Book #7: Recap
Resources and further reading.
Hi friends! I’m Jess and this is Book Club for the Planet, an online community for us to read about the climate crisis and solutions, together.
Big thank you to everyone who contributed in our book club meeting on The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing! This was probably our most heady, academic book to-date, and I’m grateful that we had the opportunity to digest it together, especially in this moment when it feels like the climate crisis is front-page news all around us. Just this past week, I started a new course in my grad school program called “Confronting Climate Change,” and I’m writing this recap while watching the lecture recording. I don’t know about you, but I ebb and flow where there are times (like now) when I can’t get enough of climate-related books, podcasts, and solutions. And there are other times where I sit in grief and anxiety and “check out” for a little while to rest and process. I recognize this experience comes from a place of great privilege as well as perception and material reality of stability. As I sit with this, I know that one of the things that will stick with me most from this last book is the awareness that all of us live in a state of constant precarity.
Even if you were unable to attend this time, I hope this list of questions offers you a foundation for discussion.
Book Club Questions:
Warm up question! How did the stories and the “world-building work” (p. 139) of matsutake get you to think about climate change and solutions differently?
In the Prologue, Dr. Tsing writes:
“This book is not a critique of the dreams of modernization and progress that offered a vision of stability in the twentieth century; many analysts before me have dissected those dreams. Instead, I address the imaginative challenge of living without those handrails, which once made us think we knew, collectively, where we were going. If we open ourselves to their fungal attractions, matsutake can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times.”
This statement serves as a founding thesis for the rest of the book to come. Let’s dissect this together—what in this statement jumps out to you?Dr. Tsing dissects the role of alienation as a key element in capitalism and the plantation's scalability and growth. She argues that in contrast, “matsutake commerce and ecology depend on interactions between scalability and its undoing” (p. 41). Do you agree with her assessment? Why or why not?
Let’s talk about “salvage accumulation,” which Dr. Tsing defines as, “the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. Salvage is not an ornament on ordinary capitalist processes; it is a feature of how capitalism works” (p. 63). Outside of matsutake harvesting and commerce, what else did this make you think of? What could this new understanding of capitalism mean for rethinking economic systems and a future beyond capitalism?
Dr. Tsing describes states of freedom and precarity for the pickers of matsutake in Oregon. She writes, “The Forest Service is asked to uphold property, even if it means neglecting the public. The pickers do their best to hold property in abeyance as they pursue a commons haunted by the possibility of their own exclusion” (79). Do their stories remind you of any other books we’ve read as part of this book club?
Dr. Tsing quotes biologist Scott Gilbert and his colleagues: “symbiosis appears to be the ‘rule,’ not the exception… Nature may be selecting ‘relationships’ rather than individuals or genomes” (p. 142). How did this book make you think about species extinction, resilience, resurgence and survival differently? Can we, humans, be part of these relationships?
What else should we talk about in this book? How did it make you think about the climate crisis differently?
Additional Reading:
I’ll keep this one short and sweet! I’m headed to the beach next week and hope to catch up on some reading then. But in the meantime, I’ll leave you with this one recommendation…
Richard Powers’ new book, Bewilderment, arrives on September 21. I’m planning for a drop-everything-cancel-plans kind of reading experience. It’s already been longlisted for the Booker Prize and his previous Pulitzer-winner, The Overstory, is one of my all-time favorites. I don’t reread books, almost ever. But I reread that one.
Future Meet-Ups:
Our next book club meeting is Sunday, October 24 for As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker. On the theme of centering indigenous voices, I also can’t recommend the Hulu show, Reservation Dogs, enough! Not about climate, but seriously—so good.