SMELLING THE RUINS: MATSUTAKE, ECOPOIESIS, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF ATTENTION
Critical Review Essay
Merve Kurt
is a PhD researcher in Psychology, University of Dundee, Scotland-UK. She is an interdisciplinary researcher, poet, artist, and practitioner working at the intersection of expressive arts, ecological thought, and social justice. She holds graduate degrees in social sciences and humanities, and her current research explores ecopoiesis, posthumanism, and cinematic aesthetics. With over a decade of experience working with international NGOs and in community-based humanitarian projects, she integrates critical theory with creative practice to examine human–nature relations, ethical aesthetics, and the healing potential of art. Her poetic and visual works reflect a commitment to more-than-human narratives, affective ecologies, and transformative imaginaries.
Abstract
This article rereads Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World as a methodological and ethical resource for ecopoiesis. Focusing on the book’s discussions of smell, scalability, salvage accumulation, and latent commons, it argues that Tsing makes visible the sensory, infrastructural, and political-economic conditions through which relations are composed under capitalism. Read in this way, ecopoiesis emerges not as a promise of harmonious relation with nature, but as a disciplined practice of attending to interdependence, invisibilized labour, and common life without guaranteed outcomes. The essay further shows that ecological care requires attention not only to affective or restorative encounter, but also to the material apparatuses of property, logistics, and standardization through which relations are organized, commodified, or erased. In doing so, it positions Tsing’s work as a critical resource for rethinking ecological world-making under conditions of ruin.
Keywords: ecopoiesis; matsutake; discipline of attention; infrastructural violence; salvage accumulation; world-making
Book cover of The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Introduction
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s [15] The Mushroom at the End of the World constructs a mushroom, together with curiosity and affection for nature, as a tracking object that renders visible the contemporary workings of capitalism, the temporality of ruined landscapes, and the fragile conditions of living together. In the Prologue, Tsing says that the idea of progress no longer works like a handrail that carries us along [15, p. 2]. In such a world, the question is not to build a grand narrative of salvation, but to attend to how life is sustained under conditions of unravelling [15, p. 1]. This orientation sets the tone of the book. It invites the reader not to “consolation,” but to a “discipline of attention.”
This orientation also reflects Tsing’s broader intellectual practice. Tsing is an anthropologist whose work brings together ethnography, political economy, and environmental humanities. She is especially concerned with precarity, labour, global capitalism, and more-than-human relations, and her writing frequently resists linear explanations in favour of situated observation, contingent encounters, and patchy assemblages. This intellectual orientation is crucial for The Mushroom at the End of the World, where matsutake becomes not simply a mushroom but a tracking object through which capitalist ruins, uneven livelihoods, and fragile forms of collaborative survival come into view.
In this essay, I use ecopoiesis in the sense developed in recent expressive and creative arts therapies writing, particularly by Stephen K. Levine and Alexander Kopytin, where it names a poietic and ecological practice of world-making grounded in creative response, aesthetic responsibility, and relation with the living environment [7, 8, 9]. In this strand of thought, ecological relation is approached as an ethically and imaginatively mediated practice of shaping worlds with human and more-than-human others. Kopytin [6] extends this orientation by framing nature-assisted creative arts therapies as part of a wider ecological paradigm shift, one that calls for a rethinking of health, creativity, and therapeutic practice in the context of planetary crisis. What Tsing’s text contributes to this field, I argue, is a sharpened awareness of the material, infrastructural, and political conditions under which relation is composed, obstructed, or rendered invisible. Tsing’s book does not romanticize encounter; it shows the costs, the labour, and the fragility of living together. In doing so, it challenges ecopoiesis to think beyond affective care and toward the regimes of property, inventory, and scalability that shape what counts as relation and who pays its price.
Matsutake stands at the centre of this invitation. Tsing defines matsutake, in the Japanese context, as a group of aromatic wild mushrooms that are highly valued, and she shows that the term does not behave like the name of a single species [15, pp. 36–37]. In the Eurasian context we encounter Tricholoma matsutake; on the west coast of North America we encounter Tricholoma magnivelare; and some researchers prefer to use matsutake as a better generic term for these aromatic mushrooms. This point exceeds taxonomy. Already at this first step, Tsing suggests that the object resists being fixed in place, and therefore presses against a single-line explanation.
