The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (25 page)

Most mushrooms in Finland are picked in privately owned forests. However, many people besides the owners have access to those mushrooms. Pickers are allowed access to private forests under ancient common law,
jokamiehenoikeus
, translated into English as “everyman’s rights.” As long as one does not disturb residents, the forest is open for hiking and picking. Similarly, state forests are open to pickers. This expands the terrain in which foragers get to know mushrooms.

One day, my hosts took me to a forest reserve, where we looked at pines with three-hundred-year-old fire scars. The trees were perhaps five hundred years old. New research suggests that there were many areas in the boreal forest where stand-replacing fires were rare, and old trees flourished. Under the trees, we picked mushrooms and spoke of those that do not flourish with the younger forests of modern timber management. But matsutake is lucky. Japanese researchers suggest that matsutake fruits best—at least in central Japan—with forty- to eighty-year-old pines.
²⁸
There is no reason that Finnish Lapland’s managed pines, planned for hundred-year harvest, would not be thick with matsutake.
²⁹
The fact that in many years they are not is itself a gift: an opening to the temporal irregularity of the histories forests make. Intermittent, spasmodic fruiting reminds us of the precarity of coordination—and the curious conjunctures of collaborative survival.

In the dilemmas generated by modern forestry’s stop-history efforts, conservationists have come to believe that forests need refugia from management. But these refugia will have to be managed if they are to survive. Perhaps one skill for the Zen arts of managed nonmanagement will be to watch pine’s partners rather than pine.

13

Resurgence

O
NE OF THE MOST MIRACULOUS THINGS ABOUT
forests is that they sometimes grow back after they have been destroyed. We might think of this as resilience, or as ecological remediation, and I find these concepts useful. But what if we pushed even further by thinking through resurgence? Resurgence is the force of the life of the forest, its ability to spread its seeds and roots and runners to reclaim places that have been deforested. Glaciers, volcanoes, and fires have been some of the challenges forests have answered with resurgence. Human insults too have been met with resurgence. For several millennia now, human deforestation and forest resurgence have responded to each other. In the contemporary world, we know how to block resurgence. But this hardly seems a good enough reason to stop noticing its possibilities.

Several practical habits are obstructions. First, expectations of progress: the past seems far away. Woodlands, where forests grow with human disturbance, retreat into shadows because the peasants who work them, as so many authors tell us, are figures from archaic times.
¹
It is an embarrassment to bring them up; we’ve moved on to barcoding life and big data. (Yet how could any catalog match the force of the forest?) Thus,
second, we imagine that—in contrast to peasants—modern Man is in control of all his work. Wilderness is the only place where nature remains sovereign; on human-disturbed landscapes, we see only the effects of that modernist caricature Man. We have stopped believing that the life of forest is strong enough to make itself felt around humans. Perhaps the best way to reverse this tide is to reclaim peasant woodlands as a figure for the here and now—not just the past.

For me to reclaim this figure, I had to visit Japan, where satoyama revitalization projects make human disturbance look good in allowing for the continual resurgence of ever-young forest. Satoyama projects reconstitute peasant disturbance to teach modern citizens to live within an active nature. This is not the only kind of forest I want to see on earth, but it is an important kind: a forest within which human household-scale livelihoods thrive. Satoyama revitalization is the subject of
chapter 18
. Here I follow the life of the forest, as this leads into more-than-human sociality, in and beyond Japan. The trail passes through pines and oaks. Where peasant farmers have created enclaves of tentative stability in the domains of states and empires, pines and oaks (in a broad sense) are often companions.
²
Here resurgence follows blasting: The resilience of pine-and-oak woodlands remediates the excesses of human-caused deforestation, regenerating the more-than-human peasant landscape.

Oaks and peasants have long histories in many parts of the world. Oak is useful. Above and beyond its strength as a building material, oak (unlike pine) takes its smooth time in burning; it makes some of the best firewood and charcoal. Better yet, felled oaks (unlike pines) tend not to die; they sprout back from roots and stumps to form new trees. The peasant practice of felling trees in the expectation that they will grow back from their stumps is called “coppicing,” and coppiced oak woodlands are exemplary peasant forests.
³
Coppiced trees are ever young and quick growing even as they live for a long time. They outcompete new seedlings, thus stabilizing the forest’s composition. Since coppice woods are open and bright, they sometimes find room for pines. Pines (with their fungi) colonize denuded spaces, and thus they also take up other parts of the continuum of peasant disturbance. Yet without human disturbance, pine may give way to oak and other broadleaf trees. It is this pine-oak-human interaction that gives the peasant
forest its integrity: As the quick growth of pine on repeatedly human-denuded hillsides yields to long-living stands of coppiced oak, forest ecosystems are regenerated and sustained.

