The Mushroom at the End of the World

This section covers Chapters 11-13: “The Life of the Forest,” “History,” and “Resurgence,” as well as Interlude 3.1, “Coming Up Among Pines.”

Tsing notes that bringing the forests into her story is philosophically challenging, as humans struggle to craft narrative that does not center themselves. This is part of the obfuscating power of progress as the only theme of stories, she argues, declaring, “we forget that collaborative survival requires cross-species coordinations” (155-156). She takes as her starting point the life cycle of nematodes, creatures in the worm family that live in pines. Nematodes interact closely with other species, including the beetles they can travel on at certain stages of their life cycle. They are no threat to American pine, native to the region, but they re-enter the story of matsutake as particular threats to Japanese pine, and they only arrive in Japan because American pinewood became a key resource in Japan’s early twentieth century modernization drive.

Tsing argues that these kinds of stories require attention to multispecies interactions she calls “polyphonic assemblages” (157) and underscores that the consequences of these phenomena can be tracked as they “come in and out of existence through the contingencies of historical change” (158). Tsing’s narrative approach eschews single protagonists, seeking complexity and ever-evolving layers. Her insistence on contingency suggests that multispecies worlds are not a play with a predictable and fixed cast of characters; they constantly shift. Tsing reminds the reader that polyphonic music has both multiple distinct melodies and key moments of overlap and that its nature “shifts as conditions change” (158). She argues that her focus could change and better existing disciplines, as science studies has not always been well integrated with environmental history, so that theories lack historical and narrative detail.

Tsing notes that her methodology is also challenging to fellow anthropologists, as the discipline often privileges traditional knowledge over empirical science, but she suggests that “observation and fieldwork” can be productively applied to understanding landscapes and the people within them (159-160). One key concept for her is understanding that ecological definitions may differ from those of social science: “disturbances a change in environmental conditions that causes a pronounced change in an ecosystem” but these changes are not always a detriment, and rather than representing a rare disaster, happen routinely (160). Scientific terms are not readily divorced from their historical context, as ecological interest in “disturbance” coincided with the 1970s and fears of general social and economic instability.

Disturbance has no easily agreed upon empirical definition, as its nature depends on perspective: floods are destructive depending on how close one lives to water. Disturbance is also not uniform, but observable in patches, like precarious economic arrangements. Tsing is particularly interested in organisms as change agents, as “a tree holds boulders in its roots that otherwise might be swept away by a stream; an earthworm enriches the soil. Each of these is an example of ecosystems engineering” (161-162). In this conception, engineering is not a science exclusive to humans—though landscapes may not operate with written blueprints, there is an observable process with measurable outcomes.

Tsing introduces her nonhuman protagonists: oak trees, pine trees, and matsutake, in their geographic and species variability across Japan, Oregon, southern China, and northern Finland. Studying these regions revealed disparate conceptions of human involvement with nature, as Japanese ideas of management include humans more overtly and directly than Chinese and American approaches, which see humans as dangers to forest flourishing. Outside Japan, forest management was also more preoccupied with “rational advancement” (162). These varying case studies, all focused on the past, present, and future of pines, offer “scenes for considering livability—the possibility of common life on a human-disturbed earth” (164). In this overview, forest management has philosophies and ideologies of its own, based largely on the value assigned to human involvement. In this vision, science, then, is no more objective or detached than anthropology or history.

Tsing recalls her journey to northern Finland by train, and the surprising uniformity and legibility of the landscape. Instead of being wild and untamed, “the ground was clean and clear without a snag or a piece of downed wood. It looked exactly like an industrial tree plantation” (167). Tsing sees this drive for predictability as an effort to take forests outside of “to cross-species entanglements in contingency and conjuncture, the components of ‘historical’ time” (168). To counter this rationalizing impulse, Tsing suggests viewing pine trees as agents rather than objects. Trees have their own agenda, just as humans do.

Tsing notes that pines are particularly suited to sparse landscapes, often inhospitable to other plants, because of their mutually beneficial relationships with fungi. Some pine species only germinate after they encounter fire or are particularly resistant to burning down. Some pine species depend on birds and humans to move their seeds from place to place. Tsing’s interest in mushrooms is not just philosophical, but readily observable from tree behavior. She notes, “In some of its most extreme environments, pine wants not just any fungal partner, but matsutake. Matsutake secretes strong acids that break down rock and sand, releasing nutrients for the mutual growth of pine and fungus” (171). Humans are another actor in this partnership, as they may aid it inadvertently by planting pines for industry, or by cutting down other trees so pine can thrive.

