The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (24 page)

Pines have made alliances with animals as well as fungi. Some pines are completely dependent on birds to spread their seeds—just as some birds are completely dependent on pine seeds for their food. Across the northern hemisphere, jays, crows, magpies, and nutcrackers have a close association with pines. Sometimes the relationship is specific: the seeds of high-altitude whitebark pines are the key food of Clark’s Nutcrackers; in turn, the uneaten seed caches of the nutcrackers are the only way the pines spread their seeds.
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Caches of small mammals such as chipmunks and squirrels also play an important role in spreading pine seeds, even for those pines whose seeds are also spread by wind.
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But no mammal has spread pine seeds more widely than human beings.

Humans spread pines in two different ways: by planting them, and by creating the kinds of disturbances in which they take hold. The latter generally occurs without any conscious intent; pines like some of the kinds of messes humans make without trying. Pines colonize abandoned fields and eroded hillsides. When humans cut down the other trees, pines move in. Sometimes planting and disturbance go together.
People plant pines to remediate the disturbances they have created. Alternatively, they may keep things radically disturbed to advantage pine. This last alternative has been the strategy of industrial growers, whether they plant or merely manage self-seeded pine: clear-cutting and soil breaking are justified as strategies to promote pine.

In some of its most extreme environments, pine wants not just any fungal partner, but matsutake. Matsutake secretes strong acids that break down rock and sand, releasing nutrients for the mutual growth of pine and fungus.
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In the harsh landscapes where matsutake and pine grow together, there are often few other fungi to be found. Besides, matsutake forms a dense mat of fungal filaments, excluding other fungi and many soil bacteria. Japanese farmers and, following them, scientists call this mat
shiro
, a “castle,” and thinking of matsutake’s castle allows us to imagine its wards and guards.
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Its defense is also offense. The mat is water-repellent, allowing the fungus to concentrate the acids it needs to break down rock.
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Together turning rock into food, matsutake-pine alliances stake out places with little organic soil.

Yet in the ordinary course of events, organic soil piles up over time, through the growth and death of plant and animal life. Dead organisms rot, becoming organic soil, which in turn becomes the ground for new life. In places without organic soil, this cycle of life and death has been broken by some contingent action; such action signals irreversible time, that is, history. By colonizing disturbed landscapes, matsutake and pine make history together—and they show us how history-making extends beyond what humans do. At the same time, humans create a great deal of forest disturbance. Matsutake, pines, and humans together shape the trajectories of these landscapes.

Two kinds of human-disturbed landscapes produce most of the matsutake that enters world trade. First, there are industrial pines—and some other conifers—in wood-producing forests. Second, there are peasant landscapes, where farmers have cut back broadleaf trees, sometimes denuding hillsides completely, advantaging pine. In peasant forests, pine often grows together with oak and oak relatives, and these are matsutake hosts in some places. This chapter goes on to tell of an industrial forest, where pine grows without other trees; here histories in the making involve all the apparatus of capitalist wood production, not only property but also the booms and busts of the logging industry, and of labor, as well as the
state apparatus of regulation, including fire suppression. The next chapter moves to interactions between pines and oaks in peasant forests. Together, they show histories made in concert by humans, plants, and fungi.

Humans and pines (with their mycorrhizal allies) have about the same length of history in Finland: as soon as the glaciers retreated, some nine thousand years ago, both humans and pines started coming.
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From a human point of view, that was a long time ago, hardly worth remembering. Thinking in terms of forests, however, the time line from the end of the Ice Age is still short. In this clash of perspectives, we see the contradictions of forest management: Finnish foresters have come to relate to forests as stable, cyclical, and renewable, yet the forests are open-ended and historically dynamic.

Birch was the first tree to arrive after the glaciers; but pine was close behind. Pine—with its fungi—knew how to handle the piles of rock and sand the glaciers left behind. Only one pine came, Scots pine,
Pinus sylvestris
, with short, bristly needles and red-brown bark. Behind birch and pine straggled other broadleafs, but most never made it to the far north. Finally, Norway spruce arrived, the latecomer. For those of us used to temperate or tropical forests, this is a very small number of trees. In Lapland, among forest-forming trees, there is one pine, one spruce, and two kinds of birch.
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That’s all. It’s from the perspective of this small species count that the time of the glaciers seems so near. Other trees have not yet arrived. The forest might seem predestined for an industrial monocrop: Many stands were just one kind before they were managed.

Yet people in Finland have not always valued the sameness of the forest. Through the beginning of the twentieth century, swidden (fire-based shifting cultivation) was a common practice; through it farmers converted forests into ashes for their crops.
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Swidden created pastures and uneven-aged broadleaf copses; it stimulated forest heterogeneity. This uneven peasant forest was one of the admired forms of nature-loving nineteenth-century artists.
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Meanwhile, masses of pines had been cut to produce tar for a maritime capitalism that sourced its products from all over the world.
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The story of a micromanaged Finnish for
estry begins not with the long-durée of forest form but with the anxieties of an emerging crop of nineteenth-century experts. A German forester’s 1858 report is downright belligerent:

