The Matsutake's Peculiar Ecosystem

(unfinished draft)

In her meditative book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes how damage to existing ecosystems and human systems sometimes leads to new assemblages formed through adaptations.

That's a mouthful, so let's unpack it with the main story Tsing tells, which involves the matsutake mushroom, a delicacy in Japan.

Matsutake are foraged. Japan was exhausting its natural sources of matsutake as demand was rising in the 1980s. Then an unexpected confluence happened: some rural Southeast Asians, displaced by the Vietnam War and adjacent conflicts, found themselves in the US Pacific Northwest.

Lessons about resilience, adaptability and innovation.

This fungal metaphor helps explain our fondness for the metaphor of The Big Fungus.

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