Every age generates theories of nature that faithfully reflect its own preoccupations. Sometimes eagles and lions prove that God wants us to have kings; sometimes flowers prove that the world needs poets, or fruited plains are the sign of Manifest Destiny. So it is no surprise to meet a theory today that likes cooking, enjoys walks in the wood and artisanal hobbies, doubts humanity is really all that, and is quietly desperate to make some sort of peace with the perennial shit-storm of global capitalism.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World is a portrait of human relations with non-human species, specifically the matsusake mushroom, which grows in northern Europe, northeast Asia, and the Pacific Northwest, and is prized in Japan as a high-status delicacy that makes a refined gift. An anthropologist who has described mushrooms as “companion species,” she is interested in what people make of mushrooms—from sub-cultures and rituals to supply chains. She is also interested—sometimes playfully, sometimes a bit more seriously—in what mushrooms might make of us.

Tsing calls her book “a riot of short chapters … like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain.” The book jumps among settings and themes. In logged-over American rain forests, we consider what mushroom foragers mean by “freedom” (mostly making money outside the nine-to-five). In Japan, we learn how the heavily used peasant forests around traditional villages, where matsusakes flourished, have become an ideal of pastoral nostalgia. We haggle with the middlemen who put foraged matsusakes onto international markets, and we are treated to extended riffs on mushroom biology, in which various strains of microbial life are so densely intertwined that the very idea of species boundaries comes into doubt.

From all this an argument emerges. Tsing wants to describe a post-Enlightenment natural world, one that can answer and support a new view of humanity. Tsing wants us to see everything in the living world as bound up together, like a mass of mushroom species, pine roots, nematodes, and soil chemicals. This, not some granite massif towering in a bright Alpine sky, should be our idea of what makes nature precious. And where John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt identified their true selves with that granite peak or with the aristocratic sequoia, we should honor our own hybrid origins and messy entanglements, from the half-wild and half-manufactured ecosystems that produce our food to the gut biomes that digest it and make each of us a metropolis of tiny life forms, a matsusake-like colony unto ourselves.

Tsing wants us to see everything in the living world as bound up together, like a mass of mushroom species, pine roots, nematodes, and soil chemicals.

For Tsing, this aesthetics is also an ethics. She yokes the complexity and strangeness of ecology to her politics, which is pluralist, anti-hierarchical, suspicious of generalized programs, and committed to prizing the odd, marginal, and unexpected. This egalitarian, anti-systematic pluralism has been a major feature of the American cultural left, especially in the academy, for at least two generations now. It has real victories to its credit, notably the extraordinary flourishing of gender diversity that has followed rapidly on the successes of the gay-rights movement. At a time when nature itself seems ever more hybrid, impure, various, commingled—queer—this politics is now confecting a nature of its own. Maybe in time it will turn out as productive as the visions of nature that were symbiotic with the politics of John Locke, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Teddy Roosevelt.