The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (3 page)

About commerce: Contemporary commerce works within the constraints and possibilities of capitalism. Yet, following in the footsteps of Marx, twentieth-century students of capitalism internalized progress to see only one powerful current at a time, ignoring the rest. This book shows how it is possible to study capitalism without this crippling assumption—by combining close attention to the world, in all its precarity, with questions about how wealth is amassed. How might capitalism look without assuming progress? It might look patchy:
the concentration of wealth is possible because value produced in unplanned patches is appropriated for capital
.

About ecology: For humanists, assumptions of progressive human mastery have encouraged a view of nature as a romantic space of antimodernity.
⁴
Yet for twentieth-century scientists, progress also unselfconsciously framed the study of landscapes. Assumptions about expansion slipped into the formulation of population biology. New developments in ecology make it possible to think quite differently by introducing cross-species interactions and disturbance histories. In this time of diminished expectations, I look for
disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest
.

While I refuse to reduce either economy or ecology to the other, there is one connection between economy and environment that seems important to introduce up front: the history of the human concentration of wealth through making both humans and nonhumans into resources for investment. This history has inspired investors to imbue both people and things with alienation, that is, the ability to stand alone, as if the entanglements of living did not matter.
⁵
Through alienation, people and things become mobile assets; they can be removed from their life worlds in distance-defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds, elsewhere.
⁶
This is quite different from merely using others as part of a life world—for example, in eating and being eaten. In that case, multispecies living spaces remain in place. Alienation obviates living-space entanglement. The dream of alienation inspires landscape modification in which only one stand-alone asset matters;
everything else becomes weeds or waste. Here, attending to living-space entanglements seems inefficient, and perhaps archaic. When its singular asset can no longer be produced, a place can be abandoned. The timber has been cut; the oil has run out; the plantation soil no longer supports crops. The search for assets resumes elsewhere. Thus, simplification for alienation produces ruins, spaces of abandonment for asset production.

Global landscapes today are strewn with this kind of ruin. Still, these places can be lively despite announcements of their death; abandoned asset fields sometimes yield new multispecies and multicultural life. In a global state of precarity, we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin.

Our first step is to bring back curiosity. Unencumbered by the simplifications of progress narratives, the knots and pulses of patchiness are there to explore. Matsutake are a place to begin: However much I learn, they take me by surprise.

This is not a book about Japan, but the reader needs to know something about matsutake in Japan to proceed.
⁷
Matsutake first appears in Japan’s written record in the eighth-century poem that starts this prologue. Already then, the mushroom is praised for its aromatic marking of the autumn season. The mushroom became common around Nara and Kyoto, where people had deforested the mountains for wood to build temples and to fuel iron forges. Indeed, human disturbance allowed
Tricholoma matsutake
to emerge in Japan. This is because its most common host is red pine (
Pinus densiflora
), which germinates in the sunlight and mineral soils left by human deforestation. When forests in Japan are allowed to grow back, without human disturbance, broadleaf trees shade out pines, preventing their further germination.

As red pine spread with deforestation across Japan, matsutake became a valued gift, presented beautifully in a box of ferns. Aristocrats were honored by it. By the Edo period (1603–1868), well-to-do commoners, such as urban merchants, also enjoyed matsutake. 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 sound of a temple bell is heard in the cedar forest at dusk, The autumn aroma drifts on the roads below.

—
A
KEMI
T
ACHIBANA
(1812–1868)
⁸

As in other Japanese nature poetry, seasonal referents helped build a mood. Matsutake joined older signs of the fall season, such as the sound of deer crying or the harvest moon. The coming bareness of winter touched autumn with an incipient loneliness, at the edge of nostalgia, and the poem above offers that mood. Matsutake was an elite pleasure, a sign of the privilege to live within the artful reconstruction of nature for refined tastes.
⁹
For this reason, when peasants preparing for elite outings sometimes “planted” matsutake (i.e., stuck mushrooms artfully in the ground because naturally occurring matsutake were not available), no one objected. Matsutake had become an element of an ideal seasonality, appreciated not only in poetry but also in all the arts, from tea ceremony to theater.

The moving cloud fades away, and I smell the aroma of the mushroom.

—
K
OI
N
AGATA
(1900–1997)
¹⁰

The Edo period was ended by the Meiji Restoration—and Japan’s rapid modernization. Deforestation proceeded apace, privileging pine and matsutake. In the Kyoto area,
matsutake
became a generic term for “mushroom.” In the early twentieth century, matsutake were particularly common. In the mid-1950s, however, the situation began to change. Peasant woodlands were cut down for timber plantations, paved for suburban development, or abandoned by peasants moving to the city. Fossil fuel replaced firewood and charcoal; farmers no longer used the remaining woodlands, which grew up in dense thickets of broadleaf trees. Hillsides that had once been covered by matsutake were now too shady for pine ecologies. Shade-stressed pines were killed by an invasive nematode. By the mid-1970s, matsutake had become rare across Japan.

