Sunday, April 10, 2016

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

There is still a controversy around what Albert Einstein apparently said: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.” Though this quote seems dramatic to many people, we do know that the problem of climate change is real. We understand that the extinction of some species, transformation of nature, and more importantly the industrial society (factories, excessive use of oil and gas, and other luxurious commodities bring to us by capitalist society) is one of the primary causes of the climate change. As Anna Tsing says, “Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes." She highlights a fascinating topic that is very relevant to our biggest problem, climate change, today. She makes an excellent point solely using one product, Matsutake. She describes that how only one commodity can be this powerful to ruin the face of the earth.

What really intrigues me about this reading was Tsing’s approach to ethnography. She mostly focuses on the relationships. She describes how one product can carry so many layers of relationships; the relationship of mushroom with the plant, the plant with land, land with forest, mushroom with human and human with the land. Using the various layers of relationships, she precisely focuses on how these interactions between fungi and trees, between trees and land, trees and forest contribute to changing the landscape that affects the multispecies living in it. She also explicitly states that the earth doesn’t only belong to the human. If they ruin it, they ruin it for other species as well. She demonstrates that knowing about multispecies interactions is a way to understand who we really are.

She refers to mushroom as a “White Gold”. Though she doesn’t explicitly talk about the “Gold Rush”, she speaks of the mass migration for seeking employment. The evolution of Gold Rush is also another story that started by individuals and fell into corporate hands. The evolution started by individuals but, later, it was ruled by corporates, and they got the power to move the mountains through cheap labor. Most people who returned home with no benefit called the evolution myth. However, the myth influenced people in both positive and negative ways. First, it transformed the landscape, which was basically destroying the land and changing the nature in search of gold. Second, it boosted the local economy. What I am trying to say here is that the Gold Rush evolution is another example of what Tsing’s call is “capitalist ruins.”

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