The destruction of forests, in which the Finns have become adept, is furthered by the careless and uncontrolled grazing of cattle, swidden practices, and destructive forest fires. In other words, these three means are used for the same main aim, namely the destruction of the forests.
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… The Finns live in and from the forest, but out of stupidity and greed—like the old woman in the fairy tale—they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
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In 1866, a comprehensive forestry law was passed, and forest management began.
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It was not until after World War II, however, that Finland became a vast terrain of modern silviculture. Two developments turned all attention to timber. First, more than four hundred thousand Karelians came over the border from the Soviet Union after Finland ceded Karelia after the war. They needed houses and amenities, and the government built roads and opened up the forests to settle them. The roads made logging possible in new areas. Second, Finland agreed to pay U.S.$300 million to the Soviet Union in reparations for the war. Timber seemed just the way to raise the money—and jump-start Finland’s postwar economy.
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Big companies got involved in managing timberlands. But most of Finland’s forests continue to be owned by small holders, and the commitment of the populace to timber as the quintessential Finnish product has helped make scientific forestry a national cause. Forestry associations came to be ruled by national standards.
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Those standards enshrined the forest as a constant cycle of renewable timber—a static and ever-sustainable resource. History making would be for humans, alone.

But how does one stop a forest in its tracks? Consider the pines. As fungi mobilize more nutrients and organic matter accumulates, the northern soils compact and sometimes become waterlogged. Spruce are likely to come in under pine, and as the pines die, succeed them. Forest management has determined to stop this process. First, there is clear-cutting, which foresters call even-aged management. In Finland, clear-cutting aims to mimic the effects of forest fires that replaced whole stands of trees every century or so in the boreal forests before humans stopped
them. Pines come back after big fires because they know how to use bright open spaces and bare soils; similarly, pines colonize clear-cuts. Between clear-cuts, there are several rounds of thinning, which weed out other species as well as ensuring an open forest for fast pine growth. Decaying wood advantages spruce seedlings, so dead wood is cleared away. Finally, after the harvest, stumps are removed and the ground is harrowed to break up the soil, advantaging a new generation of pine. Through these techniques, foresters aim to create a cycle of renewal in which only pine participates, even when it isn’t planted.

Such techniques are gaining critics in Finland, as elsewhere. Even pine forests, critics remind us, were not so homogeneous in the past.
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Foresters respond defensively, touting the biodiversity they foster.
Gynomitra
“brain mushrooms,” a popular edible in Finland (although considered poisonous in the United States), pop up in brochure after brochure as an icon of this biodiversity;
Gynomitra
often fruits in the disturbed soil that follows clear-cuts.
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What might matsutake add to this conversation?

The most curious thing about matsutake in northern Finland is its boom-and-bust habit of fruiting. Some years, the ground is covered with matsutake mushrooms. Then, in following years, no matsutake will fruit at all. In 2007, a nature guide in Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle, claims to have personally found one thousand kilograms of matsutake. He heaped it up in great pyramids or left it lying on the ground. The next year, he found nothing, and the following year only one or two caps. This fruiting habit resembles what for trees is called “masting,” in which trees allocate resources for fruiting only sporadically—but then, triggered by long-term cycles and environmental cues, fruit massively and all together across an area.
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Masting refers to more than tracking weather changes from year to year; it requires multiyear strategic planning so that carbohydrates stored up one year might be expended in later fruiting. Furthermore, mast fruiting occurs in trees with mycorrhizal partners; the storage and expenditure necessary for masting appears to be coordinated between trees and their fungi. Fungi store carbohydrates for the future fruiting of trees. Might trees also accommodate the uneven fruiting of fungi? I know of no research that tracks how fungal fruiting is coordinated with tree masting, but there
is an enticing mystery here. Might the boom-and-bust fruiting of matsutake tell us about the historicity of pine forests in northern Finland?

Pines in northern Finland do not produce seed every year. Foresters recognize this as a problem for forest regeneration; it is not always possible to expect clear-cuts to bounce back immediately into forests, despite the fact that when pines do produce seed, they produce a great deal. In northern Sweden, researchers have noted “wavelike” and “episodic” regeneration in pine forests even without fire; seed production histories become forest histories through scarce or abundant seedlings.
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Surely mycorrhizal partners must have a hand in the timing of pine seed production. Fungal fruiting may be one indication of such complex rhythms of coordination, in which pine and fungus share resources for phased, periodic reproduction.

This is a time scale humans can understand. Certainly, we might say, pines have covered new territory since the retreat of the glaciers, but that is too slow to make a difference to us. But the historical patterns of forest regeneration are another matter: We know this kind of time. It does not follow the predictable cycles desired by forest managers. It is evidence of the strain between the eternal, cyclical forests desired by managers, and actually existing historical forests. Irregular fruiting offers a not-so-cyclical rhythm, responding to cross-year environmental differences and multiyear coordination between fungi and trees. To specify these rhythms, we find ourselves speaking in dates, not cycles: 2007 was a good year for matsutake in northern Finland. In the coordination between fungal and host tree fruiting, we might begin to appreciate the history making of the forest, that is, its tracking of irreversible as well as cyclical time. Irregular rhythms produce irregular forests. Patches develop on different trajectories, creating uneven forest landscapes. And while forceful management against irregularity can drive some species to extinction, it can never succeed in transforming trees into creatures without history.