The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, rhizomatic relations, the symbolic potency of fungus, the alchemy of mycelium, high-chaos forestry, and The Understory by Robert Macfarlane. #Blessed to be joined again by Glenn from Be Your Own Drum Circle.
Plus: Glenn answers our first live listener question from Twitch: “Why do you not like the climate change?”
We’re streaming our weekly episode recording sessions Sundays at 6:30pm EST / 3:30pm PST. Call us toll-free during the show to chat or leave a message anytime at 844-9161-NOW (669).
Full episode transcripts now available on the website. (If you’re seeing this on the website, just click the “Continue Reading” link below or, like, scroll down.)
Music by Ricard Culver and Martin H. Emes.
Transcript
Distorted Voices: Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern … all future generations are at stake in this battle … failure of crops … rivers and streams serve as sewers and dumping grounds … the impacts of global climate change are already being felt …
Jeremy: This isn’t the way it has to be. It doesn’t have to be the end. There’s still time. It’s Now or Never. Let’s try again.
Jeremy: Season 2 episode 2: Speaking in Spores with Glenn Newcomer.
I’m your host, Jeremy. We’re discussing The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Understory by Robert Macfarlane… among other things. Links in the show notes.
I’m very excited to be trying out some new stuff. I’ll be doing my best to make this a weekly podcast, actually. We’re also live streaming our recording sessions on Twitch so you can catch us Sundays at 6:30 Eastern, 3:30 Pacific. You can lend your voice to these discussions directly by calling our toll free number: 844-9161-NOW. (That’s 844-916-1669.) You can also leave us a voicemail at that number any time. I would love to hear from you.
That’s enough out of me. Let’s get this podcast out before we record a new one.
Glenn: People think this podcasting shit is easy.
Jeremy: It ain’t easy.
Glenn: It’s all… it’s all tubes.
Jeremy: It’s tubes, man.
We’re here with Glenn from Be Your Own Drum Circle. Makes excellent clothing and whatnot. Blessed by an authentic new age priest. I’ve been meaning to ask, is the new age priest you or do you have a separate new age priest?
Glenn: I mean it’s me, but it can be anyone. That’s kind of the idea.
Jeremy: Excellent. The identity of the new age priest, specifically, is not what’s important.
Glenn: It’s not. Do you just want to hang out and talk about the mushroom book?
Jeremy: Let’s hang out and talk about the mushroom book. I like when structures emerge from unknowable depths, much like mushrooms — seamless transition.
Glenn: That’s very rhizomatic of you.
Jeremy: Rhizomatic! Can we use that in the way that Ninja Turtles used various words to mean “good” or “cool” or “yay?”
Glenn: Yeah, I mean, that’s how Deleuze and Guattari use it. It’s just “shit I like.” That’s rhizomatic. The mushroom book was really good. The mushroom book is, what is it even called? What is the name of the mushroom book?
Jeremy: The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. I think that it approximates correct.
Glenn: Subtitle is “the Possibilities of Life in Post-Capitalist ruin” or something like that.
It’s a pretty bold title, but it’s really good. I learned a lot about mushrooms.
Jeremy: It is a hell of a book. They covered so much ground and the topics were very expansive.
On one hand, it kind of used the whole harvesting of matsutake mushrooms as a lens to explore capitalism. But then it used this economic analysis to explore the harvesting and distribution of the mushrooms. So it sort of kept shifting these different lenses for looking at this very complex, multifaceted set of topics that have been bundled together.
Glenn: Yeah, totally. One pillar of discussion is just the biology of mushrooms, what they are, why they’re important and what they do. And then what matsutake is and why it’s important. And like mycorrhizal structures where a mushroom and, you know, a single species of tree or multiple species of tree can connect into a mycelium network underneath the ground, share nutrients, share, possibly information, and all of this cool shit that makes life possible in places where soils are providing everything that trees need.
Jeremy: Yeah. I feel like it could be multiple books in the sheer breadth of kinds of things that are discussed. I took some highlights that I thought might be good jumping off points. One of them I thought was pretty revealing about the nature of the book itself, where she’s talking about “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by Ursula K. Le Guin, which was delightful, to stumble upon a Le Guin shout-out in this, where I absolutely was not expecting it. The author writes “Ursula K Le Guin argues that stories of hunting and killing have allowed readers to imagine that individual heroism is the point of a story. Instead, she proposes that storytelling might pick up diverse things of meaning and value and gather them together like a forager rather than a hunter waiting for the big kill. In this kind of storytelling, stories should never end, but rather lead to further stories.” Which I think was very reflective of Mushroom at the End of the World as well.
