“The perspective on alliance that foraging gives us.” Photo: Anna Tsing

Gene Ray: The Mushroom at the End of the World has been a profoundly influential and resonant book. In it, you introduce the very suggestive notion of a “latent commons,” or those “mutualist and non-antagonistic entanglements found within the play of [multispecies] confusion”.[note]Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 255.[/note] The context is your search for those “fugitive moments” of Holocene resurgence, in the wake of ecological disturbance and the “capitalist ruins” of your book’s subtitle.

The commons first appears in your discussion of the complexly diverse immigrant communities engaged in picking Matsutake mushrooms, a species that is able to generate a kind of resurgence in the clear-cut forests of the Pacific Northwest. These precarious pickers, you note, treat the forest as a kind of commons. This requires them “to do their best to ignore questions of property”.[note]Ibid., p. 78.[/note] The lands they pick on are mostly national forest with some adjacent private lands; on these public and private properties protected by the state, the pickers “pursue a commons haunted by the possibility of their own exclusion”.[note]Ibid., p. 79.[/note]

The pivot to your later propositions on the latent commons is the idea of “political listening,” which you borrow from Beverly Brown, “a tireless organizer who decided to listen to the precarious workers of the northwest forest, including mushroom pickers”.[note]Ibid., p. 254.[/note] You link this idea to your concern for the arts of noticing and attention needed for more-than-human cooperation, “multi-species attunements,” and ecological resurgence: “To listen politically is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas…. We need many kinds of alertness to spot potential allies [and] hints of common agendas”.[note]Ibid., p. 254-55.[/note]

This suggests that allies in ecological repair and resurgence have to work across great differences, in order to “communicate” and “cooperate” with each other. Today, in socio-ecological planetary crisis, something like biospheric realism is challenging us to think beyond extractive anthropocentrism. Accordingly, theorists and practitioners of commoning are trying to understand how to take more-than-human life into account in their projects.

In this regard, could you elaborate a little on your assemblage of “multispecies attunement,” “political listening” and “common agendas”? How do such allies reach out to each other? Can common agendas become intentional common projects? Is this idea different from the kinds of alliances and symbiosis that permaculturalists and agroecologists aim for?

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: Thank you for your questions. I’m going to take advantage of the fact that this is an interview to answer informally, off the cuff, and in relation to the particular place I’m living while answering. I’m in the Colorado Rockies, and I’ve had the pleasure of doing some mushroom picking, especially for king boletes, this month. This high country has always been dry—although the current multiyear drought is surely connected to human-sponsored climate change. The only reason that luxuriant forests flourish here at all is the mycorrhizal fungi that connect with roots and spread out, seeking water for the trees. This is already a commons, that is, a space of open-ended living together, without considering humans. But it is also a place where one can’t forget how recently white settlers dispossessed Native Americans to turn the land into commercial farming and ranching; massacres are still celebrated here. Humans have been part of the commons; extractivism draws its resources from earlier more-than-human commoning. Luckily for me, and for the trees and mushrooms, some places have been preserved as national forests.  In these times—more than when I wrote Mushroom at the End of the World—I’m aware of the importance of the institutional safeguards we have for mushroom-full forests in the US, since now we have a president set on dismantling them, turning everything over to extraction. So, yes, we need intentional common projects! There is something here worth protecting, and even though I’m not exactly sure how to navigate the current madness, it’s essential that people work together intentionally, or all this will be gone.

There is something unique in the perspective on alliance that foraging gives us, something different than what permaculture and agroecology might offer, although I’m full of respect for them too. Plants don’t just flourish because humans take care of them; they mobilize alliances, for example, with fungi, all by themselves. Wandering through the forest seeking the patches in which mushrooms might grow, I see how assemblages come together: orchids and gentians cluster by dwarf willows in marshy meadows; wild raspberries and currants take advantage of dry creek-sides. I’m all for intentionality, but it must be done with respect for the lifeways of others. With enough chemicals, water, and soil amendments, it is possible to grow most anything anywhere… but not sustainably. Noticing how others make worlds—and yes this means other humans too—is the first step toward living in common.

G. R.:  The latent commons, you note, is latent in two senses: “first, while ubiquitous, we rarely notice them, and, second, they are undeveloped. They bubble with unrealized possibilities”.[note]Ibid., p. 255.[/note] This seems to suggest that latent commoning is the norm, which we are not used to seeing or not attentive enough to bring into view. Does latent commoning have to have intentional human participants? Is a multi-species attunement or ensemble of symbiosis that does not include people still count for you as a latent commons? Could you say a little more about what you were thinking of when you came up with this term?

