Prologue Autumn Aroma

Prologue Autumn Aroma

Takamato ridge, crowded with expanding caps, filling up, thriving— the wonder of autumn aroma.

— From the eighth- century Japanese poetry collection Man- nyo Shu

WhAt do you do when your world StArtS to FAll apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mush- rooms pull me back into my senses, not just— like flowers— through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.

Terrors, of course, there are, and not just for me. The world’s climate is going haywire, and industrial progress has proved much more deadly to life on earth than anyone imagined a century ago. The economy is

Elusive life, Oregon. Matsutake caps emerge

in the ruin of an industrial forest.

2 Prologue

no longer a source of growth or optimism; any of our jobs could disap- pear with the next economic crisis. And it’s not just that I might fear a spurt of new disasters: I find myself without the handrails of stories that tell where everyone is going and, also, why. Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all our lives are precarious— even when, for the moment, our pockets are lined. In contrast to the mid- twentieth century, when poets and philosophers of the global north felt caged by too much stability, now many of us, north and south, confront the condition of trouble without end.

This book tells of my travels with mushrooms to explore indetermi- nacy and the conditions of precarity, that is, life without the promise of stability. I’ve read that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thou- sands of Siberians, suddenly deprived of state guarantees, ran to the woods to collect mushrooms.1 These are not the mushrooms I follow, but they make my point: the uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift— and a guide— when the controlled world we thought we had fails.

While I can’t offer you mushrooms, I hope you will follow me to savor the “autumn aroma” praised in the poem that begins my pro- logue. This is the smell of matsutake, a group of aromatic wild mush- rooms much valued in Japan. Matsutake is loved as a marker of the au- tumn season. The smell evokes sadness in the loss of summer’s easy riches, but it also calls up the sharp intensity and heightened sensibili- ties of autumn. Such sensibilities will be needed for the end of global progress’s easy summer: the autumn aroma leads me into common life without guarantees. This book is not a critique of the dreams of mod- ernization and progress that offered a vision of stability in the twentieth century; many analysts before me have dissected those dreams. Instead, I address the imaginative challenge of living without those handrails, which once made us think we knew, collectively, where we were going. If we open ourselves to their fungal attractions, matsutake can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collabora- tive survival in precarious times.

Here’s how a radical pamphlet put the challenge:

The spectre that many try not to see is a simple realisation— the world will not be “saved.” . . . If we don’t believe in a global revolutionary fu- ture, we must live (as we in fact always had to) in the present.2

autumn aroma 3

When Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945, it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a mat- sutake mushroom.3

Grasping the atom was the culmination of human dreams of con- trolling nature. It was also the beginning of those dreams’ undoing. The bomb at Hiroshima changed things. Suddenly, we became aware that humans could destroy the livability of the planet— whether intention- ally or otherwise. This awareness only increased as we learned about pol- lution, mass extinction, and climate change. One half of current precar- ity is the fate of the earth: what kinds of human disturbances can we live with? Despite talk of sustainability, how much chance do we have for passing a habitable environment to our multispecies descendants?

Hiroshima’s bomb also opened the door to the other half of today’s precarity: the surprising contradictions of postwar development. After the war, the promises of modernization, backed by American bombs, seemed bright. Everyone was to benefit. The direction of the future was well known; but is it now? On the one hand, no place in the world is untouched by that global political economy built from the postwar development ap- paratus. On the other, even as the promises of development still beckon, we seem to have lost the means. Modernization was supposed to fill the world— both communist and capitalist— with jobs, and not just any jobs but “standard employment” with stable wages and benefits. Such jobs are now quite rare; most people depend on much more irregular livelihoods. The irony of our times, then, is that everyone depends on capitalism but almost no one has what we used to call a “regular job.”

To live with precarity requires more than railing at those who put us here (although that seems useful too, and I’m not against it). We might look around to notice this strange new world, and we might stretch our imaginations to grasp its contours. This is where mushrooms help. Mat- sutake’s willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes allows us to ex- plore the ruin that has become our collective home.

Matsutake are wild mushrooms that live in human- disturbed forests. Like rats, raccoons, and cockroaches, they are willing to put up with

4 Prologue

some of the environmental messes humans have made. Yet they are not pests; they are valuable gourmet treats— at least in Japan, where high prices sometimes make matsutake the most valuable mushroom on earth. Through their ability to nurture trees, matsutake help forests grow in daunting places. To follow matsutake guides us to possibilities of coexis- tence within environmental disturbance. This is not an excuse for further damage. Still, matsutake show one kind of collaborative survival.

Matsutake also illuminate the cracks in the global political econ- omy. For the past thirty years, matsutake have become a global com- modity, foraged in forests across the northern hemisphere and shipped fresh to Japan. Many matsutake foragers are displaced and disenfran- chised cultural minorities. In the U.S. Pacific Northwest, for example, most commercial matsutake foragers are refugees from Laos and Cam- bodia. Because of high prices, matsutake make a substantial contribu- tion to livelihood wherever they are picked, and even encourage cul- tural revitalizations.

Matsutake commerce, however, hardly leads to twentieth- century development dreams. Most of the mushroom foragers I spoke with have terrible stories to tell of displacement and loss. Commercial foraging is a better than usual way of getting by for those with no other way to make a living. But what kind of economy is this anyway? Mushroom foragers work for themselves; no companies hire them. There are no wages and no benefits; pickers merely sell the mushrooms they find. Some years there are no mushrooms, and pickers are left with their ex- penses. Commercial wild- mushroom picking is an exemplification of precarious livelihood, without security.

