"The Mushroom at the End of the World"

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing wrote a book with tendrils that extend to every direction, to this reader's delight. It goes well with the story that some abandoned off-shore oil rigs off the coast of California now have become fish santuraries.

• WESTERN PHILOSOphers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man, which could tame and master Nature. It was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilizational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human. <> Several things have happened to undermine this division of labor. First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue. Second, interspecies entanglements that once seemed the stuff of fables are now materials for serious discussion among biologists and ecologists,
• what follows is a riot of short chapters. I wanted them to be like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore; an always too many. The chapters build an open-ended assemblage, not a logical machine; they gesture to the so-much-more out there. They tangle with and interrupt each other—mimicking the patchiness of the world I am trying to describe.
• matsutake can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times...  If we don’t believe in a global revolutionary future, we must live (as we in fact always had to) in the present.
• 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,
• The mushroom joined the celebration of the four seasons as a marker of autumn. Outings to pick matsutake in the fall were an equivalent of cherry-blossom viewing parties in the spring. Matsutake became a popular subject for poetry.
• The modern human conceit won’t let a description be anything more than a decorative footnote. This “anthropo-” blocks attention to patchy landscapes, multiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans: the very stuff of collaborative survival... we will need to watch unruly edges. What brings Mien and matsutake together in Oregon? Such seemingly trivial queries might turn everything around to put unpredictable encounters at the center of things.
• Thinking through precarity changes social analysis. A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible. <> The only reason all this sounds odd is that most of us were raised on dreams of modernization and progress. These frames sort out those parts of the present that might lead to the future. The rest are trivial
• Nonhuman ways of being, like human ones, shift historically. For living things, species identities are a place to begin, but they are not enough: ways of being are emergent effects of encounters... Pines find mushrooms to help them use human-made open spaces. Assemblages don’t just gather lifeways; they make them.
• Assemblages cannot hide from capital and the state; they are sites for watching how political economy works. If capitalism has no teleology, we need to see what comes together—not just by prefabrication, but also by juxtaposition.
• In the classical music that displaced baroque, unity was the goal; this was “progress” in just the meaning I have been discussing: a unified coordination of time... we are used to hearing music with a single perspective. When I first learned polyphony, it was a revelation in listening
• This book argues that staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die... one-against-all survival has also engaged scholars. Scholars have imagined survival as the advancement of individual interests—whether “individuals” are species, populations, organisms, or genes—human or otherwise. Consider the twin master sciences of the twentieth century, neoclassical economics and population genetics.
• The evolution of our “selves” is already polluted by histories of encounter; ... The diversity that allows us to enter collaborations emerges from histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest. Contamination makes diversity...  If categories are unstable, we must watch them emerge within encounters. To use category names should be a commitment to tracing the assemblages in which these categories gain a momentary hold.
• They brought a distinctive script, based on Chinese characters and used for writing to spirits.8 As both refusal and acceptance of Chinese authority, the script is a neat expression of contaminated diversity: Mien are Chinese, and not Chinese. Later they would learn to be Lao/Thai, but not Lao/Thai, and then American, and not American.
• inheriting the loyalty of French-trained Hmong soldiers. One of those soldiers became General Vang Pao, who mobilized Hmong in Laos to fight in behalf of the United States, becoming what 1970s CIA director William Colby called “the biggest hero of the Vietnam War.”12 Vang Pao recruited not just individuals but villages and clans into the war. Although his claims to represent Hmong disguised the fact that Hmong also fought for the communist Pathet Lao, Vang Pao made his cause simultaneously a Hmong cause and a U.S. anticommunist cause. Through his control over opium transport, bombing targets, and CIA rice drops, as well as his charisma, Vang Pao generated enormous ethnic loyalty, consolidating one kind of “Hmong.”
• Jonsson’s oral histories of Mien in the United States suggest that what are often imagined as innocent “regional” groupings of Laotian Mien—northern Mien, southern Mien—refer to divergent histories of forced resettlement by Vang Pao and Chao La, respectively.14 War, he argues, creates ethnic identities.15 War forces people to move but also cements ties to reimagined ancestral cultures.
