The Mushroom at the End of the World

This section covers Chapters 11-13: “The Life of the Forest,” “History,” and “Resurgence,” as well as Interlude 3.1, “Coming Up Among Pines.”

Tsing notes that bringing the forests into her story is philosophically challenging, as humans struggle to craft narrative that does not center themselves. This is part of the obfuscating power of progress as the only theme of stories, she argues, declaring, “we forget that collaborative survival requires cross-species coordinations” (155-156). She takes as her starting point the life cycle of nematodes, creatures in the worm family that live in pines. Nematodes interact closely with other species, including the beetles they can travel on at certain stages of their life cycle. They are no threat to American pine, native to the region, but they re-enter the story of matsutake as particular threats to Japanese pine, and they only arrive in Japan because American pinewood became a key resource in Japan’s early twentieth century modernization drive.

Tsing argues that these kinds of stories require attention to multispecies interactions she calls “polyphonic assemblages” (157) and underscores that the consequences of these phenomena can be tracked as they “come in and out of existence through the contingencies of historical change” (158).