The Mushroom at the End of the World

Back in Open Ticket, Tsing visits a local meeting of mushroom pickers and forest service personnel. Simultaneous translation into multiple languages is happening, and Tsing recalls: “Even simple questions or explanations of rules take a very long time. In my discomfort, I understand that we are learning to listen—even if we don’t yet know how to have a discussion” (253-254). These meetings exist because a labor organizer named Beverly Brown became interested in bridging urban-rural social divides, and discovered mushroom pickers were part of forest-centered communities. Tsing argues that earlier eras of labor organizing were, in a sense, straightforward, as they required including the marginalized in an inevitable forward march toward economic plenty. Now, listening is about acknowledging many possible futures, with no clear or inevitable path forward: “At best we are looking for a most ephemeral glimmer. But, living with indeterminacy, such glimmers are the political” (256). The metaphor here reflects Tsing’s tentative optimism. “Glimmers” are more than darkness, even if what they reveal is incomplete.

Tsing introduces a new concept from social science to explain what futures await: the commons, or resources that are home to many populations and owned by no one. The ones she finds in Oregon are “latent” and imperfectly formed, defined more by what they are not than their firm shape.