This book takes up the story of precarious livelihoods and precari- ous environments through tracking matsutake commerce and ecology. In each case, I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open- ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs. I argue that only an appreciation of current precarity as an earthwide condition allows us to notice this— the situation of our world. As long as authori- tative analysis requires assumptions of growth, experts don’t see the het- erogeneity of space and time, even where it is obvious to ordinary par- ticipants and observers. Yet theories of heterogeneity are still in their

autumn aroma 5

infancy. To appreciate the patchy unpredictability associated with our current condition, we need to reopen our imaginations. The point of this book is to help that process along— with mushrooms.

About commerce: Contemporary commerce works within the con- straints and possibilities of capitalism. Yet, following in the footsteps of Marx, twentieth- century students of capitalism internalized progress to see only one powerful current at a time, ignoring the rest. This book shows how it is possible to study capitalism without this crippling as- sumption— by combining close attention to the world, in all its precar- ity, with questions about how wealth is amassed. How might capitalism look without assuming progress? It might look patchy: the concentration of wealth is possible because value produced in unplanned patches is appro- priated for capital.

About ecology: For humanists, assumptions of progressive human mastery have encouraged a view of nature as a romantic space of anti- modernity.4 Yet for twentieth- century scientists, progress also unself- consciously framed the study of landscapes. Assumptions about expansion slipped into the formulation of population biology. New developments in ecology make it possible to think quite differently by introducing cross- species interactions and disturbance histories. In this time of di- minished expectations, I look for disturbance- based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest.

While I refuse to reduce either economy or ecology to the other, there is one connection between economy and environment that seems important to introduce up front: the history of the human concentra- tion of wealth through making both humans and nonhumans into re- sources for investment. This history has inspired investors to imbue both people and things with alienation, that is, the ability to stand alone, as if the entanglements of living did not matter.5 Through alienation, people and things become mobile assets; they can be removed from their life worlds in distance- defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds, elsewhere.6 This is quite different from merely using others as part of a life world— for example, in eating and being eaten. In that case, multispecies living spaces remain in place. Alienation obviates living- space entanglement. The dream of alienation inspires landscape modification in which only one stand- alone asset matters;

6 Prologue

everything else becomes weeds or waste. Here, attending to living- space entanglements seems inefficient, and perhaps archaic. When its singular asset can no longer be produced, a place can be abandoned. The timber has been cut; the oil has run out; the plantation soil no longer supports crops. The search for assets resumes elsewhere. Thus, simplification for alienation produces ruins, spaces of abandonment for asset production.

Global landscapes today are strewn with this kind of ruin. Still, these places can be lively despite announcements of their death; aban- doned asset fields sometimes yield new multispecies and multicultural life. In a global state of precarity, we don’t have choices other than look- ing for life in this ruin.

Our first step is to bring back curiosity. Unencumbered by the sim- plifications of progress narratives, the knots and pulses of patchiness are there to explore. Matsutake are a place to begin: However much I learn, they take me by surprise.

This is not a book about Japan, but the reader needs to know something about matsutake in Japan to proceed.7 Matsutake first appears in Japan’s written record in the eighth- century poem that starts this prologue. Al- ready then, the mushroom is praised for its aromatic marking of the autumn season. The mushroom became common around Nara and Kyoto, where people had deforested the mountains for wood to build temples and to fuel iron forges. Indeed, human disturbance allowed Tricholoma matsutake to emerge in Japan. This is because its most com- mon host is red pine (Pinus densiflora), which germinates in the sunlight and mineral soils left by human deforestation. When forests in Japan are allowed to grow back, without human disturbance, broadleaf trees shade out pines, preventing their further germination.

As red pine spread with deforestation across Japan, matsutake be- came a valued gift, presented beautifully in a box of ferns. Aristocrats were honored by it. By the Edo period (1603– 1868), well- to- do common- ers, such as urban merchants, also enjoyed matsutake. The mushroom joined the celebration of the four seasons as a marker of autumn. Out- ings to pick matsutake in the fall were an equivalent of cherry- blossom

autumn aroma 7

viewing parties in the spring. Matsutake became a popular subject for poetry.

The sound of a temple bell is heard in the cedar forest at dusk, The autumn aroma drifts on the roads below.

— AkemI TAchIbAnA (1812– 1868)8

As in other Japanese nature poetry, seasonal referents helped build a mood. Matsutake joined older signs of the fall season, such as the sound of deer crying or the harvest moon. The coming bareness of winter touched autumn with an incipient loneliness, at the edge of nostalgia, and the poem above offers that mood. Matsutake was an elite pleasure, a sign of the privilege to live within the artful reconstruction of nature for refined tastes.9 For this reason, when peasants preparing for elite outings sometimes “planted” matsutake (i.e., stuck mushrooms artfully in the ground because naturally occurring matsutake were not avail- able), no one objected. Matsutake had become an element of an ideal seasonality, appreciated not only in poetry but also in all the arts, from tea ceremony to theater.

The moving cloud fades away, and I smell the aroma of the mushroom.

— KoI NAgAtA (1900– 1997)10

The Edo period was ended by the Meiji Restoration— and Japan’s rapid modernization. Deforestation proceeded apace, privileging pine and matsutake. In the Kyoto area, matsutake became a generic term for “mushroom.” In the early twentieth century, matsutake were particu- larly common. In the mid- 1950s, however, the situation began to change. Peasant woodlands were cut down for timber plantations, paved for sub- urban development, or abandoned by peasants moving to the city. Fossil fuel replaced firewood and charcoal; farmers no longer used the remain- ing woodlands, which grew up in dense thickets of broadleaf trees. Hill- sides that had once been covered by matsutake were now too shady for pine ecologies. Shade- stressed pines were killed by an invasive nematode. By the mid- 1970s, matsutake had become rare across Japan.