• Why don’t we use these stories in how we know the world? One reason is that contaminated diversity is complicated, often ugly, and humbling. Contaminated diversity implicates survivors in histories of greed, violence, and environmental destruction. The tangled landscape grown up from corporate logging reminds us of the irreplaceable graceful giants that came before. The survivors of war remind us of the bodies they climbed over—or shot—to get to us. We don’t know whether to love or hate these survivors. Simple moral judgments don’t come to hand. <> Worse yet, contaminated diversity is recalcitrant to the kind of “summing up” that has become the hallmark of modern knowledge... It has no self-contained units; its units are encounter-based collaborations. Without self-contained units, it is impossible to compute costs and benefits, or functionality, to any “one” involved.
• Scalability requires that project elements be oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounter; that’s how they allow smooth expansion. Thus, too, scalability banishes meaningful diversity
• As cane workers in the New World, enslaved Africans had great advantages from growers’ perspectives: they had no local social relations and thus no established routes for escape. Like the cane itself, which had no history of either companion species or disease relations in the New World, they were isolated. They were on their way to becoming self-contained, and thus standardizable as abstract labor.
• Sugarcane plantations expanded and spread across the warm regions of the world. Their contingent components—cloned planting stock, coerced labor, conquered and thus open land—showed how alienation, interchangeability, and expansion could lead to unprecedented profits. This formula shaped the dreams we have come to call progress and modernity. As Sidney Mintz has argued, sugarcane plantations were the model for factories during industrialization
• Matsutake resist the conditions of the plantation. They require the dynamic multispecies diversity of the forest—with its contaminating relationality.
• Matsutake commerce does not occur in some imagined time before scalability. It is dependent on scalability—in ruins. Many pickers in Oregon are displaced from industrial economies, and the forest itself is the remains of scalability work. Both matsutake commerce and ecology depend on interactions between scalability and its undoing.
• the eastern Cascades: Forest Service researchers in the 1990s found that the annual commercial value of the mushrooms was as least as much as the value of the timber.
• Nonscalable projects can be as terrible in their effects as scalable ones. Unregulated loggers destroy forests more rapidly than scientific foresters. The main distinguishing feature between scalable and nonscalable projects is not ethical conduct but rather that the latter are more diverse because they are not geared up for expansion.
• he explained the Korean origin of Japanese regard for matsutake. Before you hear the story, consider that there is no love lost between Japanese nationalists and Koreans. For Dr. Ogawa to remind us that Korean aristocrats started Japanese civilization works against the grain of Japanese desire. Besides, civilization, in his tale, is not all for the good. Long before they came to central Japan, Dr. Ogawa related, Koreans had cut down their forests to build temples and fuel iron forging. They had developed in their homeland the human-disturbed open pine forests in which matsutake grow long before such forests emerged in Japan.
• the (supply) chain illuminates something important about capitalism today: Amassing wealth is possible without rationalizing labor and raw materials. Instead, it requires acts of translation across varied social and political spaces, which, borrowing from ecologists’ usage, I call “patches.”
• In capitalist farms, living things made within ecological processes are coopted for the concentration of wealth. This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control.
• Heart of Darkness.5 The story turns around the narrator’s discovery that the European trader he much admired has turned to savagery to procure his ivory. The savagery is a surprise because everyone expects the European presence in Africa to be a force for civilization and progress. Instead, civilization and progress turn out to be cover-ups and translation mechanisms for getting access to value procured through violence: classic salvage... Moby-Dick tells of a ship of whalers whose rowdy cosmopolitanism contrasts sharply with our stereotypes of factory discipline; yet the oil they obtain from killing whales around the world enters a U.S.-based capitalist supply chain. Strangely, all the harpooners on the Pequod are unassimilated indigenous people
• Jane Collins reports that workers in Mexican garment assembly factories are expected to know how to sew before they begin their jobs, because they are women, we are offered a glimpse of noncapitalist and capitalist economic forms working together.15 Women learn to sew growing up at home; salvage accumulation is the process that brings this skill into the factory to the benefit of owners.
• while logging is allowed within Late Successional Reserves, pickers are forbidden—because no one has found funds for an environmental impact assessment... The Forest Service is asked to uphold property, even if it means neglecting the public.