Glenn: Yeah. That’s so sick. I’ve never read an Ursula K Le Guin book. I have attempted to, but couldn’t really get into it. But every description or quote from her that I’ve read is just the coolest shit. But somehow I can’t use that to really break into her work.
It’s just, it’s so wizardy.
Jeremy: Yeah. I haven’t really read the wizardy stuff.
Glenn: Is there like non-wizard?
Jeremy: She has like some science fictiony stuff, of which I read The Dispossessed. The story wasn’t super interesting. It wasn’t really about the story so much. It was kind of about these concepts and the relationship between these two societies. This revolutionary anarchist society that had been functioning for a while and one that’s like futuristic ultra-capitalist kind of thing.
But I know what you mean. It took me a long time to get through that book because… I dunno. The concepts are really interesting, but I felt like I would rather read an essay about these concepts. You know what I mean?
Glenn: Yeah. I think it’s just a taste or preference thing. I think it’s probably really, really cool, but I’d rather read about it. That’s just an aesthetic problem. That’s a really sick quote though.
I mean I understand why the book seems like a lot of other books because the concepts that we’re talking about… I mean to talk about what a fungus is and how it’s composed of mycelia and how that works is weird. We think about biology as plants or like as arborescent which is things have a structure, they have a center, they have things that branch off for them, whether it’s a concept or a tree or a power structure whatever. And subverting that into being able to really conceptualize something that doesn’t have a center and is just a network and behaves in a way that is not only weird to describe but invisible to us because it’s just happening totally under the ground and that what we think of [as a] mushroom is just this kind of fruiting body of a mushroom. Most mushrooms don’t even make fruits. They’re just down there, alive, making everything possible… Is very weird and very spacey.
Jeremy: Yeah. Something about mycelium and the nature of fungus and how fungi relate to other plants and to entire forests is so antithetical almost to how … I don’t want to say “have been taught” ’cause I don’t know if it’s like an intuitive way of how I think complex systems have to work or if it’s just how I’ve been taught to think complex systems should work but mushrooms work completely differently. There’s not like a top-down control. There’s not this pyramidal structure.
The thing that tripped me up the most was when she wrote about how genes work in fungus and fungal relationships and how they’re like gene fluid and they’ll mate with parts of themselves. Even the lines between an individual and another individual or an individual and part of that individual become so blurry and fluid and shifting.
Glenn: Yeah It’s so sick. I’ve tried to write this down so we can just describe the major parts of the book. I think there’s three. There’s an approach at understanding it through biology which is where we talk about what is mycellium… all this stuff under the ground. What are mushrooms? They’ve existed longer than just about any other land thing. They make soil and all that shit possible by digesting and breaking down rocks, making the whole operation work. There’s a thing called mycorrhizal mushroom relationships where a mushroom and a tree are buddies and they do shit for each other and under the ground… passing nutrients back and forth… If the mycellia is big enough, different trees can use it to talk to each other — which sounds like some wild hippie shit but it’s very real.
Pillar two: economic lens to talk about it where matsutake are worth a ton of money for export. They usually go to Japan. You can pick them and plug them into a supply chain. A bulk seller sells to a packager who sells to an exporter who sells to a retailer who sells to a person. So there’s a discussion of supply chains. But it’s also not something that you can grow because they’re totally ungrowable. You can maybe try to zhuzh the conditions of the forest to make them grow. But you really can’t make them grow. You’re just maybe trying to provide a landscape that they’ll like. But you’re really just guessing because there’ll be huge for a few years and then totally disappear and then the organism will do something else, decide not to fruit. You just have no control over that shit. So it launches into a discussion of when capitalism just sort of salvages something that’s already there. It was kind of interesting ’cause it made me think about this in a different way. I was thinking about value theory… You know, you make something. Labor transferred into value. And the author proposes that, really, value in our era is extraction economies. So it’s like, you know, tearing out timber, mushroom , minerals, whatever. And that shit that was already there that no one really caused it to exist, like the labor’s just in extracting it… And then it goes into a supply chain… which was fascinating. It sort of is anti-plantation, which is how we think about most biological concepts that interface with capitalism. It does the opposite of a plantation. You can’t structure it. It just either exists or it doesn’t and you get almost no say in it.