8 Prologue

This was the time, however, of Japan’s rapid economic development, and matsutake were in demand as exquisitely expensive gifts, perks, and bribes. The price of matsutake skyrocketed. The knowledge that mat- sutake grew in other parts of the world suddenly became relevant. Jap- anese travelers and residents abroad began to send matsutake to Japan; as importers emerged to funnel the international matsutake trade, non- Japanese pickers rushed in. At first it seemed that there were a plethora of colors and kinds that might appropriately be considered matsutake— because they had the smell. Scientific names proliferated as matsutake in forests across the northern hemisphere suddenly rose from neglect. In the past twenty years, names have been consolidated. All across Eur- asia, most matsutake are now Tricholoma matsutake.11 In North America, T. matsutake seems to be found only in the east, and in the mountains of Mexico. In western North America, the local matsutake is considered another species, T. magnivelare.12 Some scientists, however, think the ge- neric term “matsutake” is the best way to identify these aromatic mush- rooms, since the dynamics of speciation are still unclear.13 I follow that practice except where I am discussing questions of classification.

Japanese have figured out ways of ranking matsutake from different parts of the world, and ranks are reflected in prices. My eyes were first opened to such rankings when one Japanese importer explained: “Mat- sutake are like people. American mushrooms are white because the people are white. Chinese mushrooms are black, because the people are black. Japanese people and mushrooms are nicely in between.” Not ev- eryone has the same rankings, but this stark example can stand in for the many forms of classification and valuation that structure the global trade.

Meanwhile, people in Japan worry about the loss of the peasant wood- lands that have been the source of so much seasonal beauty, from spring blossoms to bright autumn leaves. Starting in the 1970s, volunteer groups mobilized to restore these woodlands. Wanting their work to matter beyond passive aesthetics, the groups looked for ways restored wood- lands might benefit human livelihood. The high price of matsutake made it an ideal product of woodland restoration.

And so I return to precarity and living in our messes. But living seems to have gotten more crowded, not only with Japanese aesthetics and eco-

autumn aroma 9

logical histories, but also with international relations and capitalist trad- ing practices. This is the stuff for stories in the book that follows. For the moment, it seems important to appreciate the mushroom.

Oh, matsutake: The excitement before finding them.

— YAmAguchI Sodo (1642– 1716)14

Part I What’s Left?

Conjuring time, Yunnan. Watching

the boss gamble.

It wAS A StIll- brIght evenIng when I reAlIzed I was lost and empty- handed in an unknown forest. I was on my first search for matsutake— and matsutake pickers— in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Earlier that afternoon, I had found the Forest Service’s “big camp” for mushroom pickers, but all the pickers were out foraging. I had decided to look for mushrooms myself while I waited for their return.

I couldn’t have imagined a more unpromising- looking forest. The ground was dry and rocky, and nothing grew except thin sticks of lodgepole pine. There were hardly any plants growing near the ground, not even grass, and when I touched the soil, sharp pumice shards cut my fingers. As the afternoon wore on, I found one or two “copper tops,” dingy mushrooms with a splash of orange and a mealy smell.1 Nothing else. Worse yet, I was disoriented. Every way I turned, the forest looked the same. I had no idea which direction to go to find my car. Thinking I would be out there just briefly, I had brought nothing, and I knew I would soon be thirsty, hungry— and cold.

I stumbled around and eventually found a dirt road. But which way should I go? The sun was getting lower as I trudged along. I had walked less than a mile when a pickup truck drew up. A bright- faced young

14 Part i

man and a wizened old man were inside, and they offered me a ride. The young man introduced himself as Kao. Like his uncle, he said, he was a Mien from the hills of Laos who had come to the United States from a refugee camp in Thailand in the 1980s. They were neighbors in Sacramento, California, and here to pick mushrooms together. They brought me to their camp. The young man went to get water, driving his plastic jugs to a water storage container some ways away. The older man did not know English, but it turned out he knew a little Mandarin Chinese, as did I. As we awkwardly exchanged phrases, he pulled out a smoking bong handcrafted from PVC pipe and lit up his tobacco.

It was dusk when Kao came back with the water. But he beckoned me to go picking with him: There were mushrooms nearby. In the gath- ering dark, we scrambled up a rocky hillside not far from his camp. I saw nothing but dirt and some scrawny pine trees. But here was Kao with his bucket and stick, poking deep into clearly empty ground and pulling up a fat button. How could this be possible? There had been nothing there— and then there it was.

Kao handed me the mushroom. That’s when I first experienced the smell. It’s not an easy smell. It’s not like a flower or a mouth- watering food. It’s disturbing. Many people never learn to love it. It’s hard to de- scribe. Some people liken it to rotting things and some to clear beauty— the autumn aroma. At my first whiff, I was just . . . astonished.

My surprise was not just for the smell. What were Mien tribesmen, Japanese gourmet mushrooms, and I doing in a ruined Oregon indus- trial forest? I had lived in the United States for a long time without ever hearing about any of these things. The Mien camp pulled me back to my earlier fieldwork in Southeast Asia; the mushroom tickled my inter- est in Japanese aesthetics and cuisine. The broken forest, in contrast, seemed like a science fiction nightmare. To my faulty common sense, we all seemed miraculously out of time and out of place— like some- thing that might jump out of a fairy tale. I was startled and intrigued; I couldn’t stop exploring. This book is my attempt to pull you into the maze I found.

