The Mushroom at the End of the World

Just before the prologue, Tsing presents the first image of a mushroom, “in the ruin of an industrial forest” in the American state of Oregon (1). The prologue’s epigraph is an eighth century Japanese ode to matsutake mushrooms in that country’s fall weather.

Tsing explains that her relationship to nature is emotional, rooted in a response to precarity—visiting the woods, finding mushrooms there, shows her “that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy” (1). These fears, she argues, are systemic. The world is beset by climate change, and employment and economic success is now elusive for many people. She argues that mushrooms act as a “guide—when the controlled world we thought we had fails” (2).

Having introduced her abstract subject, Tsing next describes her concrete one: “aromatic wild mushrooms much valued in Japan” called matsutake (2). She argues that extensive critique of capitalism and its failures has already been undertaken at length; she is interested in what matsutake may reveal about possibilities for endurance and happiness in an unstable and uncertain world. She cites, as encouragement, a pamphlet reminding readers that even in the aftermath of the United States military dropping atomic bombs on Japan, matsutake mushrooms continued to exist. This historical event functions a kind of useful metaphor for Tsing: the atomic bomb ushered in the knowledge that humanity could destroy the planet, as well as an age where technological progress seemed limitless. Mushrooms encourage us to hold both these ideas together, and to search for a more redemptive future, to “explore the ruin that has become our collective home” (3). The word choice here underlines that Tsing sees humans as a species, not as atomized individuals. Earth is a “home,” a living space, not some sort of abstraction that can be examined and then left alone.

Harvesting matsutake for Japanese consumers also offers a “precarious livelihood” cut loose from stable and predictable employment patterns (3). She argues that the mushrooms allow us to see the “patchy unpredictability” that undergirds our lives, in contrast to the promises originally offered by capitalism (4). Mushrooms, for Tsing, have both analytical and philosophical power. She invites the reader on a journey into the unknown, but not the unknowable. Our current ways of thinking may not serve us in the future; the mushroom hunt offers another way.

Tsing continually positions her work as a departure from existing analyses of capitalism. Marxist scholars, she insists, have still relied on viewing only “one powerful current at a time” where her framework of capitalism is about how value produced in unplanned patches is appropriated for capital” (5). Marx’s resistance to capitalism cast it as a unified, coherent force, whose continued evolution would contain its own extinction. Tsing argues that this, too, was a progress narrative, and obscures how capitalism currently functions. She wants to apply a similar framework to ecology, in a search for “disturbance-based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest” (5). Tsing’s project, then, is about resisting binaries as much as it is about mushrooms, economics, or humans. She is additionally interested in the politics of resource extraction, which, she argues, reduces landscapes to the single commodity that they produce for sale. These resources are usually finite, but the landscapes remain. Humanity’s future will require closer inspection of this “ruin” and its possibilities (6).

Finally, Tsing explains something of the ecology and history of matsutake, specifically in Japan. They have grown there since at least the eighth century, spurred on by deforestation, since red pine trees only thrive when trees with larger leaves are cut down. Red pine trees are an ideal host for the mushroom. Culturally, matsutake are associated with autumn, which poetry about matsutake frequently references. Matsutake thrived until the postwar period when industrial forests replaced pine. This led Japanese people to search for matsutake sources elsewhere in the world. More recently, there has been more effort to revive pine forests so that Japanese matsutake might return.