The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (20 page)

The challenges are enormous. 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 later I call the
“latent commons,” that is, entanglements that might be mobilized in common cause. Because collaboration is always with us, we can maneuver within its possibilities. We will need a politics with the strength of diverse and shifting coalitions—and not just for humans.

The business of progress depended on conquering an infinitely rich nature through alienation and scalability. If nature has turned finite, and even fragile, no wonder entrepreneurs have rushed to get what they can before the goods run out, while conservationists desperately contrive to save scraps. The next part of this book offers an alternative politics of more-than-human entanglements.

Interlude

Tracking

M
USHROOM TRACKS ARE ELUSIVE AND ENIGMATIC
; following them takes me on a wild ride—trespassing every boundary. Things get even stranger when I move out of commerce into Darwin’s “entangled bank” of multiple life forms.
¹
Here, the biology we thought we knew stands on its head. Entanglement bursts categories and upends identities.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi. Fungi are diverse and often flexible, and they live in many places, ranging from ocean currents to toenails. But many fungi live in the soil, where their thread-like filaments, called hyphae, spread into fans and tangle into cords through the dirt. If you could make the soil liquid and transparent and walk into the ground, you would find yourself surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae. Follow fungi into that underground city, and you will find the strange and varied pleasures of interspecies life.
²

Many people think fungi are plants, but they are actually closer to animals. Fungi do not make their food from sunlight, as plants do. Like animals, fungi must find something to eat. Yet fungal eating is often generous: It makes worlds for others. This is because fungi have extracellular
digestion. They excrete digestive acids outside their bodies to break down their food into nutrients. It’s as if they had everted stomachs, digesting food outside instead of inside their bodies. Nutrients are then absorbed into their cells, allowing the fungal body to grow—but also other species’ bodies. The reason there are plants growing on dry land (rather than just in water) is that over the course of the earth’s history fungi have digested rocks, making nutrients available for plants. Fungi (together with bacteria) made the soil in which plants grow. Fungi also digest wood. Otherwise, dead trees would stack up in the forest forever. Fungi break them down into nutrients that can be recycled into new life. Fungi are thus world builders, shaping environments for themselves and others.

Some fungi have learned to live in intimate associations with plants, and given enough time to adjust to the interspecies relations of a place, most plants enter into associations with fungi. “Endophytic” and “endomycorrhizal” fungi live inside plants. Many do not have fruiting bodies; they gave up sex millions of years ago. We are likely never to see these fungi unless we peer inside plants with microscopes, yet most plants are thick with them. “Ectomycorrhizal” fungi wrap themselves around the outsides of roots as well as penetrating between their cells. Many of the favorite mushrooms of people around the world—porcini, chanterelles, truffles, and, indeed, matsutake—are the fruiting bodies of ectomycorrhizal plant associates. They are so delicious, and so difficult for humans to manipulate, because they thrive together with host trees. They come into being only through interspecies relations.

The term “mycorrhiza” is assembled from Greek words for “fungus” and “root”; fungi and plant roots become intimately entangled in mycorrhizal relations. Neither the fungus nor the plant can flourish without the activity of the other. From the fungal perspective, the goal is to get a good meal. The fungus extends its body into the host’s roots to siphon off some of the plant’s carbohydrates through specialized interface structures, made in the encounter. The fungus depends on this food, yet it is not entirely selfish. Fungi stimulate plant growth, first, by getting plants more water, and, second, by making the nutrients of extracellular digestion available to plants. Plants get calcium, nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and other minerals through mycorrhiza. Forests, according to researcher Lisa Curran, occur only because of ectomycor
rhizal fungi.
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By leaning on fungal companions, trees grow strong and numerous, making forests.

Mutual benefits do not lead to perfect harmony. Sometimes the fungus parasitizes the root in one phase of its life cycle. Or, if the plant has lots of nutrients, it may reject the fungus. A mycorrhizal fungus without a plant collaborator will die. But many ectomycorrhizas are not limited to one collaboration; the fungus forms a network across plants. In a forest, fungi connect not just trees of the same species, but often many species. If you cover a tree in the forest, depriving its leaves of light and thus food, its mycorrhizal associates may feed it from the carbohydrates of other trees in the network.
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Some commentators compare mycorrhizal networks to the Internet, writing of the “woodwide web.” Mycorrhizas form an infrastructure of interspecies interconnection, carrying information across the forest. They also have some of the characteristics of a highway system. Soil microbes that would otherwise stay in the same place are able to travel in the channels and linkages of mycorrhizal interconnection. Some of these microbes are important for environmental remediation.
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Mycorrhizal networks allow forests to respond to threats.

Why has the world-building work of fungi received so little appreciation? Partly, this is because people can’t venture underground to see the amazing architecture of the underground city. But it is also because until quite recently many people—perhaps especially scientists—imagined life as a matter of species-by-species reproduction. The most important interspecies interactions, in this worldview, were predator-prey relations in which interaction meant wiping each other out. Mutualistic relations were interesting anomalies, but not really necessary to understand life. Life emerged from the self-replication of each species, which faced evolutionary and environmental challenges on its own. No species needed another for its continuing vitality; it organized itself. This self-creation marching band drowned out the stories of the underground city. To recover those underground stories, we might reconsider the species-by-species worldview, and the new evidence that has begun to transform it.

