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Book review: Weathered: Cultures of Climate

rience freedom – Tsing’s interlocutors describe mushrooms as ‘trophies of freedom’ rather than commodities, though they do transform into capitalist assets down the line (p. 62). Even in Japan, Tsing describes the flow of matsutake through the logic of the gift. Tsing uses these ‘pericapitalist’ forms – non-capitalist, but not outside of it – to build her ideas around ‘salvage capitalism’: the process of capitalist accumulation that takes advantage of the value produced without capitalist control. Tsing argues that salvage is integral to capitalism: ‘a feature of how capitalism works’ (p. 63). Mushrooms are particularly helpful as a metaphor here: the hidden mycorrhizal acrobatics that make the commodifiable fruit possible exemplify salvage. Tsing also uses matsutake as an inroad into the politics of knowledge. She critiques the demands for scalability in science, arguing that such a strategy both banishes diversity and precludes what Tsing calls the contamination of encounter, where individuals and histories develop through interaction with others. She contrasts the matsutake forest to plantations of sugar clones, which provided the ‘landscape model of scalability . . . [the] inspiration for later industrialization and modernization’ (p. 39). Matsutake mushrooms, on the other hand, resist the conditions of the plantation; ‘they cannot live without the transformative relations with other species’ (p. 39). Tsing insists on a methodological approach that captures the messiness of the matsutake forest, arguing for a method based on the same skills required of the mushroom picker: the art of noticing. This insistence has helped to produce an unconventional book. It consists of 24 short chapters that meander through the complexities of salvage capitalism in the same way that mushroom pickers traverse the forests, using all of their senses to notice – the bump of an underground mushroom cap, the white pine, the tracks of deer, the deep aroma of the matsutake. This is the method of the mushroom hunter, and the method of The Mushroom at the End of the World, wherein the art of noticing creates a body of empirical and theory-building work that draws our attention to the mycorrhizal encounters of salvage capitalism, and the collaborations required to salvage life within ruin. The Mushroom at the End of the World is not a simple book to read, and the intertwined stories throughout make a stand-alone chapter difficult to pull out. Nonetheless, the book unfolds, circling like the mushroom picker, meandering through the commodity chain, to allow us to see both the forest and the trees – a fascinating telling of the story of contemporary capitalism. Ruination marks the history of human interaction with nature. But, as Tsing demonstrates, ‘some kinds of disturbances have been followed by regrowth of a sort that nurtures many lives’ (p. 190). Tsing tells us that matsutake are an acquired taste, but this book is a delicious foray into and underneath forests that invites us to imagine the mycorrhizal networks of collaboration that create the possibility for life within capitalist ruin. This book is, as Tsing hopes, ‘like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore’ (p. viii).