A Threat To Holocene Resurgence Is A Threat To Livability
A Threat To Holocene Resurgence Is A Threat To Livability
WHAT IS RESURGENCE?
Disturbances, human and otherwise, knock out multispecies assemblages—
yet livable ecologies come back.1 After a forest fire, seedlings sprout in the
ashes, and, with time, another forest may grow up in the burn. The regrow-
ing forest is an example of what I am calling resurgence.2 The cross-species
relations that make forests possible are renewed in the regrowing forest.
Resurgence is the work of many organisms, negotiating across differences,
to forge assemblages of multispecies livability in the midst of disturbance.
Humans cannot continue their livelihoods without it. The dependence of
human livelihoods on resurgence is particularly obvious in considering
hunting and gathering: If animals and plants do not renew themselves,
foragers lose their livelihoods. But, although both scholars and modern
farmers are prone to forget this, such dependence is equally insistent for
agriculturalists and keepers of animals—and thus, too, all those who live on
their products. Farming is impossible without multispecies resurgence.
I first saw this dependence when studying shifting cultivation in the
Meratus Mountains of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, in the 1980s and
1990s (Tsing 2004). Meratus Dayaks cut down trees to make small farms
in the rainforest; after two years of growing grain, they allowed the forest to
regrow amongst vegetable and tree crops. Within ten years, tree trunks as
wide as a person’s thigh filled former fields. Wild animals, herbs, and fungi
joined this regrowing forest assemblage; after 50 years, old-growth species
had arrived and begun to replace pioneers. The forest was a place for
Meratus hunting and gathering as well as for the making of renewed new
fields. Forest regrowth thus allowed Meratus to maintain the farming–
foraging combination of their late twentieth-century livelihoods.
Meratus shifting cultivation embraces the forest; in contrast, fixed-field
agriculture is often imagined as the antithesis of the wild. Perhaps it was this
imaginary that led to my surprise to find that peasant farmers are equally
dependent on forest regeneration.3 In my more recent research on
A THREAT TO HOLOCENE RESURGENCE IS A THREAT TO LIVABILITY 53
increasingly began to use new modes of living involving crops and domestic
animals. Many species were disadvantaged by the spread of humans, most
dramatically those large animals whose extinction followed the late Pleisto-
cene and Holocene expansion of humans. In comparison to modern envi-
ronmental destruction, however, it is possible to think of the Holocene as an
epoch in which human farming managed to co-exist with a wide variety of
other living beings. If there is any meaning to the term sustainability, we
must look for it in Holocene ecologies—including those that have managed
to hang on in the contemporary world.
How did farming maintain its longue-durée viability during the Holo-
cene? Holocene farming privileged the same resurgence processes and
forest species assemblages as the multispecies expansion that followed the
Ice Age, including both local succession and the long-distance travel of
plants.6 Plants had to travel to survive: The cold and drought of Ice Age
glaciation pushed out many species. Spaces where those species wiped out
elsewhere continued to thrive became refugia. When the glaciers retreated
and the world became warmer and wetter, living things spread out from
refugia, remaking forests, wetlands, and meadows. In temperate lands, after
the first wave of ruderal (or weedy) plants, forest-forming trees came to
occupy once frozen places. Trees are mobile—and thus they can respond to
farming. In their spread from refugia, plants showed the lively initiative that
has helped them survive human disturbances. Holocene farmers cut back
forests, but every time farms were abandoned, forests took back the land.
Mimicking their post-Ice Age spread, forests kept returning. Meanwhile,
both crops and domestic animals depended on nutrients gained from
forests. Farming not only cut but also impoverished forests, and yet forests
bounced back.
Holocene farming might be said to have encouraged the continual
enactment of post-Ice Age successions. In their advance, both glaciers and
farms push back earlier ecologies; in their retreat, both tap multispecies
agility in ecological renewal. Luckily, such agility is not gone. Holocene
modes of existence, in this sense, are still part of the contemporary world,
although pressed by powerful modern alternatives. To recognize this con-
tinuing importance, I need a specialized usage: In this chapter, Holocene
and Anthropocene will not offer a singular chronology but instead point to
diverging ecological modes that entangle and co-exist across historical time,
even as they make histories. To preserve livability, we will need to conserve
Holocene ecologies—and to do so, we need to pay attention to them.
A THREAT TO HOLOCENE RESURGENCE IS A THREAT TO LIVABILITY 55
Plants don’t just automatically occupy places; their assemblies are formed
in cross-species negotiations. In the rest of this chapter, I use the relations
between fungi and plants to stand in for the many kinds of multispecies
relations through which Holocene resurgence, on the one hand, and
Anthropocene proliferation, on the other, emerge. Fungi are important
actors in landscape making; they are also little noticed by most of us—and
thus a good ambassador for the many hidden worlds that make the sustain-
ability of human livelihoods possible. In what follows, I consider two
distinctive fungal ways of life, which we might consider “hunting” and
“farming.”7 My fungal hunters are decomposers. They locate vegetable
prey and settle in to feast upon it. They make forest succession possible by
culling stressed trees, and by providing nutrients for newcomers. My fungal
farmers form symbiotic connections called mycorrhiza with the roots of
trees. Like human farmers, they care for their plants, providing them with
water and nutrients. In turn, plants provide them with a carbohydrate meal.
Both modes of life are important to Holocene resurgence, but I focus on
mycorrhiza. I turn then to decomposers to show how the plantation blocks
resurgence and generates unmanageable proliferation.
