The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (23 page)

Since it is already infused with attention to perspective, I am unapologetic about my use of the term “disturbance” to refer to the distinctive ways the concept is used in varied places. I learned this layered usage from Japanese forest managers and scientists, who constantly stretch European and American conventions, even as they use them. Disturbance is a good tool with which to begin the inconsistent layering of global-and-local, expert-and-vernacular knowledge layers I have promised.

Disturbance brings us into heterogeneity, a key lens for landscapes. Disturbance creates patches, each shaped by diverse conjunctures. Conjunctures may be initiated by nonliving disturbance (e.g., floods and fires) or by living creatures’ disturbances. As organisms make intergenerational living spaces, they redesign the environment. Ecologists call the effects that organisms create on their environments “ecosystems engineering.”
¹⁸
A tree holds boulders in its roots that otherwise might be swept away by a stream; an earthworm enriches the soil. Each of these
is an example of ecosystems engineering. If we look at the interactions across many acts of ecosystems engineering, patterns emerge, organizing assemblages: unintentional design. This is the sum of the biotic and abiotic ecosystems engineering—intended and unintended; beneficial, harmful, and of no account—within a patch.

Species are not always the right units for telling the life of the forest. The term “multispecies” is only a stand-in for moving beyond human exceptionalism. Sometimes individual organisms make drastic interventions. And sometimes much larger units are more able to show us historical action. This is the case, I find, for oaks and pines as well as matsutake. Oaks, which interbreed readily and with fertile results across species lines, confuse our dedication to species. But of course what units one uses depends on the story one wants to tell. To tell the story of matsutake forests forming and dissolving across continental shifts and glaciation events, I need “pines” as a protagonist—in all their marvelous diversity.
Pinus
is the most common matsutake host. When it comes to oaks, I stretch even farther, embracing
Lithocarpus
(tanoaks) and
Castanopsis
(chinquapin) as well as
Quercus
(oaks). These closely related genera are the most common broadleaf hosts for matsutake. My oaks, pines, and matsutake are thus not identical within their group; they spread and transform their storylines, like humans, in diaspora.
¹⁹
This helps me see action in the story of assemblage. I follow their spread, noticing the worlds they make. Rather than forming an assemblage because they are a certain “type,” my oaks, pines, and matsutake become themselves in assemblage.
²⁰

Traveling with this in mind, I investigated matsutake forests in four places: central Japan, Oregon (U.S.A.), Yunnan (southwest China), and Lapland (northern Finland). My small immersion in satoyama restoration helped me see that foresters in each place had different ways of “doing” forests. In contrast to satoyama, humans were
not
part of forest assemblages in matsutake management in the United States and China; managers there leaped to anxieties about too much human disturbance, not too little. In contrast, too, to satoyama work, forestry elsewhere was measured on a yardstick of rational advancement: could the forest make
futures of scientific and industrial productivity? In distinction, a Japanese satoyama aims for a livable here and now.
²¹

But, more than comparison, I seek histories through which humans, matsutake, and pine create forests. I work the conjunctures to raise unanswered research questions rather than to create boxes. I look for the same forest in different guises. Each appears through the shadows of the others. Exploring this simultaneously single and multiple formation, the next four chapters take me into pines. Each illustrates how ways of life develop through coordination in disturbance. As ways of life come together, patch-based assemblages are formed. Assemblages, I show, are scenes for considering livability—the possibility of common life on a human-disturbed earth.

Precarious living is always an adventure.

Coming Up among Pines …

12

History

I
T WAS
S
EPTEMBER WHEN
I
FIRST SAW THE PINE
forests of northern Finland. I rode the night train from Helsinki, past the Arctic Circle with its signs for Santa Claus’s home, through smaller and smaller birches, until I found myself surrounded by pines. I was surprised. I had thought of natural forests as packed with tall and tiny trees, all jumbled together, of many species and ages. Here all the trees were just the same: one species, one age, neat and evenly spaced. Even the ground was clean and clear without a snag or a piece of downed wood. It looked exactly like an industrial tree plantation. “Ah,” I thought, “How the lines have blurred.” This was modern discipline, both natural and artificial. And there was contrast: I was near the border with Russia, and people told me that across the border the forest was a mess. I asked what a mess looked like, and they told me the trees were uneven and the ground full of dead wood; no one cleared it up. This Finnish forest was clean. Even lichen was cropped close by the reindeer. On the Russian side, people said, great balls of lichen grew as high as your knees.

The lines have blurred. A natural forest in northern Finland looks a lot like an industrial tree plantation. The trees have become a modern
resource, and the way to manage a resource is to stop its autonomous historical action. As long as trees make history, they threaten industrial governance. Cleaning the forest is part of the work of stopping this history. But since when do trees make history?