• Freedom/haunting: two sides of the same experience. Conjuring a future full of pasts, a ghost-ridden freedom is both a way to move on and a way to remember. In its fever, picking escapes the separation of persons and things so dear to industrial production. The mushrooms are not yet alienated commodities; they are effects of the pickers’ freedom. Yet this scene only exists because the two-sided experience has purchase in a strange sort of commerce. Buyers translate freedom trophies into trade through dramatic performances of “free market competition.”
• Better yet, he might push a competitor to raise the price too high, forcing him to buy too many mushrooms, and, if all goes really right, to close down for a few days. There are all kinds of tricks. If the price spikes, a buyer can get pickers to take his mushrooms to sell to other buyers: Better the money than the mushrooms. There will be rude laughter for days, fuel for another round of calling the others liars—and yet, no one goes out of business despite all these efforts.
• what an art sorting is! Sorting is an eye-catching, rapid-fire dance of the arms with the legs held still. White men make it look like juggling; Lao women—the other champion buyers—make it look like Royal Lao dancing.
• During the U.S.-Indochina War, the Hmong became the front line of the U.S. invasion of Laos. Recruited by General Vang Pao, whole villages gave up agriculture to subsist on CIA airdrops of food. The men called in U.S. bombers, putting their bodies on the line so that Americans could destroy the country from the skies.
• Mushroom picking layers together Laos and Oregon, war and hunting. The landscapes of war-torn Laos suffuse present experience. What seemed to me nonsequiturs shocked me into awareness of such layers: I asked about mushrooms, and Hmong pickers answered by telling me of Laos, of hunting, or of war.
• He offered a story: A relative of his had gone back to Laos for a visit, and the hills had so drawn him that he left one of his souls behind when he returned to the United States. He soon died as a result. Nostalgia can cause death, and then it’s important to have life insurance, because that allows the family to buy the oxen for a proper funeral.
• As entrepreneurs, Lao were mediators, with all the pleasures and dangers of mediation. In my own inexperience, I found the entrepreneurial grasp of combat readiness a confusing set of juxtapositions. Yet I could tell it somehow worked as advocacy for high-risk enterprise.
• the cultural engagements with war that shape the practices of freedom of white veterans and Cambodian, Hmong, and Lao refugees. Veterans and refugees negotiate American citizenship through endorsing and enacting freedom. In this practice, militarism is internalized; it infuses the landscape; it inspires strategies of foraging and entrepreneurship. <> Among commercial matsutake pickers in Oregon, freedom is a “boundary object,” that is, a shared concern that yet takes on many meanings and leads in varied directions... Pickers’ war experiences motivate them to come back year after year to extend their living survival. White vets enact trauma; Khmer heal war wounds; Hmong remember fighting landscapes; Lao push the envelope. Each of these historical currents mobilizes the practice of picking mushrooms as the practice of freedom.
• Total immersion into American culture was expected, without bicultural extensions, and children led the way. Japanese Americans became “200 percent American.”4 At the same time, Japanese arts had flourished in the camps. Traditional poetry and music, in decline before the war, were revived. Camp activities became the basis for postwar clubs.
• Second-generation Southeast Asian Americans are nothing like Japanese American Nisei in their performance of citizenship. The difference has to do with historical events—indeterminate encounters, if you will—in which relations between immigrant groups and the demands of citizenship are formed. Japanese Americans were subject to coercive assimilation... its contrast: Southeast Asian refugees have become citizens in a moment of neoliberal multiculturalism. A love for freedom may be enough to join the American crowd.
• They remain committed to differences that mattered in Laos; because Lao sit on the floor, Mien sit on the low stools my mother still longs for as a reminder of China. They refuse raw vegetables—that’s for Lao—but prepare soups and sautés with chopsticks, as do Chinese.
• This is where freedom and precarity come back into the story: freedom coordinates wildly diverse expressions of American citizenship, and it provides the only official rudder for precarious living.
• The affirmative action policies of the 1960s and 1970s not only opened schools but also made it possible for minorities educated in public schools to find professional placements despite their racial exclusion from networks of influence. Japanese Americans were cajoled as well as prodded into the American fold. <> It is the erosion of this apparatus of state welfare that most simply helps to explain why the Southeast Asian Americans of Open Ticket have developed such a different relationship to American citizenship. Since the mid-1980s, when they arrived as refugees, all kinds of state programs have been dismantled.
