This is my second time reading the earlier chapters of The Mushroom at the End of the World, and what stands out to me this semester is very different from my first time around: previously I was focused on Tsing’s comments on “first, second, third” natures whereas this time around her emphasis on industrial promise and ecological ruin in the beginning of ‘Arts of Noticing’ caught my attention first.
Perhaps also because I’m taking another course that discusses the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ my attention is directed there, namely that Tsing appears to take some issue with the naming of such an epoch. The term uses “anthropo-” as prefix for human when the cause for disturbances is moreso (in her eyes) the “advent of modern capitalism” (Tsing 19), but is the rise of capitalism not intrinsically tied to human history? I do agree that the term ‘Anthropocene’ is a misnomer: linking the human species and our biology to such an epoch doesn’t make much sense, but can we really say that simply because capitalism turns humans into “resources” and turns people against one another that “modern human conceit” (Tsing 19) is not directly a part of our biological and psychological evolution?
What more is her discussion of ‘precarity’: how maybe uncertainty is at the core of all things we seek to discover and create from. I think this makes sense based on the introduction she gives about finding mushrooms in the ruined Oregon forest as well as her brief history on matsutake in Japan: there are things that we notice when we are uncertain that we would not otherwise see.