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

I’ve read this book several times now (it was a big part of my thinking when I was making the mushroom magazine), and each time is like taking a giant hit of oxygen—I come away woozy, exhilarated, a little disoriented, and full of the sense that big, exciting ideas are lurking just beyond the places my mind can reach. Tsing is an anthropologist interested in commodity chains—how materials and labor are extracted and processed through human interactions into that deadly, glittering substance, capital. In this book, she follows matsutake—a mushroom that thrives in “disturbed” forests, places where trees have been cut and harvested—from sites in the Pacific Northwest where it is foraged by an unlikely group of immigrants from an array of South Asian communities, veterans, and other folks living on the margins of society, through the hands of brokers and dealers to Japan, where it is purchased to become a gift. Tsing calls this process “salvage accumulation”:

"… living things made within ecological processes are coopted for the concentration of wealth. This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control. … “Salvage accumulation” is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced."

(Once you start thinking of “salvage accumulation, you see it everywhere, not least in influencers who leverage the gift of attention into a saleable good or, ahem, everything AI, but that is rant for another day, lol.) As she traces the manifold ramifications of the matsutake trade, Tsing explores what it means to look carefully, broadening the lens of what belongs in this story beyond human actions to respectfully engage with living realities of the landscapes involved and the mushroom itself. Entanglement, indeterminacy, precarity, salvage, capitalism, assemblage, and freedom are key themes here, and the last time I read it, my attention snagged hard on the idea of assemblage. We live in a time where a lot of voices are raised claiming that “community” is the fix for what ails us, but I think community is maybe too much to ask for. Understanding that we exist in assemblages is perhaps a more honest place to start:

"The question of how the varied species in an assemblage influence each other—if at all—is never settled: some thwart (or eat) each other; others work together to make life possible; still others just happen to find themselves in the same place. Assemblages are open-ended gatherings. … They show us potential histories in the making."