Quotes from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.

This book argues that staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.

As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge.

The contrast between private mushrooms and fungi-forming forest traffic might be an emblem for commoditisation more generally: the continual, never-finished cutting off of entanglement.

Over the past few decades many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias. It is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization.

But what is "public property" if not an oxymoron?

Capitalism is a translation machine for producing capital from all kinds of livelihoods, human and not human.

People and trees are caught in irreversible histories of disturbance. But some kinds of disturbance have been followed by regrowth of a sort that nurtures many lives.

Life lines are entangled: candy cane and matsutake; matsutake and its host trees; host trees and herbs, mosses, insects, soil bacteria, and forest animals; heaving bumps and mushroom pickers. Matsutake pickers are alert to life lines in the forest; searching with all the senses creates this alertness. It is a form of forest knowledge and appreciation without the completeness of classification. Instead, searching brings us to the liveliness of beings experienced as subjects rather than objects.

following in the footsteps of Marx, twentieth-century students of capitalism internalized progress to see only one powerful current at a time, ignoring the rest.

In its secular forms, then, this cosmological politics exceeds Christianity; to be an American, you must convert, not to Christianity, but to American democracy.

It's not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human.

Japanese general trading companies offered loans, technical assistance, and trade agreements to firms from other countries, which cut logs to Japanese specifications

these conglomerates, the zaibatsu, were coordinated by finance capital, not production:

keiretsu "enterprise groups."8

The putting-out system transferred less profitable manufacturing sectors and older technologies to South Korea, clearing the way for Japanese businesses to upgrade.

First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue.

women and men from around the world have clamored to be included in the status once given to Man.

Sometimes, indeed, it seemed to me that the really important exchange was the freedom, with the mushroom-and-money trophies as extensions– proofs, as it were– of the performance. After all, it was the feeling of freedom, galvanizing "mushroom fever," that energized buyers to put on their best shows and pressed pickers to get up the next dawn to search for mushrooms again.

Yet fungal eating is often generous; it makes worlds for others.

Tracking matsutake through the journeys of nematodes allows me to return to my questions about telling the adventures of landscapes, this time with a thesis. First, rather than limit our analyses to one creature at a time (including humans), or even one relationship, if we want to know what makes places livable we should be studying polyphonic assemblages, gatherings of ways of being.

In France they have two kinds, freedom and communist. In the U.S. they just have one kind: freedom.