Thing number three: the human story. I didn’t really know how to pronounce this… Is it Mein? The group of people that she mostly hangs out with who are displaced people who were really involved in conflict, communities and like surviving conflict, looking for outsider relationships and a version of freedom, living in central Oregon in these zones harvesting matsutake when they exist to sell them and keep doing their thing kind of outside of a system, to be free and to be cool. And then there’s also discussion about Japanese peasant forest upkeep and stewardship in order to try to make matsutake grow locally, which I thought was super interesting.
That’s what I have. That’s the things that I see attacking. What is the mushroom and why is it important and what is its relationship to envisioning a post-capitalist world?
Jeremy: Yeah. Which is a lot of things. Those things had things. My big thing that I came away from it, and that kind of connects with all three of those, is how powerful the symbol of the mushroom is now.
I feel like we’re seeing the end of our major cultural narratives that have been shaping how we think about our society and where we’re going. These myths of progress and infinite growth are disappearing or crumbling or exploding. And so I feel like there’s this turning in to try to find alternative myths that would help us make sense of the right way to relate to the environment that we’ve been sabotaging and each other since our social relationships have been crumbling. In so many ways this was reinforced throughout the book, including all three of those pillars that you identified. The mushroom just presents itself as this almost too good symbol for some kind of alternative myth. It overturns our ideas about how evolution works as this dog-eat-dog, individualistic, competitive, which is how we think the market should work, how we think economies should work in capitalism… And instead presents this cooperative groovy sharing alternative. I mean, it’s not completely devoid of competition but through the lens of competition, it doesn’t make sense as a whole so much. You need to be looking at how it cooperates. And so that’s informing how we think about how evolution actually works. Mushrooms are a really interesting way to see this in action but there’s also so much cooperation that is required to explain how certain creatures evolved. We’re kind of in the process of rewriting how we understand evolution. So it kind of reflects on all life, the whole ecosystem, and how we relate to it. But also just this idea that it’s this vast, hidden, underground network of cooperation and then it flowers when it needs to spread. It pushes something up into the light, into visibility when it’s ready to spore and spread and grow. I think that’s something beautiful when we we’re thinking about forming alternative systems as capitalism is in the process of eating itself and crumbling around us and probably crumbling into smaller systems kind of living off the remains of it in one way or another… The idea that fungus is also something that eats decay and is part of this recycling system allowing new life to grow and it’s essential for that and also essential for processing minerals in the earth that animals and even plants wouldn’t be able to and making those minerals bio- available, so taking stuff that nothing can use and making it usable for life as almost this kind of alchemy…
Glenn: It definitely offers a sense of wonder. Connections and how connections can be mutualistic or non-hierarchical or they can be so driven by not just chance but relationships that we don’t understand
Jeremy: Yeah. So maybe let’s talk about the model of the plantation and how that contrasts with this mushroom that can’t fit into the plantation system and then we can use that to get into salvage capitalism. What was the term?
Glenn: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s what she called it.
Jeremy: Okay. ‘Cause I definitely want to unpack that.
Glenn: No. Yeah, let’s try. I thought it was interesting, and it stuck out to me but I didn’t feel like I fully understood that. So the plantation is like I think in the book it’s presented as the foundation of colonialism, to be able to go to a place, fuck up whatever’s happening there, clear it out, know what kind of crop is gonna make you dollars — sugarcane or whatever — plant it, make local population harvest it for you and work it because they have the knowhow, and then just run off with the benefits and plug it into a Western supply chain. And she kind of like just goes deeper into it. Cause it’s like we know about plantations and colonialism kind of at a surface level. But her suggestion, to just look deeper and say who knew how to make this stuff… who knew how to show sugarcane in the first place, who understands the features of the local biology and how to grow and what to grow and it’s context I don’t necessarily have a deeper perspective on it. it’s sort of introduced as a feature of colonialism.
Jeremy: Yeah and not only a particular feature of colonialism on like a social level but also like a particular way of gardening. A way of extracting material resources from land which is also kind of a good symbol of colonialism just to like generally create these square symmetrical structures and then monocrop and cut away anything that isn’t the specific thing you want to get until usually the soil becomes super degraded and then you move on.
Glenn: Yeah totally. And it’s usually just what is the the highest market rate that you can get for something and you’ll just annihilate every other growing option based on that.
Jeremy: Yeah. The crops are selected based on what makes the money not necessarily what supports a society or even the workers of the plantation itself. It’s just a cash grab. It’s like how can we extract the most monetary value from a whole ecosystem or a whole people or a whole civilization a whole culture.
Glenn: Yeah totally. It would be in contradiction if the purpose of the plantation was to feed people because it’s like you destroy the local ecosystem by doing a monoculture but you’re trying to feed people and those would be in contradiction but they’re really not because your goal is never to feed people you know just acquire a commodity to exchange for the highest possible profit.