Associations of oak and pine define and anchor peasant forest diversity. The long life of coppiced oaks, together with the quick colonization of empty spaces by pines, creates a tentative stability in which many species thrive, not just humans and their domesticates, but also familiar peasant companions such as rabbits, songbirds, hawks, grasses, berries, ants, frogs, and edible fungi.
⁴
Like the lives in a terrarium, in which one creature produces oxygen so that another may breathe, the diversity of peasant landscapes can be self-sustaining.

Yet history is always at work, both generating the terrarium and undermining it. Might the imagined stability of peasant landscapes follow upon great cataclysms—and the devastation I call “blasted landscapes”—that bring them into existence? Yes, I think. Peasant communities are defined by their subordination within states and empires; it takes power and violence to hold them in place. The multispecies assemblages they form are creatures too of the play of imperial power, with its property forms, its taxes, and its wars. Yet this is no reason to disparage the rhythms that develop around peasant life. Peasant forests tame blasted landscapes to make them sites of multispecies life—and peasant income. Peasant living channels and taps a forest resurgence it cannot fully control. But thus it recuperates larger-scale destructive projects, bringing life to damaged landscapes.

In Japan, one place to begin is not with humans but with the Grey-faced Buzzard (
Butastur indicus
), a lover of satoyama. These buzzards are migratory, mating in Siberia, then coming to Japan for the spring and summer to raise their young before flying off to Southeast Asia. Male buzzards feed nesting females during egg incubation. They sit atop pine trees, surveying the landscape, looking for reptiles, amphibians, and insects. In May, paddy fields are flooded, and the buzzards look for frogs. When grown rice blocks hunting, the buzzards look into the peasant woodlands for insects. One study found that male buzzards are unwilling to
sit on a given tree for more than fourteen minutes if they spot no food.
⁵
The peasant landscape must be laid out as a larder, with frogs and insects appropriately arrayed, for these birds to thrive.

Grey-faced Buzzards have adapted their migration patterns to the Japanese peasant landscape. Meanwhile, all their foods are equally dependent on this disturbance regime. Without maintenance of the irrigation system, the frog population declines.
⁶
And so many insects have evolved just to live with peasant trees!
Konara
oak (
Quercus serrata
) has at least eighty-five specialist butterflies that depend on it as food. One colorful butterfly,
Sasakia charonda
, requires the sap of young oaks—kept young by peasant coppicing; when coppicing is not maintained, the oaks grow old, and the butterfly declines.
⁷

How is it that the ecological relations of peasant forests have come to be the subject of so much research—especially now that Japan’s woodlands have been largely abandoned, as fossil fuels have replaced firewood and as the younger generation has moved to the city? Some researchers are clear: future sustainability is best modeled with the help of nostalgia. At least that was the view of Professor K, an environmental economist in Kyoto.

Professor K told me he had become an economist because he thought he could help poor people. But ten years into a successful career, he realized his research was helping no one. Worse yet, he saw the glazed eyes of his students. He spoke to them and knew it wasn’t just his lectures; his students too had lost touch with questions that mattered. Professor K reconsidered his life trajectory. He remembered his visits as a boy to his grandparents’ village: how alive he felt as he explored the countryside! That landscape sustained people rather than sapping their strength. So he turned his professional work toward restoring Japan’s peasant landscape. He argued and pushed until his university obtained access to an area of abandoned fields and forests, and he took his students there, not just to look but also to study the skills of peasant life. Together, they learned: they re-cleared the irrigation channels, planted rice, opened up the forests, built a kiln to make charcoal, and found their way into taking care of the forest with the eyes and ears of peasants. How enthusiastic his seminars were now!

He showed me the overgrown, abandoned forest that still crowded around their reclaimed fields. There was so much work to do to make a
sustainable peasant forest emerge from the tangled brush.
Moso
bamboo, he explained, had gone wild here. Brought from China some three hundred years ago for the excellence of its bamboo shoots, plantings had always been carefully trimmed around peasant households. But as peasant forests and fields have been neglected, the bamboo has become an aggressive invader, taking over the forest. He showed me how it was suffocating the remaining pines, cloaking them in the deep shade that made them vulnerable to pine wilt. But his students were cutting back bamboo and learning too to make it into charcoal.

The coppiced oaks were also in trouble. We admired the ancient stools that had regrown over and over into trees. But a wilderness of other plants now surrounded them, and since they had not been coppiced for many years, they no longer retained the always-youthful qualities that shaped the architecture of the forest. He and his students, he explained, would have to learn the art of coppice again. Only then, he said, could they attract the plants and animals of the peasant landscape: the birds, shrubs, and flowers that made Japan’s four seasons so fruitful and inspiring. Because of the work they had already done, he said, these life forms were beginning to come back. But all this was an ongoing labor of love. The sustainability of nature, he said, never just falls into place; it must be brought out through that human work that also brings out our humanity. Peasant landscapes, he explained, are the proving grounds for remaking sustainable relations between humans and nature.