1 Arts of Noticing

I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one- way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

In 1908 And 1909 two rAIlroAd entrePreneurS raced each other to build track along Oregon’s Deschutes River.1 The goal of each was to be the first to create an industrial connection be- tween the towering ponderosas of the eastern Cascades and the stacked lumberyards of Portland. In 1910, the thrill of competition yielded to an agreement for joint service. Pine logs poured out of the region, bound for distant markets. Lumber mills brought new settlers; towns sprung

Conjuring time, Kyoto Prefecture.

Mr. Imoto’s map of revitalizing. This is his matsutake mountain:

a time machine of multiple seasons,

histories, and hopes.

18 ChaPter 1

up as millworkers multiplied. By the 1930s, Oregon had become the na- tion’s largest producer of timber.

This is a story we know. It is the story of pioneers, progress, and the trans- formation of “empty” spaces into industrial resource fields.

In 1989, a plastic spotted owl was hung in effigy on an Oregon log- ging truck.2 Environmentalists had shown that unsustainable logging was destroying Pacific Northwest forests. “The spotted owl was like the canary in the coal mine,” explained one advocate. “It was . . . symbolic of an ecosystem on the verge of collapse.”3 When a federal judge blocked old- growth logging to save owl habitat, loggers were furious; but how many loggers were there? Logging jobs had dwindled as timber compa- nies mechanized— and as prime timber disappeared. By 1989, many mills had already closed; logging companies were moving to other re- gions.4 The eastern Cascades, once a hub of timber wealth, were now cutover forests and former mill towns overgrown by brush.

This is a story we need to know. Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes. And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope— or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin.

What emerges in damaged landscapes, beyond the call of industrial promise and ruin? By 1989, something else had begun in Oregon’s cut- over forests: the wild mushroom trade. From the first it was linked to worldwide ruination: The 1986 Chernobyl disaster had contaminated Europe’s mushrooms, and traders had come to the Pacific Northwest for supplies. When Japan began importing matsutake at high prices— just as jobless Indochinese refugees were settling in California— the trade went wild. Thousands rushed to Pacific Northwest forests for the new “white gold.” This was in the middle of a “jobs versus the environ- ment” battle over the forests, yet neither side noticed the mushroomers. Job advocates imagined only wage contracts for healthy white men; the foragers— disabled white veterans, Asian refugees, Native Americans, and undocumented Latinos— were invisible interlopers. Conservation- ists were fighting to keep human disturbance out of the forests; the entry of thousands of people, had it been noticed, would hardly have been welcome. But the mushroom hunters were mainly not noticed. At

arts of notiCing 19

most, the Asian presence sparked local fears of invasion: journalists wor- ried about violence.5

A few years into the new century, the idea of a trade- off between jobs and the environment seemed less convincing. With or without conservation, there were fewer “jobs” in the twentieth- century sense in the United States; besides, it seemed much more likely that environ- mental damage would kill all of us off, jobs or no jobs. We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collabo- rative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us— but it might open our imaginations.

Geologists have begun to call our time the Anthropocene, the epoch in which human disturbance outranks other geological forces. As I write, the term is still new— and still full of promising contradictions. Thus, although some interpreters see the name as implying the triumph of humans, the opposite seems more accurate: without planning or inten- tion, humans have made a mess of our planet.6 Furthermore, despite the prefix “anthropo- ,” that is, human, the mess is not a result of our species biology. The most convincing Anthropocene time line begins not with our species but rather with the advent of modern capitalism, which has directed long- distance destruction of landscapes and ecologies. This time line, however, makes the “anthropo- ” even more of a problem. Imagin- ing the human since the rise of capitalism entangles us with ideas of progress and with the spread of techniques of alienation that turn both humans and other beings into resources. Such techniques have segre- gated humans and policed identities, obscuring collaborative survival. The concept of the Anthropocene both evokes this bundle of aspira- tions, which one might call the modern human conceit, and raises the hope that we might muddle beyond it. Can we live inside this regime of the human and still exceed it?

This is the predicament that makes me pause before offering a de- scription of mushrooms and mushroom pickers. The modern human conceit won’t let a description be anything more than a decorative

20 ChaPter 1

footnote. This “anthropo- ” blocks attention to patchy landscapes, mul- tiple temporalities, and shifting assemblages of humans and nonhu- mans: the very stuff of collaborative survival. In order to make mush- room picking a worthwhile tale, then, I must first chart the work of this “anthropo- ” and explore the terrain it refuses to acknowledge.

Consider, indeed, the question of what’s left. Given the effectiveness of state and capitalist devastation of natural landscapes, we might ask why anything outside their plans is alive today. To address this, we will need to watch unruly edges. What brings Mien and matsutake together in Oregon? Such seemingly trivial queries might turn everything around to put unpredictable encounters at the center of things.

We hear about precarity in the news every day. People lose their jobs or get angry because they never had them. Gorillas and river porpoises hover at the edge of extinction. Rising seas swamp whole Pacific islands. But most of the time we imagine such precarity to be an exception to how the world works. It’s what “drops out” from the system. What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity is the condition of our time— or, to put it an- other way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precar- ity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?

Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredict- able encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to sur- vive. Thinking through precarity changes social analysis. A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned na- ture of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.