Most of Japan’s central island, Honshu, was not covered by ice in the last
glaciation; still, the climate was cold and dry, and conifer forests covered
most of the land (Tsukada 1983). As the region warmed at the end of the
Ice Age, broadleaf trees moved in, and conifers retreated to the high central
mountains. The only conifers in the hills and valleys (that is, outside of the
central mountains) were those that could grow interspersed with broadleafs,
such as sugi (Cryptomeria) and hinoki (Japanese cypress). In the first part of
the Holocene, humans seem to have managed trees but not to have made
extensive clearings in the regrowing broadleaf forest (Crawford 2011).
Then, several thousand years ago, farmers started cutting down trees for
intensive agriculture. Suddenly, pines, which had disappeared from hills
and valleys since the end of the Ice Age, were back (Kremenetski et al.
2000: 102). Pines’ partners in this return were matsutake. Together, they
answered the need for ongoing resurgence.
Japanese peasants on Honshu have long cultivated a distinctive village
landscape, enshrined as traditional practice (Takeuchi et al. 2003). Flat
valleys are spots for rice paddies, vegetable fields, and houses. Irrigation
channels slow down scouring mountain streams as they also water the rice.
Since the nineteenth century, timber plantations of sugi and hinoki have
become increasingly common. Yet the heart of the village landscape is the
anthropogenic woodland on surrounding steep hills, the satoyama forest.
Satoyama forest is intensively used. It may be cleared for timber and shifting
cultivation; trees are also regularly cut for firewood and charcoal. Forest
products such as wild vegetables, fruits, and mushrooms are gathered. And
fallen leaves and humus are raked for green manure for the fields. The
satoyama forest is an essential part of village life, supplying everyday needs
and fertilizing the fields.
Farming depends upon forests—and forests require the resilience of
resurgence. Matsutake shows us repeated beginnings of this process. Pines
colonize bare mineral soil, laid bare by peasant practices, through their
partnership with matsutake. Matsutake make nutrients available for pine
from the mineral soils; pine give matsutake their carbohydrate fix. As pines
and matsutake rehabilitate bare land for forests, broadleafs follow. If farmers
did not continue disturbing the area, pines would eventually die out.
But farmers’ continuing use of the forest repeats the need for pioneering
succession again and again. Pine and matsutake oblige. This is the opening
act of Holocene resurgence. If Japanese peasant landscapes might be said to
be “sustainable”—and indeed they have had a long viability—it is because of
A THREAT TO HOLOCENE RESURGENCE IS A THREAT TO LIVABILITY 57
Until 40–50 years ago, horticulture trading was done mostly at local level.
Nurseries raised plants close to where they would be planted. . .. From the 1970s
onwards, however, the industry changed rapidly. . .. From that time, seedlings or
cuttings were produced by specialized nurseries, transported to other nurseries as
“liners” for potting into two or three litre containers, then taken from that stage
into larger pots. . .. The development of international trade in plants largely
followed from the widespread uptake of containerized transport: the availability
of space in container ships, some capable of carrying over 18,000 standard-sized
containers means that tens of thousands of plants can be shipped by sea, reaching
their intended distribution points within days to a few weeks. . .. Inevitably, plant
production condensed. . .. Young plants were often supplied by nurseries in
regions where employment costs were lower, initially Central and Eastern Europe,
then beyond Europe, as far as Asia, Africa, and North and South America.
formed. It seems likely that this was the situation for ash dieback. And the
feast goes on and on, never lacking for new dishes. In more ordinary
ecologies, pathogens become less virulent over time, as they adjust to the
population dynamics of their prey. In the plantation, however, the supply of
bodies is constantly refreshed. There is no reason for pathogens to reduce
their virulence.
Welcome to the Anthropocene, in which alienated and disengaged
organisms, including humans, multiply and spread without regard to
multispecies living arrangements. Such proliferation makes no adjustments
for previous residents and shows no signs of limits. Ash dieback is one of
many products of the plantation economy, set loose into the world. These
feral biologies block Holocene resurgence—and threaten the livability of
multispecies landscapes.
Consider ash dieback, then, through its spread through containerized
shipping, a floating plantation. This has not been a casual introduction,
an ordinary result of travel. The thoroughfares for the fungus are the nodes
of industrial plantation exchange: from really low-cost nurseries in Asia
to still low-cost nurseries in Eastern Europe; from Eastern Europe to
the Netherlands, the center of industrial nursery shipping; from the
Netherlands to the rest of Europe. This has been the route for a reason:
the organization of the industrial nursery trade. The FAO report I quoted
continues: “Once in the EU, the plants are considered ‘clean,’ having
passed the border inspections, even if not inspected. Further trade within
the EU ensues, with huge numbers of plants shipped to countries other
than the initial importing state” (FAO 2104: 21). In 2012, UK journalists
reported that local nurseries relabeled their imported ashes as “British,”
hoping to please customers (Gray 2012). Ash dieback has spread by
bringing the plantation into the forest.
In his celebration of ash trees, British botanist Oliver Rackham put the
problem as follows (2014: 8–10):
The greatest threat to the world’s trees and forests is globalisation of plant
diseases: the casual way in which plants and soil are shipped and flown around
the globe in commercial quantities, inevitably bringing with them diseases to
which the plants at their destination have no resistance. This has been
subtracting tree after tree from the world’s ecosystems: if it goes on for
another hundred years how much will be left?
A THREAT TO HOLOCENE RESURGENCE IS A THREAT TO LIVABILITY 61
NOTES
1. Disturbance is a comparatively quick change in ecosystems conditions; it is not
necessarily bad—and not necessarily human. Unfortunately, humanists often
misunderstand the term as a way of criticizing humans; without this (mistaken)
implication, it could be a useful term for an anthropology of a world always in
motion. See Tsing (2015a, Chapter 11). Meanwhile, there is no implication
here that post-disturbance ecologies are the same as those they replace.
A THREAT TO HOLOCENE RESURGENCE IS A THREAT TO LIVABILITY 63
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