To find a useful plant, animal, or fungus, foragers learned familiar places and returned to them again and again. Familiar places are the beginning of appreciation for multi-species interactions.įoraging worked just this way for most of human history. You visit the spot enough, and you know its seasonal flowers and its animal disturbances you have made a familiar place in the landscape. If you want to find chanterelles in central California, you must look under oaks-but not just any oak: You must look for the oak that lives with chanterelle mycelium, and you'll know it because you have seen the mushrooms there before. In many cases, the growing body (mycelium) that gives rise to mushrooms as its fruits lasts from season to season besides, some mushroom growing bodies are life-long companions to particular trees. Conscious decision can also take me to a spot of past encounters, for the best way to find mushrooms is always to return to the places you found them before. Many times, wandering, I have suddenly remembered every stump and hollow of the spot on which I stood-through the mushrooms I once encountered there. The very excitement of my senses commits to memory the suite of colours and scents, the angle of the light, the scratching briars, the solid placement of this tree, and the rise of the hill before me. 2ĭelight makes an impression: an impression of place. For a moment, my tired load of guilt is absolved, and, like a lottery winner, I am alight with the sweetness of life itself. These mushrooms are not the product of my labour, and because I have not toiled and worried over them, they jump into my hands with all the pleasures of the unasked for and the unexpected. But of these delights the best, I think, are two: first, the undeserved bounty of the gift and second, the offer of a place that will guide my future walks. The excitement of colour, fragrance, and design-not to speak of pride to be the first to find them-well up. What better than to encounter the orange folds of chanterelles pushing through the dark wet or the warm muffins of king boletes popping up through crumbly earth. After the rains, the air smells fresh with ozone, sap, and leaf litter, and my senses are alive with curiosity. Walking is the speed of bodily pleasure and contemplation it is also just the speed to look for mushrooms. Wandering and love of mushrooms engender each other. These materials present a fungal argument against too avid an ideal of domestication, at least of women and plants. 1 In this spirit, my essay begins with companionate experience and biology before moving to the history of domestication, European conquest, and the politically-and-biologically diverse potentials of the seams of global capitalism. This essay is indebted to Donna Haraway not only for the concept of ‘companion species’ but also for the permission she offers us all to be both scientist and cultural critic-that is, to refuse the boundaries that cordon nature from culture-and besides, to dare tell the history of the world in a single sentence, or certainly a short essay. Consider, instead, the bounteous diversity of roadside margins. For all its hyped pleasure, perhaps this is not the best idea for multi-species life on earth. Home is where dependencies within and among species reach their most stifling. Domination, domestication, and love are deeply entangled.
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