In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, the author travels the globe in pursuit of matsutake – “the most valuable mushrooms on earth” – in a journey that spans Oregon in the United States, Yunnan in China, Lapland and Japan. One startling revelation is the story that after the atomic bomb wiped out Hiroshima in 1945, the first living organism to re-emerge was this particular mushroom. So out of the most human-damaged landscapes on Earth, this mushroom grows – and in doing so helps forests to emerge in places where they would otherwise perish. And the people who forage for them have their own perspective on life away from the city and in the heart of nature…
further reading…
In The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, the author travels the globe in pursuit of matsutake – “the most valuable mushrooms on earth” – in a journey that spans Oregon in the United States, Yunnan in China, Lapland and Japan. One startling revelation is the story that after the atomic bomb wiped out Hiroshima in 1945, the first living organism to re-emerge was this particular mushroom. So out of the most human-damaged landscapes on Earth, this mushroom grows – and in doing so helps forests to emerge in places where they would otherwise perish. And the people who forage for them have their own perspective on life away from the city and in the heart of nature…