The only reason all this sounds odd is that most of us were raised on dreams of modernization and progress. These frames sort out those parts of the present that might lead to the future. The rest are trivial; they “drop out” of history. I imagine you talking back: “Progress? That’s an idea from the nineteenth century.” The term “progress,” referring to a general state, has become rare; even twentieth- century modernization has begun to feel archaic. But their categories and assumptions of im- provement are with us everywhere. We imagine their objects every day:

arts of notiCing 21

democracy, growth, science, hope. Why would we expect economies to grow and sciences to advance? Even without explicit reference to devel- opment, our theories of history are embroiled in these categories. So, too, are our personal dreams. I’ll admit it’s hard for me to even say this: there might not be a collective happy ending. Then why bother getting up in the morning?

Progress is embedded, too, in widely accepted assumptions about what it means to be human. Even when disguised through other terms, such as “agency,” “consciousness,” and “intention,” we learn over and over that humans are different from the rest of the living world because we look forward— while other species, which live day to day, are thus dependent on us. As long as we imagine that humans are made through progress, nonhumans are stuck within this imaginative framework too.

Progress is a forward march, drawing other kinds of time into its rhythms. Without that driving beat, we might notice other temporal patterns. Each living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime reproductive patterns, and geographies of expan- sion. Within a given species, too, there are multiple time- making projects, as organisms enlist each other and coordinate in making landscapes. (The regrowth of the cutover Cascades and Hiroshima’s radioecology each show us multispecies time making.) The curiosity I advocate fol- lows such multiple temporalities, revitalizing description and imagina- tion. This is not a simple empiricism, in which the world invents its own categories. Instead, agnostic about where we are going, we might look for what has been ignored because it never fit the time line of progress.

Consider again the snippets of Oregon history with which I began this chapter. The first, about railroads, tells of progress. It led to the fu- ture: railroads reshaped our destiny. The second is already an interrup- tion, a history in which the destruction of forests matters. What it shares with the first, however, is the assumption that the trope of progress is sufficient to know the world, both in success and failure. The story of decline offers no leftovers, no excess, nothing that escapes progress. Progress still controls us even in tales of ruination.

Yet the modern human conceit is not the only plan for making worlds: we are surrounded by many world- making projects, human and not human.7 World- making projects emerge from practical activities of

22 ChaPter 1

making lives; in the process these projects alter our planet. To see them, in the shadow of the Anthropocene’s “anthropo- ,” we must reorient our attention. Many preindustrial livelihoods, from foraging to stealing, persist today, and new ones (including commercial mushroom picking) emerge, but we neglect them because they are not a part of progress. These livelihoods make worlds too— and they show us how to look around rather than ahead.

Making worlds is not limited to humans. We know that beavers re- shape streams as they make dams, canals, and lodges; in fact, all organ- isms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. With- out the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world. Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples sug- gest, world- making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species. Humans, too, have always been involved in multispecies world making. Fire was a tool for early humans not just to cook but also to burn the landscape, encouraging edible bulbs and grasses that at- tracted animals for hunting. Humans shape multispecies worlds when our living arrangements make room for other species. This is not just a matter of crops, livestock, and pets. Pines, with their associated fungal partners, often flourish in landscapes burned by humans; pines and fungi work together to take advantage of bright open spaces and exposed mineral soils. Humans, pines, and fungi make living arrangements si- multaneously for themselves and for others: multispecies worlds.

Twentieth- century scholarship, advancing the modern human con- ceit, conspired against our ability to notice the divergent, layered, and conjoined projects that make up worlds. Entranced by the expansion of certain ways of life over others, scholars ignored questions of what else was going on. As progress tales lose traction, however, it becomes possi- ble to look differently.

The concept of assemblage is helpful. Ecologists turned to assem- blages to get around the sometimes fixed and bounded connotations of ecological “community.” The question of how the varied species in a species assemblage influence each other— if at all— is never settled: some thwart (or eat) each other; others work together to make life pos- sible; still others just happen to find themselves in the same place. As-

arts of notiCing 23

semblages are open- ended gatherings. They allow us to ask about com- munal effects without assuming them. They show us potential histories in the making. For my purposes, however, I need something other than organisms as the elements that gather. I need to see lifeways— and non- living ways of being as well— coming together. Nonhuman ways of being, like human ones, shift historically. For living things, species identities are a place to begin, but they are not enough: ways of being are emergent effects of encounters. Thinking about humans makes this clear. Foraging for mushrooms is a way of life— but not a common characteristic of all humans. The issue is the same for other species. Pines find mushrooms to help them use human- made open spaces. As- semblages don’t just gather lifeways; they make them. Thinking through assemblage urges us to ask: How do gatherings sometimes become “happenings,” that is, greater than the sum of their parts? If history without progress is indeterminate and multidirectional, might assem- blages show us its possibilities?

Patterns of unintentional coordination develop in assemblages. To notice such patterns means watching the interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the divergent lifeways that gather. Surprisingly, this turns out to be a method that might revitalize political economy as well as environmental studies. Assemblages drag political economy inside them, and not just for humans. Plantation crops have lives different from those of their free- living siblings; cart horses and hunter steeds share species but not lifeways. Assemblages cannot hide from capital and the state; they are sites for watching how political economy works. If capi- talism has no teleology, we need to see what comes together— not just by prefabrication, but also by juxtaposition.