Jeremy: And that gets into the nature of salvage capitalism which I sort of took as the idea that capitalism is all about grabbing what it can and running away with it like thieving from… There’s this line I clipped out: “private assets most always grow out of unacknowledged commons.” The idea that you’re essentially stealing something from the commons. There’s something fundamental about how capitalism works, where it’s always plundering something that everyone would otherwise share and turning it into a private asset, something that’s owned, that’s owned by a specific individual or entity.
On like an archetypal level, there’s something about this failing collapsing system of doing things, patriarchy, capitalism, the way that religion works in our culture, the way that the economy works in our culture, whatever this mega structure of ideas that we have all these different lenses for looking at… It seems very driven by… In alchemy. there’s the idea of “solve et coagula” or cutting apart and then sticking together or merging together, separating and then rejoining. And it seems like in archetypal terms capitalism specifically — but also us culturally and our cultural myths — is all about cutting things apart.
Like the plantation system is all about taking apart and separating tracts of land, cutting out anything we don’t want, and just taking the tiny little bits that we want , fitting them into a supply chain where they’ll usually be processed and further separated then packaged in these very discrete entities.
But there’s something very primally “coagula” about the mushrooms. It’s fitting everything together. It’s fitting forests together and it’s fitting these different peoples together. The thing I feel like I have the most trouble grappling with in this book is all these different cultures that are being explored. Frequently what the author is examining are these cultures of immigrants that had been cut from their own cultural matrix and then forming these new little patches. She calls them patches or something of culture and they’re all interacting in these different ways around harvesting these mushrooms. It’s forming this patchwork of interrelating cultures and they’re not perfectly harmonious and there is competition at the individual and the group level, but they’re all relating in this shared way. Like the mushroom is extending its mycelial structures almost on a social cultural level, reflecting what’s happening with the biology.
Glenn: Totally. With mushrooms it’s not like there’s no competition. If one mushroom stops filling a resource for some reason in an area, another one that’s able to fill that niche will come in and do it. And that’s sort of the same thing that happens culturally, but it’s not the same thing as the plantation because it can’t really be controlled. It just happens. It defies being contained, controlled.
Jeremy: Yeah. In The Mushroom at the End of the World the author explorers different ways that humans have disturbed the forest. So they’re adding this input to the forest, and then different kinds of things emerge. There’s differences of opinion about what’s most conducive to the matsutake growing and, at least some of the opinions, there’s a way that the whole system benefits from humans interfering.
It kind of works against this anti-humanist tendency. Once you start to get doom-woke and you start to see what’s going on with the environment, it’s easy to be like, man, humans are disease. You get
like Agent Smith about it. But that’s not necessarily true. There are ways that we too can affect nature and natural relationships where something good emerges from it. We’re not trying to seize control over it. We’re not trying to cut it apart into tiny little plantation squares or anything like that, but there’s a way that we can affect it and have a relation with it that still contributes to the overall growth of the whole.
Glenn: Which is hard because that’s a high-chaos approach to forestry. From our vantage point, it’d be like, this is exactly the best thing to do. Or like, this is the ideal state . If you build a parking lot over mycelium, it’s not going can grow back. But as for what to what to do positively, other than stop catastrophic damage to the systems, it’s really hard to say and it’s high chaos and that’s kind of interesting.
Jeremy: It’s also so extremely contextual. Even if we did figure out in this one forest what the optimal way for human beings to effect the forest to produce a net positive in everything we can measure, it’s going to be completely different one forest over, or even a different part of the forest or a different season. There’s so many variables. Just setting underbrush on fire might work perfectly in this one forest, but this other forest with a completely different kind of underbrush or with different temperatures different ecosystems, different species , that wouldn’t work at all. And so all we can do is look at indigenous relations where people have been relating with…. I was getting that out of Indigenous People’s History of the United States, but just still haven’t finished because it’s such a fucking bummer. Just like chronicling all the ways that white people totally fucked up. There’s so much genocide.
But something I really got out of it, aside from that, was ways that indigenous people managed forests. Where settlers were like, “Oh, look at these forests. They’re beautiful. Well, let’s take these beautiful forests that we assume just happened.” But different indigenous tribes, they’ve been managing them for, you know, ages and ages. We can only look to these indigenous people almost, or we’re starting from scratch. In places where indigenous peoples have been totally removed from their land or cultures have been totally destroyed, we lose that knowledge of how to optimally relate to land . So we have to reverse engineer it and it can only be super ad hoc and specific and small scale and trial and error .
