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

On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

 

In this book, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, investigates one of the world’s most sought after and expensive fungi, the matsutake mushroom, and uses it as ‘an examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth’.

 

The book, which at times reads like a novel and is organized in at first seemingly unconnected chapters, follows the path of the matsutake mushroom (it cannot be grown in captivity), and grows in forests across the northern hemisphere that have been overexploited for industrial and commercial reasons. With its ability to nurture trees it helps forests to grow in these disturbed places.

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Tsing describes in colourful form the strange world of this fungi’s commercial journey: refugee foragers from Cambodia and Laos, American veterans, pickers who work for themselves and sell the mushroom they find. The mushrooms are bought up by wholesalers, then shipped to sorters, classified and then exported mostly to Japan where it is considered a delicacy and demand very high prices.

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With this book Tsing gives us insights into contemporary capitalism, presenting it as ‘disturbance- based ecologies in which many species sometimes live together without either harmony or conquest’, but rejecting comprehensive critique of capitalism.

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Tsing uses the mushroom as a metaphor for showing how this species comes up with strategies of survival for itself by forming a symbiosis with trees and other plants. She compares this mushroom’s life strategy to the life of millions of people around the world who have to live now in exploitive capitalist systems and face the effects of climate change, managing ‘life in capitalist ruins’.

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Tsing’s book offers no neat conclusions but is a series of observations, analysis and evocative descriptions and the reader finds that the chapters in the end satisfyingly connect like a mycelium network. Hers is the urgent message to go beyond the divide of ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’ as opposites, necessary to change the way we think about and relate to our world.

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