Other authors use “assemblage” with other meanings.8 The qualifier “polyphonic” may help explain my variant. Polyphony is music in which autonomous melodies intertwine. In Western music, the madrigal and the fugue are examples of polyphony. These forms seem archaic and strange to many modern listeners because they were superseded by music in which a unified rhythm and melody holds the composition together. In the classical music that displaced baroque, unity was the goal; this was “progress” in just the meaning I have been discussing: a unified coordination of time. In twentieth- century rock- and- roll, this unity takes the form of a strong beat, suggestive of the listener’s heart;

24 ChaPter 1

we are used to hearing music with a single perspective. When I first learned polyphony, it was a revelation in listening; I was forced to pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance they created together. This kind of noticing is just what is needed to appreciate the multiple temporal rhythms and trajectories of the assemblage.

For those not musically inclined, it may be useful to imagine the polyphonic assemblage in relation to agriculture. Since the time of the plantation, commercial agriculture has aimed to segregate a single crop and work toward its simultaneous ripening for a coordinated harvest. But other kinds of farming have multiple rhythms. In the shifting culti- vation I studied in Indonesian Borneo, many crops grew together in the same field, and they had quite different schedules. Rice, bananas, taro, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, palms, and fruit trees mingled; farmers needed to attend to the varied schedules of maturation of each of these crops. These rhythms were their relation to human harvests; if we add other relations, for example, to pollinators or other plants, rhythms multiply. The polyphonic assemblage is the gathering of these rhythms, as they result from world- making projects, human and not human.

The polyphonic assemblage also moves us into the unexplored terri- tory of the modern political economy. Factory labor is an exemplar of coordinated progress time. Yet the supply chain is infused with poly- phonic rhythms. Consider the tiny Chinese garment factory studied by Nellie Chu; like its many competitors, it served multiple supply lines, constantly switching among orders for local boutique brands, knock- off international brands, and generic to- be- branded- later production.9 Each required different standards, materials, and kinds of labor. The factory’s job was to match industrial coordination to the complex rhythms of supply chains. Rhythms further multiply when we move out of facto- ries to watch foraging for an unpredictable wild product. The farther we stray into the peripheries of capitalist production, the more coordi- nation between polyphonic assemblages and industrial processes be- comes central to making a profit.

As the last examples suggest, abandoning progress rhythms to watch polyphonic assemblages is not a matter of virtuous desire. Progress felt great; there was always something better ahead. Progress gave us the “progressive” political causes with which I grew up. I hardly know how

arts of notiCing 25

to think about justice without progress. The problem is that progress stopped making sense. More and more of us looked up one day and re- alized that the emperor had no clothes. It is in this dilemma that new tools for noticing seem so important.10 Indeed, life on earth seems at stake. Chapter 2 turns to dilemmas of collaborative survival.

Interlude Tracking

MuShroom trAckS Are eluSIve And enIgmAtIc; following them takes me on a wild ride— trespassing every boundary. Things get even stranger when I move out of commerce into Darwin’s “entangled bank” of multiple life forms.1 Here, the biology we thought we knew stands on its head. Entanglement bursts categories and upends identities.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi. Fungi are diverse and often flexible, and they live in many places, ranging from ocean cur- rents to toenails. But many fungi live in the soil, where their thread- like filaments, called hyphae, spread into fans and tangle into cords through the dirt. If you could make the soil liquid and transparent and walk into the ground, you would find yourself surrounded by nets of fungal hy- phae. Follow fungi into that underground city, and you will find the strange and varied pleasures of interspecies life.2

Many people think fungi are plants, but they are actually closer to animals. Fungi do not make their food from sunlight, as plants do. Like animals, fungi must find something to eat. Yet fungal eating is often gen- erous: It makes worlds for others. This is because fungi have extracellular

Elusive life, Oregon. The spoor of deer and elk lead pickers to matsutake

patches. There, cracks signal a deep- seated

mushroom rising through the ground. Tracking

means following worldly entanglements.

138 interlude

digestion. They excrete digestive acids outside their bodies to break down their food into nutrients. It’s as if they had everted stomachs, di- gesting food outside instead of inside their bodies. Nutrients are then absorbed into their cells, allowing the fungal body to grow— but also other species’ bodies. The reason there are plants growing on dry land (rather than just in water) is that over the course of the earth’s history fungi have digested rocks, making nutrients available for plants. Fungi (together with bacteria) made the soil in which plants grow. Fungi also digest wood. Otherwise, dead trees would stack up in the forest forever. Fungi break them down into nutrients that can be recycled into new life. Fungi are thus world builders, shaping environments for themselves and others.

Some fungi have learned to live in intimate associations with plants, and given enough time to adjust to the interspecies relations of a place, most plants enter into associations with fungi. “Endophytic” and “endo- mycorrhizal” fungi live inside plants. Many do not have fruiting bodies; they gave up sex millions of years ago. We are likely never to see these fungi unless we peer inside plants with microscopes, yet most plants are thick with them. “Ectomycorrhizal” fungi wrap themselves around the outsides of roots as well as penetrating between their cells. Many of the favorite mushrooms of people around the world— porcini, chanterelles, truffles, and, indeed, matsutake— are the fruiting bodies of ectomycor- rhizal plant associates. They are so delicious, and so difficult for humans to manipulate, because they thrive together with host trees. They come into being only through interspecies relations.

The term “mycorrhiza” is assembled from Greek words for “fungus” and “root”; fungi and plant roots become intimately entangled in my- corrhizal relations. Neither the fungus nor the plant can flourish with- out the activity of the other. From the fungal perspective, the goal is to get a good meal. The fungus extends its body into the host’s roots to siphon off some of the plant’s carbohydrates through specialized inter- face structures, made in the encounter. The fungus depends on this food, yet it is not entirely selfish. Fungi stimulate plant growth, first, by get- ting plants more water, and, second, by making the nutrients of extra- cellular digestion available to plants. Plants get calcium, nitrogen, po- tassium, phosphorus, and other minerals through mycorrhiza. Forests, according to researcher Lisa Curran, occur only because of ectomycor-

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rhizal fungi.3 By leaning on fungal companions, trees grow strong and numerous, making forests.

