The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (21 page)

Interspecies relations draw evolution back into history because they depend on the 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 in 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. When British conservationists tried to save the Large Blue butterfly, mentioned above, they could not assume that a mating population could by itself reproduce the species, although, according to the modern synthesis, populations are formed from individuals formed by genes. They could not leave out the ants without which the larvae cannot survive.
¹⁵
Large Blue butterfly populations are thus not a scalable effect of the butterflies’ DNA. They are nonscalable sites of interspecies encounter. This is a problem for the mod
ern synthesis, because population genetics was from the early twentieth century at the core of evolution-without-history. Might population science need to step aside for an emergent multispecies historical ecology? Might the arts of noticing I discuss be at its core?
¹⁶

Reintroducing history into evolutionary thinking has already begun at other biological scales. The cell, once an emblem of replicable units, turns out to be the historical product of symbiosis among free-living bacteria.
¹⁷
Even DNA turns out to have more history in its amino-acid sequences than once thought. Human DNA is part virus; viral encounters mark historical moments in making us human.
¹⁸
Genome research has taken up the challenge of identifying encounter in the making of DNA. Population science cannot avoid history for much longer.
¹⁹

Fungi are ideal guides. Fungi have always been recalcitrant to the iron cage of self-replication. Like bacteria, some are given to exchanging genes in nonreproductive encounters (“horizontal gene transfer”); many also seem averse to keeping their genetic material sorted out as “individuals” and “species,” not to speak of “populations.” When researchers studied the fruiting bodies of what they thought of as a species, the expensive Tibetan “caterpillar fungus,” they found many species entangled together.
²⁰
When they looked into the filaments of
Armillaria
root rot, they found genetic mosaics that confused the identification of an individual.
²¹
Meanwhile, fungi are famous for their symbiotic attachments. Lichen are fungi living together with algae and cyanobacteria. I have been discussing fungal collaborations with plants, but fungi live with animals as well. For example,
Macrotermes
termites digest their food only through the help of fungi. The termites chew up wood, but they cannot digest it. Instead, they build “fungus gardens” in which the chewed-up wood is digested by
Termitomyces
fungi, producing edible nutrients. Researcher Scott Turner points out that, while you might say that the termites farm the fungus, you could equally say that the fungus farms the termites.
Termitomyces
uses the environment of the termite mound to outcompete other fungi; meanwhile, the fungus regulates the mound, keeping it open, by throwing up mushrooms annually, creating a colony-saving disturbance in termite mound-building.
²²

Our metaphorical language (here termite “farming”) sometimes gets in the way and sometimes throws up unexpected insights. One of the most common metaphors in talk of symbiosis is “outsourcing.” You
could say the termites outsource their digestion to fungi, or, alternatively, that the fungi outsource food gathering and niche building to termites. There are lots of things wrong with comparing biological processes to contemporary business arrangements, too many, indeed, to catalogue. But perhaps there is one insight here. As in capitalist supply chains, these chains of engagement are not scalable. Their components cannot be reduced to self-replicating interchangeable objects, whether firms or species. Instead, they require attention to the histories of encounter that maintain the chain. Natural history description, rather than mathematical modeling, is the necessary first step—as in the economy. Radical curiosity beckons. Perhaps an anthropologist, trained in one of the few remaining sciences that values observation and description, might come in handy.

Part III

Disturbed Beginnings: Unintentional Design

W
HEN KATO-SAN INTRODUCED ME TO THE WORK HE
was doing for the prefectural forest-research service to restore the forest, I was shocked. As an American tutored in wilderness sensibilities, I thought forests were best at restoring themselves. Kato-san disagreed: If you want matsutake in Japan, he explained, you must have pine, and if you want pine, you must have human disturbance. He was supervising work to remove broadleaf trees from the hillside he showed me. Even the topsoil had been carted away, and the steep slope now looked gouged and bare to my American eyes. “What about erosion?” I asked. “Erosion is good,” he answered. Now I was really startled. Isn’t erosion, the loss of soil, always bad? Still, I was willing to listen: pine flourishes on mineral soils, and erosion uncovers them.