Glenn: Yeah, that is one of the cooler things that she argues for in the book is a highly specific relationship to the world, which is pretty much like, don’t think that much about the idea of ecosystems and shit and like global ecology. I mean, to the extent that we should stop, you know, annihilating it, 100%. But like, you want to go deep and understand what’s happening? You have to do it at the what’s-under-your-feet level, which is cool. That’s some cool shit to say. I like that. Since I read the book, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to what is underneath my feet and it’s pretty cool and very fun.
I watched the Fantastic Fungi movie. Paul Stamets’ joint. Largely about similar concepts. It goes deeper into medicinal, mushroom practices, which was really interesting. But it introduces a lot of the same biological concepts about what mycelium is and what it does and how it’s responsible for the world. But it did kind of remind me that, I think it’s, I don’t know if it’s cubensis or whatever, but it’s only found in human-disturbed environments. So there’s this whole debate over where it came from or what it wants or what it’s doing. It’s also pretty unclear how mushroom speciation works.
Jeremy: Almost like it could have co-evolved. Or something
Glenn: How do you speciate? To what degree did we influence your speciation?
I did think that in the chain of salvage capitalism, it was interesting, and I don’t know a lot about this, but I feel like you see the phrase “salvage punk” in collapse circles. Like you might see “solarpunk” or something as like a survival strategy for a post-collapse kind of scenario. It seems pretty self explanatory. You’re salvaging shit to make the world around you. And I feel like she kind of ignored that and went around it because that concept is, you know, sci-fi, which is cool. I thought it was interesting, but I think that her elucidation of that the salvage is already here, it’s not a thing of science fiction, like we’re already living in it. It’s already happening.
Jeremy: Oh yeah, Mad Max is already here. It’s already peoples fighting savagely over oil and guns. It’s already just kind of a symbol or an expression of what’s already happening, much in the same way that the more I’ve read about collapse, I no longer am capable of seeing it as this separate thing that’s going to happen. It’s more just like a way of looking at things that have already been unfolding this entire time. Collapse is kind of baked into the form of society that we have right now. It’s just downward slope of the life cycle.
Glenn: Yes, totally. I mean, we know that science fiction is always just a way to describe what’s happening in the present. And I think when we talk about like a Mad Max future , we’re talking about the Mad Max present and that moment in the book gave me like a tool with which to talk about it.
Jeremy: I almost have to relate to this book in a rhizomatic way. It doesn’t feel like the kind of thing where there’s this one thesis statement that’s backed up by all of these pieces of evidence . It feels less hierarchical in that pyramidal form of hierarchy. It’s more different ideas relating to each other in varied ways and then I have to relate to all of those ideas. It sort of makes sense that as we’re going through, we’re kind of connecting it with completely other things like Mad Max, alchemy…
Glenn: Yeah, totally. I do feel like there is a current resurgence of interest in the rhizome both from biology and from literature nerds who are into Deleuze and Guattari. They talk a lot about the rhizome, and I’m not going to pretend that I understand that, but I do know that the way they described the rhizome, they’re like, it’s a constantly shifting relationship that’s nonhierarchical between power relationships, art, biology, linguistic structures, history… with no center, it’s anti-arborescent, meaning it doesn’t have a center that branches off, it’s a network with no center. It’s both subject and object. I think that that sounds delicious to a lot of people right now. A lot of people in similar positions who are looking for tools to deal.
Jeremy: Yeah. So here was an interesting term that was introduced. I’m quoting from the text, “Some biologists have begun to speak of the hologenome theory of evolution, referring to the complex of organisms and their symbionts as an evolutionary unit, the holobionte.” So extrapolating from this idea that there can be two species that have a mutually beneficial relationship such as the hippo and those birds that clean their teeth or their mouths or whatever that is — first of all, gross. But whatever, birds and hippos, you do you, but… Ugh. Second of all, the idea that they co-evolved to some degree, and there’s more extreme cases of this, including mitochondria in every one of our cells, but now you can extrapolate that to this hologenome theory of evolution. So a complex of organisms, everything related together and evolving together is the thing that will make sense of why a species evolved in a particular way, not that particular species and how it got one over all of the other spaces in the system.
Glenn: Yeah, it emphasizes connectivity and the focus is on a multiplicity of things that are happening in… I’m going to call it “the assemblage.”
Jeremy: yeah. Let’s talk more about that term , “assemblage.”
