The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (37 page)

Satoyama movements attempt to recover the lost sociality of community life. They design activities to bring together elders, young people, and children, combining education and community building with work and pleasure. There is more involved than helping out peasants—and pines. Satoyama work, volunteers explain, remakes the human spirit.

In the economic boom that followed Japanese recovery from World War II, urban migrants left the countryside behind to pursue modern
commodities and lifestyles. Yet when economic growth slowed in the 1990s, neither education nor employment seemed so easy a route to progress-based well-being. The economy of spectacles and desires flourished, but it became detached from life-course expectations. It became harder to imagine where life should lead and what, besides commodities, should be in it. One iconic figure called public attention to this problem: the
hikikomori
is a young person, usually a teenage boy, who shuts himself in his room and refuses face-to-face contact. Hikikomori live through electronic media. They isolate themselves through engagement in a world of images that leaves them free from embodied sociality—and mired in a self-made prison. They capture the nightmare of urban anomie for many: there is a little bit of hikikomori in all of us. It is this nightmare that
chapter 13
’s Professor K saw in the glazed eyes of his students. It sent him to the countryside as a site for remaking students—and himself; and it has sent many other advocates, educators, and volunteers there also.

Satoyama revitalization addresses the problem of anomie because it builds social relations with other beings. Humans become only one of many participants in making livability. Participants wait for trees and fungi to associate with them. They work landscapes that require human action yet exceed that requirement. By the turn of the century, several thousand satoyama revitalization groups had emerged across Japan. Some focus on water management, nature education, the habitat of a particular flower—or matsutake mushrooms. All are engaged in remaking persons as well as landscapes.

To rebuild themselves, citizens’ groups mix science and peasant knowledge. Scientists often take leadership roles in satoyama revitalization. But they aim to incorporate vernacular knowledge; here, urban professionals and scientists consult elderly farmers for their advice. Some volunteer to help farmers with their work or interview elders about disappearing ways of life. Their goal is to restore working landscapes, and for this they need working knowledge.

Mutual learning is also an important goal. Groups are candid about making mistakes—and learning from them. One report about satoyama work by a group of volunteers includes all the problems and mistakes of their efforts. Without coordination, they cut down too many trees. Some of the areas they cleared grew back even thicker with undesirable
species. In the end, the report’s authors argue, the group developed a “do, think, observe, and do again” principle, elevating collective trial and error to an art. Since one of their goals was participatory learning, allowing themselves to make and observe mistakes was an important part of the process. The authors conclude, “To be successful, volunteers have to participate in the program at all levels and stages.”
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Groups such as Kyoto’s Matsutake Crusaders take advantage of the mushroom’s allure to make it the symbol for their commitments to renewing the working relations of people and forests. If matsutake do emerge—as they did in a Crusader’s well-worked hillside in the fall of 2008—they bring a surge of excitement to the volunteers. Nothing could be more thrilling than this unexpected entanglement with other participants in forest making. Pines, humans, and fungi are renewed in a moment of co-species being.

No one thinks matsutake will bring Japan back to its pre-bubble glory. Rather than redemption, matsutake-forest revitalization picks through the heap of alienation. In the process, volunteers acquire the patience to mix with multispecies others without knowing where the world-in-process is going.

19

Ordinary Assets

S
OMETIMES COMMON ENTANGLEMENTS EMERGE NOT
from human plans but despite them. It is not even the undoing of plans, but rather the unaccounted for in their doing that offers possibilities for elusive moments of living in common. This is the case for the making of private assets. Assembling assets, we ignore the common—even when it pervades the assembly. Yet the unnoticed, too, can be a site for potential allies.

Contemporary Yunnan is a place to consider this problem because, in the wake of the communist experiment, international and national elites are in a frenzy to make private assets everywhere. Yet much asset making is strange and raw; the juxtaposition between privatization and other ways people relate to things pops into view.
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Matsutake forests, and the matsutake trade, are a case in point. Whose forests, and whose trade?

Forests—with their unbounded spaces and diverse ecologies—are everywhere a challenge for privatizers. For the past sixty years, Yunnan forests have ricocheted across multiple tenure arrangements, and the forest experts Michael Hathaway and I spoke with worried that peasants had become disheartened and confused in their management.
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Still, they were hopeful about one recent tenure category: the contracting of forests to individual peasant households.

