Tales Of Adventure, Nature Love, And Money On The Globalocal Mushroom Trail

Whole Earth, Spring, 2000 by David Arora

One replied, "Because nothing to do there, nowhere to go. Here, life hard, yes, but nobody own us. We [can] walk all day, see nobody. No gas, no electricity, sleep on ground, cook on fire, just like Laos."

To spend significant time with full-time mushroom pickers is to be continually impressed by their familiarity with the natural world and their ability to read every nook and nuance of the landscape.

One evening around a campfire in a muddy mushroom camp in British Columbia, while the pink and green Northern Lights shimmered ethereally overhead, I listened to nine pickers reminisce about "blackouts" (carpets of black trumpets so thick the ground couldn't be seen) 1,500 miles to the south and two years in the past. The conversation narrowed from the forests of northern California to a certain watershed east of the coastal town of Fort Bragg, then to one mountain toward the back of the watershed, and to a system of finger ridges emanating from that mountain, and finally, to a particular stand of tan oaks and manzanitas under which the world's most spectacular "blackouts" occurred. Seven of the nine pickers knew of the watershed and the mountain, and four were sufficiently familiar with the stand of tan oaks that they were able to independently supply details of aspect, slope, vegetation, and timing, even down to details of the humus composition, distribution of wood-rat nests, the shapes of the shiros (a term for a mushroom colony they have appropriated from the Japanese), and other kinds of mushrooms present.

In a time when "local control," "stakeholders," and "land stewardship" have become buzzwords in conservation circles, migrants tend to be viewed with suspicion and denied standing in all three clubs. Yet one would be hard-pressed to find four residents of Fort Bragg as conversant in the local landscape as these wandering mushroom pickers sharing a campfire in British Columbia. Such specific and intimate knowledge of far-flung localities belies the bioregionalist assertion that kinship to the land is predicated upon being rooted to one spot (a criterion, incidentally, that would eliminate much of the world's population). Instead it suggests that kinship and stewardship develop out of less exclusive and more elusive criteria, such as passion and curiosity, and perhaps some more measurable ones such as actual number of hours immersed in nature. To suggest that these mushroom pickers do not "belong," that they do not have as much stake in a place as its permanent residents, is like saying that migrating geese do not belong to the lakes to which they flock in the winter, or that steelhead have no stake in the streams in which they spawn.

Though wild mushrooms, like pine nuts or huckleberries, can be harvested without visibly altering the forests in which they grow, some people have questioned whether the mushroom harvest is sustainable at current levels. While this is a complex subject beyond the scope of this article, European and North American studies show that intensive picking has little negative effect on future crops, as long as the ground isn't dug too deeply, and may even have a stimulating effect. This isn't terribly surprising, because the commercially valuable species tend to be more plentiful in second-growth forests or those affected to some degree by human beings--which is probably why we came to value them in the first place.