Mutual benefits do not lead to perfect harmony. Sometimes the fun- gus parasitizes the root in one phase of its life cycle. Or, if the plant has lots of nutrients, it may reject the fungus. A mycorrhizal fungus with- out a plant collaborator will die. But many ectomycorrhizas are not lim- ited to one collaboration; the fungus forms a network across plants. In a forest, fungi connect not just trees of the same species, but often many species. If you cover a tree in the forest, depriving its leaves of light and thus food, its mycorrhizal associates may feed it from the carbohydrates of other trees in the network.4 Some commentators compare mycorrhi- zal networks to the Internet, writing of the “woodwide web.” Mycorrhi- zas form an infrastructure of interspecies interconnection, carrying in- formation across the forest. They also have some of the characteristics of a highway system. Soil microbes that would otherwise stay in the same place are able to travel in the channels and linkages of mycorrhi- zal interconnection. Some of these microbes are important for environ- mental remediation.5 Mycorrhizal networks allow forests to respond to threats.

Why has the world- building work of fungi received so little appreci- ation? Partly, this is because people can’t venture underground to see the amazing architecture of the underground city. But it is also because until quite recently many people— perhaps especially scientists—imag- ined life as a matter of species- by- species reproduction. The most im- portant interspecies interactions, in this worldview, were predator- prey relations in which interaction meant wiping each other out. Mutualistic relations were interesting anomalies, but not really necessary to under- stand life. Life emerged from the self- replication of each species, which faced evolutionary and environmental challenges on its own. No spe- cies needed another for its continuing vitality; it organized itself. This self- creation marching band drowned out the stories of the under- ground city. To recover those underground stories, we might reconsider the species- by- species worldview, and the new evidence that has begun to transform it.

When Charles Darwin proposed a theory of evolution through nat- ural selection in the nineteenth century, he had no explanation for her- itability. Only the recovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics

140 interlude

suggested a mechanism by which natural selection could produce its effects. In the twentieth century, biologists combined genetics and evo- lution and created the “modern synthesis,” a powerful story about how species come into being through genetic differentiation. The early- twentieth- century discovery of chromosomes, structures within cells that carry genetic information, gave palpability to the story. Units of heredity—genes— were located on chromosomes. In sexually reproduc- ing vertebrates, a special line of “germ cells” was found to conserve the chromosomes that give rise to the next generation. (Human sperm and eggs are germ cells.) Changes in the rest of the body— even genetic changes—should not be transmitted to offspring as long as they do not affect the germ cells’ chromosomes. Thus the self- replication of the spe- cies would be protected from the vicissitudes of ecological encounter and history. As long as the germ cells were unaffected, the organism would remake itself, extending species continuity.

This is the heart of the species self- creation story: Species reproduc- tion is self- contained, self- organized, and removed from history. To call this the “modern synthesis” is quite right in relation to the questions of modernity that I discussed in terms of scalability. Self- replicating things are models of the kind of nature that technical prowess can control: they are modern things. They are interchangeable with each other, because their variability is contained by their self- creation. Thus, they are also scalable. Inheritable traits are expressed at multiple scales: cells, organs, organisms, populations of interbreeding individuals, and, of course, the species itself. Each of these scales is another expression of self- enclosed genetic inheritance, and thus they are neatly nested and scalable. As long as they are all expressions of the same traits, research can move back and forth across these scales without friction. Some hint of coming problems appeared in this paradigm’s excesses: when researchers took scalability literally, they produced bizarre new stories of the gene in charge of ev- erything. Genes for criminality and creativity were proposed, sliding freely across scales from chromosome to social world. “The selfish gene,” in charge of evolution, required no collaborators. Scalable life, in these versions, captured genetic inheritance in a self- enclosed and self- replicating modernity, indeed, Max Weber’s iron cage.

The discovery of the stability and self- replicating properties of DNA in the 1950s was the jewel in the crown of the modern synthesis— but

traCking 141

also the opening to its undoing. DNA, with associated proteins, is the material of chromosomes. The chemical structure of its double helix strands is both stable and, amazingly, able to replicate exactly on a newly built strand. What a model for self- contained replication! The replication of DNA was mesmerizing; it formed an icon for modern sci- ence itself, which requires the replication of results, and thus research objects that are stable and interchangeable across experimental itera- tions, that is, without history. The results of the replication of DNA can be tracked at every biological scale (protein, cell, organ, organism, pop- ulation, species). Biological scalability was given a mechanism, strength- ening the story of thoroughly modern life— life ruled by gene expres- sion and isolated from history.