This was the time, however, of Japan’s rapid economic development, and matsutake were in demand as exquisitely expensive gifts, perks, and bribes. The price of matsutake skyrocketed. The knowledge that matsutake grew in other parts of the world suddenly became relevant. Japanese travelers and residents abroad began to send matsutake to Japan; as importers emerged to funnel the international matsutake trade, non-Japanese pickers rushed in. At first it seemed that there were a plethora of colors and kinds that might appropriately be considered matsutake—because they had the smell. Scientific names proliferated as matsutake in forests across the northern hemisphere suddenly rose from neglect. In the past twenty years, names have been consolidated. All across Eurasia, most matsutake are now
Tricholoma matsutake
.
¹¹
In North America,
T. matsutake
seems to be found only in the east, and in the mountains of Mexico. In western North America, the local matsutake is considered another species,
T. magnivelare
.
¹²
Some scientists, however, think the generic term “matsutake” is the best way to identify these aromatic mushrooms, since the dynamics of speciation are still unclear.
¹³
I follow that practice except where I am discussing questions of classification.

Japanese have figured out ways of ranking matsutake from different parts of the world, and ranks are reflected in prices. My eyes were first opened to such rankings when one Japanese importer explained: “Matsutake are like people. American mushrooms are white because the people are white. Chinese mushrooms are black, because the people are black. Japanese people and mushrooms are nicely in between.” Not everyone has the same rankings, but this stark example can stand in for the many forms of classification and valuation that structure the global trade.

Meanwhile, people in Japan worry about the loss of the peasant woodlands that have been the source of so much seasonal beauty, from spring blossoms to bright autumn leaves. Starting in the 1970s, volunteer groups mobilized to restore these woodlands. Wanting their work to matter beyond passive aesthetics, the groups looked for ways restored woodlands might benefit human livelihood. The high price of matsutake made it an ideal product of woodland restoration.

And so I return to precarity and living in our messes. But living seems to have gotten more crowded, not only with Japanese aesthetics and eco
logical histories, but also with international relations and capitalist trading practices. This is the stuff for stories in the book that follows. For the moment, it seems important to appreciate the mushroom.

Oh, matsutake:

The excitement before finding them.

—
Y
AMAGIJCHI
S
ODO
(1642–1716)
¹⁴

Part I

What’s Left?

I
T WAS A STILL-BRIGHT EVENING WHEN
I
REALIZED
I was lost and empty-handed in an unknown forest. I was on my first search for matsutake—and matsutake pickers—in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Earlier that afternoon, I had found the Forest Service’s “big camp” for mushroom pickers, but all the pickers were out foraging. I had decided to look for mushrooms myself while I waited for their return.

I couldn’t have imagined a more unpromising-looking forest. The ground was dry and rocky, and nothing grew except thin sticks of lodgepole pine. There were hardly any plants growing near the ground, not even grass, and when I touched the soil, sharp pumice shards cut my fingers. As the afternoon wore on, I found one or two “copper tops,” dingy mushrooms with a splash of orange and a mealy smell.
¹
Nothing else. Worse yet, I was disoriented. Every way I turned, the forest looked the same. I had no idea which direction to go to find my car. Thinking I would be out there just briefly, I had brought nothing, and I knew I would soon be thirsty, hungry—and cold.

I stumbled around and eventually found a dirt road. But which way should I go? The sun was getting lower as I trudged along. I had walked less than a mile when a pickup truck drew up. A bright-faced young
man and a wizened old man were inside, and they offered me a ride. The young man introduced himself as Kao. Like his uncle, he said, he was a Mien from the hills of Laos who had come to the United States from a refugee camp in Thailand in the 1980s. They were neighbors in Sacramento, California, and here to pick mushrooms together. They brought me to their camp. The young man went to get water, driving his plastic jugs to a water storage container some ways away. The older man did not know English, but it turned out he knew a little Mandarin Chinese, as did I. As we awkwardly exchanged phrases, he pulled out a smoking bong handcrafted from PVC pipe and lit up his tobacco.

It was dusk when Kao came back with the water. But he beckoned me to go picking with him: There were mushrooms nearby. In the gathering dark, we scrambled up a rocky hillside not far from his camp. I saw nothing but dirt and some scrawny pine trees. But here was Kao with his bucket and stick, poking deep into clearly empty ground and pulling up a fat button. How could this be possible? There had been nothing there—and then there it was.

Kao handed me the mushroom. That’s when I first experienced the smell. It’s not an easy smell. It’s not like a flower or a mouth-watering food. It’s disturbing. Many people never learn to love it. It’s hard to describe. Some people liken it to rotting things and some to clear beauty—the autumn aroma. At my first whiff, I was just … astonished.