Glenn: She breaks it out in the book a couple of times and I’m like, damn, I know that that’s a philosophy word.
Jeremy: Is it just what it says on the label? ‘Cause I don’t remember her really defining ” assemblage.” She just sort of uses it. So maybe if she’s using it in a literal sense of… All right. Here’s something I highlighted: “assemblages are performances of livability … If we want to know what makes places livable, we should be studying polyphonic assemblages, gatherings of ways of being.” Assemblages are performances of livability.
Glenn: Yeah, totally. I mean, it’s not like a, it’s not like a philosophy where that’s like a hidden word that means something totally different than what it is. I mean, yeah, from D&G: “assemblage theory provides a bottom up framework for analyzing social complexity by emphasizing fluidity, exchangeability, multiple functionalities through entities, and their connectivity.” I mean, it’s what you’re describing.
Do you have any other highlights in that section?
Jeremy: I have a bunch.
Oh, okay. I made a weird connection here. Maybe we can talk about this. Maybe you have some insight. She’s talking about businesses as opposed to mushrooms or the societies that are harvesting these mushrooms. “Scalable business, for example, does not change its organization as it expands. This is possible only if business relations are not transformative, changing the business as new relations are added.” So capitalism values scalability, and businesses that are able to expand and contract without fundamentally transforming themselves. And my weird connection is with how we define consciousness.
A lot of definitions of consciousness that I’ve seen have to do with how responsive something is to stimulus. So, something that I read is a common perception from people on a psychedelic drug trip is the realization that a thermostat has a low level of consciousness because it has this feedback mechanism where it’s responding to its environment in some way. So I was thinking a scalable business would have a lower level of consciousness than a more organic or rhizomatic structure where something would have to fundamentally transform itself in response to a new context. And if it is responding in a very complex way and transforming itself in a very complex way, then could you call that system more conscious to some degree?
Glenn: Yes. That’s a very cool connection. I mean even if you’re not necessarily like ranking consciousnesses, it does hyper- emphasize that adaptability is something that we can relate to as a part of the mushroom lifestyle that we know is important to be a person. And we know that the more static we are usually the less happy we are. Even just internally, our inner experience. You’re not growing and changing, you’re probably less satisfied and less fulfilled. Just the emphasis on wild adaptability and change as like a survival strategy is resonant with me. That makes sense.
Jeremy: I’m trying to see if there’s a connection there. I’m like halfway through that Johann Hari book Lost Connections. It’s looking at depression and anxiety as the result of severed or strained connections with nature, other people, meaning, as opposed to… The first thing it does for the first quarter of the book is just completely demolish the serotonin regulation theory, the neurochemical theory of the cause of depression. Just… pulverizes that. And which kind of, again, connects to the reason it’s so popular is because of capitalism. Because that’s what makes drug companies money. It was a hypothesis that someone gave that there wasn’t really any evidence for, and then drug companies kind of ran with it. And then the way that the studies were funded, it allowed them to just toss out anything that didn’t support that. So you had really crappy evidence for it working in the first place. But that’s like, if you cherry-pick the good stuff. But then it kind of goes to this point that was really transformative for me in my twenties was maybe depression is something that everyone is going through — like statistically, it’s exploding right now — because it has something to do with society. And so the whole rest of the book is kind of pointing out, yeah, this is a result of a shitty society. This is the result of the society that alienates us from each other. That alienates us from nature. That alienates us from meaning, that destroys anything meaningful about our lives. And he, just now like halfway through, used the “capitalism” word specifically as maybe this is why we’re not talking about it because it calls capitalism into question. Which I really dig. I think maybe the connection I’m trying to make here after longwindedly introducing this completely separate texts is: this whole exploration in Mushroom at the End of the World of these rhizomatic structures and the way assemblages of people and patches of culture or whatever are relating with each other is intensely interconnected as opposed to what we have now, which is like a plantation.
Education is kind of a plantation, our housing structures are shaped like if a plantation was a house, you know what I mean? The way that we structure knowledge is plantation shaped. The way that we consume information or seek pleasure is sort of plantation shaped… And it’s all sort of alienating and disconnecting. And so there’s this polarity that forms in my mind between the happy mushroom formation and then this cut up plantation society that we’re living in that’s causing psychological-level failures. Not just collapse as something that’s happening wide-scale, but collapse as something that you can see within individuals participating in a system as the soil of being degrades or the pesticides of propaganda poison these little plots of land that is our lives. I guess I’m just making this strange connection. Does that mean anything to you?
