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October 13, 2019 - January 22, 2021
To understand capitalism (and not just its alternatives), then, we can’t stay inside the logics of capitalists; we need an ethnographic eye to see the economic diversity through which accumulation is possible.
what is “public property” if not an oxymoron?
One wry Lao elder explained why even young Lao pickers wear camouflage: “These people weren’t soldiers; they’re just pretending to be soldiers.”
a Hmong picker evoked a different imaginary: “We wear camouflage so we can hide if we see the hunters first.” If they saw him, hunters might hunt him, he implied.
Frontier romanticism runs high in the mountains and forests of the Pacific Northwest. It is common for whites to glorify Native Americans and identify with the settlers who tried to wipe them out.
Through hunting, even noncombatants can experience the forest landscape as a site for making freedom.
in the confusions of the Cambodian civil war, it was never quite clear on which side one was fighting. Where white vets imagined freedom on a starkly divided racial landscape, Cambodians told stories in which war bounced one from one side to the other without one’s knowledge.
Other Cambodians spoke about mushroom foraging as healing from war. One woman described how weak she was when she first came to the United States; her legs were so frail that she could hardly walk. Mushroom foraging has brought back her health. Her freedom, she explained, is freedom of motion.
Hunting recalls the familiarity of Laos for Hmong in the United States. The Hmong elder explained his coming of age in Laos: as a boy, he had learned to hunt, and he used his hunting skills in jungle fighting. Now in the United States, he teaches his sons how to hunt. Hunting brings Hmong men into a world of tracking, survival, and manhood.
Instead of sassing the law, Latino pickers tried to stay out of the way, and, if caught, juggle papers and sources of legitimation and support. In contrast, most Lao pickers, as refugees, are citizens and, embracing freedom, hustle for more room.
If we want our theories of the “economic system” to have anything to do with livelihood practices, we had better take note of such salvage rhythms.
Assemblages, in their diversity, show us what later I call the “latent commons,” that is, entanglements that might be mobilized in common cause. Because collaboration is always with us, we can maneuver within its possibilities. We will need a politics with the strength of diverse and shifting coalitions—and not just for humans.
The business of progress depended on conquering an infinitely rich nature through alienation and scalability. If nature has turned finite, and even fragile, no wonder entrepreneurs have rushed to get what they can before the goods run out, while conservationists desperately contrive to save scraps.
Fungi are diverse and often flexible, and they live in many places, ranging from ocean currents to toenails.
If you could make the soil liquid and transparent and walk into the ground, you would find yourself surrounded by nets of fungal hyphae.
fungi have extracellular digestion. They excrete digestive acids outside their bodies to break down their food into nutrients. It’s as if they had everted stomachs, digesting food outside instead of inside their bodies. Nutrients are then absorbed into their cells, allowing the fungal body to grow—but also other species’ bodies.
We say made for sex, but biology says made for symbiosis
associations with plants, and given enough time to adjust to the interspecies relations of a place, most plants enter into associations with fungi. “Endophytic” and “endomycorrhizal” fungi live inside plants. Many do not have fruiting bodies; they gave up sex millions of years ago. We are likely never to see these fungi unless we peer inside plants with microscopes, yet most plants are thick with them.
“Ectomycorrhizal” fungi wrap themselves around the outsides of roots as well as penetrating between their cells. Many of the favorite mushrooms of people around the world—porcini, chanterelles, truffles, and, indeed, matsutake—are the fruiting bodies of ectomycorrhizal plant associates.
Why has the world-building work of fungi received so little appreciation?
because until quite recently many people—perhaps especially scientists—imagined life as a matter of species-by-species reproduction.
This is the heart of the species self-creation story: Species reproduction is self-contained, self-organized, and removed from history. To call this the “modern synthesis” is quite right in relation to the questions of modernity that I discussed in terms of scalability. Self-replicating things are models of the kind of nature that technical prowess can control: they are modern things. They are interchangeable with each other, because their variability is contained by their self-creation. Thus, they are also scalable. Inheritable traits are expressed at multiple scales: cells, organs,
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Scalable life, in these versions, captured genetic inheritance in a self-enclosed and self-replicating modernity, indeed, Max Weber’s iron cage.
In contrast to the modern orthodoxy, they found that many kinds of environmental effects could be passed on to offspring, through a variety of mechanisms, some affecting gene expression and others influencing the frequency of mutations or the dominance of varietal forms.
