The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (22 page)

Pine wilt nematodes are unable to move from tree to tree without the help of pine sawyer beetles, who carry them without benefit to themselves. At a particular stage in a nematode’s life, it may take advantage of a beetle’s journey to hop on as a stowaway. But this is not a casual transaction. Nematodes must approach beetles in a particular stage of the beetles’ life cycle, just as they are about to emerge from their piney cavities to move to a new tree. The nematodes ride in the beetles’ tracheae. When the beetles move to a new tree to lay their eggs, the nematodes slip into the new tree’s wound. This is an extraordinary feat of coordination, in which nematodes tap into beetles’ life rhythms.
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To immerse oneself in such webs of coordination, Uexküll’s bubble worlds are not enough.

Despite this sojourn with a nematode, I have not abandoned matsutake. A major reason for the current rarity of matsutake in Japan is the demise of pines that results from the habits of pine wilt nematodes. Just as whalers catch whales, pine wilt nematodes catch pines and kill
them and their fungal companions. Still, nematodes were not always involved in this way of making a living. Just as for whalers and whales, nematodes become killers of pines only through the contingencies of circumstance and history. Their voyage into Japanese history is as extraordinary as the webs of coordination they weave.

Pine wilt nematodes are only minor pests for American pines, which evolved with them. These nematodes became tree killers only when they traveled to Asia, where pines were unprepared and vulnerable. Amazingly, ecologists have traced this process rather precisely. The first nematodes disembarked at Japan’s Nagasaki harbor from the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, riding in American pine.
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Timber was a resource for industrializing Japan, where elites were hungry for resources from around the world. Many uninvited guests arrived with those resources, including the pine wilt nematode. Soon after its arrival, it traveled with local pine sawyer beetles; its moves can be traced concentrically out from Nagasaki. Together, the local beetle and the foreign nematode changed Japan’s forest landscapes.

Still, an infected pine might not die if it is living in good conditions, and this indeterminate threat thus holds matsutake, implicated as collateral damage, in suspense. Pines stressed by forest crowding, lack of light, and too much soil enrichment are easy prey to nematodes. Evergreen broadleaf trees crowd and shade Japanese pine. Blue-stain fungus sometimes grows in pine’s wounds, feeding the nematodes.
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The warmer temperatures of anthropogenic climate change help the nematodes to spread.
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Many histories come together here; they draw us beyond bubble worlds into shifting cascades of collaboration and complexity. The livelihoods of the nematode—and the pine it attacks and the fungus that tries to save it—are honed within unstable assemblages as opportunities arise and old talents gain new purchase. Japan’s matsutake enters the fray of all this history: its fate depends on the enhancement or debilitation of the Uexküllian agilities of pine wilt nematodes.

Tracking matsutake through the journeys of nematodes allows me to return to my questions about telling the adventures of landscapes, this time with a thesis. First, rather than limit our analyses to one creature at a time (including humans), or even one relationship, if we want to know what makes places livable we should be studying polyphonic assemblages, gatherings of ways of being. Assemblages are performances of
livability. Matsutake stories draw us into pine stories and nematode stories; in their moments of coordination with each other they create livable—or killing—situations.

Second, species-specific agilities are honed in the coordinations of assemblages. Uexküll gets us on the right track by noticing how even humble creatures participate in making worlds. To extend his insights, we must follow multispecies attunements in which each organism comes into its own. Matsutake is nothing without the rhythms of the matsutake forest.

Third, coordinations come in and out of existence through the contingencies of historical change. Whether matsutake and pine in Japan can continue to collaborate depends a great deal on other collaborations set in motion by the arrival of pine wilt nematodes.

To put all this together it may be useful to recall the polyphonic music mentioned briefly in
chapter 1
. In contrast to the unified harmonies and rhythms of rock, pop, or classical music, to appreciate polyphony one must listen both to the separate melody lines and their coming together in unexpected moments of harmony or dissonance. In just this way, to appreciate the assemblage, one must attend to its separate ways of being at the same time as watching how they come together in sporadic but consequential coordinations. Furthermore, in contrast to the predictability of a written piece of music that can be repeated over and over, the polyphony of the assemblage shifts as conditions change. This is the listening practice that this section of the book attempts to instill.

By taking landscape-based assemblages as my object, it is possible to attend to the interplay of many organisms’ actions. I am not limited to tracking human relations with their favored allies, as in most animal studies. Organisms don’t have to show their human equivalence (as conscious agents, intentional communicators, or ethical subjects) to count. If we are interested in livability, impermanence, and emergence, we should be watching the action of landscape assemblages. Assemblages coalesce, change, and dissolve: this
is
the story.

