Spiny Pines at the End of the World

“In open and disturbed landscapes, it’s hard to keep a pine down.” (Tsing, 169) This spiny, resilient tree is a subject of the utmost fascination for writer Anna Tsing, in her book “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.” Introducing the pine as an integral supporting actor to the famous matsutake mushroom, Tsing exhibits incredible care in the way she crafts a narrative for the tree, explaining its unique role within ecosystems around the world. In the same manner as the matsutake, the pine is presented as a defiant, scrappy character that manages to grow, and in fact thrives, in the harshest conditions known to the natural world. While erosion, fire, and deforestation, slow other life in the forest to a halt, the pine uses these catastrophic events to gain momentum, growing when nothing else can. 

Tsing explains that these extreme landscapes are not only the result of recent human disturbance, but that pine trees have been thriving in hostile conditions since the melting of the first ice age, and continue to pop up after events that revolve around human activity to different degrees, such as volcano eruptions and glacier melts. The way in which the scrappy pine is presented has a twofold effect on the narrative surrounding climate change and anthropocene. In the first place it shows the resilience of the natural world, how despite the manipulations of human beings, it has found ways to adapt and survive. The pine’s presence further encourages us to think of a more interconnected relationship between humans and the natural world, in which the two parties have equal power to profoundly affect one another. 

The resilience of the natural world is crucial in the stories of pines that Tsing tells. She writes that the trees are able to survive in the harshest conditions, making it seem as though human impact is negligible and almost innocuous in comparison to the unflappable presence of the pines. Though what she presents could be interpreted as encouraging apathy within the context of the global climate crisis, by featuring species that thrive in disrupted landscapes, it seems that her prerogative is to highlight the power of the natural world, reframing nature and humans as equal. In this way, her point is not the resilience of pines, but rather she is using this species to show how entangled the existence of humans and forests really are. Together, humans, pines and matsutake create the fabric of the forest, its current conception would be incomplete without the interaction of these elements. She explains, “By colonizing disturbed landscapes, matsutake and pine make history together– and they show us how history-making extends beyond what humans do. At the same time, humans create a great deal of forest disturbance. Matsutake, pines, and humans together shape the trajectories of these landscapes.” (Tsing, 171) By telling the story primarily of the pine, Tsing brings the focus away from the human and instead narrows in on how the pine has adapted and thrived.

By explaining the forests not as a dichotomy of good and evil but rather a complex and fascinating dance of destruction and adaptation, Tsing’s writing imagines a seamless relation between humans and the natural world around them. She writes that ecosystems are not just able to coexist with humans, but that they actually need human beings to bring out their sustainability. Her study of the peasant forests of Japan, expose her to a different perspective regarding the role of human beings in relation to the forests. A Japanese man who is involved in the management of peasant forests offers a radical perspective regarding the creation of sustainable relations between humans and nature. The peasant foresters in Japan believe that humans and nature both discover their truest form through their interaction. Tsing writes: “The sustainability of nature, never just falls into place; it must be brought out through human work that also brings out our humanity. Peasant landscapes are the proving grounds for remaking sustainable relations between humans and nature.” (Tsing, 183) This sentiment is entirely different from the common discourse that equivalates human intervention in the natural world with absolute destruction. With this example and others, Tsing warns that assuming a global perspective; flattens cultural specificity and knowledge. She argues that understanding the specificity of cultural practice is key. Landscapes are specific, therefore the way that human beings interact and imagine their lives on them; will be as well. 

The pine is similarly brought alive as a subject of Tsing’s story; due to its ability to be compared across cultures. As in the case of the Japanese peasant forester, the presence of pine elicits a different response depending on geography as well as cultural practices crafted around forests. Similarly in their article “On the Importance of Date or Decolonizing the Anthropocene” authors Heather Davis and Zoe Todd talk about the concept of indigenous place thought, as originally articulated by Vanessa Watts, saying “Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts”… Indigenous Place-Thought necessarily disrupts a concept of knowledge separate from the geosphere and biosphere, and posits instead that land and thought are integral to one another.” (Tsing, 770) Recognizing the profound ways that land and thought are intertwined, instills the possibility of a more harmonious relationship to the natural world in every person. Place thought, which is brought about and encouraged by texts like Tsing’s, helps conceptualize and more importantly remember, a way in which sustainability did function in the past. Therefore this book and its supporting character, the spiky resilient pine, provides glimmers of light and encouragement amongst the seemingly insurmountable rubble of capitalist ruins. It imagines these ruins not as barren, but rather filled with pine trees, mushrooms and human beings, the three elements from which arise many forests around the world. 

Works Cited

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World : On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Davis, Heather, and Zoe Todd. 2017. “On the Importance of a Date, Or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene”. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16 (4), 761-80.

Written by Celia Hurvitt