The discipline of attention and the sensory conditions of relation
In the first main part, Tsing turns this pressure into method. Chapter 1, titled Arts of Noticing, argues that the world cannot be read through smooth stories of progress, and that what is required instead is to follow small encounters and multiple relations [15, pp. 17–25]. “Noticing” here is a technique of attention that makes relations visible. It allows one to see, selectively, which ties, which forms of labour, and which interspecies interactions carry value production. Tsing shapes the form of the book accordingly. She states openly that the chapters do not move forward like a logical machine, and that what she is assembling is an open-ended assemblage [15, p. 22]. Assemblage here means that people, mushrooms, trees, market actors, scientific practices, and state regulations come together in temporary convergences and transform one another. For Tsing, there is no single whole managed from the centre.
This method also has a bodily dimension. In the Smelling interlude, when Tsing says that it is difficult to describe the smell of matsutake, she is not simply saying that “smell cannot be described.” She is offering a critique of epistemology. Modern academic languages often build the world in terms of what is measurable and easily translatable. Smell resists this language. For this reason, Tsing invites the reader to think of smell as another form of knowledge [15, p. 42]. The issue is not to elevate nature as an emotional “backdrop.” The issue is to question what counts as knowledge and what is declared non-knowledge and silenced. Smell makes this questioning concrete because it lets one find direction in the forest, recognize the season, and sense the proximity of a living being. Yet you cannot easily package these into a language of “evidence.” What Tsing does, in this sense, is not to romanticize the senses, but to make visible how sensation works in the production of knowledge.
Read ecopoietically, the Smelling interlude matters because it shifts attention from nature as therapeutic backdrop to the sensory and material conditions through which relation becomes possible. For ecopoiesis, this is a critical move. The real question is not whether smell, ground, light, rhythm, and air heal by themselves, but under what conditions nature can be reduced to “décor.” In this strand of ecopoietic writing, Kopytin [5] has argued that the healing powers of nature are enhanced by the degree of mindfulness and mental focus brought to ecological interactions, emphasizing sensory awareness and attentive presence in the environment. Rugh [12] deepens this argument by showing that attention in expressive arts and nature-based practice is not a generic cognitive skill but a cultivated capacity shaped by the encounter between body, environment, and artistic engagement. Tsing’s intervention pushes both claims further by showing that regimes of attention are not simply an individual capacity of choosing, but something shaped by how space and infrastructure are built. A forest path, a plantation, a golf course, or an urban park are different spaces and landscapes, yet they also arrange the body at different speeds, make different sounds and smells possible, and facilitate some forms of contact while constraining others. Kopytin’s [4] work on the “green studio” is relevant here, because it demonstrates how the therapeutic setting itself, understood as an ecological space rather than a neutral container, organizes the sensory and relational conditions of encounter. Tsing’s decision to place smell at the centre makes this work of arrangement visible at a much larger scale. In this way, nature is not thought of as an essential “source of healing,” but as a field of conditions that enables or constrains relation. The logic of scalability and the plantation does not only standardize trees; it also standardizes sensation. For this reason, the Smelling interlude appears as a small but critical threshold that builds a bridge between capitalism’s mechanisms of invisibilization and ecological experience [15].
Contamination, sympoiesis, and the ethics of encounter
Chapter 2 of the first main part, Contamination as Collaboration, moves relationality onto an ethical plane [15, pp. 27–34]. When Tsing speaks of contamination, she does not mean only physical pollution. Rather, she refers to contact points where different worlds touch one another. Migration, war, markets, forest management, scientific classification, all of these are part of such contacts. These contacts are often read as “wrong” or as “damage,” because modern thought leans on the idea of purity. It draws distinctions such as pure nature, pure culture, pure knowledge, pure market. Tsing’s objection begins here. Such a “promise of purity” offers a sense of safety, yet it also renders violence invisible. Historically, both ecologies and social life are already shaped through encounters. For this reason, she asks us to move beyond the purity–pollution dualism, to accept that encounters transform worlds, and to take up the ethical weight of that transformation. Tsing’s claim that “purity is not an option” [15, p. 27] should therefore be read not as a simple love of nature, but as a warning about the political consequences of modern separations.
This line can be opened through Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis, because Haraway also opposes the idea of a self-producing, closed, independent subject. Sympoiesis means making-with. It emphasizes that life is not a production controlled by a single being, but a shared work of making carried out through mutual dependence among many beings [3]. The key point here is that if we make the world together, then responsibility cannot be only a matter of intention. It must also be a matter of how we form relations, with whom do we form relations, whom do we leave out, which species, which human communities, and which human subjects do we render invisible. Sympoiesis is therefore also the acceptance of dependence, indebtedness, and reciprocal obligations, precisely because it is relational.