When Charles Darwin proposed a theory of evolution through natural selection in the nineteenth century, he had no explanation for heritability. Only the recovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics
suggested a mechanism by which natural selection could produce its effects. In the twentieth century, biologists combined genetics and evolution and created the “modern synthesis,” a powerful story about how species come into being through genetic differentiation. The early-twentieth-century discovery of chromosomes, structures within cells that carry genetic information, gave palpability to the story. Units of heredity—genes—were located on chromosomes. In sexually reproducing vertebrates, a special line of “germ cells” was found to conserve the chromosomes that give rise to the next generation. (Human sperm and eggs are germ cells.) Changes in the rest of the body—even genetic changes—should not be transmitted to offspring as long as they do not affect the germ cells’ chromosomes. Thus the self-replication of the species would be protected from the vicissitudes of ecological encounter and history. As long as the germ cells were unaffected, the organism would remake itself, extending species continuity.

This is the heart of the species self-creation story: Species reproduction is self-contained, self-organized, and removed from history. To call this the “modern synthesis” is quite right in relation to the questions of modernity that I discussed in terms of scalability. Self-replicating things are models of the kind of nature that technical prowess can control: they are modern things. They are interchangeable with each other, because their variability is contained by their self-creation. Thus, they are also scalable. Inheritable traits are expressed at multiple scales: cells, organs, organisms, populations of interbreeding individuals, and, of course, the species itself. Each of these scales is another expression of self-enclosed genetic inheritance, and thus they are neatly nested and scalable. As long as they are all expressions of the same traits, research can move back and forth across these scales without friction. Some hint of coming problems appeared in this paradigm’s excesses: when researchers took scalability literally, they produced bizarre new stories of the gene in charge of everything. Genes for criminality and creativity were proposed, sliding freely across scales from chromosome to social world. “The selfish gene,” in charge of evolution, required no collaborators. Scalable life, in these versions, captured genetic inheritance in a self-enclosed and self-replicating modernity, indeed, Max Weber’s iron cage.

The discovery of the stability and self-replicating properties of DNA in the 1950s was the jewel in the crown of the modern synthesis—but
also the opening to its undoing. DNA, with associated proteins, is the material of chromosomes. The chemical structure of its double helix strands is both stable and, amazingly, able to replicate exactly on a newly built strand. What a model for self-contained replication! The replication of DNA was mesmerizing; it formed an icon for modern science itself, which requires the replication of results, and thus research objects that are stable and interchangeable across experimental iterations, that is, without history. The results of the replication of DNA can be tracked at every biological scale (protein, cell, organ, organism, population, species). Biological scalability was given a mechanism, strengthening the story of thoroughly modern life—life ruled by gene expression and isolated from history.

Yet DNA research has led in unexpected directions. Consider the trajectory of evolutionary developmental biology. This field was one of the many that emerged from the DNA revolution; it studies genetic mutation and expression in the development of organisms, and the implications of this for speciation. In studying development, however, researchers could not avoid the history of encounters between an organism and its environment. They found themselves in conversation with ecologists, and suddenly they realized they had evidence for a type of evolution that had not been expected by the modern synthesis. In contrast to the modern orthodoxy, they found that many kinds of environmental effects could be passed on to offspring, through a variety of mechanisms, some affecting gene expression and others influencing the frequency of mutations or the dominance of varietal forms.
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One of their most surprising findings was that many organisms develop only through interactions with other species. A tiny Hawaiian squid,
Euprymna scolopes
, has become a model for thinking about this process.
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The “bob-tailed squid” is known for its light organ, through which it mimics moonlight, hiding its shadow from predators. But juvenile squid do not develop this organ unless they come into contact with one particular species of bacteria,
Vibrio fischeri
. The squid are not born with these bacteria; they must encounter them in the seawater. Without them, the light organ never develops. But perhaps you think light organs are superfluous. Consider the parasitic wasp
Asobara tabida
. Females are completely unable to produce eggs without bacteria of the genus
Wolbachia
.
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Meanwhile, larvae of the Large Blue butterfly
Maculinea arion
are
unable to survive without being taken in by an ant colony.
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Even we proudly independent humans are unable to digest our food without helpful bacteria, first gained as we slide out of the birth canal. Ninety percent of the cells in a human body are bacteria. We can’t do without them.
¹⁰

As biologist Scott Gilbert and his colleagues write, “Almost all development may be codevelopment. By codevelopment we refer to the ability of the cells of one species to assist the normal construction of the body of another species.”
¹¹
This insight changes the unit of evolution. Some biologists have begun to speak of the “hologenome theory of evolution,” referring to the complex of organisms and their symbionts as an evolutionary unit: the “holobiont.”
¹²
They find, for example, that associations between particular bacteria and fruit flies influence fruit fly mating choice, thus shaping the road to the development of a new species.
¹³
To add the importance of development, Gilbert and his colleagues use the term “symbiopoiesis,” the codevelopment of the holobiont. The term contrasts their findings with an earlier focus on life as internally self-organizing systems, self-formed through “autopoiesis.” “More and more,” they write, “symbiosis appears to be the ‘rule,’ not the exception…. Nature may be selecting ‘relationships’ rather than individuals or genomes.”
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