The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

But none of the agents have planned this effect. The design is clear in the landscape’s ecosystem. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. They make each other’s world-making projects possible. …one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. Tsing highlights both the resilience of the matsutake, which humans have found cannot be domesticated, and the entanglements between and co-dependency of different species-or multi-species 'assemblages'-in not only surviving precarious and disturbed environments, but in creating new environments. In the book, Tsing follows foragers as they search for mushrooms, the traders who buy and sell them, and the Japanese consumers who especially prize them, largely as gifts.

The matsutake is considered a delicacy and is a mushroom that thrives in human-disturbed forests, foraged by humans in locales as diverse as Oregon, Yunnan, and Lapland. The Mushroom at the End of the World uses the matsutake as a focal point for exploring what Tsing describes as the end of capitalist progress as ecological degradation and economic precarity proliferate in the twenty-first century. The book describes and analyzes the globalized commodity chains of matsutake mushrooms. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins is a 2015 book by the Chinese American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Tsing notes that it is common to speak of our age as the “Anthropocene,” a time driven by human interactions with the world.Capitalism, Commodity chain, Matsutake, Anthropocene “We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination,” Tsing argues (19). Tsing argues that while many commentators consider how to continue economic precarity without wreaking further ecological devastation, climate change implies that everything is in jeopardy. In Oregon, the answer turns out to be matsutake mushrooms for export to Japanese consumers. She argues that this story should not be considered the end, however, and poses a question: “What emerges in damaged landscapes, beyond the call of industrial promise and ruin?” (18). This story of people reshaping landscapes to create economic booms is the “story we know” (18).

Tsing begins with her own narrative of progress, the early 20th century lumber boom in Oregon. Le Guin, about her desire to look for human futures that will “put a pig on the tracks” rather than depict stolid utopias (17). The chapter epigraph is a quotation from science fiction author Ursula K.

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing