Resurgence: Opportunities for Growth in Nature and Humanity

By Emily Amos, Audrey LeFinson, Vivienne Moore, and Cami Hoffman.

Most quarters, a group of students at WWU gathers to discuss a recent book or set of podcasts about environmental justice. This post reflects our discussion of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins in Winter 2021.

“One of the most miraculous things about forests is that they sometimes grow back after they
have been destroyed. . . Resurgence is the force of the life of the forest, its ability to spread its
seeds and roots and runners to reclaim places that have been deforested. Glaciers, volcanoes, and
fires have been some of the challenges forests have answered with resurgence. . . In the
contemporary world, we know how to block resurgence. But this hardly seems a good enough
reason to stop noticing its possibilities.” -Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

Professor K, an environmental economist in Kyoto who Tsing interviewed to write The
Mushroom at the End of the World, is working to restore Japan’s peasant landscapes. “The
sustainability of nature, he said, never just falls into place; it must be brought out through that
human work that also brings out our humanity.”

This question of how we experience our humanity through working with nature can be
answered in diverse ways. Some share memories of past restoration projects along
salmon-bearing streams; some removed invasive plants from community garden spaces in high
school. Others who grew up in more urban areas reminded us that small things count, and by
simply walking through a city forest provides one with a connection to the natural environment. With or without humans, forests across the planet are continuously evolving and
changing form. Humans and nature cause ruin at times, but often these disturbances pave
pathways for the resurgence of unexpected life.

Often we view the actions of humans in nature as negative. We fail to look at the positive
side of these interactions. Resurgence offers a more hopeful and positive look at these encounters
between humans and nature. Resurgence in the natural world, like the growth after a volcanic
eruption or recovery after a forest fire, offers hope for the future of our planet. We focus so much
on the negative effects humans have on the environment, that sometimes improvement seems
impossible. Resurgence after natural disasters shows us that improvement and growth after ruin
is possible. Nature knows how to recover from destruction.

Ruin begs, even demands, resilience, which in turn allows space for resurgence. This
resurgence may birth a landscape similar or identical to the one before it, like regrowth in the
changing of seasons, or force those affected to adapt and move forward with a new landscape in
front of them, not unlike the way a forest returns after resource depletion or a brain is rewired
after trauma. Though each mode of forced rebirth, through decimation of a terrestrial, cultural, or
emotional landscape, may initially devastate a population the resilience and newly necessary
interspecies cooperation of each living body within that population, both human and nonhuman,
can allow for radical positive change. This idea of ruin as a means of forward progress, drawn
from the rebirth of the Eastern Cascades and continued reliance on Japanese peasant forests, can
be thoughtfully applied across personal and community struggles, such as with the COVID-19
pandemic response, to provide hope and drive towards systemic change.

The “bursting through” nature of resurgence is not strictly limited to forest life, although
it is perhaps most profoundly witnessed there. But, if we look closely, we can see resurgence
crop up in our own human lives. This pandemic, for instance: some might observe that the
widespread stay-at-home orders have brought back a resurgence in exploring our humanity.
Many folks have gotten a chance to (re)connect with what makes us all human.

This pandemic has offered some the privilege of getting a breather from the endless rat
race of capitalism. What is one to do without the direction of capitalistic production and
consumption? This is where resurgence comes into play. It’s not like we’ve never known how to
live without capitalism; that spark of pure, raw human curiosity has been in us from the very
beginning. It’s just a matter of bringing out what has been beaten down, perhaps even corrupted,
after years of surviving in this system. For some, this exploration emerges through hobbies like
gardening, crafting, baking, etc. These activities provide modes of living and thriving that allow
us to connect with our roots — sometimes literally, in the case of gardening. It’s easy to forget
what makes us human when we live in a society that demands us to be consumers.

There’s a lot we can learn from nature, and resurgence after adversity is just one of her
lessons. Much like resurgence in forests, one has to be listening in order to learn these lessons. If
we all pay attention and hold to our gratitude, nature can forever humble and inspire us with her
age-old wisdom.