• The freedom they had endorsed to enter the United States had to be translated into livelihood strategies. <> Histories of survival shaped what they could use as livelihood skills.
• In the wake of the welfare state, this concurrence of freedom agendas—in all its unruly diversity—has seized the time. <> And what better participants in global supply chains! Here are nodes of ready and willing entrepreneurs, with and without capital, able to mobilize their ethnic and religious fellows to fill almost any kind of economic niche. Wages and benefits are not needed. Whole communities can be mobilized—and for communal reasons. Universal standards of welfare hardly seem relevant. These are projects of freedom.
• Global supply chains ended expectations of progress because they allowed lead corporations to let go of their commitment to controlling labor. Standardizing labor required education and regularized jobs, thus connecting profits and progress. In supply chains, in contrast, goods gathered from many arrangements can lead to profits for the lead firm... Supply chains require a particular kind of salvage accumulation, involving translation across patches.
• Scared by the success of Japanese investments, American business leaders destroyed the corporation as a social institution and propelled the U.S. economy into the world of Japanese-style supply chains. One might call this “Reverse Black Ships.”
• This is not just a story, then, but also a method: big histories are always best told through insistent, if humble, details. <> Money can open the tale. Both the U.S. dollar and the yen came into being in a world dominated by Spanish pesos
• he story of how Japan helped build South Korea’s economy to avoid U.S. quotas.13 By transferring light industry to South Korea, Japanese traders could export more products freely to the United States. Yet Japanese direct investment was resented in Korea. Thus Japan adopted what Castley calls a “putting out” approach. “It involved merchants (or firms) supplying subcontractors with loans, credit, machinery and equipment to produce or finish goods, which would be sold in distant markets by the merchant.”
• From the U.S. perspective, the yen was “undervalued,” making Japanese goods cheap in the United States and U.S. exports to Japan too dear there. U.S. anxieties about the yen were one small part of the situation in 1971 that led to the U.S. abandonment of the gold standard.
• Nike began as a U.S. outpost of a Japanese distribution chain for athletic shoes... Subject to the disciplines of the Japanese trading regime, Nike learned the supply-chain model. But Nike slowly began to transform it, American style. Instead of making value through trade as translation, Nike would use American advantages in advertising and branding.
• Kula valuables are known through the personal relations they make; people of note, in turn, are known through their kula gifts. Things, then, do not just have value in use and commodity exchange; they may have value through the social relationships and reputations of which they are part. <> The difference between value making in kula and capitalism seemed so striking that some analysts argued that we might divide the world into “gift economies” and “commodity economies,”
• When he has made a judgment about the quality and special characteristics of the lot, he calls the right buyers—the ones who could use just that kind of matsutake. He has already given the mushrooms relation-making powers: the powers of quality.
• In Vancouver, it was immigrant Hong Kong housewives. These are workers in the classic sense of the term: alienated labor without interest in the product. And yet they are translators, North American style. It is precisely because they have no knowledge or interest in how the mushrooms got there that they are able to purify them as inventory. The freedom that brought those mushrooms into the warehouse is erased in this new assessment exercise. Now the mushrooms are only goods, sorted by maturity and size.
• Since no patch is “representative,” no group’s struggles, taken alone, will overturn capitalism. Yet this is not the end of politics. Assemblages, in their diversity, show us what later I call the “latent commons,” that is, entanglements that might be mobilized in common cause. Because collaboration is always with us, we can maneuver within its possibilities. We will need a politics with the strength of diverse and shifting coalitions—and not just for humans.
• until quite recently many people—perhaps especially scientists—imagined life as a matter of species-by-species reproduction. The most important interspecies interactions, in this worldview, were predator-prey relations... This self-creation marching band drowned out the stories of the underground city. To recover those underground stories, we might reconsider the species-by-species worldview
• To call this the “modern synthesis” is quite right in relation to the questions of modernity that I discussed in terms of scalability. Self-replicating things are models of the kind of nature that technical prowess can control: they are modern things. They are interchangeable with each other, because their variability is contained by their self-creation. Thus, they are also scalable... Scalable life, in these versions, captured genetic inheritance in a self-enclosed and self-replicating modernity, indeed, Max Weber’s iron cage.
