The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (30 page)

The 1960s were, in contrast, a time of optimism in Oregon—in part because of the Japanese market for Oregon’s wood. Here is how historian William Robbins described that period: “When I arrived in Oregon in the early 1960s, loggers cut trees to water’s edge, ‘cat skinners’ drove bulldozers through streambeds, and some of the largest timberland owners were indifferent to reforesting cutover land. Willamette Valley farmers plowed from fence row to riverbank, removed hedgerows, and drained sloughs to create ever larger fields, all in the interest of economies of scale.”
²³
Expansion still seemed to answer all problems.

Robbins’s description prefigured the concerns of the next decade: By the 1970s, environmental activists were complaining about Pacific Northwest forests. In 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act required environmental impact statements. Voices were raised against herbicide spraying of forests, which had been linked to miscarriages. Critics opposed clear-cutting. Public forest managers were pressed to attend to environmental goals. So, too, in Japan: in 1973, new national policy called for environmental goals in national forests.

But perhaps the most important events of the 1970s for both forests were happening elsewhere. In the 1960s, Philippine wood imports to Japan had increased, but easily logged Philippine wood was already running out. In 1967, Indonesia passed a new forest law that assigned all forests to the state, which then used timber to court foreign investment. In the 1970s and 1980s, logs for Japan came flooding out of Indonesia, and later out of other parts of Asia.
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Domestic industrial timber competed with easy pickings elsewhere. By 1980, the prices of Japanese do
mestic wood had fallen so low that almost no one could afford to harvest trees. Although intensive management was still strongly promoted in Oregon, the end was coming. By the 1990s, the timber companies had left, the Forest Service was broke, and the dream of intensive public management was in ruin.

I wrote of Oregonian ruin in the previous chapter. What of Japanese forests? As mentioned above, sugi and hinoki were planted densely on steep slopes, with the expectation of manual weeding, thinning, and pruning, followed by manual harvesting. The fact that everyone’s trees were the same age did not help prices. It became too expensive to weed, thin, and prune, and even too expensive to harvest these forests. Crowding led to pests and diseases; the timber became less and less saleable.

Many Japanese came to dislike these forests. The pollen of sugi drifted over the countryside in clouds, causing allergies and stopping some families from leaving the city for fear of affecting their children. Hikers avoided these dark and monotonous places. The young plantings had encouraged herbaceous weeds, which in turn had encouraged a spike in the deer population; as the trees grew up and shaded out undergrowth, the deer had nothing to eat and became pests in villages and towns. The quest for controlled abundance that once had foreigners calling Japan “the green archipelago” had led to ruined forests.
²⁵

As Mitsuo Fujiwara put it: “[M]ost forests will remain uncut and will progress from middle to old age because forest owners have lost interest in silviculture…. If forests are simply left to age without being tended, they will not produce good-quality timber, nor will they perform the environmental function expected of well-maintained, mature forests.”
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The effect of industrial ruins on living things depends on which living things we follow. For some insects and parasites, ruined industrial forests proved a bonanza. For other species, the rationalization of the forest itself—before ruination—proved disastrous. Somewhere between these extremes lie the world-building proclivities of matsutake.

The decline in matsutake in Japan resulted from the loss of actively maintained village woodlands since the 1950s, particularly owing to their conversion to sugi and hinoki plantations. After the 1970s, it was
too expensive for owners to maintain them; the making of new plantations stopped. That there are significant patches of pine and broadleaf forest left at all, then, derives from this change in prices and resulting forestry practices. If there is still matsutake forest, it is because not all that forest was felled to make way for sugi and hinoki. In this sense, the matsutake forest is in debt to the violent deforestation of Southeast Asia—at least if one takes for granted Japan’s inflamed pursuit of plantations beforehand. Although matsutake do not grow in Japan’s ruined plantations, they grow because of their ruin, which saved other forests from conversion.

This is the spot of common ground with Oregon forests where matsutake flourish. At the height of the postwar logging boom in Oregon, in the 1960s and 1970s, the most important market for Oregon’s timber was Japan. But emerging Southeast Asian wood was so cheap that Oregon eventually could not compete. It was this problem as much as the more-heralded rise of environmental lawsuits that drove the timber companies out of Oregon. With prices low, the companies wanted cheaper wood, and they saw it first in the regrowing pines of the U.S. South and then, with the continuing mobility of capital, in supply-chain timber around the world, wherever local strongmen make deforestation cheap. With the departure of the timber companies, the Forest Service lost both goals and resources. Intensive management for timber was no longer either necessary or possible. Replanting with superior stock, systematic thinning and selection, spraying poisons to kill insects and weeds: none of these were worth discussing. Had such programs been put into place, matsutake would have suffered. Intensively managed plantations have not suited matsutake. Besides, foragers might not have been welcome among expensive timber; certainly, no one would have devised management plans to suit them. Oregon’s matsutake forests, then, also owe their flourishing to the low price of global timber. Matsutake forests in Oregon and central Japan are joined in their common dependence on the making of industrial forest ruin.

