Free The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing Page B

groups who disturb the landscape as a way of stimulating changes in multispecies gatherings—and themselves. Kyoto’s Matsutake Crusaders is one. The Crusaders offer the motto: “Let’s revitalize the forest so we can all eat sukiyaki .” The meal, a meat and vegetable stew best served with matsutake, evokes the sensual pleasure that emerges from woodland revitalization. Yet, as one Crusader admitted to me, matsutake might not appear in his lifetime. The best he can do is disturb the forest—and hope that matsutake come.
    Why might working the landscape evoke a sense of renewed possibilities? How might it change volunteers as well as ecologies? This chapter tells the story of woodland revitalization groups who hope that small-scale disturbance might draw both people and forests out of alienation, building a world of overlapping lifeways in which mutualistic transformation, the mode of mycorrhiza, might yet be possible.
    It was a sunny Saturday in June when Shiho Satsuka and I went to see how the Matsutake Crusaders were disturbing the forest. More than twenty volunteers had come out to work. By the time we arrived, they were scattered across the hillside, digging up the roots of the broadleaf trees that had invaded what once had been a hillside of pines. They had strung a rope and pulley down the hillside, and they lowered great bags of roots and humus to a pile at the bottom of the hill. They left only red pine—lonely survivors on an otherwise empty hillside. My first reaction was disorientation. I saw a forest disappearing rather than renewal.
    Dr. Yoshimura, the leader of the group, was generous enough to explain. He showed me the tangled evergreen-broadleaf brush that had developed on the hillside after its abandonment by peasant farmers. It was so dense that one could barely reach a hand through the bushes, much less a body. In the dark shade, no understory layer could develop. Light-loving species were dying out, and the lack of understory left the slope vulnerable. In all the time that peasants had cared for the hillside, Dr. Yoshimura noted, there had been no significant erosion. The road at the base of the hill was just as it had been, in local records, for severalcenturies. Now the dense and undisturbed forest, with its simplified structure, threatened the soil. 1
    In contrast, he showed me the next flank of the hill, where the Crusaders had finished their work. Pines greened the hillside, and spring flowers and wildlife had returned by themselves. The group was developing uses for this forest. They had built a kiln to make charcoal and made compost heaps to breed the beetles Japanese boys like to collect. There were fruit trees and vegetable gardens, fertilized by the humus they had removed, and plans for many more projects.
    Many of the volunteers were retired people, but there were also students, housewives, and salaried employees willing to give up free weekends. Some had private forestland, and they were learning how to manage their own pines. One showed pictures of his satoyama forest, which had won several prizes for its beauty. In the spring, his hillsides were bedecked with the blossoms of wild cherries and azaleas. Even if no matsutake appeared, he explained, he was happy to be participating in this reconstructed woodland. The Crusaders do not aim for finished gardens; they work for still-emergent forests, which arrange themselves around the possibilities of tradition-sized disturbance. The satoyama becomes a zone where more-than-human social relations—including their own—have a chance to flourish.
    At lunchtime, the volunteers gathered for introductions, jokes, and a celebratory meal. They prepared lunch: flowing somen, “noodles in the stream.” A bamboo aqueduct was constructed, and I joined the line to catch the noodles flowing by. Everyone was having fun and learning as they saved the forest.
    Saving an abandoned forest? As I suggested earlier, in American sensibilities an “abandoned