The Mushroom at the End of the World

“Imagine “first nature” to mean ecological relations (including humans) and “second nature” to refer to capitalist transformations of the environment. This usage—not the same as more popular versions—derives from William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis.1 My book then offers “third nature,” that is, what manages to live despite capitalism. To even notice third nature, we must evade assumptions that the future is that singular direction ahead. Like virtual particles in a quantum field, multiple futures pop in and out of possibility; third nature emerges within such temporal polyphony. Yet progress stories have blinded us. To know the world without them, this book sketches open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, as these coalesce in coordination across many kinds of temporal rhythms. My experiment in form and my argument follow each other.”

Tsing establishes her relationship to existing scholarly frameworks, including those of Cronin, an eminent environmental historian. Though she is indebted, perhaps, to his work, she also clarifies her intent to expand upon it. Capitalism and “third nature” are not, perhaps, antagonistic, but the use of “despite” underlines that Tsing’s main subject exists outside of capitalist modes of deliberation of intention. To properly evaluate it, the task is to “evade” the pull of progress. Tsing is on an escape mission and bringing the reader with her. The future is not uniform, and in describing it as “polyphony” she suggests that listening for multiple melodies may prove useful. This listening is counter to the progress narratives that have otherwise “blinded” other observers. Her assertion that form and argument are connected emphasizes her intent to disrupt existing views of nature and the traditional boundaries of academic writing that may rely on longer, discrete chapters. Her loyalty is to the world as it is, not scholarly frameworks.

“While I can’t offer you mushrooms, I hope you will follow me to savor the “autumn aroma” praised in the poem that begins my prologue. This is the smell of matsutake, a group of aromatic wild mushrooms much valued in Japan. Matsutake is loved as a marker of the autumn season. The smell evokes sadness in the loss of summer’s easy riches, but it also calls up the sharp intensity and heightened sensibilities of autumn. Such sensibilities will be needed for the end of global progress’s easy summer: the autumn aroma leads me into common life without guarantees.”

By addressing the reader directly, Tsing underlines her commitment to a unique kind of intellectual journey. She is not a distant expert, but a guide, encouraging readers to “savor” the world of matsutake mushrooms. Her word choice stresses that the relationship to matsutake in Japan is highly emotional—they are not merely valued, but “loved” a word often reserved for human relationships with other mammals, not fungi. The intense smell of matsutake is emotionally complex: it evokes a change of seasons, a time when plentiful resources may soon vanish. However, autumn brings “heightened sensibilities.” With perpetual abundance, there would be no enhanced awareness of the word. For Tsing, loss brings insight, even if this compensation is imperfect. The mushroom reminds her of global precarity: mushrooms evoke the greater loss of social and environmental stability. Tellingly, a “common life” remains. Autumn is still a season for interrelationships, a theme Tsing will repeatedly underline throughout the work.

“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.”

In introducing Marxist views of society and the economy, Tsing further underlines her effort to move beyond existing intellectual frameworks. Though Marx was a strident critic of capitalism and sought its abolition, his framework was also that of “one current at a time.” Marxism imposed narrative tidiness on history, but Tsing suggests adopting another gaze. Untidiness does not prevent capitalism from continuing to thrive. Instead, “unplanned patches” still create wealth in the form of currency. Tellingly, removing progress narratives is not emancipatory: it explains capitalism’s endurance capacity, rather than providing a path to its abolition. Tsing is committed to a perspective shift more than she is on providing optimistic views of the present.

“My surprise was not just for the smell. What were Mien tribesmen, Japanese gourmet mushrooms, and I doing in a ruined Oregon industrial forest? I had lived in the United States for a long time without ever hearing about any of these things. The Mien camp pulled me back to my earlier fieldwork in Southeast Asia; the mushroom tickled my interest in Japanese aesthetics and cuisine. The broken forest, in contrast, seemed like a science fiction nightmare. To my faulty common sense, we all seemed miraculously out of time and out of place—like something that might jump out of a fairy tale.”

Tsing underlines that she is a direct participant in her research rather than a distant observer. She is in the forest with mushrooms, and people, and sees their collective presence as a worthy intellectual inquiry. Further, she looks to her own past to deepen a sense of mystery: she has never heard of the lived reality of this forest, yet it reminds her of her earlier fieldwork in geographically distant region. She is emotionally as well as intellectually engaged—the mushroom “tickles her” like a passing curiosity or whim. The forest sparks extremes of imagination, spurring her to remember both “nightmare” and “fairy tale.” Both words underline that the forest is its own reality, with its own rules she has not yet uncovered.

“Yet the modern human conceit is not the only plan for making worlds: we are surrounded by many world-making projects, human and not human. World-making projects emerge from practical activities of making lives; in the process these projects alter our planet. To see them, in the shadow of the Anthropocene’s “anthropo-,” we must reorient our attention. Many preindustrial livelihoods, from foraging to stealing, persist today, and new ones (including commercial mushroom picking) emerge, but we neglect them because they are not a part of progress. These livelihoods make worlds too—and they show us how to look around rather than ahead.”

Tsing continues her skepticism about modernity by calling it a “conceit”—it is constructed rather than inevitable or immutable. Humanity, and a view of history that centers human activity, casts a “shadow,” implying that Tsing’s goal is to bring in more light. “Practical activities” are not the sole realm of humans, as Tsing brings out in later chapters with her attention to forests as worlds with their own dramas. Before the reader can accompany Tsing into the field, that is, the specific places she finds mushrooms and those who pick and sell them, they must learn to “look around” for the ways of being that are outside progress.

“The question of how the varied species in a species assemblage influence each other—if at all—is never settled: some thwart (or eat) each other; others work together to make life possible; still others just happen to find themselves in the same place. Assemblages are open-ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about communal effects without assuming them. They show us potential histories in the making. For my purposes, however, I need something other than organisms as the elements that gather. I need to see lifeways—and nonliving ways of being as well—coming together. 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.”

Tsing’s description of assemblages underlines that humanity does not have a monopoly on dynamism and diversity. Strikingly, though Tsing makes clear that assemblages can describe both human and nonhuman arrangements, her verb choices evoke social connections. Organisms “thwart” each other, suggesting a high conflict world. Assemblages are “gatherings” and “communal” even if no people are present. Her search for “lifeways” emphasizes her dedication to stories with multiple narrative threads. There is no lone hero here, and no desire to untangle what is complicated. Instead, she is invested precisely in “encounter”—what happens at moments of overlap which may not be harmonious but are rarely insignificant.

“Ponderosa, fir, and lodgepole, each finding life through human disturbance, are now creatures of contaminated diversity. Surprisingly, in this ruined industrial landscape, new value emerged: matsutake. Matsutake fruit especially well under mature lodgepole, and mature lodgepole exists in prodigious numbers in the eastern Cascades because of fire exclusion. With the logging of ponderosa pines and fire exclusion, lodgepoles have spread, and despite their flammability, fire exclusion allows them a long maturity. Oregon matsutake fruit only after forty to fifty years of lodgepole growth, made possible by excluding fire.7 The abundance of matsutake is a recent historical creation: contaminated diversity.”

Tsing’s tale of the relationship between mushrooms and trees in Oregon emphasizes that creation can happen through processes that may otherwise be seen as negative. Human “disturbances” also make certain kinds of forests. Mushrooms are part of “contaminated” diversity that results from the imposition of human agendas. Just as progress narratives diminish our understanding, so too does an assumption that destruction lacks any productive elements. Further, recent human efforts to preserve the forest have also had a productive side: ending burning practices has meant pines live long enough to become matsutake breeding grounds. This is also an illustration of the power of unintended consequences, which Tsing frequently underlines her in her analysis of how socioeconomic systems operate. It is these unintended consequences that produce a “contaminated diversity”—a term that evokes contradictions, since diversity is usually celebrated, and contamination is not. This suggests that accepting contradiction may be key to moving beyond progress narratives.

