The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2 page)

A number of grants and institutional arrangements made my work possible. A seed grant from the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program helped sponsor the first stages of my research. A Toyota Foundation award sponsored Matsutake Worlds Research Group joint research in China and Japan. UC Santa Cruz allowed me to take leaves to continue my research. Nils Bubandt and Aarhus University made it possible for me to begin the conceptualization and writing of this book in a calm and stimulating environment. A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2010–11 made writing possible. The final work on the book overlapped with the beginning of the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene project, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. I am grateful for these opportunities.

Individuals have stepped forward, too, to read drafts, discuss problems, and otherwise make the book possible. Nathalia Brichet, Zachary Caple, Alan Christy, Paulla Ebron, Susan Friedman, Elaine Gan, Scott Gilbert, Donna Haraway, Susan Harding, Frida Hastrup, Michael Hathaway, Gail Hershatter, Kregg Hetherington, Rusten Hogness, Andrew Mathews, James Scott, Heather Swanson, and Susan Wright kindly listened, read, and commented. Miyako Inoue retranslated the poetry. Kathy Chetkovich was an essential writing-and-thinking guide.

This book includes photographs only because of Elaine Gan’s generous help in working with them. All emerge from my research, but I have taken the liberty of using several photographs shot by my research assistant, Lue Vang, when we worked together (images preceding
chapters 9
,
10
,
14
, and bottom photo of the “Tracking” interlude). I took the others. Elaine Gan made them usable with help from Laura Wright. Elaine Gan also drew the illustrations that mark sections within the chapters. They show fungal spores, rain, mycorrhiza, and mushrooms. I leave it to readers to wander through them.

I owe another enormous set of debts to the many people who agreed to talk and work with me in all my research sites. Pickers interrupted their foraging; scientists interrupted their research; entrepreneurs took time
from their businesses. I am grateful. Yet, to protect people’s privacy, most individual names in the book are pseudonyms. The exceptions are public figures, including scientists as well as those who offer their views in public spaces. For such spokespersons, it seemed disrespectful to cover up names. A similar intention shapes my use of place names: I name cities but, because this book is not primarily a village study, I avoid local place names when I move to the countryside, where mentioning names might disrupt people’s privacy.

Because this book relies on such motley sources, I have included references in notes rather than compile a unified bibliography. For Chinese, Japanese, and Hmong names in the citations, I put the first letter of the family name in bold for the first usage. This allows me to vary surname order, depending on where the author’s name happened to enter my research.

A few of the chapters in this book are extended in other forums. Several repeat enough to deserve mention:
Chapter 3
is a summary of a longer article I published in
Common Knowledge
18, no. 3 (2012): 505–524.
Chapter 6
is excerpted from “Free in the forest,” in
Rhetorics of insecurity
, ed. Zeynep Gambetti and Marcial Godoy-Anativia (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 20–39.
Chapter 9
is developed in a longer essay in
Hau
3, no. 1 (2013): 21–43.
Chapter 16
includes material from an article in
Economic Botany
62, no. 3 (2008): 244–256; although it is only one part of the chapter, this is notable because the journal article was written with Shiho Satsuka. The third interlude exists in a longer version in
Philosophy, Activism, Nature
10 (2013): 6–14.

The Mushroom at the End of the World

Prologue

Autumn Aroma

Takamato ridge, crowded with expanding caps, filling up, thriving—the wonder of autumn aroma.

—From the eighth-century Japanese poetry collection
Man-nyo Shu

W
HAT DO
you
DO WHEN YOUR WORLD STARTS TO FALL
apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just—like flowers—through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.

Terrors, of course, there are, and not just for me. The world’s climate is going haywire, and industrial progress has proved much more deadly to life on earth than anyone imagined a century ago. The economy is
no longer a source of growth or optimism; any of our jobs could disappear with the next economic crisis. And it’s not just that I might fear a spurt of new disasters: I find myself without the handrails of stories that tell where everyone is going and, also, why. Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all our lives are precarious—even when, for the moment, our pockets are lined. In contrast to the mid-twentieth century, when poets and philosophers of the global north felt caged by too much stability, now many of us, north and south, confront the condition of trouble without end.

This book tells of my travels with mushrooms to explore indeterminacy and the conditions of precarity, that is, life without the promise of stability. I’ve read that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thousands of Siberians, suddenly deprived of state guarantees, ran to the woods to collect mushrooms.
¹
These are not the mushrooms I follow, but they make my point: the uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift—and a guide—when the controlled world we thought we had fails.

