Living in the Ruins

My current morning book is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

After reading the other morning, it occurred to me that we — in this case “we” means progressives who want a better country and are resisting the current destruction — keep trying to come up with fixes for our current messes that don’t change the system very much. So, for example, our ideas about health care are to imitate the European social programs and set up some kind of government-run single-payer system.

And while that’s not a bad idea as far as it goes and far more radical than anything that’s likely to happen anytime soon, I still have a feeling that we’re going to need something more than that, because our health care system is a colosal ruin.

Probably we have to start by recognizing how ruined things really are.

Tsing’s book uses the harvesting of matsutake mushrooms as a metaphor – or maybe a guideline – for dealing with with life in an area that has been ruined.

Matsutake only grow in the wild; they can’t be farmed. And they mostly grow in ruined forests, which is why there is a thriving business in them in the forests of Oregon, where the old growth forests were heavily logged. The timber companies replaced them with timber “plantations” of fir and lodgepole pine.

While this doesn’t make for the diverse and healthy forest that came before, it does provide an environment for the matsutake.

The matsutake are a delicacy in Japan, which provides a market.

There are many different kinds of pickers and also a variety of buyers who arrange the international sales. Many of the pickers are immigrants from various parts of Southeast Asia who were displaced by the U.S. war in Vietnam and other parts of the region, but even those come from different ethnic groups and have different approaches.

There are also immigrants from Latin America as well as some White native-born Americans, many of them war veterans who find holding regular jobs difficult.

But also – interestingly – there are Japanese Americans who approach this as a cultural activity, not a business. These are people descended from those who were interred in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. Their approach is quite different from that of the people doing it as a business.

The various immigrant cultures and their descendants are people figuring out how to survive after their worlds have been upended by war and economic crisis. Making a living finding mushrooms that grow in ruins makes sense in their world.

But for people like me, middle class though far from wealthy, the idea of surviving amidst the ruins that capitalism has wrought is scary. Still, when I look around me, I see those ruins everywhere.

I walk around Oakland, where ordinary houses sell for a million dollars (fancy ones for much more) and the rents for cafes and retailers are so exorbitant that far too many go out of business quickly. I see boarded up buildings everywhere alongside new apartment complexes — ugly ones, but still shiny.

Our city has been cut to pieces by highways running through it, tearing apart neighborhoods. Those highways and other badly planned projects add environmental ruin to the mix.

And of course, we have people living on the streets. Some have serious mental illness or addition problems, but a lot of them just don’t have the money for a place to live.

So much money and so much ruin, all at once.

It’s not just Oakland; I mention it because it’s where I live now and I know it. You can see it everywhere. Chris Brown’s book A Natural History of Empty Lots provides detailed looks at what creatures and plants are coming back in ruined urban landscapes, primarily in Austin, Texas.

Now I can see better ways of doing damn near everything and I would love to wave a magic wand and make those things happen. We have the tools, the resources, even the brainpower to make all this happen. Our problem has always been the will, particularly the political will.

But I think we’re only going to build this better world in the ruins of the capitalist state.

That doesn’t mean we should wait around for everything to crash. Rather, I think we need to be working on new ways of doing things now.

I’m involved in the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Co-op, which has the potential of becoming a much more effective way of owning and using real property than our current haphazard system. Imagine having some of the advantages of homeownership – like control over how the property is cared for and protection from being summarily kicked out because the owner decides to sell – without having all the responsibilities or needing a lot of money.

Imagine making that available for local businesses and nonprofits as well as for people who need a place to live.

EB PREC is small now, but I hope some day it owns a substantial part of the property in the East Bay.

Or take public banking, which is slowly becoming a reality in California. What if local and state governments weren’t at the mercy of big banks but rather had a public bank option for parking their money and using it to build things?

These are systems we can build in the cracks now that can grow as we change.

Bill McKibben writes frequently about how renewable energy is now affordable and reasonable for future planning. The fossil fuel companies are hanging on, though one wonders if the destruction currently going on in the Middle East in this absurd war will end up changing that.

A lot of projects now are small and some of them should stay that way. But we will need to scale others. Public health, for example, needs to be both local and large scale – local, because one-on-one care of people is most effective and large scale because contagious diseases don’t stay in one location and vaccine development (to pick just one aspect) requires lots of money.

I’m not sure how all these things will come together. I think about it a lot, in part because I’d like to write some near-future SF in which we’re building a better society in capitalist ruins, but also because I’d like to live in that better society.

I’m probably not going to live long enough, but I hope I at least see us moving in that direction before I go.