What Tsing and Haraway share is a distance from the myth of control and autonomy. Both underline that life cannot be built as if it were a “manageable project.” Their difference is that Tsing grounds this argument, through everyday political economy, on a very concrete terrain. Haraway most often speaks at the level of ontology and ethics. Tsing, by contrast, materializes similar questions by showing how encounters are turned into value production, how supply chains salvage profit from those encounters, and how property apparatuses render commoning invisible [15]. For this reason, Tsing’s insistence on contamination is, together with the philosophical ground she builds, also an analytic tool that opens how capitalism works. For Tsing, there is no life without encounters, yet capitalism operates precisely by cutting up, obscuring, and turning these encounters into assets. The ethical claim of the book also concentrates here. The necessity of living together forces us out of the fairy tales of “purity” and into a harder question about what we will do with these relations, and who pays the cost of these relations.
For ecopoiesis, the significance of this argument is direct. If ecopoietic practice is understood as a form of making-with, as Levine’s [8] concept of poietic ecology and his broader account of poiesis as a relational and world-shaping capacity suggest, then it cannot proceed as if the space of encounter were neutral or given. Tsing shows that encounters are always already shaped by power, history, and infrastructure. An ecopoietics that does not reckon with this shaping risks reproducing the very separations it claims to overcome.
Scalability and the infrastructural organization of relation
Chapter 3 of the first main part, Some Problems with Scale, sets up one of the book’s sharpest theoretical moves by discussing Tsing’s concept of scalability. Scalability is the desire for a project to expand without changing its framing as it grows [15, pp. 37–43]. It is like the technical language of the modern idea of progress. The plantation model is its concrete form. It describes an order that grows through the elimination of local plants and people, and through the logic of a single species, a single rhythm, a single product. Matsutake becomes the counter-example here. Tsing says that the transformative mutualism the mushroom forms with tree roots makes it impossible to cultivate under plantation conditions [15, p. 40]. In Tsing’s lines, this becomes more than a note in biology; it turns into a political ecology that shows the limits of the idea of controllable nature.
For ecopoiesis, the significance of scalability is that it reveals how relation is not simply lived but administratively organized, standardized, and often thinned out by infrastructures of extraction. In the account developed by Levine and Kopytin [9], ecopoietic capacity involves building a more sustainable life through creative engagement with the living world. Yet Tsing’s analysis shows that this engagement cannot be thought apart from the regimes that organize space, rhythm, and sensory possibility. The plantation does not only eliminate biodiversity; it eliminates the conditions under which diverse forms of attention and encounter can take place. In this sense, scalability is not merely an economic concept; it is a sensory and relational regime.
Salvage accumulation, inventory, and the invisibilization of relation
The second main part, After Progress, carries the title Salvage Accumulation and provides the political-economic backbone of the book [15]. Here Tsing approaches capitalism from a different angle than the classical story. In the classical story, capitalism organizes production, disciplines labour, controls the factory and the field. What Tsing shows is a more contemporary mode of operation. Capitalism can accumulate even when it cannot control everything. It does so by extracting value from domains it does not control and by translating that value into “commodities” within its own accounting language. Salvage accumulation is precisely this, namely accumulation through salvage [15, pp. 62–65]. The issue is not that companies “manage” the forest or labour, but that they convert production already taking place in forests and livelihood worlds into profit form by attaching it to their own chains.
Tsing’s account of salvage accumulation extends ecopoiesis beyond affective care by showing that relations are also shaped through inventory systems, logistical abstraction, and regimes of invisibilization. Tsing goes down to the most critical detail and shows how tools such as universal product codes and inventory systems turn a product into a countable and traceable unit. At first glance, this may look like a merely technical detail. Yet within Tsing’s argument, the background of this technical detail is political and ethical. The moment a product is translated into an inventory code, the relations that make it possible are pushed into the background. Under what conditions the forest is damaged, under what risks labour takes place, who gathers under migration and insecurity, these now fall outside the price and the code. In this way, “commodity circulation” appears smooth, but this smoothness is built through invisibilization [15, p. 63].
