Poaching Thom van Dooren
by Shiho Satsuka, University of Toronto

Cite as: Satsuka, Shiho (2011) Eating Well With Others / Eating Others Well. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 99/100: 134-138 (Download article PDF)

In his article, “Vultures and Their People in India: Equity and Entanglement in a Time of Extinctions,” Thom van Dooren (2011) nicely illustrates that eating is a nodal point of life and death. The practices of eating – who eats (or does not eat) what and how – shape the web of relations among various life forms on the Earth. In this web of relations, species create their niches and become the forms of life as we know them today. Of course, humans are not an exception.

Van Dooren explains that in India, people use cows for plowing, milking and carrying things, but do not eat cows because of the Hindu reverence for cattle. Once cattle die, vultures eat them, clean up the environment and reduce the chance of disease transmission (e.g. anthrax) to humans. Thus, he argues, “together, vultures, people, cattle and others co-produced a unique environment.” But he also points out that India’s vultures are facing extinction. In the past two decades, they have been indirectly poisoned by diclofenac, a drug used as a painkiller for cows. With the decrease of vulture populations, cattle corpses have accumulated. In turn, dog and rat populations have increased, as has the danger for humans of being attacked by dogs and anthrax bacteria.

I found the meat of this story to be anti-romanticism. There are two significant points regarding the politics, or microbiopolitics (Paxson 2008:17), of multispecies relations: First, the story makes us realize that humans have cultivated their niches by unintentional collaboration with cattle and vultures, but as soon as a gap is opened in the multispecies chain of eating and living, other organisms try to fill that space. The niche humans created with cattle and vultures put pressure on other living forms, such as dogs, rats or anthrax bacteria. Mutual niche creation is a fortunate relation for some species but not for others. Our lives are based on the sacrifice and patience of other species that are not participating actively in the current collaborative chain of eating and living. As humans, we are making choices about what multispecies worlds we most want to live in – in this case, whether we should live with anthrax or with vultures.

Ironically, we often only realize the disruption of the chain of eating and living when the most vulnerable people are pressed to change their practices in their struggle to eat and live. According to van Dooren, Diclofenac was used by poor people who needed their weak and old cattle to continue working. It was also the poor who were most affected by the disappearance of the vultures, as they had a higher chance of contracting rabies from dogs and anthrax from cattle carcasses.

This story makes me re-evaluate the citizen’s forest revitalization project, called the Matsutake Crusaders in Kyoto, Japan.¹ (There is no connection with Christianity in their activities. Many of their activities are meshed with Shinto-animism and Buddhism.) The group is led by a charismatic microbial ecologist, Dr. Fumihiko Yoshimura. Their aim is to return the matsutake to the forests. Matsutake is a wild mushroom that has been long treasured in Japan as an autumn delicacy, and as a blessing from the mountain deity. The historical records show that in ancient and medieval times, matsutake was used for ritual gift exchange among aristocrats, and the peasants had to present matsutake to their lords as tax in kind. The harvest of matsutake increased up until 1940s, but has decreased drastically since the 1960s (Arioka 1997).

Matsutake is a mycorrhizal mushroom that requires a specific symbiotic relationship with its host trees – in central Japan, mostly red pines. Unlike saprobic mushrooms, such as shiitake, matsutake does not have enzymes to digest dead trees. Thus, matsutake form structures called mycorrhiza, which literally means “fungus roots,” by entangling with pine roots. Through mycorrhiza, matsutake exchange nutrients with live trees. The mechanism of this symbiosis still poses “puzzles” for scientists (Suzuki 2005). No one has yet artificially cultivated this mushroom. Thus, matsutakes are only harvested in the “wild.”

However, the “wildness” of matsutake requires attention. Dr. Makoto Ogawa, a prominent matsutake scientist, suggests that matsutake has been “unintentionally cultivated” by humans (Ogawa 1991). The typical niche for red pines and matsutake in central Japan is satoyama (village forest), the secondary forest near human settlements. In satoyama, humans have selectively coppiced and cleaned the forest ground to use wood, fallen leaves and grasses for fuel and fertilizer. The dry, open and cleared forest ground with poor soil nutrition is an ideal habitat for matsutake. Because matsutake is a weak competitor among fungi and microbes, if the soil is rich enough to provide food for other species, matsutake cannot thrive. In satoyama, the human usage of the red pine forest temporarily held up forest succession. Together, humans, red pines and matsutake have co-produced a unique environment to live together.