The story of landscapes is both easy and hard to tell. Sometimes it relaxes readers into somnolence, making us think we are not learning anything new. This is a result of the unfortunate wall we have built between
concepts and stories. We can see this, for example, in the gap between environmental history and science studies. Science studies scholars, unpracticed in reading concepts through stories, don’t bother with environmental history. Consider, for example, Stephen Pyne’s fine work on fire in the making of landscapes; because his concepts are embedded in his histories, science studies scholars remain uninfluenced by his radical suggestions on geochemical agency.
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Pauline Peters’s trenchant analysis of how the logic of the British enclosure system came to Botswana range management—or Kate Showers’s surprising findings about erosion control in Lesotho—could revolutionize our notions of normal science, but they have not.
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Such refusals impoverish science studies, encouraging the play of concepts in a reified space. Distilling general principles, theorists expect that others will fill in the particulars—but “filling in” is never so simple. This is an intellectual apparatus that shores up the wall between concepts and stories, thus, indeed, draining the significance of the sensitivities science studies scholars try to refine. In what follows, then, I challenge readers to notice concepts and methods within the landscape histories I present.

Telling stories of landscape requires getting to know the inhabitants of the landscape, human and not human. This is not easy, and it makes sense to me to use all the learning practices I can think of, including our combined forms of mindfulness, myths and tales, livelihood practices, archives, scientific reports, and experiments. But this hodgepodge creates suspicions—particularly, indeed, with the allies I hailed in reaching out to anthropologists of alternative world makings. For many cultural anthropologists, science is best regarded as a straw man against which to explore alternatives, such as indigenous practices.
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To mix scientific and vernacular forms of evidence invites accusations of bowing down to science. Yet this assumes a monolithic science that digests all practices into a single agenda. Instead, I offer stories built through layered and disparate practices of knowing and being. If the components clash with each other, this only enlarges what such stories can do.

At the heart of the practices I am advocating are arts of ethnography and natural history. The new alliance I propose is based on commitments
to observation and fieldwork—and what I call noticing.
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Human-disturbed landscapes are ideal spaces for humanist and naturalist noticing. We need to know the histories humans have made in these places
and
the histories of nonhuman participants. Satoyama restoration advocates were exceptional teachers here; they revitalized my understanding of “disturbance” as both coordination and history. They showed me how disturbance might initiate a story of the life of the forest.
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Disturbance is a change in environmental conditions that causes a pronounced change in an ecosystem. Floods and fires are forms of disturbance; humans and other living things can also cause disturbance. Disturbance can renew ecologies as well as destroy them. How terrible a disturbance is depends on many things, including scale. Some disturbances are small: a tree falls in the forest, creating a light gap. Some are huge: a tsunami knocks open a nuclear power plant. Scales of time also matter: short-term damage may be followed by exuberant regrowth. Disturbance opens the terrain for transformative encounters, making new landscape assemblages possible.
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Humanists, not used to thinking with disturbance, connect the term with damage. But disturbance, as used by ecologists, is not always bad—and not always human. Human disturbance is not unique in its ability to stir up ecological relations. Furthermore, as a beginning, disturbance is always in the middle of things: the term does not refer us to a harmonious state before disturbance. Disturbances follow other disturbances. Thus all landscapes are disturbed; disturbance is ordinary. But this does not limit the term. Raising the question of disturbance does not cut off discussion but opens it, allowing us to explore landscape dynamics. Whether a disturbance is bearable or unbearable is a question worked out through what follows it: the reformation of assemblages.

Disturbance emerged as a key concept in ecology at the very same time that scholars in the humanities and social sciences were beginning to worry about instability and change.
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On both sides of the humanist/naturalist line, concerns about instability followed after the post–World War II American enthusiasm for self-regulating systems: a form of stability in the midst of progress. In the 1950s and 1960s, the idea of ecosystem equilibrium seemed promising; through natural succession, ecological formations were thought to reach a comparatively stable balance point. In the 1970s, however, attention turned to disruption and change,
which generate the heterogeneity of the landscape. In the 1970s, too, humanists and social scientists began worrying about the transformative encounters of history, inequality, and conflict. Looking back, such coordinated changes in scholarly fashion might have been early warning of our common slide into precarity.

As an analytic tool, disturbance requires awareness of the observer’s perspective—just as with the best tools in social theory. Deciding what counts as disturbance is always a matter of point of view. From a human’s vantage, the disturbance that destroys an anthill is vastly different from that obliterating a human city. From an ant’s perspective, the stakes are different. Points of view also vary
within
species. Rosalind Shaw has elegantly shown how men and women, urban and rural, and rich and poor each conceptualize “floods” differently in Bangladesh, because they are differentially affected by rising waters; for each group, the rise exceeds what is bearable—and thus becomes a flood—at a different point.
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No single standard for assessing disturbance is possible; disturbance matters in relation to how we live. This means we need to pay attention to the assessments through which we know disturbance. Disturbance is never a matter of “yes” or “no”; disturbance refers to an open-ended range of unsettling phenomena. Where is the line that marks off too much? With disturbance, this is always a problem of perspective, based, in turn, on ways of life.