Yet DNA research has led in unexpected directions. Consider the trajectory of evolutionary developmental biology. This field was one of the many that emerged from the DNA revolution; it studies genetic mu- tation and expression in the development of organisms, and the impli- cations of this for speciation. In studying development, however, re- searchers could not avoid the history of encounters between an organism and its environment. They found themselves in conversation with ecol- ogists, and suddenly they realized they had evidence for a type of evolu- tion that had not been expected by the modern synthesis. In contrast to the modern orthodoxy, they found that many kinds of environmental effects could be passed on to offspring, through a variety of mecha- nisms, some affecting gene expression and others influencing the fre- quency of mutations or the dominance of varietal forms.6

One of their most surprising findings was that many organisms de- velop only through interactions with other species. A tiny Hawaiian squid, Euprymna scolopes, has become a model for thinking about this process.7 The “bob- tailed squid” is known for its light organ, through which it mimics moonlight, hiding its shadow from predators. But juve- nile squid do not develop this organ unless they come into contact with one particular species of bacteria, Vibrio fischeri. The squid are not born with these bacteria; they must encounter them in the seawater. Without them, the light organ never develops. But perhaps you think light organs are superfluous. Consider the parasitic wasp Asobara tabida. Females are completely unable to produce eggs without bacteria of the genus Wolba- chia.8 Meanwhile, larvae of the Large Blue butterfly Maculinea arion are

142 interlude

unable to survive without being taken in by an ant colony.9 Even we proudly independent humans are unable to digest our food without helpful bacteria, first gained as we slide out of the birth canal. Ninety percent of the cells in a human body are bacteria. We can’t do without them.10

As biologist Scott Gilbert and his colleagues write, “Almost all devel- opment may be codevelopment. By codevelopment we refer to the abil- ity of the cells of one species to assist the normal construction of the body of another species.”11 This insight changes the unit of evolution. Some biologists have begun to speak of the “hologenome theory of evo- lution,” referring to the complex of organisms and their symbionts as an evolutionary unit: the “holobiont.”12 They find, for example, that associ- ations between particular bacteria and fruit flies influence fruit fly mat- ing choice, thus shaping the road to the development of a new species.13 To add the importance of development, Gilbert and his colleagues use the term “symbiopoiesis,” the codevelopment of the holobiont. The term contrasts their findings with an earlier focus on life as internally self- organizing systems, self- formed through “autopoiesis.” “More and more,” they write, “symbiosis appears to be the ‘rule,’ not the excep- tion. . . . Nature may be selecting ‘relationships’ rather than individuals or genomes.”14

Interspecies relations draw evolution back into history because they depend on the contingencies of encounter. They do not form an inter- nally self- replicating system. Instead, interspecies encounters are always events, “things that happen,” the units of history. Events can lead to rel- atively stable situations, but they cannot be counted on in the way self- replicating units can; they are always framed by contingency and time. History plays havoc with scalability. The only way to create scalability is to repress change and encounter. If they can’t be repressed, the whole relation across scales must be rethought. When British conservationists tried to save the Large Blue butterfly, mentioned above, they could not assume that a mating population could by itself reproduce the species, although, according to the modern synthesis, populations are formed from individuals formed by genes. They could not leave out the ants without which the larvae cannot survive.15 Large Blue butterfly popula- tions are thus not a scalable effect of the butterflies’ DNA. They are non- scalable sites of interspecies encounter. This is a problem for the mod-

traCking 143

ern synthesis, because population genetics was from the early twentieth century at the core of evolution- without- history. Might population sci- ence need to step aside for an emergent multispecies historical ecology? Might the arts of noticing I discuss be at its core?16

Reintroducing history into evolutionary thinking has already begun at other biological scales. The cell, once an emblem of replicable units, turns out to be the historical product of symbiosis among free- living bacteria.17 Even DNA turns out to have more history in its amino- acid sequences than once thought. Human DNA is part virus; viral encoun- ters mark historical moments in making us human.18 Genome research has taken up the challenge of identifying encounter in the making of DNA. Population science cannot avoid history for much longer.19

Fungi are ideal guides. Fungi have always been recalcitrant to the iron cage of self- replication. Like bacteria, some are given to exchanging genes in nonreproductive encounters (“horizontal gene transfer”); many also seem averse to keeping their genetic material sorted out as “individ- uals” and “species,” not to speak of “populations.” When researchers studied the fruiting bodies of what they thought of as a species, the ex- pensive Tibetan “caterpillar fungus,” they found many species entan- gled together.20 When they looked into the filaments of Armillaria root rot, they found genetic mosaics that confused the identification of an individual.21 Meanwhile, fungi are famous for their symbiotic attach- ments. Lichen are fungi living together with algae and cyanobacteria. I have been discussing fungal collaborations with plants, but fungi live with animals as well. For example, Macrotermes termites digest their food only through the help of fungi. The termites chew up wood, but they cannot digest it. Instead, they build “fungus gardens” in which the chewed- up wood is digested by Termitomyces fungi, producing edible nutrients. Researcher Scott Turner points out that, while you might say that the termites farm the fungus, you could equally say that the fungus farms the termites. Termitomyces uses the environment of the termite mound to outcompete other fungi; meanwhile, the fungus regulates the mound, keeping it open, by throwing up mushrooms annually, cre- ating a colony- saving disturbance in termite mound- building.22

Our metaphorical language (here termite “farming”) sometimes gets in the way and sometimes throws up unexpected insights. One of the most common metaphors in talk of symbiosis is “outsourcing.” You

144 interlude

could say the termites outsource their digestion to fungi, or, alterna- tively, that the fungi outsource food gathering and niche building to termites. There are lots of things wrong with comparing biological pro- cesses to contemporary business arrangements, too many, indeed, to catalogue. But perhaps there is one insight here. As in capitalist supply chains, these chains of engagement are not scalable. Their components cannot be reduced to self- replicating interchangeable objects, whether firms or species. Instead, they require attention to the histories of en- counter that maintain the chain. Natural history description, rather than mathematical modeling, is the necessary first step— as in the econ- omy. Radical curiosity beckons. Perhaps an anthropologist, trained in one of the few remaining sciences that values observation and descrip- tion, might come in handy.

 

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