Glenn: I mean, my impressions from the book were all very personal and it’s just sort of seeded in me, sort of just in the back, working. Even in this last week, I’ve been thinking about just work and friends and how trying to make the conditions for good things to happen and the more control I’d try to exert over situations , the shittier or they can become, but a sense of tending, distantly, relationships and stuff and putting in work, which is sort of like how the Japanese peasant forestry is discussed. I just sort of meditated on a little bit. It didn’t lead me to a big singular realization or something, but these ideas are kind of a part of my vision right now, at least in this season of my life and the really interesting. But they’re not, like, one singular global thing, which kind of comes back to like, the review of this book that I read, sort of accused it of not having prescriptive or revolutionary potential, whatever . I think sort of missed the point. If there is a thesis in the book, it’s just to look really closely and to be very specific about how you approach the world around you and to look at what’s under your feet, what’s in your own space. And I think that it provides some tools to do that in a way I thought was really interesting because I’ve also been thinking about plantation versus, rhizomatic structures. So it stuck with me, but in a way that is a little bit vague. So I definitely relate to that.
Jeremy: Something you said about trying to plan for things or trying to control things, resulting in everything going to shit. Which I kind of relate to as someone with a predominantly Buddhist-influenced spiritual practice. You know, I sit and I watch my consciousness be out of control. And that sort of changes your relationship with consciousness where it’s less about attempting to seize control or force control one way or another, but seeing what emerges.
There’s this one highlight I have, “Sometimes common entanglements emerge not from human plans, but despite them and is not even the undoing of plans, but rather the unaccounted for in their doing that offers possibilities for elusive moments of living in common.”
Glenn: That’s very cool.
Jeremy: [laughs]
Glenn: No, I mean, feel like I took away a lot of that, but I was just like, this is very cool. I’m really enjoying this. This is sick. That’s a sick thing to say.
That’s enough for me from the mushroom book.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Yeah, It doesn’t have to have a prescriptive, “this is what we do now.” Not everything has to be that, but it’s full of interesting mushroom spore ideas that can now spread and form new rhizomatic structures with other areas of theory or forms of thinking about this.
Glenn: If nothing else, learn about mushrooms. Biology is hella interesting .
I got on this app called iNaturalist, which is extremely cool if you are starting to get into biology. On iNat, you can, one, like look at your region. It’s basically, it’s like a biology observation tool. So it’s like someone takes a picture of a thing, a mushroom or plant or whatever, uploads it. Either they know what it is or, this AI thing thinks it knows what it is. It’s pretty bad at identifying mushroom , but it’s pretty good at identifying plants. We post it, “here’s where I saw it,” whatever it is. If you don’t know what it is, people will look at it and, a lot of times it’s biologists or people who actually know what they’re looking at, and identify it for you. So you can look at your region or if you’re interested in a thing, you can find out where it is, where you can go see it, what is under your feet, so to speak. It’s pretty good at finding mushrooms and where they might grow, where the mycelium that’s might be, if you have something that you want to go check out.
Jeremy: Oh, that’s awesome.
Oh, we have chats. Hi, ed_switch. Yurly Petrov asks “Why do you not like the climate change?”
Glenn, why do you not like the climate change?
Glenn: It’s bad.
Jeremy: It’s bad.
Glenn: It’s bad for everyone, everything. The human impact on climate change is undeniable, and you’re a shithead grandpa if you don’t recognize that.
Jeremy: Well, that’s all the questions we have.
Did you ever read the Terence McKenna mushroom book?
Glenn: The one where he talks about the Stoned Ape Theory?
Jeremy: The Stoned Ape Theory? Yeah.
Glenn: That book goes hella hard. It’s really good. They discuss Stoned Ape theory a little bit in the mushroom movie. They don’t really go too deep in it because it’s kooky even by kooky mushroom guy standards, but it’s also so cool that it’s really hard to not talk about it.
Jeremy: That’s the zone that I have to put it in is the cool ideas that are very conjectural and they’re not playing in the same room as more hard science ideas, but it’s pretty rad to think about.
Glenn: Yeah. I don’t have, I don’t have a skin in the game on that one, but if that was true, it’d be very cool.
Jeremy: It would be hard to prove or disprove. There’s no fossils for how stoned people were way back when.
Glenn: In the mists of prehistory.
Jeremy: Yeah. Similar is the idea of panspermia, like fungi came from space, which could hypothetically have happened. It’s such a cool idea. Do fungi just go around releasing space spores and then interrelating with the evolution of life on that planet so they can release more space spores. Are mushrooms secretly transforming humans into a space-fairing civilization so we can spread mushroom spores?