• In contrast to the modern orthodoxy, they found that many kinds of environmental effects could be passed on to offspring, through a variety of mechanisms, some affecting gene expression and others influencing the frequency of mutations or the dominance of varietal forms. <> One of their most surprising findings was that many organisms develop only through interactions with other species.
• you could equally say that the fungus farms the termites. Termitomyces uses the environment of the termite mound to outcompete other fungi; meanwhile, the fungus regulates the mound, keeping it open, by throwing up mushrooms annually, creating a colony-saving disturbance in termite mound-building... they require attention to the histories of encounter that maintain the chain. Natural history description, rather than mathematical modeling, is the necessary first step—as in the economy. Radical curiosity beckons.
• Working with forest managers in Japan changed how I thought about the role of disturbance in forests. Deliberate disturbance to revitalize forests surprised me.
• one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents,
• I make disturbance a beginning, that is, an opening for action. Disturbance realigns possibilities for transformative encounter.
• Yet we are not used to reading stories without human heroes. This is the puzzle that informs this section of the book. Can I show landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant?
• Amazingly, ecologists have traced this process rather precisely. The first nematodes disembarked at Japan’s Nagasaki harbor from the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, riding in American pine.
• Many histories come together here; they draw us beyond bubble worlds into shifting cascades of collaboration and complexity. The livelihoods of the nematode—and the pine it attacks and the fungus that tries to save it—are honed within unstable assemblages as opportunities arise and old talents gain new purchase.
• if we want to know what makes places livable we should be studying polyphonic assemblages, gatherings of ways of being. Assemblages are performances of livability.
• In the 1970s, too, humanists and social scientists began worrying about the transformative encounters of history, inequality, and conflict. Looking back, such coordinated changes in scholarly fashion might have been early warning of our common slide into precarity.
• Disturbance brings us into heterogeneity, a key lens for landscapes.
• It looked exactly like an industrial tree plantation. “Ah,” I thought, “How the lines have blurred.” This was modern discipline, both natural and artificial. And there was contrast: I was near the border with Russia, and people told me that across the border the forest was a mess. I asked what a mess looked like, and they told me the trees were uneven and the ground full of dead wood; no one cleared it up. This Finnish forest was clean. Even lichen was cropped close by the reindeer. On the Russian side, people said, great balls of lichen grew as high as your knees.
• Pines grow in extreme environments: cold high places; almost-deserts; sand and rock. <> Pines also grow with fire. Fire shows off their diversity; there are many and varied pine adaptations to fire... Some store seeds for years in cones that open only in fire: Those seeds will be first to hit the ashes. <> Pines live in extreme environments because of the help they get from mycorrhizal fungi.
• Above and beyond its strength as a building material, oak (unlike pine) takes its smooth time in burning; it makes some of the best firewood and charcoal. Better yet, felled oaks (unlike pines) tend not to die; they sprout back from roots and stumps to form new trees. The peasant practice of felling trees in the expectation that they will grow back from their stumps is called “coppicing,” and coppiced oak woodlands are exemplary peasant forests.
• The sustainability of nature, he said, never just falls into place; it must be brought out through that human work that also brings out our humanity. Peasant landscapes, he explained, are the proving grounds for remaking sustainable relations between humans and nature.
• Iriai rights are common-land rights shared by villagers, allowing enrolled households to gather firewood, make charcoal, and use all the products of village lands. In contrast to common forest rights in many other places, iriai rights in Japan were codified and enforceable in courts of law. Yet it was unlikely to find a sugi or hinoki in Japan’s premodern iriai forests; those trees were claimed by aristocrats, even if they grew on village lands. But sometimes peasants could claim oaks even on the lord’s land;
• Perhaps the living peasant forests of early-twentieth-century Japan looked a little like today’s forests in central Yunnan. Although historians rush to differentiate the modernization achieved by Japan’s Meiji Restoration and the failures of China’s Great Leap Forward, from the perspective of a tree, there may not have been much difference.
• it seems clear that an especially intimate companionship has formed between matsutake and lodgepole in the eastern Cascades. <> Like most friendships, this one depends on chance meetings and small beginnings that later surge into significance.