. “Every buyer and bulker longed to sell directly to Japan—but none had any idea how. Misconceptions about the matsutake trade both in Japan and in other supply sites proliferated. White pickers swore that the value of the mushrooms in Japan was as an aphrodisiac. (While matsutake in Japan do have phallic connotations, no one eats them as a drug.) Some complained about the Chinese Red Army, which, they said, drafted people to pick, which depressed global prices. (Pickers in China are independent, just as in Oregon.) When someone discovered extremely high prices in Tokyo on the Internet, no one realized that these prices referred to Japanese matsutake.”

This anecdote brings out the importance of emotion and imagination in mushroom picking, as well as its geographic limits. Oregonian mushroomers “long” to expand their reach—the search for more profit animates their emotions. But they lack any real knowledge of the Japanese market or how to enter it. This longing produces myth, as powerful as the dreams of progress Tsing writes against. Tellingly, much of it is driven by gendered imaginings: white Americans imagine that matsutake are valued for sexual conquest. They find foreign “others” to blame through a story about the Chinese Army interfering with free commerce. Even internet research has its limits: googling prices reveals domestic value, not the value of imports. The episode illustrates Tsing’s point that while her story is one of interrelationships, those connections are not always consistent or coherent, and do not always involve the same individuals.

“After all, it was the feeling of freedom, galvanizing “mushroom fever,” that energized buyers to put on their best shows and pressed pickers to get up the next dawn to search for mushrooms again. But what is this freedom about which pickers spoke? The more I asked about it, the more unfamiliar it became to me. This is not the freedom imagined by economists, who use that term to talk about the regularities of individual rational choice. Nor is it political liberalism. This mushroomers’ freedom is irregular and outside rationalization; it is performative, communally varied, and effervescent. It has something to do with the rowdy cosmopolitanism of the place; freedom emerges from open-ended cultural interplay, full of potential conflict and misunderstanding. I think it exists only in relation to ghosts. Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape; tit does not exorcise the haunting but works to survive and negotiate it with flair.”

The story of Open Ticket is the story of human emotions and quests, and the ideas that come to animate the mushroom hunt. The search for mushrooms is a “fever”—beyond rationality, heated and intense. Tsing finds that academic disciplines and knowledge cannot explain to her how mushroom pickers conceive of their autonomy. Familiar notions enter the forest and become something else. She decides that it is “effervescent”—a life force of its own. Freedom is powerful, perhaps even transgressive. The continued use of a “ghost” metaphor in the Oregon forest positions late capitalism as akin to a haunted house—defined not only by what is found there, but what is not, and what, or who has died both in Oregon and in Southeast Asia to bring about this particular world Tsing inhabits.

“White pickers imagine themselves not only as violent vets but also as self-sufficient mountain men: loners, tough, and resourceful. One point of connection with those who did not fight is hunting. One white buyer, too old for Vietnam but a strong supporter of U.S. wars, explained that hunting, like war, builds character. We spoke of then Vice President Cheney, who had shot a friend while bird hunting; it was through the ordinariness of accidents such as this that hunting makes men, he said. Through hunting, even noncombatants can experience the forest landscape as a site for making freedom.”

As an anthropologist, Tsing repeatedly stresses the importance of cultural values and self-conception to how and why humans pursue certain livelihoods. This includes constructions of gender and self. White pickers see their work as enshrining their independence, a masculine vision of freedom that depends on no one else. Though Tsing is interviewing them about mushroom hunting, the white pickers she meets also discuss hunting animals, whether they have also killed men in combat or not. They see violence as fortifying and powerful. Even a hunting accident that would showcase carelessness becomes a masculinizing exercise in this world. Hunting and the forest are stand-ins for combat, allowing more white men to see themselves as emancipated in ways lesser humans are not. This anecdote also showcases Tsing’s commitment to a certain degree of description without comment: she lets the hunter’s interpretation of his life and politics stand for itself, rather than interject or correct his vision.

“But while patrolling one day he stepped on a land mine, which blew off his leg. He begged his comrades to shoot him, since the life of a one-legged man in Cambodia was beyond what he imagined as human. Through luck, however, he was picked up by a UN mission and transported to Thailand. In the United States he gets along well on his artificial leg. Still, when he told his relatives that he would pick mushrooms in the forest, they scoffed. They refused to take him with them, since, they said, he would never be able to keep up. Finally, an aunt dropped him off at the base of a mountain, telling him to find his own way. He found mushrooms! Ever since, the matsutake harvest has been an affirmation of his mobility.”