This is also why Tsing uses the Wal-Mart example. Wal-Mart is a US-based multinational retail corporation. As one of the world’s largest retailers, it buys products from many suppliers and distributes them to its stores through an immense supply chain and inventory management system. Tsing’s reason for choosing this example is that Wal-Mart’s power lies less in “producing” than in “managing the flow” [15, p. 64]. Through systems such as universal product codes, it converts products into standardized units, manages stock and logistics at a distance, and can therefore generate profit without needing to know in detail where, under what labour conditions, and under what ecological conditions a product was produced (Tsing, 2015). The language of inventory makes “management” possible without needing to know production conditions. This allows the corporation to generate profit without touching the violence and exploitation at the site of production, and therefore to preserve its “respectability”.
For this reason, ecology is the site where value is produced. The mushroom’s emergence, the forest’s disturbance rhythms, root relations, the poverty of the soil, all of these are conditions of production. Yet the inventory system does not take these conditions into account. It “externalizes” ecological processes and social labour relations and treats them not as costs, but as if they were not there at all. This is where the central problem Tsing discusses emerges. Life is produced through relations, yet capitalist accounting records only profit by erasing relation.
Cowen’s critique of logistics strengthens this line, because logistics is an infrastructure of power that regulates flow along with the movement of goods. Which roads will be opened, which borders will be crossed, which work will be sped up, which will be slowed down, who will be placed at risk, these are decided within logistics. For this reason, logistics cannot be explained through an innocent language of “efficiency.” On the contrary, logistics carries the regimes of violence and sovereignty embedded in global trade [1]. Tsing’s inventory example is therefore a warning for ecopoietic ethics. If we build the language of “care” only at the level of good intention and feeling, if we do not question these infrastructures, care can easily be taken into the market and turned into a new “product.” In other words, an ethics of relating to nature also requires vigilance toward regimes of measuring, counting, standardizing, and invisibilizing [1, 15]. In this strand of ecopoietic writing, the eco-human approach recognizes a synergy between human health and environmental integrity [5]. Yet Tsing’s analysis presses this recognition further. Without attention to the infrastructures that sever and commodify ecological relations, such synergy remains an aspiration rather than a practice.
Disturbance, slow violence, and the terrain of world-making
The third main part is titled Disturbed Beginnings, Unintentional Design, and it focuses on how life can be reorganized in ruined landscapes. Here the concept of disturbance becomes key. Disturbance is a change in environmental conditions that produces a marked change in an ecosystem. It can be destructive, and it can also be renewing [15, p. 160]. This frame breaks the habit of thinking of environmental destruction only as an instant catastrophe. Nixon’s concept of slow violence provides analytic clarity at this point. Slow violence is violence that is dispersed across time, becomes difficult to see, and seeps into everyday life [11]. Read together with Nixon’s slow violence, Tsing’s ruined landscapes make this accumulation concrete. Forest management, industrial cutting, disease, abandonment, these do not operate as a single event, but as a chained process.
For ecopoiesis, disturbance matters because it forces a reckoning with where world-making begins. If ecopoietic practice assumes a pristine starting point, a nature waiting to be encountered in its fullness, then it risks ignoring the historical depth of the terrains it works with. Tsing shows that the landscapes in which renewal takes place are already damaged, already shaped by long histories of use, extraction, and abandonment [15, pp. 160–161]. World-making, in other words, does not begin from zero. It begins from ruins. This is not a pessimistic observation; it is a methodological one. It means that any practice of ecological relation, including ecopoietic practice, must begin by attending to the particular history of damage and resilience that characterizes the terrain it enters. The question is not whether the landscape is pristine, but what forms of life and relation the disturbance has made possible or foreclosed.
Common labour without guaranteed outcomes
The section titled “Matsutake Crusaders,” it would not be an exaggeration to say, is central to the book’s ethical and political thesis. Here Tsing speaks of how humans cannot control matsutake. Waiting to see whether the mushroom will appear can therefore become an existential problem [15, p. 257]. Those who wait, the volunteers, enter a process in which they transform both the ecology and themselves through small-scale interventions in the landscape [15, pp. 257–263].
What the “Matsutake Crusaders” scene contributes to ecopoiesis is not an image of harmony, but a practice of common labour sustained without control, certainty, or guaranteed outcomes. The power of this section lies in showing the idea of satoyama not as an abstract ideal, but as a concrete scene of labour and learning. Satoyama is a working landscape that requires human intervention but cannot be reduced to human intervention. Human work is required, yet the outcome is not in human hands [15, p. 258]. Tsing says openly that the volunteers initially experience uprooting the broadleaf invasive trees on the slope as a kind of destruction, and she does not hide this shock. Then the group leader explains that the abandoned and thickened forest has killed the understory, cut off the light, made the soil fragile, and increased the risk of erosion [15, pp. 259–260]. This explanation gives the intervention a purpose, yet it still offers no guarantee.