Glenn: You could make the analogy that there is, you know, there are fungus es that are parasitic with species of ants or bugs. Spores on them or in them … Funguses are pretty good at hijacking nervous systems so there’s a few situations like this where a bug gets driven to a behavior by a fungus. A cool one that they talk about in the mushroom movie that was new to me is , there’s a fungus that naturally produces meth, or amphetamines or whatever, which is not something we thought was a natural occurring thing in the world, affects a wasp, I think, or a bug or some shit, like a Cicada, produces amphetamines in the brain, so it keeps flying around because it’s in terrible pain as it’s being eaten by fungus , keeps going, spread spores everywhere. The fungus that’s inside it propagates. That’s pretty wild. There’s a similar situation with an ant where they’ll get driven up as the parasitic mushroom grows inside it, up towards the canopy, so the mushroom can have better spore distribution. There could be a similar situation where we’re getting pushed out into space.
Jeremy: The minute a human sets foot on Mars, they’re just gonna freeze up and then a mushrooms just gonna launch out of their skull.
Glenn: Wow. That’d be cool. I’d be fine with that.
Jeremy: It’s an interesting way to go out. Better than living life on a Elon Musk colony for the rest of your days.
Glenn: Well, you don’t want to — he invented indentured servitude. You don’t think that’s a cool tech disruption?
Jeremy: What other mushroomy connections can we make? I was talking to Talon about, the need for different stories and we were looking for stories or characters that worked better with a collectivist kind of attitude and getting away from the individual hero going on a journey that saves the world single-handedly. And one character that I introduced for consideration is Toad from Super Mario Brothers because he’s a mushroom person. It’s not clear what gender Toad is or does Toad transcend gender? But also there’s a weird relationship between Toad, the individual, and Toad the society of Toads. Toad is definitely not one mushroom person. There’s got to be a bunch of mushroom people who are called “Toad,” or is that just how they introduce themselves to Mario ? So maybe maybe there’s a way we can tap into the cultural currency of the character Toad and salvage the meaning from that.
Glenn: Yeah, they are weird.
I had written down like another mushroom thing that I thought was very sick, which is even as decayers, things that process, there are varieties of fungus that just chill. So it’s like, a variety that’s associated with a kind of tree, like an Oak or whatever, will basically just get a foothold and will sort of grow in the bark, but not to a degree that even really does anything in the tree. Like it just kind of chills . But eventually when the tree dies, she gets knocked over or whatever, that fungus is like already on it and just immediately starts doing the work of decomposition. It’s very patient, which is just a wild-ass adaptation where it’s not actively trying to kill something, but it’s just like, yeah, but you’re going to die eventually.
Jeremy: We’re all gonna die.
I like that as a symbol of death itself almost. It’s just like this thing that’s just chilling out with you. It’s just like “I’ll be here. Whenever I got time.”
Can I read my one clipping from Understory? I think this was the reason I thought it was valuable, the lines ” Rivers of sap flow in the trees around us. If we were right now to lay a stethoscope to the bark of a Birch or Beach we would hear the sap bubbling and crackling as it moves through the trunk.”
I really liked that image. Making it feel more like a living creature that you don’t perceive as such. It’s easy to think of trees is just things that are just kind of there, but envisioning the sap running, you kind of think about it like blood with the circulation system.
Glenn: That is cool. I do like that.
Jeremy: More Understory bits. “Ecologists in the US seeking to understand how American trees will respond to the stress of climate change have began to focus on the presence of soil fungi as the key indicator of future forest resilience. Recent studies suggests that well developed fungal networks will enable forests to adapt faster at larger scales to the changing conditions of the Anthropocene. …”
“Maybe then what we need to understand the forest’s underland is a new language altogether — one that doesn’t automatically convert it to our own use values. Our present grammar militates against animacy; our metaphors, by habit and reflex, subordinate and anthropomorphize the more-than-human world. Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi. … We need to speak in spores.”
Thanks to our guest, Glenn Newcomer. Thanks to ed_switch and Yurly Petrov for chiming in on Twitch. Thank YOU so much for listening.
Gratitude also to the groovy writers and rhizomatic thinkers whose brain juices powered this episode: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Ursula K Le Guin, Robert Macfarlane, Paul Stamets, Terence McKenna, Johann Hari, and Deleuze and Guattari.
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Music this episode by Ricard Culver and Martin H Emes. Links to everything on the website.
Until next time, stay rhizomatic. Talk to trees. Grow some mushrooms.