The Mushroom at the End of the World

1. Matsutake: A Guide to Life in Capitalist Ruins

If we open ourselves to their fungal attractions, matsutake can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times.

Embracing precarity. The book begins by acknowledging a world falling apart—climate chaos, economic instability, and a loss of guiding narratives. This "precarity" is life without the promise of stability, a universal condition now. Matsutake mushrooms, emerging unexpectedly in disturbed landscapes, offer a unique lens to explore this indeterminacy and the possibilities of survival amidst ruin.

Beyond progress narratives. Traditional stories of progress and modernization have blinded us to the messy reality of our planet. Matsutake, thriving in human-disturbed forests, challenges the idea that nature is a passive backdrop for human mastery. It forces us to look for "third nature"—what manages to live despite capitalism—and to question singular, forward-moving futures.

Curiosity as survival. The mushroom's ability to grow in "blasted landscapes" like post-Hiroshima or logged-over forests, invites a radical curiosity. This curiosity is crucial for collaborative survival, pushing us to notice the "patchiness" of life—a mosaic of entangled ways of being, human and nonhuman, that coalesce in unpredictable rhythms.

2. "Arts of Noticing" Reveal Patchy, Contaminated Worlds

Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others.

Reorienting attention. The "modern human conceit" often prevents us from seeing the complex, layered realities of our world, reducing non-human life to mere resources. To understand what truly "remains" in damaged landscapes, we must cultivate "arts of noticing," shifting our focus from grand narratives of progress or ruin to the unruly edges and unexpected encounters that shape existence.

Contamination as collaboration. Survival is not about individual conquest but about "livable collaborations" that inherently involve contamination—transformation through encounter. This challenges the self-contained individual actor models of neoclassical economics and population genetics, which ignore how beings are remade by their interactions. Diversity itself emerges from these messy, often violent, histories of encounter.

Polyphonic assemblages. Instead of fixed categories, the book proposes "polyphonic assemblages"—open-ended gatherings of diverse lifeways and non-living elements. These assemblages, like intertwining melodies, reveal multiple temporal rhythms and shifting interactions, making history in unpredictable ways. Noticing these dynamic, non-scalable gatherings is essential for understanding how life persists in a world without teleology.

3. Salvage Accumulation: Capitalism's Hidden Engine

Salvage accumulation is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced.

Capitalism's patchy reality. While Marx focused on factory rationalization, much of today's global economy operates through "supply chains" that link radically different economic scenes. This system, termed "salvage accumulation," allows lead firms to concentrate wealth by appropriating value produced under diverse, often non-capitalist, conditions without directly controlling labor or raw materials.

Translation across patches. Supply chains act as "translation machines," converting value from "pericapitalist" activities—those simultaneously inside and outside capitalism—into legible capitalist inventory. This process is exemplified by:

• Nineteenth-century ivory trade (Conrad's Heart of Darkness)
• Whale oil procurement (Melville's Moby-Dick)
• Wal-Mart's reliance on cheap, often unregulated, production

The "Reverse Black Ships" effect. The rise of global supply chains, particularly in the U.S., was significantly influenced by Japan's economic success in the late 20th century. Japanese trading companies pioneered models of outsourcing and "putting out" systems, which allowed them to accumulate capital by translating diverse global production into inventory. This "Reverse Black Ships" phenomenon led U.S. corporations to dismantle traditional employment expectations, pushing labor into precarious, outsourced situations globally.

4. Precarious Freedom: War's Legacy in the Forest

Freedom is the negotiation of ghosts on a haunted landscape; it does not exorcise the haunting but works to survive and negotiate it with flair.

Freedom's varied meanings. In Oregon's matsutake forests, "freedom" is a central, yet complex, concept for pickers. It's not the rational choice of economists or political liberalism, but an irregular, performative, and communally varied effervescence. This freedom is deeply intertwined with the "ghosts" of past traumas, particularly the U.S.-Indochina War and its aftermath.

Haunted landscapes. The forest is haunted by:

• Untimely deaths of pickers
• Dispossessed Native American communities
• Stumps of logged-out old-growth trees
• Memories of war and displacement
  This haunting shapes the pickers' commitment to the forest, offering a space to escape urban confinement, reject "labor" in favor of "searching," and navigate property boundaries as a "fugitive commons."

War's enduring influence. For many Southeast Asian refugees (Mien, Hmong, Lao, Cambodian), mushroom picking is a direct extension of their war survival. White veterans also bring their trauma and resentment. This shared, yet diverse, commitment to freedom—whether as healing, remembering fighting landscapes, or entrepreneurial daring—mobilizes the matsutake harvest, creating a unique, self-organized economy without corporate recruitment or discipline.

5. Forests as "Unintentional Design": Multispecies Histories

Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design.

Beyond human heroes. To understand the "life of the forest," we must move beyond human-centric narratives and recognize landscapes as active protagonists. This means acknowledging the historical agency of nonhuman beings, like pines and fungi, in shaping environments. "Unintentional design" describes the emergent patterns of ecosystems resulting from the overlapping, often uncoordinated, world-making activities of many agents.

