Tsing in her book shows how taking advantage of a wild mushroom can ruin the condition after the beginning of modern capitalism. The matsutake that grows below ground is impossible to cultivate, and hard to find, was the first living thing to emerge from the devastated landscape of Hiroshima. This mushroom high value makes it a great source of money for the post-war society with the job crisis. Tsing in her ethnographic study follows this spicy-smelling mushroom’s global commodity chain, from the forests of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains and elsewhere to Tokyo auction markets. She recounts her interviews with mushroom pickers, scientists, and entrepreneurs in the United States, Asia, and elsewhere to explore the matsutake’s commerce and ecology. The role of this species in the forests, how they impact the territory of animals related to if they like or dislike its spicy smell and how picking them to disturb their ecological surrounding. She writes about the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination and how we need to think about a way for collaborative survival. Tsing shows how the matsutake, as an example, emblematic of survival amid changing circumstances, thrives in transformative collaboration with trees and other species and points the way toward coexisting with environmental disturbance.
For a long time astronomers have been telling us humanity is not the most important thing in the universe and evolutionary biologists established long ago that we're not even the greatest show on earth. Currently, geologists proposed that humanity is the most powerful force on the planet, shaping the environment. It looks we entered a phase of human domination or the anthropocene.
When human being took over the world?
Simon Lewis in the Nature article argues it started tens of thousands of years ago when people hunted large mammals to extinction. Others are as recent as the post-World War II period when such "persistent industrial chemicals" as plastics, cement, lead, and other fruits of the laboratory started to find their way into nature.
Humanity is changing the face of the earth with taking advantage of almost anything, from lands to mushroom. As Tsing states matsutake is one example to make us think about what we are doing to the world we are living in.
No comments:
Post a Comment