The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (27 page)

The forest in central Yunnan is mainly sparse and young. It
looks
disturbed. Tracks run through the eroded hillsides. Despite the ban on commercial timber, everything is used, from the ground to the treetops. Evergreen oaks dominate the landscape, ranging from shrubs to coppiced trees. Yet the forest is open; pines mix with the oaks. Pine, like oak, has many uses. Pine resin is sometimes tapped. Pine pollen is gathered to sell to the cosmetics industry; some pines also produce commercially valuable edible seeds. Pine needles are gathered for bedding for the pigs each household raises; pig feces held together by pine needles
are a major fertilizer for crops. Herbaceous plants are gathered for food for the pigs—as well as for food and medicine for people. Pig food is cooked every day with firewood on an outdoor stove; thus, even where households have other fuel sources for human cooking, every household gathers great stacks of firewood. Shepherds bring cattle and goats to browse wherever land is not obviously under crops. Commercial picking of wild mushrooms, not just matsutake but many species, creates foot traffic in the forest. In some places, groves of serious trees are still available for a vigorous if illegal timber trade, but in most areas the trees are thin and small. Exotic eucalyptus, first planted for a village-based oil industry, spreads along the roads. This is a hard forest to promote as timeless peasant wisdom, although brave Chinese scholars have tried.
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The messy peasant forest does little to satisfy foreign conservationists, who have flocked to Yunnan to save endangered nature, and they are quick to blame the excesses of communism for deviations from their wilderness dreams. Young Chinese scholars and students follow the foreign lead. More than one young city person told me that Yunnan’s hills were deforested by Red Guards during China’s Cultural Revolution, although this story seems unlikely. The Cultural Revolution is an easy scapegoat for everything that seems wrong. To attribute forest damage to this period mainly indicates that the faults of this young and open forest are easy for everyone to see. It is in this context that it seems striking to note similarities between peasant forests in central Yunnan and central Honshu, Japan. Perhaps Japan’s oak-pine forests, in their prime, were less aesthetically and ecologically perfect than they are imagined by advocates now. Perhaps Yunnan’s oak-pine forests are better than critics imagine. Those eroded hillsides are the site of a lively regeneration in which oak, pine, and matsutake have a good thing going—not just for peasants but also for many kinds of life.

The time delays are eerily similar. Central Yunnan’s forests suffered during China’s Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when China mustered its resources for rapid industrialization. The “green steel” to which the old villager referred was used in part to fuel backyard furnaces in which peasants melted down their pots to contribute the metal to China’s development.
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Some forests were protected, but in the next decade, the central government cut lumber from these
forests for export to raise foreign currency. Forty to fifty years later, pines had colonized bare spaces, and oak stools had sprouted into trees. The peasant forest was in full flower, and matsutake mushrooms were one sign of its success.

Similarly, central Japan’s forests suffered during Japan’s rapid industrialization in the decades after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Forty to fifty years later, peasant oak-pine forests achieved the perfection for which they are remembered today. After the initial disturbance, as in China, peasants learned to make the regrowing trees work for them. The interlocking uses of the forest fit together; the landscape became recognizable and seemed increasingly stable and thus harmonious. Oak supplied building materials, firewood, and charcoal; pine supplied matsutake mushrooms as well as wood, turpentine, needles, and fast-burning fuel. 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. If peasant forests are viewed differently in each context, it may be in part be contrast between close and distant, and forward- and backward-looking views.

People and trees are caught in irreversible histories of disturbance. But some kinds of disturbance have been followed by regrowth of a sort that nurtures many lives. Peasant oak-pine forests have been eddies of stability and cohabitation. Yet they are often put into motion by great cataclysms, such as the deforestation that accompanies national industrialization. Small eddies of interlocking lives within great rivers of disturbance: these are surely sites for thinking about human talents for remediation. But there is also the forest’s point of view. Despite all insults, resurgence has not yet ceased.

14

Serendipity

W
HEN OLD TIMERS EXPLAINED THAT
O
REGON’S
eastern Cascades had once been a center for industrial logging, I could hardly believe them. All I saw was the highway, flanked by unhealthy-looking trees—although a few roadside signs said “Industrial Forest.” People showed me where towns and mills had once flourished, but now there was nothing but brush.
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They took me to now-vanished homes, hotels, and hobo camps. The hobos had left piles of rusting cans, but the towns were gone to scruffy stands of overcrowded pines, neither wilderness nor civilization. The folks who remained made do with this and that. On the highway, shut-down stores sagged with broken windows. Businesses mixed gun and liquor sales. Signs on driveways said uninvited guests would be shot. When a new truck stop opened, they said, no one showed up for the preemployment open meeting because they had heard about the company’s drug testing and personal surveillance. “Anyone who lives out here wants to be left alone,” someone explained.
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Resource management does not always lead to the effects it expects. One place to look for life in the forest is in those plans’ undoing. Mistakes were made … but mushrooms popped up.