Many argue that the main cause of the decline of matsutake in Japan was the “fuel revolution,” or the introduction of propane gas in the rural communities. Some forestry specialists say, “propane ate up matsutake” (Arioka 1997:264). From the late 1950s to early 1960s, the rapid industrialization and urbanization deteriorated agricultural communities. Youth left for the cities to become industrial workers. The elderly were left behind. People in rural agricultural communities began using propane to ease the burden of collecting wood for fuel. The satoyama forests were neglected and piled up with fallen leaves and trees. Forest succession began. Red pines were pressured by broad leaf trees; accordingly, other fungi and microbes dominated the soil, and pushed matsutake away from the forest ground. The disappearance of the mycorrhizal relationship with matsutake further weakened pine trees and made them vulnerable to pine wilt disease. Rural areas were left with dense, unhealthy forests. They became easy targets for industrial development. Many were turned into golf courses, suburban communities, factory complexes or industrial waste dumps.

Concerned with this situation, Dr. Yoshimura made some agreements with several land owners near a suburban bed town community at the outskirts of Kyoto City. He mobilized citizens to return the forest back to the state in 1955, before the fuel revolution. On weekends, about thirty volunteers gather and work on the forest. When I first visited their activity site with my research collaborator Anna Tsing in 2006, they were uprooting cedars, konara (quercus serrata), and other broad leaf trees. It looked as if they were clear-cutting the forest instead of restoring it. Their activities put multispecies politics in your face – as humans we cast ourselves “with some ways of life and not others” (Haraway 2008: 284).

The majority of the volunteers are retired urban residents. Every week, the members were busy cutting trees, burning the diseased trees, raking leaves and transporting all the forest litter out of the forests. The mass of cut trees, under grass and leaves was enormous. In order to consume the biomass, the group started a small vegetable garden at their base camp, and used the forest litter for fertilizer. The more they worked, the more fertilizer they collected. Soon, they expanded the vegetable field, and planted tea trees, persimmons, mandarin oranges. They also created rice paddies. They recreated not only the red pine forest, but also a miniature landscape of the whole satoyama ecology. In order to consume the logs, they built a kiln, and invited a pottery artist who taught them how to make pottery themselves. They were also planning to use the logs for charcoal making.

With this small insertion of satoyama landscape, Dr. Yoshimura saw the gradual increase of small animals and insects, familiar creatures that had long been absent in the area. He sees the potential of bringing back biodiversity to the monotonous landscape of the bed town community. By revitalising the satoyama forest, Dr. Yoshimura worked to rewind time. He borrowed the charisma of matsutake and mobilized people to redo history. The members, who joined the group in order to see matsutake, became active agents of recreating an ecological habitat, not only for matsutake, but also for other species in the satoyama landscape.

With a lack of human intervention, the forest succession will progress and reach the “climax” forest stage, in which broad leaf trees, such as oaks and quercus, will dominate. The Matsutake Crusaders’ activities urge us to rethink the meaning of the climax forest. It seems as if Dr. Yoshimura advocates for another kind of climax forest, the 1955 satoyama that includes human beings as a part of the interspecies relations; humans can be a part of the picture of the climax forest if they do not suffer too much from human exceptionalism.

The Matsutake Crusaders’ activities resonate with the recent arguments in satoyama ecological conservation in Japan. For example, conservation ecologist Izumi Washitani writes:

The environmental stress, such as the proper level of human disturbance is necessary for enhancing the diversity of plant species. Because if there was no stress, only the competitive species would monopolize the resource and create vegetation consisting of only a few dominant species. The disturbance allows to accommodate various species’ various necessities and their unique ways of livelihood. Disturbance transforms the natural landscape that is occupied by a few privileged species into a system in which multiple species live together. (Washitani 2001: 14-17, my translation)

This reminds me of Donna Haraway’s caution regarding the introduced species. She argues:

The crucial question is not, Are they original and pure (natural in that sense)? But rather has to be, What do they contribute to the flourishing and health of the land and its critters (naturalcultural in that sense)? That question does not invite a disengaged “liberal” ethics or politics but requires examined lives that take risks to help the flourishing of some ways of getting on together and not others. (Haraway 2008:288)

