The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Forest Service closed the area to commercial picking. The buyer went back to Open Ticket. But without enforcement, commercial pickers still sneak in, and hostilities between Japanese and Southeast Asian Americansstill smolder. Clearly, they are different kinds of Asian Americans. As one Japanese American picker unself-consciously quipped, “The forests were great until the Asians came.” Who?
    Let me return to Southeast Asian pickers’ freedom. Certainly, it includes sneaking into forbidden places when one can get away with it. But freedom is more than personal daring; it is an engagement with an emerging political formation. I am sure I am not the only product of integration who was taken by surprise by the strength of twenty-first-century resentment of this program, particularly by rural whites, who feel left out and left behind. Some white pickers and buyers call their position “traditionalism.” They oppose integration; they want to savor their own values, without contamination from others. They also call this “freedom.” This is not a multicultural plan. And yet, ironically, it has helped bring to life the most cosmopolitan cultural formation the United States has ever known. The new traditionalists reject racial mixing and the muscular legacy of the welfare state that made mixing possible—through coercive assimilation. As they dismantle assimilation, new formations emerge. Without central planning, immigrants and refugees hold on to their best chances to make a living: their war experiences, languages, and cultures. They join American democracy through that single word, “freedom.” They are free, indeed, to continue transnational politics and trade; they may plot to overthrow foreign regimes and stake their fortunes on international fashions. In contrast to earlier immigrants, they need not study to become American from inside out. In the wake of the welfare state, this concurrence of freedom agendas—in all its unruly diversity—has seized the time.
    And what better participants in global supply chains! Here are nodes of ready and willing entrepreneurs, with and without capital, able to mobilize their ethnic and religious fellows to fill almost any kind of economic niche. Wages and benefits are not needed. Whole communities can be mobilized—and for communal reasons. Universal standards of welfare hardly seem relevant. These are projects of freedom. Capitalists looking for salvage accumulation, take note.

… in Translation

Part III
    Disturbed Beginnings: Unintentional Design

    W HEN KATO-SAN INTRODUCED ME TO THE WORK HE was doing for the prefectural forest-research service to restore the forest, I was shocked. As an American tutored in wilderness sensibilities, I thought forests were best at restoring themselves. Kato-san disagreed: If you want matsutake in Japan, he explained, you must have pine, and if you want pine, you must have human disturbance. He was supervising work to remove broadleaf trees from the hillside he showed me. Even the topsoil had been carted away, and the steep slope now looked gouged and bare to my American eyes. “What about erosion?” I asked. “Erosion is good,” he answered. Now I was really startled. Isn’t erosion, the loss of soil, always bad? Still, I was willing to listen: pine flourishes on mineral soils, and erosion uncovers them.
    Working with forest managers in Japan changed how I thought about the role of disturbance in forests. Deliberate disturbance to revitalize forests surprised me. Kato-san was not planting a garden. The forest he hoped for would have to grow itself. But he wanted to help it along by creating a certain kind of mess: a mess that would advantage pine.
    Kato-san’s work engages with a popular and scientific cause: restoring satoyama woodlands. Satoyama are traditional peasant landscapes,combining rice agriculture and water management with woodlands. The woodlands—the heart of the satoyama concept—were once disturbed, and thus