The eastern Cascades is managed for industrial pine, but it does not look like Finnish Lapland. The forest is messy. Dead wood lies and leans everywhere. Trees are often scraggly and either sparse or densely packed. Dwarf mistletoe and root rot sap their strength. In contrast to Finland, where smallholders jointly manage most of the forest, Cascades matsutake grows on national forest—or else timber company—land. There are few small forest owners to coordinate management. This is just as well for forest management dreams, because white residents and visitors tend to resent the idea of forest regulation as iconic of an overreaching federal government. They shoot holes in Forest Service signs and boast about the rules they flaunt. The Forest Service works to appeal to them, but it is an uphill battle.

Social scientists often stress the bureaucratic assertiveness of the U.S. Forest Service. Yet the foresters I met in the eastern Cascades were humble in their explanations of forest management. Their programs, they said, were a series of experiments, and most all of them had failed. How, for example, should they deal with the lodgepoles that just kept coming back in denser thickets? They tried clear-cutting, which created those dense thickets. They tried saving seed trees and shelterwood, but lone trees were blown down by the wind and snow. Should they try to save jobs at the one remaining logging mill even when it means clashing with environmentalists in court?
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Although environmental goals have changed Forest Service rhetoric, district offices are still evaluated by the board feet of timber they generate. There was nothing to do, they said, but deal with each dilemma as it arose. Since there was no good alternative, they just kept trying.

The landscape has not made forest management easy. While, as in Finland, there were glaciers in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, pines occupy the eastern Cascades for a different reason. A volcanic eruption some 7,500 years ago covered the region with lava, ash, and pumice (the air-filled stone that results when ejected lava cools). If there was organic soil there before, it was buried. There are still blocks of lava and pumice beds where almost nothing grows. That pines grow at all on this unfriendly ground seems a miracle—and one for which matsutake can claim some credit.

Matsutake grows with many host trees in Oregon. In the wet, mixed conifer forests found at high altitudes, matsutake is abundant with Shasta red fir, mountain hemlock, and sugar pine. On western Cascade slopes, it is sometimes found with Douglas fir; on the Oregon coast, matsutake grows with tanoak. On the dry eastern slopes of the Cascades, matsutake lives with ponderosa pines. In each of these sites, there are other fungi. Where the relationship between tree and fungus starts to get exclusive is the lodgepole pine forests. Foraging in lodgepole, one only occasionally spots another mushroom species. This is not a sure sign of lack of underground diversity: many fungi rarely send up fruiting bodies. Still, 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. Both protagonists were once neglected; if now they dominate regional news, there must be a story. Deploying their own blasted-landscapes metaphor, foragers call this area “ground zero” of the American matsutake scene. What brought fungus and root together with such spectacular results?

When whites first came to the eastern Cascades in the nineteenth century, they did not notice lodgepoles. Instead, they stood in awe of the giant ponderosas that dominated the forest. According to historian William Robbins, these pine forests once were “the most impressive and spectacular” of Oregon’s interior forests.
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The trees were huge, and they were surrounded by parklike open country with little underbrush. U.S. Army Captain John Charles Fremont came through in 1834: “Today the country was all pine forest…. The timber was uniformly large, some of the pines measuring 22 feet in circumference, and 12 to 13 feet at six above.”
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A turn-of-the-century U.S.G.S. surveyor added, “The forest floor is often as clean as if it had been cleared, and one may ride or drive without hindrance.”
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A 1910 newspaper made the obvious connection: “No timber in the world can be logged more easily.”
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Ponderosa timber attracted both government and industry. In 1893, President Grover Cleveland created the Cascade Forest Reserve; soon, a race was on to construct railroads to bring out the timber, and by the early twentieth century, lumbermen had obtained title to huge lots.
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By the 1930s, Oregon timber dominated the U.S. wood industry; eastern
Cascade ponderosas, in heavy demand, were logged as fast as fellers could get to them.
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The mix of public and private land shaped the timing of logging. Before World War II, timber companies pressured the government to keep national forests closed, to keep prices high. By the end of the war, private lands were depleted, and the same voices then called for opening the national forests. Only this, they said, could keep the mills open, preventing unemployment and national wood shortages. Afterward, national forests increasingly bore the brunt of logging.
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The impact of logging changed with postwar practices of industrial forestry. Foresters, buoyed by the optimism of new technologies as well as the boom economy, had an idea for how national forests could be opened without depleting their timber. All they had to do was replace “decadent,” “overmature” old growth forests with fast-growing and vigorous young trees, which would be harvestable in predictable eighty- to one-hundred-year year intervals.
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They might even plant superior stock, making the new forests faster-growing and more resistant to pests and diseases. New technologies were making it practical to remove all the trees, not just the most desirable ones; thus foresters turned to clear-cutting.
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Clear-cutting would lead to renewal even as it made the forest into units of expansion. The faster the forest was cut, according to this logic, the more productive it would become. Some local foresters were not convinced, but the force of national opinion swept them along. In the 1970s, replanting after cutting became standard practice. Aerial spraying against “weeds” was also used in some areas.
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As one eastern Cascade forester recalled, in the vision of that period, “Forests of the future would be dominated by a mosaic of 25 to 40 acre even-aged stands of healthy and intensively managed young-growth.”
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