This anecdote highlights how many Southeast Asian pickers, unlike their white counterparts, do not have to imagine combat to construct their new lives. Gender still comes into play: this man sees disability as emasculating, unbearable, and death as the only outlet. Once he arrives in Oregon, he finds that his family shares this view of disability as a burden, leaving him in the forest alone to fend for himself. Instead of meeting death or failure, he finds mushrooms. The contaminated diversity of the Cascade Mountains offers him hope, a reminder of his continued use in the world.

“In contrast to earlier immigrants, they need not study to become American from inside out. 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. Capitalists looking for salvage accumulation, take note.”

Tsing brings Southeast Asian mushroom pickers into history, specifically the history of immigration policy and its changing expectations of those who rely on it. Economic participation has replaced sociocultural assimilation. The only value need be an allegiance of freedom, performed through capitalist labor. This vision of capitalism relies on communal ties, even exploits them—here, there are no stories of individual combat efforts, only “ethnic and religious fellows” slotted into “niches” like cogs into a machine. Ideas of welfare are ‘irrelevant”—there are no obligations on the part of the state, or business owners. Mushroom pickers’ freedom similarly frees capitalist elites from an ethics of care for laborers. Though Tsing concludes with the suggestion that capitalists “take note” of her findings, this is far from a straightforward invitation: she does not, after all, present salvage accumulation as something that she celebrates and wishes to continue. The language also slightly echoes that of a Marxist exhortation, though it is a call to observe the capitalist present rather than the hope a revolutionary future. 

“Yet the chain stretches to North America, enrolling Americans as suppliers rather than as chain directors. Nike on its head! How were Americans convinced to take on such a lowly role? As I have explained, no one in Oregon thinks of him- or herself as an employee of a Japanese business. The pickers, buyers, and field agents are there for freedom. But freedom has come to mobilize the poor only through the freeing of American livelihoods from expectations of employment—a result of the transpacific dialogue between U.S. and Japanese capital.”

As her discussion of supply chains circles back to Oregon, after detours to Japan, Tsing demonstrates its global reach. In the matsutake trade, Americans have a “lowly” role. They are subordinates, not giants of capital, and the mushroom trade is “Nike on its head”—that is, the matsutake “brand” resides outside America and the labor to produce it is done there. Mushroom pickers are part of a system they reject, partly without knowing it—Tsing underscores through this episode that economic structures shape human lives however else people may construct meaning around their work. Freedom, too, has its costs, as it is also the end of employment, that is, steady, predictable labor that may make for a comfortable life. Though matsutake pickers may see themselves as rich in freedom, they are “poor’ in capital. This poverty is part of a long history of commodity chains replacing earlier capitalist arrangements—at this stage in the process, the lively occupants of Open Ticket are erased, their human value unseen.

“Matsutake is then a capitalist commodity that begins and ends its life as a gift. It spends only a few hours as a fully alienated commodity: the time when it waits as inventory in shipping crates on the tarmac and travels in the belly of a plane. But these are hours that count. Relations between exporters and importers, which dominate and structure the supply chain, are cemented within the possibility of these hours. As inventory, matsutake allow calculations that channel profits to exporters and importers, making the work of organizing the commodity chain worthwhile from their perspective. This is salvage accumulation: the creation of capitalist value from noncapitalist value regimes.”

Tsing’s language here underlines that matsutake are the driving force of her narrative even though they are not animate. They have a life cycle that makes capitalism’s transformations visible: once on an airplane for shipping, the formerly cherished mushrooms are stripped of emotion, only to be assigned capitalist value. Transformation does not require lengthy interludes: only hours are needed to turn mushrooms into profit. This is also transformation in the service of power, not transformation akin to magic: capitalism is powerful but not liberating. In this anecdote, importers and exporters are nameless and faceless, underscoring that this systemic logic of capitalist transformation is, perhaps, dehumanizing.