“History” is both a human storytelling practice and that set of remainders from the past that we turn into stories. Conventionally, historians look only at human remainders, such as archives and diaries, but there is no reason not to spread our attention to the tracks and traces of nonhumans, as these contribute to our common landscapes. Such tracks and traces speak to cross-species entanglements in contingency and conjuncture, the components of “historical” time. To participate in such entanglement, one does not have to make history in just one way.
¹
Whether or not other organisms “tell stories,” they contribute to the overlapping tracks and traces that we grasp as history.
²
History, then, is the record of many trajectories of world making, human and not human.

Yet modern forestry has been based on the reduction of trees—and particularly pines—to self-contained, equivalent, and unchanging objects.
³
Modern forestry manages pines as a potentially constant and unchanging resource, the source of sustainable yields of timber. Its goal is to remove pines from their indeterminate encounters, and thus their ability to make history. With modern forestry, we forget that trees are historical actors. How might we remove the blinders of modern resource management to regain a feel for the dynamism so central to the life of the forest?

In what follows, I offer two strategies. First, I delve into the abilities of pines, across many times and places, to change the scene with their presence and transform the trajectories of others—that is, to make history. In this, my guide is a book, the kind of heavy tome that when it slips off your bicycle on a turn makes a great clatter and smash, stopping traffic. That book is David Richardson’s edited volume,
Ecology and Biogeography of Pinus
.
⁴
Despite its heft and reserved title, it is an adventure story. Richardson’s authors animate the variety and agility of
Pinus
, making it a lively subject across space and time, a historical subject. This provocation convinced me that all of
Pinus
, rather than a particular kind of pine, would be my subject. Following pines through their challenges is a form of history.

Second, I return to northern Finland to follow pines into interspecies encounters, and thus the assemblages of which they are architects. Industrial forestry comes back, but so too do those aggravations that reduce its success in stopping history. Matsutake helps me with this story, for, without the efforts of foresters, they help pines survive. Pine flourishes only in the encounter. Modern forest management can grasp a moment in pine’s history, but it cannot stop the indeterminacy of encounter-based time.

If you ever wanted to be impressed by the historical force of plants, you might do well to start with pines. Pines are among the most active trees on earth. If you bulldoze a road through a forest, pine seedlings will likely spring up on its raw shoulders. If you abandon a field, pines will be the first trees to colonize it. When a volcano erupts, or a glacier moves back, or the wind and sea pile sand, pines may be among the first to find a foothold. Until people moved things around, pine grew only in the northern hemisphere. People carried pine and grew it in plantations in the global south. But pine jumped over the plantation fence and spread out across the landscape.
⁵
In Australia, pines have become a major fire hazard. In South Africa, they threaten the rare endemics of the fynbos. In open and disturbed landscapes, it’s hard to keep pine down.

Pines need light. In the open they can be aggressive invaders, but they decline in the shade. Furthermore, pines are poor competitors in what are usually considered the best places for plants: places with fertile soil, adequate moisture, and warm temperatures. There, pine seedlings lose out to broadleafs, whose seedlings quickly develop the broad leaves through which we name them, shading out the pines.
⁶
As a result, pines have become specialists in places without those ideal conditions. Pines grow in extreme environments: cold high places; almost-deserts; sand and rock.

Pines also grow with fire. Fire shows off their diversity; there are many and varied pine adaptations to fire. Some pines go through a “grass stage,” spending several years looking like tufts of grass while their root systems grow strong, and only then shooting up like crazy
things until their buds might get above the coming flames. Some pines develop such thick bark and high crowns that everything can burn around them without giving them more than a scar. Other pines burn like matches—but have ways of ensuring that their seeds will be first to sprout on the burned earth. Some store seeds for years in cones that open only in fire: Those seeds will be first to hit the ashes.
⁷

Pines live in extreme environments because of the help they get from mycorrhizal fungi. Fossils have been found from 50 million years ago that show root associations between pines and fungi; pines have evolved with fungi.
⁸
Where no organic soil is available, fungi mobilize nutrients from rocks and sand, making it possible for pines to grow. Besides providing nutrients, mycorrhizas protect pines from harmful metals and other, root-eating, fungi. In return, pines support mycorrhizal fungi. Even the anatomy of pine roots has been formed in association with fungi. Pines put out “short roots,” which become the site of mycorrhizal association. If no fungi encounter them, the short roots abort. (In contrast, fungi do not cover at least the tips of anatomically different “long roots,” specialized for exploration.) By moving across disturbed landscapes, pines make history, but only through their association with mycorrhizal companions.