The same caution applies to human interactions with other species. Here, when we think of the multispecies connectivities, eating is central. Because one’s eating and living also means killing other species, directly or indirectly. Eating and living rely on the sacrifice of other species, not only animals but also plants, fungi, and microbes. Haraway points out:

There is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to eat and not to become with other mortal beings to whom we are accountable, no way to pretend innocence and transcendence or a final peace. … Multispecies human and nonhuman ways of living and dying are at stake in practices of eating. (Haraway 2008:295)

The highlight of the Crusaders’ weekly activities is their lunch. Around noon, the volunteers scattered in different patches of mountains come back to the base camp. They cook a meal combining their own garden produce, fish or meat brought by the members, and some gifts sent from supporters. Some members said sharing these blessings from the fields, forests, rivers and ocean in the lunch festivity helped them to get energized and persevere with the hard physical work in the field. I learned from their website that in the fall of 2010, they found two matsutakes in their forest (“Matsutakeyama Fukkatsu Sasetai (Matsutake Jujigun) Katsudo Hokoku [Matsutake Forest Revival Troop (Matsutake Crusaders) Activity Report]”). They picked one and shared the slices in soup. Dr. Yoshimura was cautious to claim their success because these matsutakes may have emerged due to the unusual weather in the summer. He continued encouraging the members saying that if they take good care of the forests with respect, the mountain deity will give them matsutake as a blessing.

The matsutake meal embodies the multispecies swarm. In a small slice of the mushroom, there exist the traces of the lives of red pines, as well as those of lives of other species – plants, fungi, microbes and others – who sacrificed their lives and gave way to the red pine-matsutake habitat. The lives of these other species, transformed into fertilizer for the vegetable garden, were further appreciated by the group’s members in their own eating and living.

Notes

¹ This research is a part of a larger collaborative project, Matsutake Worlds. The Matsutake World Research Group consists of Timothy Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Anna Tsing and myself. For more on the project, see Matsutake Worlds Research Group (2009a) and (2009b).

References

Arioka, Toshiyuki (1997) Matsutake. Tokyo: Hosei University Press.

Haraway, Donna (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Matsutake Forest Revival Troop (2010) “Matsutakeyama Fukkatsu Sasetai (Matsutake Jujigun) Katsudo Hokoku [Matsutake Forest Revival Troop (Matsutake Crusaders) Activity Report]” Oct. 30. 2010 and Nov. 5. 2010. Matsutake Crusaders <http://blog.goo.ne.jp/ npoiroem/m/201010>, <http://blog.goo.ne.jp/npoiroe/m/201011>

Matsutake Worlds Research Group (Timothy Choy, Lieba Faier, Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka, and Anna Tsing)
(2009a) Strong Collaboration as a Method for Multi-sited Ethnography: on Mycorrhizal Relations. In Multi-Sited Ethnography. Mark-Anthony Falzon, ed. Pp. 197- 214. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing.

Matsutake Worlds Research Group (2009b) A New Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake Worlds. American Ethnologist 36(2): 380–403.

Ogawa, Makoto (1991) [1978] Matsutake no Seibutsugaku [Biology of Matsutake Mushroom]. Tokyo: Tsukiji Shokan.

Paxson, Heather (2008) Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States. Cultural Anthropology. 23(1): 15-47.

Suzuki, Kazuo (2005) “Ectomycorrhizal Ecophysiology and the Puzzle of Tricholoma Matsutake.” Journal of the Japanese Forest Society 87(1):90-102.

van Dooren, Thom (2011) Vultures and their People in India: Equity and Entanglement in a Time of Extinctions. In “Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinctions”, special issue of the Australian Humanities Review 50.

Washitani, Izumi (2001) Hozen Seitaigaku kara Mita Satochi Shizen [Countryside Natural Landscape from the Perspective of Conservation Ecology]. In Satoyama no Kankyogaku [Satoyama: The Traditional Rural Landscape of Japan]. Kazuhiko Takeuchi, Izumi Washitani and Atsushi Tsunekawa, eds. Pp. 9-18. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press.

Poaching at the Multispecies Salon

• Poaching Round Table (AAA 2010)
• The Practice of Poaching
• A Swarm Of Poachers
• Eating Well With Others / Eating Others Well
• Poaching Mushrooms
• Conservation Is Our Government Now
• Where Banyan Meets Cloud
• Fermenting Ethics
• We Both Wait Together
• Bear Story