“Salvage accumulation reveals a world of difference, where oppositional politics does not fall easily into utopian plans for solidarity. Every livelihood patch has its own history and dynamics, and there is no automatic urge to argue together, across the viewpoints emerging from varied patches, about the outrages of accumulation and power. 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 I will call the “latent commons” that is, entanglements that might be mobilized in common cause.”

Throughout the work, Tsing frequently defines salvage accumulation and its aftereffects by the opportunities it closes off. There is no future of “utopian plans”—a significant word choice as utopia comes from the Greek for “no place.” Instead, Tsing turns to the world that exists. Livelihood patches are singular, small worlds were nothing can be assumed. She does suggest that while coordination may not be straightforward, it is necessary and warranted. “Power and accumulation” are not assumed facts of life, but “outrages” that presumably should be contested. Patches may retain their distinction, but their dynamism offers a new political path: a “latent commons” that works within capitalism’s destructive landscape to search for a brighter future. All of Tsing’s language here is conditional—all of this “might be” precisely because the world we live in is too unstable for assumptions.

“Interspecies relations bring evolution back into history because they depend on contingencies of encounter. They do not form an internally self-replicating system. Instead, interspecies encounters are always events, ‘things that happen,’ the units of history. Events can lead to relatively stable situations, but they cannot be counted on the way self-replicating units can. They are always framed by contingency and time. History plays havoc with scalability. The only way to create scalability is to repress change and encounter. If they can’t be repressed, the whole relation across scales must be rethought.”

This episode underlines how Tsing’s interpretation of biology is inextricable from her larger arguments about progress and modes of knowledge. In rejecting views of evolution as mechanistic, she finds another way to undercut progress narratives or stories of inevitability. History, for her, is always contingent, relational, and not predictable, which is why matsutake are historical subjects. History is made of “events” not laws and processes that drive themselves. Events are not random or chaotic, but neither are they trustworthy, as Tsing’s use of “relied upon” underlines. Searching for scalability requires “repression”—a flattening of the more diverse world mushrooms and trees exist in together.

“But, more than comparison, I seek histories through which humans, matsutake and pines create forests. I work the conjunctures to raise unanswered research questions rather than to create boxes. I look for the same forest in different guises. Each appears through the windows of the others. Exploring this simultaneously single and multiple formation, the next four chapters take me into pines. Each illustrates how ways of life develop through coordination in disturbance. As ways of life come together, patch-based assemblages are formed. Assemblages, I show, are scenes for considering livability—the possibility of common life on a human-disturbed earth.”

Once more, Tsing makes humanity only one of several actors in the story of forests and mushrooms. All three elements are “creators” and Tsing herself is driven by curiosity, not an urge to create more fixed categories. In this reckoning, truth is not singular, as the forest may wear “different guises” like someone adopting different identities at different places or times. There is no unitary perspective, as the three life forms reflect one another back, like reflections—or so the window analogy suggests. This multiplicity creates “patches” not quite communities, but connections: “ways of life come together” but not in a way that signifies permanence. This instability, however, is perhaps the only “common life” that lies ahead. The indication that earth is “human disturbed” emphasizes that all three actors in this equation are not equally powerful or significant, though they should not be considered apart from each other.

“Irregular fruiting offers a not-so-cyclical rhythm, responding to cross-year environmental differences and multiyear coordination between fungi and trees. To specify these rhythms, we find ourselves speaking in dates, not cycles: 2007 was a good year for matsutake in northern Finland. In the coordination between fungal and host tree fruiting, we might begin to appreciate the history making of the forest, that is, its tracking of irreversible as well as cyclical time. Irregular rhythms produce irregular forests. Patches develop on different trajectories, creating uneven forest landscapes. And while forceful management against irregularity can drive some species to extinction, it can never succeed in transforming trees into creatures without history.”

The cyclical life cycle of Finnish pines, and Finnish matsutake, underlines Tsing’s larger themes of flourishing outside progress narratives. Finnish matsutake fruit in a “non-cyclical” manner because the pine trees do, and the forest endures without indulging human desires for annual predictability. “Irregular” forests are still alive, still observable, and Tsing can walk in them. In linking the quest for more predictable forest management to “extinction” Tsing argues that accepting the existence of historical, contingent, and dynamic time is to preserve life itself.