Two Buddhist concepts can help name, without replacing, the ethical orientation at work in this scene. Sammā vāyāma, often translated as right effort, refers to the sustained cultivation of wholesome mental and ethical qualities through intention, practice, and persistence. In Gethin’s [2] account, it concerns the ongoing work of preventing unwholesome tendencies from taking hold, weakening those that have arisen, and fostering conditions in which beneficial states can emerge and endure. Right effort therefore describes an ethical discipline of continuance, one oriented toward how practice is maintained rather than toward the control of outcomes. Upekkhā, often translated as equanimity or unshakable balance, is the capacity to see what is as it is with clear attention, without being thrown back and forth between pleasure and disappointment [2, 13]. Upekkhā in Buddhist ethical thought refers to a cultivated ethical steadiness grounded in insight into the changing and conditioned nature of experience. It enables sustained responsiveness to the world without being overtaken by aversion, possessiveness, or disappointment when outcomes remain uncertain or uncontrollable [14, pp. 185–186].
These concepts do not Buddhicize Tsing’s argument. Rather, they name a distinction already present in her scene, namely the distinction between action and control. The Crusaders act, but they do not control. They make effort, but they do not master. They wait, but their waiting is not passivity. It is these concepts’ capacity to sharpen the line between effort without mastery and balance without passivity that makes them useful here.
On the next slope we see that after intervention the pines return, and that flowers and wildlife come back on their own. The critical difference is that the Crusaders do not aim for a finished garden. They keep open a forest that is still coming into being, an unfinished space of living together [15, p. 262]. From the standpoint of ecopoiesis, this scene describes making-with in a way that is not a romantic promise of harmony, but a process sustained through common labour without guaranteed outcomes. Levine’s [7] understanding of poiesis as the human capacity to shape worlds not through mastery but through responsive, creative engagement finds a concrete ground in this scene.
Latent commons, alienation, and the conditions of justice
In this section, Tsing’s concept of latent commons becomes decisive. Latent commons is not a ready-made common property. It is a shared possibility of articulation that can appear and be gathered when conditions form [15, p. 255]. The Crusaders know that they cannot create a commons in the full sense. Still, by working with the landscape, they try to awaken this possibility [ibid]. Beckett’s waiting for Godot is not invoked for nothing here. Waiting is not passivity, but a political and existential discipline of living with uncertainty.
One dimension of this discipline can be opened through the concept of alienation. Alienation is the process of severing something from the relations of its living world and turning it into a mere object of exchange. The Crusaders’ aim is to call both people and the forest back, to some extent, from this severing. Working, eating, joking, learning together, trial and error, these remake sociality as much as they remake the landscape [15, p. 261]. For this reason, the section also invites the reader to see ecological renewal as a psychological and social scene. It offers an embodied being-together against anomie.
Here Tsing shows how privatization projects work, and why they can never be fully completed. Private assets often feed on an invisible commons. For matsutake to appear in the forest, there must be the traffic produced by shared use. Soil, humus, grazing, pruning, gathering, all of these produce the conditions the mushroom likes [15, p. 252]. Yet the mushroom is turned into an asset as if it were only the fruit of individual property. Tsing narrates this tension through very concrete scenes. On the one hand there are so-called model forests, where an overly accumulated duff layer produces long-term risk for matsutake (Tsing, 2015). On the other hand, there are forests where shared use continues for most of the year, with boundaries drawn only during the season, and matsutake does well precisely within this illicit commoning. The argument here is very clear for ecopoietic thinking. Value production works not by cutting relations, but by rendering relations invisible. For this reason, the language of justice and care must be thought together with regimes of property and infrastructure, not only with intention.
Moore’s Capitalocene frame provides conceptual sharpness at this point. The agent of crisis is not an abstract human species, but the historical relation organized by capitalism as world-ecology [10]. Even if Tsing’s text does not place this debate at the centre by name, it keeps open the same question through the mechanisms of privatization and salvaged value.