While I can’t offer you mushrooms, I hope you will follow me to savor the “autumn aroma” praised in the poem that begins my prologue. This is the smell of matsutake, a group of aromatic wild mushrooms much valued in Japan. Matsutake is loved as a marker of the autumn season. The smell evokes sadness in the loss of summer’s easy riches, but it also calls up the sharp intensity and heightened sensibilities of autumn. Such sensibilities will be needed for the end of global progress’s easy summer: the autumn aroma leads me into common life without guarantees. This book is not a critique of the dreams of modernization and progress that offered a vision of stability in the twentieth century; many analysts before me have dissected those dreams. Instead, I address the imaginative challenge of living without those handrails, which once made us think we knew, collectively, where we were going. If we open ourselves to their fungal attractions, matsutake can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times.

Here’s how a radical pamphlet put the challenge:

The spectre that many try not to see is a simple realisation—the world will not be “saved.” … If we don’t believe in a global revolutionary future, we must live (as we in fact always had to) in the present.
²

When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945, it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom.
³

Grasping the atom was the culmination of human dreams of controlling nature. It was also the beginning of those dreams’ undoing. The bomb at Hiroshima changed things. Suddenly, we became aware that humans could destroy the livability of the planet—whether intentionally or otherwise. This awareness only increased as we learned about pollution, mass extinction, and climate change. One half of current precarity is the fate of the earth: what kinds of human disturbances can we live with? Despite talk of sustainability, how much chance do we have for passing a habitable environment to our multispecies descendants?

Hiroshima’s bomb also opened the door to the other half of today’s precarity: the surprising contradictions of postwar development. After the war, the promises of modernization, backed by American bombs, seemed bright. Everyone was to benefit. The direction of the future was well known; but is it now? On the one hand, no place in the world is untouched by that global political economy built from the postwar development apparatus. On the other, even as the promises of development still beckon, we seem to have lost the means. Modernization was supposed to fill the world—both communist and capitalist—with jobs, and not just any jobs but “standard employment” with stable wages and benefits. Such jobs are now quite rare; most people depend on much more irregular livelihoods. The irony of our times, then, is that everyone depends on capitalism but almost no one has what we used to call a “regular job.”

To live with precarity requires more than railing at those who put us here (although that seems useful too, and I’m not against it). We might look around to notice this strange new world, and we might stretch our imaginations to grasp its contours. This is where mushrooms help. Matsutake’s willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes allows us to explore the ruin that has become our collective home.

Matsutake are wild mushrooms that live in human-disturbed forests. Like rats, raccoons, and cockroaches, they are willing to put up with
some of the environmental messes humans have made. Yet they are not pests; they are valuable gourmet treats—at least in Japan, where high prices sometimes make matsutake the most valuable mushroom on earth. Through their ability to nurture trees, matsutake help forests grow in daunting places. To follow matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance. This is not an excuse for further damage. Still, matsutake show one kind of collaborative survival.

Matsutake also illuminate the cracks in the global political economy. For the past thirty years, matsutake have become a global commodity, foraged in forests across the northern hemisphere and shipped fresh to Japan. Many matsutake foragers are displaced and disenfranchised cultural minorities. In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, for example, most commercial matsutake foragers are refugees from Laos and Cambodia. Because of high prices, matsutake make a substantial contribution to livelihood wherever they are picked, and even encourage cultural revitalizations.

Matsutake commerce, however, hardly leads to twentieth-century development dreams. Most of the mushroom foragers I spoke with have terrible stories to tell of displacement and loss. Commercial foraging is a better than usual way of getting by for those with no other way to make a living. But what kind of economy is this anyway? Mushroom foragers work for themselves; no companies hire them. There are no wages and no benefits; pickers merely sell the mushrooms they find. Some years there are no mushrooms, and pickers are left with their expenses. Commercial wild-mushroom picking is an exemplification of precarious livelihood, without security.

This book takes up the story of precarious livelihoods and precarious environments through tracking matsutake commerce and ecology. In each case, I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs. I argue that only an appreciation of current precarity as an earthwide condition allows us to notice this—the situation of our world. As long as authoritative analysis requires assumptions of growth, experts don’t see the heterogeneity of space and time, even where it is obvious to ordinary participants and observers. Yet theories of heterogeneity are still in their
infancy. To appreciate the patchy unpredictability associated with our current condition, we need to reopen our imaginations. The point of this book is to help that process along—with mushrooms.