Working with forest managers in Japan changed how I thought about the role of disturbance in forests. Deliberate disturbance to revitalize forests surprised me. Kato-san was not planting a garden. The forest he hoped for would have to grow itself. But he wanted to help it along by creating a certain kind of mess: a mess that would advantage pine.

Kato-san’s work engages with a popular and scientific cause: restoring
satoyama
woodlands. Satoyama are traditional peasant landscapes,
combining rice agriculture and water management with woodlands. The woodlands—the heart of the satoyama concept—were once disturbed, and thus maintained, through their use for firewood and charcoal-making as well as nontimber forest products. Today, the most valuable product of the satoyama woodland is matsutake. To restore woodlands for matsutake encourages a suite of other living things: pines and oaks, understory herbs, insects, birds. Restoration requires disturbance—but disturbance to enhance diversity and the healthy functioning of ecosystems. Some kinds of ecosystems, advocates argue, flourish with human activities.

Ecological restoration programs around the world use human action to rearrange natural landscapes. What distinguishes satoyama revitalization, for me, is the idea that human activities should be part of the forest in the same way as nonhuman activities. Humans, pines, matsutake, and other species should all make the landscape together, in this project. One Japanese scientist explained matsutake as the result of “unintentional cultivation,” because human disturbance makes the presence of matsutake more likely—despite the fact that humans are entirely incapable of cultivating the mushroom. Indeed, one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of
unintentional design
, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. The design is clear in the landscape’s ecosystem. But none of the agents have planned this effect. Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design.

As sites for more-than-human dramas, landscapes are radical tools for decentering human hubris. Landscapes are not backdrops for historical action: they are themselves active. Watching landscapes in formation shows humans joining other living beings in shaping worlds. Matsutake and pine don’t just grow in forests; they make forests. Matsutake forests are gatherings that build and transform landscapes. This part of the book begins with disturbance—and I make disturbance a beginning, that is, an opening for action. Disturbance realigns possibilities for transformative encounter. Landscape patches emerge from disturbance. Thus precarity is enacted in more-than-human sociality.

11

The Life of the Forest

T
O WALK ATTENTIVELY THROUGH A FOREST, EVEN A
damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into the light. But how does one tell the life of the forest? We might begin by looking for drama and adventure beyond the activities of humans. Yet we are not used to reading stories without human heroes. This is the puzzle that informs this section of the book. Can I show landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant?

Over the past few decades, many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias; it is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization.
¹
There are other ways of making worlds. Anthropologists have become interested, for example, in how subsistence hunters recognize other living beings as “persons,” that is, protagonists of stories.
²
Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Yet expectations of progress block this insight: talking animals are for children and primitives. Their voices silent, we imagine well-being without them. We trample over them for our advancement; we forget that collaborative survival requires
cross-species coordinations. To enlarge what is possible, we need other kinds of stories—including adventures of landscapes.
³

One place to begin is a nematode—and a thesis on livability.

“Call me
Bursaphelenchus xylophilus
.
I
’m a tiny, wormlike creature, a nematode, and I spend most of my time crunching the insides of pine trees. But my kin are as well-traveled as any whaler sailing the seven seas. Stick with me, and I’ll tell you about some curious voyages.”

But wait: who would want to hear about the world from a worm? That was, in effect, the question addressed by Jakob von Uexküll in 1934, when he described the world experienced by a tick.
⁴
Working with the tick’s sensory abilities, such as its ability to detect the heat of a mammal, and thus a potential blood meal, Uexküll showed that a tick knows and makes worlds. His approach brought landscapes to life as scenes of sensuous activity; creatures were not to be treated as inert objects but as knowing subjects.

And yet: Uexküll’s idea of affordances limited his tick to the bubblelike world of its few senses. Caught in a small frame of space and time, it was not a participant in the wider rhythms and histories of the landscape.
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This is not enough—as the voyages of
Bursaphelenchus xylophilus
, the pine wilt nematode, attest. Consider one of the most colorful: