The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (29 page)

Given that a major government bureaucracy faces off here with rather powerless forest foragers, it is amazing to me that foresters listen to such complaints at all. Perhaps it is a sign of the newly equivocal Forest Service. In any case, something extraordinary happened during the matsutake season of 2008: one Forest District decided to officially experiment with lodgepole management for matsutake. What this meant was not thinning, even where other Forest Service mandates, such as fire protection, would warrant thinning. At least for a moment, matsutake had entered the Forest Service imagination, and its pact with lodgepole was noticed. To appreciate how strange this is, consider that no other nontimber forest product has attained the status of a management objective, at least in this part of the country. In a bureaucracy that sees only trees, a mushroom companion has made a splash appearance.

Mistakes were made … and mushrooms popped up.

15

Ruin

T
HE MATSUTAKE FORESTS OF
J
APAN AND
O
REGON ARE different in almost every possible way except one: they would probably be converted to more profitable industrial forests if the price of timber were higher. This small convergence is a reminder of structures explored in part 2: the globe-spanning supply chains through which commodities are procured and the state-and-industry pacts through which capitalists gain leverage. Forests are shaped not only in local livelihood practices and state management policies but also by transnational opportunities for the concentration of wealth. Global history is at play—but sometimes with unexpected results.

This chapter asks, how are ruined industrial forests produced separately and in tandem? How do transnational conjunctures make forests? Instead of showing us one overarching frame, conjunctures show us how to follow connections snaking in and out of nations, regions, and local landscapes. These arise from common histories—but also from unexpected convergences and moments of uncanny coordination. Precarity is a globally coordinated phenomenon, and yet it does not follow
unified global force fields. To know the world that progress has left to us, we must track shifting patches of ruination.

To taste the surprising force of unexpected concurrences, I begin off track, with falling timber in Southeast Asia in the last third of the twentieth century. Southeast Asian tropical wood supplied the Japanese construction boom between the 1960s and the 1990s. Deforestation was sponsored by Japanese trading companies and put in place through Southeast Asian military force. Because of these supply-chain arrangements, the wood was incredibly cheap. It depressed the global price of timber—and particularly timber used by Japanese consumers. The tropical forests of Southeast Asia were devastated.
¹
So far, I imagine you are not surprised. But consider the effects on two still-standing forests: the interior pine forests of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, and the sugi “cedar” and hinoki “cypress” forests of central Japan. Both were potential sources of industrial timber for Japan’s development. Both lost their ability to compete. Both fell into neglect. Both are exemplars of ruined industrial forests.
²
Each holds a separate ironic relation to the production of matsutake. Their connected difference invites me to explore global coordination in its multiple forms.

How can we peer into the history of ruination without positing just
one
forest history in which all forests are merely stops along the way? My experiment pulls threads from the contrasting histories of forests in Oregon and central Japan.
³
Since distinctive forests and management are involved, I assume their difference. What calls out for explanation, then, is when they happen to converge. In these moments of unexpected coordination, global connections are at work. But rather than homogenizing forest dynamics, distinctive forests are produced despite the convergences. It is this process of patchy emergence within global connection that a history of convergences can show. Matsutake allows my story to reflect on life in global histories of industrial ruin. In what follows, I pair convergent moments, explaining them in my own words.

Sometimes conjunctures are the result of international “winds,” the term Michael Hathaway uses to describe the force of traveling ideas, terms, models, and project goals that prove charismatic or forceful and thus are
able to reshape human relations to the environment.
⁴
This was the case with the nineteenth-century German forestry I mentioned as having changed Finland’s forests. One characteristic feature of this traveling expertise was categorical opposition to forest burning. This opposition became a keystone of “modern” forest management in many countries.

1929 central Japan
. National law prohibits burning in national forests.
⁵

1933 Oregon
. At the start of America’s New Deal, the Tillamook fire places fire control at the center of public-private forest cooperation. When the fire, starting in a private logging operation, blows up, the Civilian Conservation Corps is called to fight it. Afterwards, state foresters facilitate private “salvage” logging and call for “concerted private and public action.” The U.S. Forest Service begins an ambitious program of fire exclusion—unintentionally changing Oregon’s forests.
⁶

Because its goals were to manage forests for states, modern forestry took hold in relation to peculiarities of state making. Early-twentieth-century Japan and the United States had different state-making styles. Yet in both countries, for different reasons, state foresters were concerned with how to work with private interests. In the United States, corporations were already then more powerful than any state bureaucracy; foresters could only propose rules with which at least some timber barons agreed.
⁷
In Japan, Meiji-era reforms deeded more than half of the forest to small private owners. State standards of forestry were relayed and negotiated with forest owners through forest associations.
⁸
Despite these differences, in both countries, fire exclusion became the connecting point between public and private interests in the forest. Within divergent forest histories, common ground emerged.

A few years after, forest bureaucracies developed governance traction through mobilization for war—with each other. Coordination arose in their mutual opposition.

1939 central Japan
. Municipality-level forest associations are listed with other forms of mobilization for war and become mandatory under the Amended Forest Law.
⁹

1942 Oregon
. A Japanese floatplane launched from a submarine unsuccessfully attempts to start a forest fire in the mountains of southern
Oregon. This small incident begins an intensification of U.S. Forest Service governance in which the campaign against forest fires is pursued with military-like discipline and zeal. In 1944, as fears of Japanese fire bombs over Oregon forests circulate, Smokey Bear becomes a symbol of fire protection as homeland security.
¹⁰

To manufacture industrial forest ruins first requires an apparatus of governance for imposing public-private dreams—to the detriment of ecological processes. In both Japan and the United States, the bureaucracies of modern forestry played this role.

After Japan’s surrender, U.S. occupation tied the countries together, including in their forestry policies. For a few years, their forests could not be imagined separately; convergence derived from a common structure of authority. Postwar U.S. political culture pushed the optimism of growth, public and private, as the route to American-style democracy. In the United States, this meant opening the national forests to private loggers. In Japan, this meant converting natural forests to tree plantations. In each case, policymakers looked forward to a future of expanded business opportunities.

1950 Oregon
. Oregon’s timber production leads the nation at 5,239 million board feet.
¹¹
In one mill complex on the Deschutes River, loggers cut an average of 350,000 board feet of ponderosa pine every day.
¹²

1951 central Japan
. A forest law sponsored by the U.S. occupation expands the business role of forest associations. New activities include the remaking of private persons, as forest associations invest to improve forest owners’ socio-economic position.
¹³
The new entrepreneurial persons promoted by the law can then be groomed to make forest plantations.

This is the period in which forests designed for modern industry were promoted in both places. The new Japan that arose after American occupation was just as devoted to growth as Americans advised, but national interests were to shape growth, including a plan for self-sufficiency in wood. In both Japan and the United States, old forests were cut down and new dreams of industrially rationalized resources took their place.
¹⁴
The past would not rule the future. New forests would be scalable and rationally managed for industry; their production could be calculated, adjusted, and maintained. Still, the timing of such fantasies differed in
each case. In central Japan, planting and intensive management began in the 1950s. Intensive management on private land also took off in Oregon, but in the national forests, the 1950s were devoted to cutting. Great trees were still there for the taking.

1953 central Japan
. Loans and tax advantages are offered for converting forests to sugi and hinoki plantations. Japan will be self-sufficient and meet rising demand for wood. Village loggers remember the call to cut timber. Even during the war they had taken out expensive woods first; now all kinds of trees are cut together. In their place, plantations are established, even on steep slopes.
¹⁵
Both sugi and hinoki are planted densely, with the government recommending 3,500 to 4,500 seedlings per hectare.
¹⁶
Labor is cheap. The trees can be hand-weeded, thinned, pruned, and harvested later. The government subsidizes half the cost and agrees to tax just one fifth of the income.
¹⁷

1953 Oregon
.
Newsweek
writes, “The sweetest smell to the Oregonian is that of sawdust. Roughly 65 cents of every dollar in incomes derives from wood and wood products.”
¹⁸

Reminders occasionally popped up of other ways of making forests. Another convergence: in both regions, the value of forest land to elites owed a debt to earlier residents—and to the violence of the state. Earlier forms of forest management had
made
the forests that states and corporations now claimed.

1954 Oregon
. The U.S. federal government grabs the Klamath Reservation for the national forest system.

1954 central Japan
. The newly organized Japanese Self-Defense Forces take over village forests on Mt. Fuji’s north slope as practice grounds. But these forests are the common-access satoyama woodlands of eleven villages. Villagers say military practice disrupts the ecosystem and damages the trees. In the mid-1980s, perhaps even as the Klamath Tribes are being reinstated, villagers win a lawsuit for compensation to their commons.
¹⁹

Optimism over industrial forestry did not last long. In Japan, the problem began as early as the 1960s, when enthusiasm over tree plantations ended. Wood imports had begun. Between the end of the war and 1960, the Japanese government had prohibited the importation of timber
to save foreign currency in order to buy oil, which was imagined as a strategic resource. But by 1960, oil had become cheap, and the construction industry had pressured the government to open the gates to foreign wood. The first breath of coming domestic difficulties came with a new disparity between the prices of sugi and hinoki, which until the 1960s had been similar. In 1965, the entry of U.S. Pacific Northwest timber into the Japanese market changed this. Hemlock, Douglas fir, and pine competed with sugi, a softwood, but not hinoki, which could be reserved for finer uses.
²⁰
In addition, the wage rate for forest workers rose, thus discouraging forest maintenance.
²¹
By 1969, Japan’s measure of self-sufficiency in timber had fallen for the first time to less than 50 percent.
²²