The Mushroom at the End of the World #wip
A book, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Enabling Entanglements: Ever since the Enlightenment, western philosophers have shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man, which could tame and master Nature. It was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilisational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and non-human
Below the forest floor, fungal bodies extend themselves in nets and skeins, binding roots and mineral soils, long before producing mushrooms
This book takes up the story of precarious livelihoods and precarious environments through tracking matsutake commerce and ecology. In each case, I find mself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spacial arcs
This is a story we need to know. Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes. And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope - or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin
Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structire of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive
Progress is embedded … in widely accepted assumptions about what it means to be human. Even when disguised through other terms such as ‘agency’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘intention’, we learn over and over that humans are different from the rest of the living world because we look forward - while other species, which live day to day, are thus dependent on us. As long as we imagine tht humans are made through progress, nonhumans are stuck within this imaginative framework too.