Pines as historical actors. Pines, often seen as mere resources, are dynamic historical actors. They colonize disturbed landscapes—volcanic ash, glacial till, abandoned fields—and thrive in extreme environments due to their deep evolutionary partnership with mycorrhizal fungi. This mutualism allows pines to grow where other plants cannot, making them pioneers in ecological succession.

Disturbance as a beginning. "Disturbance," whether from natural events (fires, floods) or human actions (logging, farming), is not always destructive; it can renew ecologies and open terrain for new transformative encounters. Matsutake, for instance, often flourishes in human-disturbed pine forests, demonstrating how specific kinds of "messes" can inadvertently foster biodiversity and new forms of collaborative survival.

6. Ruin and Resurgence: Disturbance as a Creative Force

Intersecting historical processes produced forest ruins in Oregon and Japan, but it would be preposterous to argue that forest-making forces and reactions are therefore everywhere the same.

Global coordination of ruin. Forests worldwide are shaped by transnational economic forces, leading to "ruined industrial forests." The cheap timber from Southeast Asia, for example, depressed global prices, making domestic logging in both Oregon and Japan uneconomical. This led to the neglect of industrial timber plantations, creating new forms of "ruin" that paradoxically allowed matsutake to flourish in some areas.

Serendipity in mistakes. Oregon's eastern Cascades, once a logging hub, became a "ground zero" for matsutake due to a series of "mistakes." Fire exclusion, intended to protect ponderosa pines, inadvertently allowed dense thickets of lodgepole pine to mature—the ideal habitat for matsutake. This unintended consequence highlights how ecological resurgence can emerge from the contingencies of human error and shifting management priorities.

Resurgence in peasant woodlands. In Japan and Yunnan, peasant woodlands, shaped by centuries of human disturbance (coppicing, raking for manure), demonstrate a different kind of resurgence. These "ever-young" forests, often dominated by oaks and pines, thrive on human interaction. Even after massive deforestation (e.g., Japan's Meiji era, China's Great Leap Forward), these landscapes show a remarkable ability to regenerate, with matsutake often returning as a valuable product of this human-forest co-creation.

7. Science as Patchy Translation: Beyond Universal Truths

Cosmopolitan science is made in emerging patches of research, which grow into or reject each other in varied encounters.

Science as a translation machine. Science, like capitalism, is a "translation machine" that draws insights from diverse ways of life, but often in messy, incoherent ways. "National matsutake sciences" have emerged, with Japanese research emphasizing human disturbance for matsutake growth (satoyama restoration) and U.S. research focusing on picker impact and sustainable harvest within timber management frameworks.

Gaps and incompatibilities. These national "knowledge patches" persist despite international communication, due to differing research questions, site selection, and scales of analysis. Japanese studies, often "descriptive" and site-specific, are dismissed by U.S. researchers seeking scalable, timber-compatible models. This divergence is evident in places like Yunnan, where U.S. conservation models clash with local peasant practices and Japanese-influenced business interests.

Flying spores and fluid kinds. Beyond fixed scientific categories, the concept of "flying spores" offers a metaphor for open-ended communication and the fluid nature of "species." DNA sequencing, while precise, reveals that species boundaries are often arbitrary, and fungal "kinds" are shaped by rare, long-distance dispersal events and continuous genetic exchange within mosaic bodies. This speculative science embraces indeterminacy, showing how knowledge, like life, emerges from historical mergings and unexpected encounters.

8. The Latent Commons: Finding Allies in the Middle of Things

Latent commons are those mutualist and nonantagonistic entanglements found within the play of this confusion.

Beyond institutionalized struggle. In a world without clear progress narratives, political struggle shifts from grand, unified programs to detecting "latent commons"—inchoate, often unnoticed, entanglements that offer possibilities for shared assembly. This requires "political listening" and "arts of noticing" to identify potential allies, human and nonhuman, amidst institutionalized alienation.

Characteristics of latent commons:

• Not exclusive human enclaves: Include pests, diseases, and diverse ecologies, accepting imperfection.
• Not good for everyone: Acknowledge that collaborations benefit some while excluding others.
• Don't institutionalize well: Thrive in law's interstices, catalyzed by infraction, infection, and poaching.
• Cannot redeem us: Exist in the "here and now," amidst trouble, without promising utopia.

Fugitive entanglements. In Yunnan, despite efforts to privatize forests through household contracts, matsutake thrives in a "fugitive commons" where seasonal enclosure allows year-round peasant traffic (firewood, grazing, foraging) that inadvertently maintains the open, disturbed conditions matsutake needs. This highlights how private assets often grow out of unacknowledged common living spaces, and how the "thrill of private ownership is the fruit of an underground common." Living in the middle of things means continuously exploring these overgrown verges, catching the scent of elusive mutualities.

Last updated: November 2, 2025