Against closure
The “anti-ending” and the Spore Trail that follows turn the book into a new beginning rather than a closure [15, pp. 278–286]. Here Tsing shows that precarity is not only a matter of livelihood, but also a matter of ways of knowing. Searching for mushrooms by feeling the leaf litter with one’s hands is another form of attention for living without progress [15, p. 279]. In the Spore Trail, she proposes, against the commodification of academic knowledge, that we think of intellectual life not as a plantation but as a woodland [15, p. 286]. This carries the critique of scalability that runs through the book from the start into the production of knowledge. Knowledge, too, is born from common labour, yet evaluation regimes reduce it to individual brand and number. These passages carry a directly contemporary warning for an ecopoiesis reader. To defend ecological relation is also to defend the form through which knowledge is produced.
Conclusion
As a critical assessment, the book is strong in three areas that are directly relevant for ecopoietic thought. First, through the concept of scalability, it diagnoses the modern idea of progress not as an innocent language of growth, but as a violent technique of arrangement. Second, through salvage accumulation, it makes visible late capitalism’s mode of accumulating by salvaging without control, and it concretizes this through supply chains and inventory technologies. Third, through disturbance, it builds a non-romantic thought of renewal in ruined landscapes, and it materializes this through the satoyama scenes. Its most debatable side emerges in the question of political strategy. The idea of latent commons offers a powerful image and a practical suggestion, yet in the face of institutional violence, border regimes, and property relations, the question of how this commoning can become a sustainable line of justice is left more to the reader. Yet it is precisely this openness that makes the book productive for ecopoiesis. Because ecopoiesis, too, works not as a promise of results, but as an ethical proposition about how relation is formed.
Tsing’s book changes the “measure” through which we think about ecological crisis. It does not try to persuade the reader through ready-made explanations. Instead, it becomes a methodological proposal that questions which relations we treat as normal, which relations we ignore, and which costs are made invisible in the production of value. In this way, it ceases to be a piece of environmental writing that merely speaks about nature and turns into an intervention that also problematizes the conditions of knowledge production. From the standpoint of ecopoiesis, the most important gain is that it does not narrow relation to nature into a promise of inner calm, but forces us to think relation through indebtedness, mutual dependence, fragility, and material apparatuses [3, 15].
One of the most important stakes of this reading, perhaps, is that ethical language has to face infrastructure. Because when inventory, measuring, counting, standardizing, and supply chain management are left as merely technical details, the conditions through which ecological destruction is produced become invisible. What Tsing shows is that this work of invisibilization itself determines how value is formed. At this point the space opened by an ecopoietic sensibility becomes clear. A language of care based only on good intention does not undo these regimes. Care can easily be instrumentalized unless it becomes a political stance that asks which species, which forms of labour, and which places are being counted and accounted for [1, 15]. For this reason, the book moves the reader out of a naïve aesthetic of closeness and toward the forms of power that establish the conditions of care, supporting our confrontation with them.
At the same time, the book does not find it sufficient to read ruined landscapes only through a feeling of loss. Rather than reducing destruction to the shock of a single moment, it makes slow violence concrete by showing how accumulations spread across long durations, how abandonment, management decisions, disease, and industrial arrangements feed into one another [11, 15]. This concreteness makes it possible to ask sharper questions about the agent of ecological crisis. It develops a historical consciousness that targets regimes of value and forms of property. Here the Capitalocene line provides a background that can deepen the questions Tsing opens [10]. Yet the strength of the book is that it conducts this debate from within relations that are visible on the ground. The livelihood world formed by mushroom pickers and buyers in Oregon is one example. Many pickers come from precarious jobs and experiences of migration. Searching for mushrooms in the forest appears as a fragile form of livelihood that substitutes for regular wage labour, and the tie between market and forest is renegotiated every day. Here slow violence appears not as a one-time disaster, but as the continuity of insecurity, the normalization of fragile labour, and the everydayness of risk (Tsing, 2015). These scenes allow the reader to feel how ecological destruction and economic precarity are lived on the same terrain.
Finally, the book becomes both a political and an existential discipline through an idea of common labour that separates waiting from passivity, cannot guarantee outcomes, yet keeps relation open. Relation with the world is a practice of world-making that proceeds through attention, trial and error, reciprocity, and the acceptance of limits. I understand ecopoiesis in a similar way. The book is powerful because it invites us to think this practice without romanticizing it, while also not hiding its costs and inequalities. It also pushes the reader to ask under what conditions such practices of making-with move closer to justice, and under what conditions they are absorbed again by market and property regimes.
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Suggested citation note
Kurt, M. (2026). Smelling the ruins: Matsutake, ecopoiesis, and the discipline of attention. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 7 (2). [open access internet journal]. – URL: http://ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)