Tsing’s writing stood out to me for her discussion surrounding the theme of precarity, through the medium of matsutake. I like how she ties together growth of the Japanese-native mushroom to regional industrialization and globalization, as part of an uncertain process that showcases “collaborative survival” and indeterminacy, which lies at heart of the systemic understanding of “progress”. Tsing’s description of how the transformation of peasant woodlands have affected matsutake growth supports her argument that “precarity is the condition of our time”, exemplifying the correlation between the “first nature” and the “second nature”. I admire Tsing’s emphasis on how capitalist transformation of the environment, precarious in its nature to the ecological relations, could cause responding changes—that are also unpredicted—to the capitalist system. I want to quote her direct words on page 20 because I think they are the key to understand Tsing’s message in a comprehensive manner:
“What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity is the condition of our time—or, to put it an- other way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?”