• What went wrong with the postwar vision? Ponderosa was increasingly logged out, and it did not grow back, at least not readily. It was missing fire. The great ponderosas in their open parks had emerged together with Native American fire regimes, in which frequent burning of the underbrush encouraged browse for deer and berries for fall picking... The landscape looked less and less like the open ponderosa forests of the early twentieth century—and less and less like a landscape of interest to the timber industry. <> In dispossessing Native peoples from the lands they had made so inviting, white loggers, soldiers, and foresters destroyed the parklike forests they had wanted so badly. To pause in recollection, it seems useful to tell of the last great Native dispossession by fiat: the 1954 “termination,” or ending of all treaty obligations to the Klamath Tribes.
• The Klamath Tribes were by every measure not only no burden, but a significant contributor to the local economy. Their strength and wealth were, however, no match for determined efforts of the federal government to eradicate their culture and acquire their most valuable natural resources—a million acres of land and ponderosa pine.
• But forty-to-fifty-year-old lodgepole might not even exist except for Forest Service fire exclusion. The budding presence of matsutake mushrooms, their mycelia entwined with lodgepole roots, is an unintended consequence of the most famous Forest Service mistake in the interior forests of the American West: the exclusion of fire.
• 1942 Oregon. A Japanese floatplane launched from a submarine unsuccessfully attempts to start a forest fire in the mountains of southern Oregon. This small incident begins an intensification of U.S. Forest Service governance in which the campaign against forest fires is pursued with military-like discipline and zeal. In 1944, as fears of Japanese fire bombs over Oregon forests circulate, Smokey Bear becomes a symbol of fire protection as homeland security.
• After Japan’s surrender, U.S. occupation tied the countries together, including in their forestry policies. For a few years, their forests could not be imagined separately;
• The young plantings had encouraged herbaceous weeds, which in turn had encouraged a spike in the deer population; as the trees grew up and shaded out undergrowth, the deer had nothing to eat and became pests in villages and towns. The quest for controlled abundance that once had foreigners calling Japan “the green archipelago” had led to ruined forests.
• If there is still matsutake forest, it is because not all that forest was felled to make way for sugi and hinoki. In this sense, the matsutake forest is in debt to the violent deforestation of Southeast Asia—at least if one takes for granted Japan’s inflamed pursuit of plantations beforehand. Although matsutake do not grow in Japan’s ruined plantations, they grow because of their ruin, which saved other forests from conversion.
• Oregon’s matsutake forests, then, also owe their flourishing to the low price of global timber. Matsutake forests in Oregon and central Japan are joined in their common dependence on the making of industrial forest ruin.
• AS WITH CAPITALISM, IT IS USEFUL TO CONSIDER science a translation machine. Translation helps them watch the elements of science come together into a unified system of knowledge and practice. There has been less attention to the messy process of translation as jarring juxtaposition and miscommunication.
• That divergences matter is particularly evident when alternative sciences arrive in the same place. In China, matsutake science and forestry are caught between Japanese and U.S. trajectories. In the matsutake forests of China’s northeast, Japanese scientists have sturdy collaborations with Chinese counterparts.6 But in Yunnan, U.S. experts in conservation and development have arrived in droves, ... Yet Yunnan’s forests are nothing like U.S. matsutake forests. As I argued in chapter 13, they have affinities to Japan’s satoyama. American experts do not recognize the landscape dynamics of such forests.
• One Pacific Northwest researcher told me that Japanese studies are not very useful because they are “descriptive.” In untangling what “descriptive” might mean, and what is wrong with it, the cultural and historical specificity of U.S. forestry research comes into focus. Descriptive means site-specific, that is, attuned to indeterminate encounters and thus nonscalable. U.S. forestry researchers are under pressure to develop analyses compatible with the scalable management of timber trees.
• When researchers ask villagers about declines in matsutake harvests, they do not ask about forests. The question of decline is addressed as if mushrooms inhabited the landscape alone.24 This is the American question, the question learned from the experience of rationalizing timber in the hopes of saving it from greedy loggers.
• As a result of isolation, he said, Chinese taxonomies are strange. Internationally, there are no rules for naming a genus (the first name in a Latin binomial), so Chinese taxonomers have added “China” to genus names, assembling Sinoboletus instead of Boletus, and confusing foreign counterparts. Furthermore, they recognize species indiscriminately. They claim to have twenty-one species of oyster mushrooms in Yunnan, but there are only fourteen species recognized in the world.