“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 the 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.”

Though Tsing sees forests as part of history, this episode underlines that historical narratives are an exclusively human preoccupation. To celebrate more distant Japanese modernization, while decrying Maoist economic policies, is to put human perspectives first, rather than acknowledge that the consequences for the trees were identical. Ideology may not matter to forests, but it does to human perspectives. Regrowth may come from destruction, but the description here underlines that this coincidence is not necessarily a sign destruction was worthwhile: renewed forests come only after “cataclysms” great disasters that reshape nations and the landscape. Renewal has a cost.

“What this meant was not thinning, even where other Forest Service mandates, such as fire protection, would warrant thinning. At least for a moment, matsutake had entered the Forest Service imagination, and its pact with lodgepole was noticed. To appreciate how strange this is, consider that no other nontimber forest product has attained the status of a management objective in this part of the country. In a bureaucracy that sees only trees, a mushroom companion has made a splash appearance.”

Once more, mushrooms exist as historical and even political actors. In Oregon, matsutake, through the lives of those who pick it, has become visible even to bureaucracies that have no reason to appreciate it. Its “pact” with lodgepole suggests that the forest has treaties and a diplomacy of its own, and that Forest Service members merely chose to sign on. This choice is “strange”—a departure from the Forest Service’s essential purpose, as mushrooms are emphatically not trees. They have made a “splash appearance”—a sudden moment that is undeniable.

“Perhaps you imagine that I am trying to dress up this ruin or make lemonade from lemons. Not at all. What interests me is the whole sale, interconnected, and seemingly unstoppable ruination of forests across the world such that even the most geographically, biologically, and culturally disparate forests are still linked in a chain of destruction. It is not just forests that disappear that are affected, as in Southeast Asia, but also the forests that manage to remain standing. If all our forests are buffeted by such winds of destruction, whether capitalists find them desirable or throw them aside, we have the challenge of living in the ruin, ugly and impossible as it is.”

This anecdote underscores Tsing’s commitment to brutal realism. She denies any commitment to “make lemonade from lemons”—rejecting cliches as childish. Instead, she is interested in the power of capitalism, mostly for the worse: resource extraction is such an urgent demand that it has homogenized regions that are otherwise distinct. Even the forests that remain have some aspects of their existence dictated by capitalism: survival is not the same as escape. What remains is “ugly”—the only redemption in it is to survive, to refuse to give up.

“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.”

This return to Japan offers clues into Tsing’s views of the future, and how it is inaccurate to categorize her as either an optimist or a pessimist. The Japanese Matsutake Crusaders are “thrilled” by their time in the forest, and the collectivity between pine and mushrooms they find themselves able to join. Uplifting emotions endure despite ruin. They are animated not by hope, or the certainty that a more stable past will return, but by the search. The “heap of alienation” may contain something of value, and they dedicate themselves to a “world-in-process.” They know what they wish to see, but, perhaps most importantly, who they wish to become whatever the results of their labor turn out to be.

“Others in her area have trained themselves as nature guides, taking urban visitors into the woods for sports and hobbies, including mushroom picking. I had the chance to pick with one exuberant young man, who promised he would be the “king of matsutake” next good year. He had learned mushrooms in a class; this was not his traditional heritage. It represented a hope for him, an opening, an enthusiasm on which he would ride should a rising tide arrive. If the mushrooms came, he would pick all night with lights. Matsutake were his dream not just for getting by, but for getting by with verve.”

In this Finnish interlude, Tsing underlines that the search for a profession may still be part of how people experience matsutake. The Finnish young man is not motivated by nostalgia, as some of the Japanese people she meets are, or by abstract ideas of freedom. Instead, somewhat like the Chinese entrepreneurs of Yunnan, he seeks his fortune in the forest. But his quest is, perhaps, quixotic: it depends on a “rising tide” not a predictable event. It is a “hope” and a “dream”—still ephemeral and emotional, still not quite in one individual’s control. Matsutake have their own rhythm that may not support human dreams—or they may lead to wealth. The outcome, like humanity’s future, is not clear.