Humans and pines have existed together in Finland since the end of the Ice Age. But the industrial forests are more recent—until the 19th century, Finns burned forests to use their ashes for field cultivation or to produce pine tar for global markets. Rationalizing forest management drives are a more recent phenomenon. Industrial forests seemed to offer new economic and social possibilities after World War II, since refugees from the newly ceded territory of Karelia needed jobs and the Finnish government was required to pay war reparations to the USSR. Forest management involved ensuring that spruce trees were kept back in favor of pine by removing dead wood, cutting trees, and removing tree stumps to support future pine growth.

In Finland, matsutake also behave differently, as some years are more prolific than others for the mushroom. This may be because pine trees also produce variable amounts of seeds from year to year. For Tsing, this showcases the limits of modern management techniques, as “while forceful management against irregularity can drive some species to extinction, it can never succeed in transforming trees into creatures without history” (175). This account, then, is a small setback for the human drive to make nature predictable in the name of regularized profit. Finnish matsutake picking is further shaped by legal and social norms around picking; namely that private lands and state forests are open to all for picking, with no legal restrictions or need for permits. The irregular mushroom cycles help remind Tsing, and forest managers, that even modern methods require periods of rest, what she calls “managed nonmanagement” (178).

Tsing’s travels to Japan remind her that the relationship between people and forests is not necessarily one where trees are powerless and men are the only actors, or one where forests belong only to a distant past. “Resurgence is the force of the life of the forest, its ability to spread its seeds and roots and runners to reclaim places that have been deforested,” she writes (179). She takes as her subject Japanese satoyama, or “peasant forests” that rely on interactions between oak trees, pine trees, and humans. Oak is prized as fuel, and it grows back from the stumps of felled trees, creating forests through a practice called “coppicing” (180), which may make more space for pine. Peasant forests, too, are subjects of history and politics. They may be devastated by political change, but they recover in ways no landowner intended or planned. Forests, in this narrative, pursue thriving around human agendas even if they cannot stop them.

The story of Japanese forests is emotional from the outset, as one of King’s interview subjects, an ecology professor, she calls Professor K, notes that he relies heavily on “nostalgia” for the rural past to revitalize his discipline and make his academic work less abstract. He takes students to the countryside so they can directly engage in landscape restoration, including by cutting invasive bamboo that has become overgrown. They similarly work to support oak regrowth. Humans renew themselves through partnership with nature, not by letting it grow without assistance or support.

Tsing notes that the forests are called “peasant” for a reason, as Japanese elites historically prized cedar trees and left oak for peasants. In central Japan, deciduous oaks were cultivated, and their falling leaves helped make space for pine’s need for sunlight. Oak cultivation, and deforestation allowed matsutake to flourish as well. As Japan industrialized and urbanized, trips to the forest for mushrooms became a leisure pastime. The flourishing of these pine forests was inextricable from industrialization that increased demand for oak trees. The forests Japanese people are now nostalgic for were not ecology projects but the natural results of industrial deforestation.

Tsing then turns to northern China, where peasant forests are “in motion, not recreated through nostalgia” (187). In China, people emphasized a return to peasant management as the antidote to decades of state neglect. In this view, capitalist incentives were key to renewal: “The key, they thought, was to sort out tenure and incentives, allowing entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats, to manage. In these new times, the forests would be remade with the market” (188).

Turning to the woods themselves, Tsing finds young trees in China, oak and pine growing together, and every part of the pine tree being used, whether for eventual use in cosmetics or as bedding for livestock, particularly pigs. Most Chinese people Tsing spoke to blame the excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolution for devastating the landscape, whether or not this is historically accurate. This period of industrialization, cultural repression, and increased political centralization has been repudiated by current Chinese leadership. However, the difference between Chinese and Japanese forests is less a matter of ideology than the pace of capitalism: Japanese deforestation was driven by late nineteenth century industrialization, while China’s began under Mao in the 1950s. Tsing suggests that “from the perspective of a tree, there may not have been much difference” between the two systems (192). This statement is deliberately provocative. As Tsing alludes, the Cold War, with its ideological clashes between communism and capitalism, shaped much of the 20th century. However, with this assertion, Tsing emphasizes that it shaped humanity’s 20th century; forests have no such lens on events. Her anthropological gaze allows her to see as both person and forest, to emphasize commonality where politics and culture suggest no overlap should exist.