The “bob-tailed squid” is known for its light organ,
biologist Scott Gilbert and his colleagues write, “Almost all development may be codevelopment. By codevelopment we refer to the ability of the cells of one species to assist the normal construction of the body of another species.”11
the complex of organisms and their symbionts as an evolutionary unit: the “holobiont.”12
To add the importance of development, Gilbert and his colleagues use the term “symbiopoiesis,” the codevelopment of the holobiont. The term contrasts their findings with an earlier focus on life as internally self-organizing systems, self-formed through “autopoiesis.” “More and more,” they write, “symbiosis appears to be the ‘rule,’ not the exception…. Nature may be selecting ‘relationships’ rather than individuals or genomes.”
Might population science need to step aside for an emergent multispecies historical ecology? Might the arts of noticing I discuss be at its core?16
One Japanese scientist explained matsutake as the result of “unintentional cultivation,” because human disturbance makes the presence of matsutake more likely—despite the fact that humans are entirely incapable of cultivating the mushroom. Indeed, one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other’s world-making projects possible. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human.
But how does one tell the life of the forest?
What story will tell the stories? D. Harraway
Over the past few decades, many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias; it is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization.1
To enlarge what is possible, we need other kinds of stories—including adventures of landscapes.
Speaking of nematodes and landscapes, the father of hematology envisioned a landscape, a world, entirely of nematodes
Pine wilt nematodes are only minor pests for American pines, which evolved with them. These nematodes became tree killers only when they traveled to Asia, where pines were unprepared and vulnerable.
if we want to know what makes places livable we should be studying polyphonic assemblages, gatherings of ways of being. Assemblages are performances of livability.
Organisms don’t have to show their human equivalence (as conscious agents, intentional communicators, or ethical subjects) to count.
Species are not always the right units for telling the life of the forest. The term “multispecies” is only a stand-in for moving beyond human exceptionalism.
Oaks, which interbreed readily and with fertile results across species lines, confuse our dedication to species. But of course what units one uses depends on the story one wants to tell.
A natural forest in northern Finland looks a lot like an industrial tree plantation. The trees have become a modern resource, and the way to manage a resource is to stop its autonomous historical action. As long as trees make history, they threaten industrial governance.
Conventionally, historians look only at human remainders, such as archives and diaries,
Tree rings and all of geology say otherwise
Although environmental goals have changed Forest Service rhetoric, district offices are still evaluated by the board feet of timber they generate.
The singularity of interspecies gatherings matters; that’s why the world remains ecologically heterogeneous despite globe-spanning powers.
AS WITH CAPITALISM, IT IS USEFUL TO CONSIDER science a translation machine. It is machinic because a phalanx of teachers, technicians, and peer reviewers stands ready to chop off excess parts and to hammer those that remain into their proper places. It is translational because its insights are drawn from diverse ways of life. Most scholars have studied the translational features of science only as they contribute to the machinic ones.
the stratosphere is full of fungal spores; at those high altitudes they blow around the earth. It’s not clear, he continued, how many of these spores survive to germinate in distant places. Ultraviolet radiation kills, and most spores are viable only for a short time, perhaps a few weeks.
Species has always been a slippery concept, and DNA sequencing—despite its precision—has not made it easier to handle. Classically, species boundaries were defined by the inability of individuals on each side to mate and produce fertile offspring. That’s easy enough to figure for horses and donkeys. (They mate but do not produce fertile offspring.) But what about fungi?
Species are open-ended when even individuals are so molten, so long-lived, and so unwilling to draw lines of reproductive isolation. “Armillaria root rot is fifty species in one species,” he said; “it depends on what you are dividing species for.”
Ignatio Chapela, a forest pathologist at the University of California, Berkeley,
“This binomial system of naming things is kind of quaint, but it is a complete artifact,” he told me. “You define things with two words and they become an archetypal species. In fungi, we have no idea what a species is. No idea…. A species is a group of organisms that potentially can exchange genetic material, have sex. That applies to organisms that reproduce sexually. So already in plants, where out of a clone you can have change as time goes by, you have problems with species…. You move out of vertebrates to the cnidarians, corals, and worms, and the exchange of DNA, and the way groups are
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Where do you break down the species?9”
the old taxonomic approach you say, ‘this is my ideal’—it’s completely Platonic—and everything is going to compare as a missed approximation to that ideal.
One example is the bacteria in our mouths: he says that the bacteria in the mouths of middle-class urban Chinese are vastly different from those of their peasant neighbors—but just the same as the bacteria of North Americans on a similar diet. It is the environment, not the location, that matters.