Perhaps you imagine that I am trying to dress up this ruin or to make lemonade from lemons. Not at all. What engages me is the wholesale, interconnected, and seemingly unstoppable ruination of forests across the world such that even the most geographically, biologically, and culturally disparate forests are still linked in a chain of destruction.
It is not just forests that disappear that are affected, as in Southeast Asia, but also the forests that manage to remain standing. If all our forests are buffeted by such winds of destruction, whether capitalists find them desirable or throw them aside, we have the challenge of living in that ruin, ugly and impossible as it is.

And yet heterogeneity remains important; it is impossible to explain the situation through the actions of a single hammer striking every nail with the same stroke. The difference between disappearing forests, forests plagued by overcrowding and pests, and forests left to grow when conversions to plantations prove uneconomic, matters. Intersecting historical processes produced forest ruins in Oregon and Japan, but it would be preposterous to argue that forest-making forces and reactions are therefore everywhere the same. The singularity of interspecies gatherings matters; that’s why the world remains ecologically heterogeneous despite globe-spanning powers. The intricacies of global coordination also matter; not all connections have the same effects. To write a history of ruin, we need to follow broken bits of many stories and to move in and out of many patches. In the play of global power, indeterminate encounters are still important.

… in Gaps and Patches

16

Science as Translation

A
S WITH CAPITALISM, IT IS USEFUL TO CONSIDER
science a translation machine. It is machinic because a phalanx of teachers, technicians, and peer reviewers stands ready to chop off excess parts and to hammer those that remain into their proper places. It is translational because its insights are drawn from diverse ways of life. Most scholars have studied the translational features of science only as they contribute to the machinic ones.
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Translation helps them watch the elements of science come together into a unified system of knowledge and practice. There has been less attention to the messy process of translation as jarring juxtaposition and miscommunication. In part this is because science studies has only too rarely been willing to stray outside of that imagined entity, the West. Science studies needs postcolonial theory to extend itself beyond the common sense of this self-imposed box. In postcolonial theory, translation shows us misfits as well as joins.
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Thus Shiho Satsuka watches
nature
emerge in just this kind of mixed-up, unresolved translation. In transnational practices for interpreting nature, she shows, shared training can go hand and hand with the eruption of difference.
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Translation in this sense creates patches of incoherence and incompatibility in science. To the extent that there are separate bodies of research, review, and reading, such patches may persist despite crosscutting forms of training and communication. These patches are neither closed nor isolated; they shift with new materials.
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Their distinctiveness is not prior logic but an effect of the convergence. Watching them returns me to the open-ended gatherings I am calling assemblages. Here layered, inconsistent, and jumbled ontologies form even within the domain of the machine. Matsutake science and forestry are vivid examples; this chapter explores messy translation and the formation of knowledge patches through it.

To begin with, if science is an international enterprise, why might there be
national
matsutake sciences? The answer requires attention to the infrastructure of science, which segregates even as it draws together. Matsutake science is national to the extent that it is tied to state-sponsored forestry institutes. Forestry emerged as a science of state governance and continues a close relationship. Even in its cosmopolitan reach, forestry is national. Already, we are on the road to divergent assemblages. But the situation is even more peculiar. Why has established research had so little influence across national borders? Why are the gaps so great, despite common training, international conferences, and public-domain publication? The answers here begin with the exclusion of Japan from North American and European common sense. Matsutake science and forestry are well established in Japan. Everywhere else, they are new, emerging with the commercialization of matsutake. One might expect that Japanese matsutake science would be the mother tradition that inspires new science elsewhere. Except in Korea, this is not the case.
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Scientists in matsutake-exporting countries are busy inventing their own matsutake sciences. This is not the universal science we are taught to expect. Following its uneven development shows us science as postcolonial translation.

Alternative performances of “nature” are at stake. Consider their different takes on human disturbance. Drawing from satoyama research, Japanese scientists argue that matsutake forests are threatened by too little human disturbance. Abandoned village forests shade out pines, losing matsutake. In contrast, in the United States, scientists argue that matsutake forests are threatened by too much human disturbance.
Reckless harvesting kills off species. This is not a debate: despite the fact that both groups of scientists circulate internationally, there has been almost no communication about these positions. Furthermore, scientists in Japan and in the United States tend to use contrasting investigative strategies—particularly on issues of site selection and scale. This removes the possibility of direct comparisons across their respective results. In this process, segregated patches of knowledge and research practice are formed.