What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just–like flowers–through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.
page 1, Prologue Autumn Aroma, The Mushroom at the End of the World
Table of Contents
Why The Mushroom at the End of the World
I first heard about this book from a video essay about climate change, namely Sophie from Mars’ The World Is Not Ending. The video essay is an excellent watch on the topic and I highly recommend everyone watch it.
The thread connecting both this book and the video is the sub-heading of the book: “on the possibility of life in capitalism”. The book explores what it means to live at the very edges of capitalism, what the book calls “salvage capitalism” or “salvage accumulation” through the lens of one organism: the matsutake mushroom.
The Book
The author demonstrates in great detail how mushroom foragers live and why they live that way. It talks about the historical relations that made them forage in this way. These foragers live on the edges of capitalism, still interacting with the capitalist world but crossing the borders between the forests where their mushrooms grow and the streams of capital.
The matsutake mushroom is the main character of this book and what a character it is. Humans have not figured out a way to guarantee growth of this particular mushroom. Therefore all the matsutake in the world must come from foragers in forests and not vast industrialized farms. The matsutake proves elusive to industrialization and what the book calls “scalability”.
The book posits that the foragers and increasingly all of us living within capitalism live in a state of precarity. Our jobs no longer stable, economies under stress, increased wealth inequality, and climate change means that all of us become foragers in a way. In that transformation, we must learn how to help each other because precarity is a mode that cannot be survived alone.
Precarity is a state of acknowledgement of our vulnerability to others. In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent. [..] It is unselfconscious privilege that allows us to fantasize–counterfactually–that we each survive alone.
page 29, chapter 2, Contamination as Collaboration
The book spends a while talking about forestry in different parts of the world and how various economic, legal and cultural forces shape forests and in turn shape the environment in which matsutake grows (or doesn’t). I learned about various woodland forest management techniques like coppicing, managed burns, and farming land bordered by forests like the satoyama in Japan.
I found this book a very interesting read, It presented a way of looking at the world we live in ways that I don’t usually think about. Like the last book I read, I don’t think the book is trying to prescribe any solutions to our problems of precarity but is instead exploring other ways of existing in harmony with what the book calls the “latent commons”. The matsutake is a real thing but in this book it feels more like a metaphor for this latent commons.
I’ll leave y’all with another quote from the very end of the book:
Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes–the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons–and the elusive autumn aroma.
page 282, chapter 20
Thank you for reading this blog post. Please consider supporting my writing work directly through Stripe or Patreon. Additionally, please share this post on your socials and/or with your friends. It really helps! If you have any thoughts/feedback/thoughtful criticism to share, feel free to use the handy contact me page to send that to me.