mats from China, which is where they make them, and it’s best for them to use their own hair rather than ours. And of course Korea is crawling with oyster mushrooms, so that won’t be a problem.

What is one of the greatest faults of our political system?
We’re too often told that you can only look at something one way. If I was absolutely forced to, I would say that I’m pro-choice, but because I have a son who passed away, I think there is a lot to celebrating life, and I don’t like that I’m forced to have a black or white decision on this issue. To me that’s so sad, because life is about celebration and inclusiveness, and everything is a gray area that needs to be looked at and thought about and discussed. That’s how people grow and learn.

What books are on your nightstand?
I’m reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco right now, and I’m also reading Pillars of the Earth, by Kenneth Follett. One of my favorite books is To Kill a Mockingbird, but my absolute favorite is Pride and Prejudice. I’ve written two screenplays, too, and for a while that was where a lot of creative energy went. One is called Pipeline and the other is called Dam. Pipeline I started writing in 1999. It’s all about the petroleum industry and it’s actually one of the reasons I became interested in the hair mats. The whole oil business is a fascinating story. It has everything that a good plot could want. It has crazy characters. It has big business. It has small companies. It has conspiracies. It has danger. It has foreign countries. If you want to write a screenplay, the petroleum industry is a good topic.

What keeps you motivated?
Curiosity. I’m a very curious person. I also try very, very hard to keep an open mind to everything. Everything. I actually keep open to the possibility that George Bush has a method to his madness that we might understand if we were being shown the bigger picture, [even if] it’s hard for me to give him the benefit of the doubt. Really, I try to keep my mind open to everything. Any conspiracy theory, any logic behind a financial deal, anything that looks at first glance like it’s corrupt — I’ll first consider how it might have some integrity to it. In general, I’m pretty sure that 99.9 percent of the world is not evil and that a lot of people are trying to do things that will benefit somebody besides themselves.

What keeps you hopeful?
That there are so many people in the world all doing stuff. There are always young people full of energy and ideas. Nothing is going to stop that. There is always going to be somebody out there who is not controlled, somebody who will say, “Wait, this situation is not right. I’m going to venture out and try to make this right.” So whatever you hear about how society is run by big business and corruption, I think there are just as many good things going on, whether it’s non-profits traveling around the world and helping communities or kids or animals, or homeless people working for the community. There are even good people in prison. There’s hope everywhere. Everywhere you look, there’s hope.

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