A. T.: When we think of social mobilizations in the past, we often turn to intentions, in part because our records are full of post-hoc explanations. But if you think back on any mobilization you have been part of, I’ll bet other elements come to mind. When someone is killed by the authorities, it’s the unstoppable eruption of rage. When marching at a demonstration, it’s the thrill of bodies pressed together and the moving rhythm of chants and songs. Even when we consider humans working with humans, then, intention is not all there is to commoning.

I’ve been trying to think about more-than-human interactions in ways that don’t privilege human consciousness as the great maker of history. One way is to look at encounters through form. For example, commoning with rivers happens through the form of the water channel, its floods, its falls, its swamps, and its avulsions. Rivers are participants, and so too are plants and animals, including humans. 

I love thinking and writing, the elements of consciousness and intention. I’m angry that AI (Anthropocene Idiocy) has taken command over these skills for so many of my students. Thinking and writing together can indeed help us identify promising latent commons for advocacy and mobilization. Right now, I’m writing a book with five other people about another latent commons—tropical wetlands; we hope to make it an intentional focus for discussion and action. We identify the latent commons right in the title, The Clam, the Mud, and the Girl. We hope that by showing people how mud makes more-than-human worlds (that is, latent commons), we might at least raise awareness of the unthinking eradication of wetlands.

G. R.: In your discussion you “stretch” the concept of commoning by advancing four “negative” characterizations, each followed by an elaborating paragraph. The first two of these are fairly straightforward. “Latent commons are not exclusive human enclaves.” Here you remind us that harmony can’t be hoped for in a latent commons: “the lion will not lie down with the lamb. And organisms don’t just eat each other; they also make divergent ecologies”.[note]Ibid.[/note] So any attunements and common agendas have to “negotiate” this confusion.

In the second characterization (“Latent commons are not good for everyone.”), you point out that collaboration does not benefit all involved equally: “Whole species lose out in some collaborations. The best we can do is aim for ‘good-enough’ worlds, where ‘good-enough’ is always imperfect and under revision”.[note]Ibid.[/note]

The last two characterizations seem more difficult and in need of some additional explanation. Here is the third, in whole: “Latent commons don’t institutionalize well. Attempts to turn the commons into policy are commendably brave, but they do not capture the effervescence of the latent commons. The latent commons moves in the law’s interstices; it is catalyzed by infraction, infection, inattention – and poaching”.[note]Ibid.[/note]

Could you comment on the problem here: is it the challenge of making a commoning institution durable over time, or is it a deeper antagonism with the law, property and law enforcement? The fugitivity here brings to mind Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of “the undercommons.” Is latent commoning a fugitive practice because the mutuality of commoning is antagonistic to capitalist property relations and regimes of representation? Should we be working harder to imagine and invent counter-institutions that could offer resistance to these?

A. T.: As I mentioned above, I’m hardly in the mood these days to discount institutions. It’s easy to criticize the liberal world order until you lose it to fascism, state corruption, and authoritarian rule. At the same time, I agree with what you say about Harney and Moten: commoning is antagonistic to capitalist property relations and regimes of representation. 

I agree, too, that the long game requires inventing counter-institutions. Sometimes, finding unguarded spaces in existing institutions works out well too; that is why mushrooms continue to flourish in the Rockies. The liberal academy has some of those spaces. Perhaps, in its small way, the collaboratively written book I just described pushes into such unguarded spaces, itself advancing commoning. The book is not an edited volume but rather a truly collaborative work in which each chapter has been written and rewritten by multiple team members. This is still rare in the humanities and social sciences, where solo-authored books are the standard. I know that Europeans are writing team books, responding to the organization of grants there, but they still rarely involve every member hashing out arguments together, that is, thinking across differences in common.  Furthermore, the goal of our book is to remind readers that capitalist property relations are not the human condition, but instead one historically peculiar form. People have lived productively with wetlands; the idea that they must be eradicated is the strange logic of capitalist development. We want readers to notice the possibilities of wetlands commoning; we would like this to lead to protecting wetlands-with-people, rather than ornamental segregated wetlands or developers’ eradicated wetlands. So that too would be an example of counter-institution building. As I’ve said, the effort is quite intentional, but it also builds on millennia of latent commons. 

But maybe where you are guiding me is to the question: “Can we make a revolution?” That was the question I grew up with; I thought I could glimpse the revolution on the horizon. I haven't given up dreams of justice and goals of advocacy—but I have come to see them through the possibilities of collaboration and alliance, rather than a one-move-takes-all coup. The patient work of discovering and mobilizing from latent commons can still build something. Indeed, at least in the US, the range of crimes in the present—from genocide to health care and education, from gender to the environment, from human dignity to class, citizenship, corruption, and war—could still inspire a coalition politics worth fighting for.

G. R.:  The last one seems the most difficult: “Latent commons cannot redeem us. Some radical thinkers hope that progress will lead us to a redemptive and utopian commons. In contrast, the latent commons is here and now, amidst the trouble. And humans are never in control”.[note]Ibid.[/note]

In what sense can latent commons not redeem us, and why? Would some partial repair, attunement and resurgence not count as a kind of reparation for human exceptionalism and its violent extractions? Isn’t latent commoning a break with modernist projects for the mastery and control of nature? Which radical thinkers do you have in mind here? 

A. T.: Finding latent commons now, rather than in some imagined future, is important. They are all around us; that’s why mushroom picking is a good window into the problem. Mushrooms aren’t a plantation crop; you also don’t need to travel to untouched wilderness. Wherever land with trees still exists, even by the side of the road, you might find mushrooms. I often find good, edible mushrooms at the edge of parking lots; they like the light.

Similarly, when my current research group wants to show readers wetlands, we go out foraging with the girls who are looking for clams. People living with wetlands is not a future dream; it exists—even if only within the fragments made by coastal development. Part of the pleasure of finding latent commons is that they are all around us. They show us possibilities for futures beyond capitalist property relations.

One member of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, Shiho Satsuka, is writing a book about Japanese scientists who see future possibilities through the matsutake worlds they study. She was going to call her book Undoing the Twentieth Century because the whole point of their work was to block further destruction of the 20th century sort: ecological simplifications; segregations between humans and nature; violent economies of scale. So, absolutely, finding latent commons is a break with modernist projects of extraction. And the whole point of looking for patches is to create spaces for refuge, repair, and resurgence. (Now Shiho thinks too many people won’t remember the 20th century, so the new title is The Charisma of Mushrooms.) 

Why isn’t this redemption? I’m trying to avoid masculinist heroism, or, as Ursula Le Guin once explained it, storytelling at the point of a spear. Le Guin instead calls our attention to the painstaking work of gathering and arranging things in a basket. This is also what Isabelle Stengers calls “slow science,” that is, knowledge that considers what matters rather than rushing to produce results. 

Tricoloma matsutake mushrooms growing in a latent commons. Image: Caspar S. License: Wikimedia Commons.

G. R.:  In The Mushroom at the End of the World, you are critical of capitalism and highly skeptical of the modernist “progress stories,” as you call them. Can you very briefly clarify your position on capitalism? Given the planetary heating, climate change and biospheric meltdown we are now living through, the “trouble” in the “capitalist ruins” would seem to call for a systemic transformation and a collective agency and counter-power that do not now exist. Are projects of justice still tenable, after the critique of progress? Does “the possibility of life in the capitalist ruins” hold open possibilities for politics of contention and resistance leading out of capitalism?

A. T.: Wow, that’s quite a question. A big, general answer risks being just empty words, so I’ll do the opposite, go for the extremely small and concrete. Another research project I’m working on, again with a small group, takes me to Indonesian Papua. One of the strangest things we have found is that the landscape is littered with unfinished building projects, not just houses, but also resorts, warehouses, plantations, and more. They are all over both the city and the countryside.  It turns out that to claim state-recognized property rights, one doesn’t have to build anything useful; one just has to ruin the land—thus removing it from the possibility of being either empty or Indigenous land. So developers start projects, draining wetlands and deforesting hillsides, but they don’t finish them. Thus they get their land recognized by the state as part of the “modern” capitalist political economy. 

Ruining the land makes capitalist property: this is important. Both boosters and critics have been so hung up on capitalism’s productivity that they forget to notice all the projects that never come to fruition, but instead merely destroy the land’s ecological capacities and the lifeworld of earlier human and nonhuman residents. Capitalism is a system for ruining land… and if we want to recover living ecologies, even just little bits, we have to push back. That’s why protecting those refuges that still exist seems so important to me. Sophisticated critics say protecting refuges is “romantic” and backward looking, but their criticism is a perfect example of the ideology of progress. A strategy for landscape reform begins with patches. It also involves standing up for people and places being run over by the capitalist bulldozer. Yes, projects of justice are still tenable. They no longer can claim the inevitability of progress, however, and so they take the hard work of mobilizing allies. Nonhumans as well as humans are potential allies.  That’s why we need attention to latent commons. 

This interview was conducted by email exchange from August 10 to August 24, 2026.