While not the free right of American private property, such contracts, experts hoped, might rationalize peasant landscapes. Powerful international overseers imagine individual tenure as a form of conservation because it offers incentives for wise use.
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In Yunnan, it also opens populist hopes: after an intense history of top-down impositions, here at last is a chance for local farmers to have some say in managing their own forests. Yunnan researchers, in dialogue with cosmopolitan developments in the field of political ecology, show how social justice goals may be possible through local control of forests, made possible by household contracts.
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Thus, too, researchers are alert to the creativity and insight of farmers who learn how to use the privileges of contracts to solve local problems. One researcher reports on the ways villagers reallocate forest tracts to equalize the potential gains from each. She documents the work of adult brothers, for example, who switch forest plots sequentially to make sure each has a chance for benefits.
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But what are these imagined benefits? Yunnan has been under a logging ban for some years, and, at least officially, timber is to be harvested only with permission, and for domestic use. Yet there are other potential assets. In the mountains of Chuxiong Prefecture in central Yunnan, matsutake is the most valuable forest product. Experts are excited about household contracts because of it; without this step toward privatization, they say, the pickers might destroy the resource. Foresters told us of the horrors of other Yunnan areas, where village pickers spread out before dawn, combing the commons with flashlights. This is chaos, they said. Besides, small mushrooms are picked before they achieve their highest market value. Contracts, in contrast, order the forest, blocking such wildness and inefficiency. Chuxiong forests offer a model for making private assets: an example for forest reform for Yunnan and for all China.
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One widely praised arrangement for matsutake management is the village auction. What is auctioned is access to villagers’ contracted forests during the matsutake season. The system is reminiscent of Japan’s iriai forest auctions. The right to harvest and sell the matsutake on villagers’ lands goes to the auction winner. In the area we visited in Yunnan, the money gained from the auction is distributed to each household and
forms an important part of its cash income. 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. Advocates of household contracts also argue that the resource—matsutake—will grow better without the pressures of chaotic overharvesting. But can matsutake thrive in private forests? Let me approach this question in steps.

Within the rural economy, auction winners are exemplary figures of the search to gather private assets. “Boss” L is one; he has won the contract to harvest matsutake in his home village of eleven households, and he has also become a major local buyer. His relationships with government foresters and researchers are good. About fifteen years ago, the foresters asked him to create a matsutake showcase forest. He fenced off several hectares of forest and built a boardwalk meandering through so that visiting foresters and researchers could look at a model forest without disturbing it. Without peasant disturbance, the trees in the showcase forest have grown big and beautiful. The ground, undisturbed by peasant rakes, has built up a thick duff—that is, a layer of leaves and needles over ever-richer humus. It is refreshing to walk through this forest, with its gracefully arching trees and its rich earth smells. When one spots a mushroom, it is a thrill; and since no one picks the matsutake here, they rise out of the duff into neat umbrellas. Visitors come from many places to admire this matsutake forest. But foresters know enough to worry: there is too much duff. The humus is too rich. The matsutake are still coming, but perhaps not for long. Matsutake prefer more goings on.

Certainly, there is plenty going on elsewhere. Outside the showcase forest, matsutake forests are much used and abused. Everywhere Michael Hathaway and I went, broadleaf trees showed signs of extensive pruning for firewood; many were reduced to much-hacked bushes. Pines too are cut and cut, as peasants remove branches to collect pollen or pine nuts, depending on species. Pine needles are raked for bedding for the pigs, which later becomes fertilizer for the fields. Goats are ubiquitous, eating everything, including young pines, which seem to have developed a “grass-stage”-like adaptation to survive the heavy grazing. People are everywhere, too, collecting medicinal plants, pig food, and commercially salable mushrooms—not only matsutake but many kinds, from acrid
Lactarius
that must be dried or boiled to questionably
edible
Amanita
. Far from serene and graceful, the forest is a busy intersection of traffic both for human needs and for the benefit of their plant and animal domesticates.

Yet these forests are the much-praised model of individual-access enclosure! How can they also be the sites of so much traffic? I was confused by the dissonance between traffic and enclosure until I spent the day with “Little” L, another matsutake forest auction winner, but one who works smaller forest holdings than Boss L. He took our team to his forest and introduced us to its plants and mushrooms. Like the other matsutake forests I had seen in the area, it was a badly scarred young forest, marked with traces of grazing and cutting. Little L did not mind; he showed us the richness of the forest’s mushroom harvest, emerging in the midst of all that traffic. And he explained the interplay between traffic and enclosure, clearing up my confusion. During the matsutake season, he paints blazes where his forest borders on roads and trails. People know they should not enter, and, in general, they do not, although there are some problems with poaching. The rest of the year, they are free to come, to gather firewood, to graze their goats, and to look for other forest products. Of course! Despite his pride at matsutake enclosure, Little L did not see this as subterfuge. How else would people get their firewood, he explained, if they could not enter the forests?

This is not an official plan. Provincial foresters and experts do not talk about seasonal enclosure; if they know about it, they put it out of their minds as something international authorities would surely censure. 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. In this area, matsutake pairs with oaks and oak relatives as well as pine; the whole young and scarred forest works with matsutake to survive on mineral soils. Without all the traffic, the duff builds up, the soil becomes rich, and other fungi and bacteria crowd out matsutake. It is the traffic, then, that privileges matsutake, making this one of the great
areas for matsutake production. Yet the traffic must take place under the radar of contracts, which were introduced to this area with the explicit purpose of
saving
matsutake. Matsutake thrives in this fugitive commons. It is only matsutake incomes that can be raised through individual access.
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