• The precision of DNA sequencing, which allows such determinations, also undermines confidence in the species as the basic category for understanding kinds.
• He told me about Armillaria root rot, a complex of species in which clear species boundaries may not be relevant. Armillaria root rot spreads across whole forests, stimulating boasts of “the largest organism in the world.” Differentiating “individuals” becomes difficult, as these individuals contain many genetic signatures, helping the fungus adapt to new environmental situations... “Armillaria root rot is fifty species in one species,” he said; “it depends on what you are dividing species for.”... Dr. Suzuki was treating species in the way cultural anthropologists treat their units: as frames that must be continually questioned to retain their use.
• matsutake spores are capable of something else. They can join with body cells that already have chromosomal pairs. This is called “di-mon” mating, from the prefixes for “two”—the number of chromosome copies in fungal body cells—and “one”—the number in the germinating spore. It’s as if I decided to mate with (not clone) my own arm: how queer... Evolution in one body: the fungus can discard less competitive genomes to pick up others.
• No “one” fungal body lives self-contained, removed from indeterminate encounters. The fungal body emerges in historical mergings—with trees, with other living and nonliving things, and with itself in other forms.
• only careful observation reveals those gentle heaves. Calm but fevered, impassioned but still: the picker’s rhythm condenses this tension in a poised alertness.
• Brown’s political listening addresses this. It suggests that any gathering contains many inchoate political futures and that political work consists of helping some of those come into being. Indeterminacy is not the end of history but rather that node in which many beginnings lie in wait. To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas.
• Latent commons are not good for everyone. Every instance of collaboration makes room for some and leaves out others. Whole species lose out in some collaborations. The best we can do is to aim for “good-enough” worlds, where “good-enough” is always imperfect and under revision... The latent commons moves in law’s interstices; it is catalyzed by infraction, infection, inattention—and poaching.
• One widely praised arrangement for matsutake management is the village auction... Without the press of competition from other pickers, the auction winner should be able to pick each mushroom when its market price is highest, thus maximizing his or her income as well as that of the compensated villagers.
• Seasonal enclosure would defeat the program of the “privatization-is-conservation” creed, because local residents are using resources in common in just the way those experts frown upon. Besides, those experts would hate the way this forest looks: young, scarred, full of traffic. This is not the plan. And yet, might not this way of enacting privatization be the saving grace for matsutake? The traffic keeps the forests open, and thus welcoming to pine; it keeps the humus thin and the soils poor, thus allowing matsutake to do its good work of enriching trees... Yet the traffic must take place under the radar of contracts, which were introduced to this area with the explicit purpose of saving matsutake... the point that private assets most always grow out of unacknowledged commons. This point is not just about wily Yunnan peasants. Privatization is never complete; it needs shared spaces to create any value.
• Rural bosses are replacements for socialist heroes; they are models for human aspirations. Bosses are embodiments of the entrepreneurial spirit. In contrast to earlier socialist dreams, they are supposed to make themselves, not their communities, wealthy. They dream of themselves as self-made men. Yet their autonomous selves bear comparison to matsutake mushrooms: the visible fruit of unrecognized, elusive, and ephemeral commons.
• The Yunnan countryside at this historical moment is good to think with because interest in rationalizing natural resource management extends only to property law and accounting. Privatization takes place merely by claiming the fruits of scavenging—not by reorganizing labor or landscape... there is something peculiar and frightening in this dedication to salvage, as if everyone were taking advantage of the end of the world to gather up riches before the last bits are destroyed.
• This combination of intimate knowledge and feeling through the duff focuses my attention back on the here and now, the middle of things. We trust our eyes too much... Getting by without progress requires a good deal of feeling around with our hands.
• Precarity means not being able to plan. But it also stimulates noticing, as one works with what is available. To live well with others, we need to use all our senses,
• Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes—the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations.
• What kind of book is this that refuses to end? Like the matsutake forest, each contingent gathering sponsors others in unexpected bounty. None of this would be possible without transgressing against the commodification of scholarship... Intellectual woodlands too: ideas born in common play still beckon.