mycophobia
The defining feature of our time is precarity. We live in persistent uncertainty. The present fails to serve as connective tissue between pasts and potential futures. It is jarring because all we’ve been told is the inevitability of progress, of modernity. The economy will always grow; science will always advance; you are better off than your parents. Indeterminacy is felt before it is seen. And so dissonance sprouts between the cracks.
The Mushroom at the End of the World is a book that asks how humans might survive (or even thrive) amidst ruin. It uses the coveted matsutake mushroom to tell this story. Only sprouting up in forests disturbed and deforested by humans, the mushrooms are the fruits of an underground web of fungus associated with certain trees, notably pine. The trees feed the mushrooms, and in return, the mushrooms forage for nutrients, enabling the trees to survive in poor soil. The matsutake, prized in Japanese cuisine, has resisted domestication because it requires dynamic, diverse relationships with other species, which, in scientific terms, are called mycorrhizal.
It is an unintentional thing. It is a thing inherently reliant on others. And it is a thing that grows out of debris, out of mess, out of precarity.
Author Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing puts forth many definitions of precarity, but here are two:
Life without the ability to plan.
The condition of being vulnerable to/reliant on others.
Mycorrhizal fungi are, in a way, opposite to monocrops. Plantations in the New World were built by eradicating / exterminating local people, preparing the abandoned land, and importing labor to harvest a single cash crop. Sugarcane, for example, has simple needs; all plants were clones, and it had few to no interspecies relations. “As plants go,” Tsing says, “it was comparatively self-contained, oblivious to encounter.” Like the imported crops, enslaved labor from Africa, with no local social ties, was isolated and thus more easily controlled. Each component of the supply chain was self-contained, interchangeable, alienated. The process itself was scientific, regulated, perfected, and importantly, scalable. The plantation is a place of extreme intentions; it is a planned place. Monoculture is the antithesis of diversity and polyphony.
All the moving parts of the fast-paced capitalist world must be anonymous. Idiosyncrasies must be sanded down so we can fit like puzzle pieces. And when we are alienated, when everything must stand alone, the production of the monocrop is all that matters. “[E]verything else becomes weed or waste.” The system’s alienating effects trickle down: reliance on and vulnerability to others can only be a weakness. The plantation leaves behind social estrangement, shallow roots, and unsustainable consumption. Because when that monocrop inevitably fails (no more timber, no more oil), the landscape is abandoned. It becomes ruin, vacant… but only to the inattentive…
“In a global state of precarity, we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin.”
What makes the matsutake so resilient is its ability to make do with what it has. In that way, precarity makes us perceptive and resourceful. It makes us more willing to use all our senses, accept help from humans and non-humans alike, and tolerate and even appreciate difference. While the capitalist plantation obsesses over purity, the dwellers of the mushroom woods are contaminated and happily so. To the former, neighbors are competitors or outright enemies. To the latter, neighbors are the very condition necessary for life.
I am not fetishizing precarity. I hope for stability and prosperity for all. But that does not mean that I cannot prepare for any struggle and suffering on the horizon. For if capitalism reaches its terminus and goes out with a bang, something will sprout out of the ashes. And the very first life to emerge from the blasted wasteland of Hiroshima in 1945 was nothing other than the matsutake mushroom.