Matsutake Mushrooms and The End of the World
Matsutake, or more simply pine mushrooms, live in a mutual relationship with conifers. Just like other forms of mycorrhizal mutualism we’ve investigated, the two organisms help each other out, mushrooms helping trees to flourish in pool soil and receiving necessary nutrients in return. Sound familiar? Yes, I did write about conifers and fungi not so long ago. But there are some very, very interesting things about matsutake relationships that can help us connect natural worlds and human ones. This is a kind of symbiosis that is very much caught up with culture, with global economy, and even the possibility of life after ecological collapse. Woah!? What do mushrooms have to do with the end of the world? If you let me put on my humanities hat and invite an anthropologist to the science party, I can explain,
Matsutake are not just any garden variety mushroom. They are highly prized in Japan and priced accordingly, with the most desirable specimens selling for up to $1,000 a pound (!). There are the most valuable mushrooms in the world. While many Japanese people covet the mushroom’s powerful aroma, many others find the smell um, well….overwhelming at best. Here value is cultural, tied to long traditions of what counts as delicious.
What’s perhaps most surprising, is that Mastutake grow more prolifically in forests that we humans have altered for other purposes. In the Cascade Mountains (and similarly with other tree species in Japan) ponderosa pine logging, and decades of wildfire suppression has resulted in very uniform forests of mature lodgepole pine. Though these transformations were all in the name of large-scale industrial logging, they accidentally created conditions that matsutake think are most excellent-thank-you. At some point, the value of the mushrooms was estimated to have exceeded that of the trees that tended to end up close together and lanky, like supersized toothpicks (Tsing 2015).
Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz has been studying these globe-spanning webs of relationships that weave together mushrooms and pines, industrial forests, as well as migrant mushroom pickers and Japanese mushroom lovers. Her book The Mushroom at the End of the World is an exquisitely written account of how closely biological relationships are coupled with economy and culture. Instead of stopping at how mushrooms depend on trees, or how some cultures find matsutake good to eat, Tsing calls upon fungi to help us think through what the future of life might be like on a planet we humans have so drastically altered.
Mastutake in particular are a powerful example of the limitations of human attempts to control other species. Though matsutake thrive because of human actions, they do not simply follow orders from us. Matsutake actually refuse to be cultivated. Given their great monetary value you can bet than many people have tried to grow them, and that lots of research dollars have gone in to making this happen. But the results? Frustrated scientists, and mushrooms that continue to insist on growing on their own symbiotic terms with trees.
For humanities scholars like Tsing, however, symbiosis can helps us imagine life after ecological collapse where unexpected forms of life and value continue to quietly spring up and give us hope.
Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10581.html
http://www.matsutakeworlds.org/
Yun, W. and R. Hall. 2004. Edible ectomycorrhizal mushrooms: challenges and achievements. Canadian Journal of Botany.
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/b04-051#.V2dmIa7yuos
