To love a mushroom

The Mushroom at the End of the World profiles mushroom aficionados pursuing a bounty of fungal practices. We meet a Danish academic pouring over dusty mushroom herbaria, a celebrated composer writing music helping us to “hear” the silent shooting of mushroom spores, a veteran from Louisiana hoping to build a democratic mushroom science, and a Kyoto volunteer organization enlisting mushroom fever to revitalize the countryside. Many of these mushroom lovers have attachments to beloved foraging spots. Mushroom foraging is a wandering activity, but it’s a grounded kind of wandering. Take Hiro, an elder Japanese American, for whom the forest is a repository of memory and history, “layered on the landscape, threaded in and out the spots we check for new life emerging” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 245). This history is ecological, reflecting memories of storms, flooding, and erosion (244). But it is also social:

Hiro’s attachment to his beloved forest is moving. But what, ultimately, can someone like him—an old man who enjoys walking through a familiar landscape—teach us about the possibility of life in capitalist ruins? What is so special about mushroom lovers, and what might they have to teach the rest of us? Tsing’s gambit is that following mushrooms—and those who have a feverish affection for them—can illustrate the kind of love that makes sense for our ecological conjuncture. Mushroom lovers model a kind of eco-affection that can inspire us to deepen our quotidian environmental attachments. A (2010) Tsing essay features two titles: “Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom.” Mushroom lovers, it turns out, are particularly well-trained at practicing “arts of inclusion that call to others,” oriented toward cultivating relations of mutual flourishing (2010, 192). Wild mushroom foragers, Tsing writes,

These people—by virtue of their fungal passion—can teach us something about constructing “livable worlds.” If we open ourselves to their wisdom, we can learn to love our own landscapes in a way that refuses the rage to control. Mushroom loving is a school of environmental ethics. Out of this inquiry into the ethics of mushroom loving will emerge an account of undomesticated love, a virtue that combines a full-body receptivity to the shocks of encounter, an “open yet focused” attention, practices of self-restraint and landscape wandering, and, ultimately, an orientation toward livable multispecies collaborations. Suddenly, environmental love is not the passive enjoyment of an inert landscape but an ethic of collective action. This virtue grows out of environmental pleasure but is resilient to disappointment and pain; undomesticated love culminates in a disposition to multispecies flourishing even in pleasure’s absence.

Mushroom lovers’ central agility is a capacity to collaborate amid indeterminacy. This capacity separates practitioners of undomesticated love from those whose eco-loves are domesticated. Tsing begins Mushroom with the experience of indeterminacy, the experience of the world as unpredictable and disorienting. “What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?” she asks, before offering an answer of her own: “I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms” (2015, 1). Tsing’s mushroom writings hope to prepare readers for the cultivation of mutualistic collaborations across species divides. However, the cultivation of such relationships requires indeterminate encounters with difference. Loving matsutake mushrooms, it turns out, requires a particularly sensitive receptivity to encounter; if we can learn to receive matsutake, we might learn to receive all manner of living, shocking things. Encounters with difference are “by their nature, indeterminate” because they transform us in a way that we cannot anticipate (2015, 46). She analogizes encounter to smell, as “smell, unlike air, is a sign of the presence of another, to which we are already responding” (2015, 46). Smell, like encounter, can be a shock, producing disgust as well as delight. The Matsutake mushroom has a notoriously shocking smell. “It’s not an easy smell,” Tsing admits. “It’s not like a flower or a mouth-watering food. It’s disturbing. Many people never learn to love it” (2015, 14). In this way, learning to love the smell of the Matsutake offers a particularly intense sensory guide to the indeterminacy of encounter. Tsing herself had to be trained to love its aroma—and she hopes to train readers to love it in turn:

In her disgust, Tsing describes reaching out to a Japanese friend who shows her how to prepare Matsutake properly:

I hope to make two claims about Tsing’s ethics of aroma. First, receptivity to encounter must be trained in a way that reaches into the senses. Openness to the other is a full-body capacity, not some abstract ethical principle. Learning to love the smell of Matsutake prefigures an openness to diverse collaborations across species divides. Second, there is something egalitarian about Tsing’s rhetoric in these passages. While the capacity to love Matsutake smell must be learned, it can be learned while preserving equality between teacher and student. Tsing does not hold herself apart from the reader as some sage; rather, she models her own initial insensitivity to Matsutake. To receive her sensory training, she turns to an equal, a friend, and then turns to the reader with humility, inviting them to join her in inhabiting a more sensitive sensory-affective-ethical horizon.

In addition to this sensory receptivity, mushroom-loving generates the capacity to pay attention to indeterminate landscapes. Tsing frequently offers us exemplars: mushroom lovers who come, through their passionate fungal engagement, to embody some virtue. The experimental composer John Cage, Tsing (Reference Tsing2010) informs us, was one such mushroom lover—one particularly adept in virtues of noticing. Cage “believed noticing mushrooms and noticing sounds in music were related skills” (194). Matsutake mushrooms cannot be cultivated by human beings—they pop up in surprising places, modeling the indeterminacy of our landscapes. Cage’s music is similarly indeterminate; he wanted force listeners to “attend to all the sounds around them, whether composed or incidental” (Tsing Reference Tsing2010, 194). The training one receives loving mushrooms generates an attention that is “open yet focused” (194)—focused enough to discern difficult landscape rhythms, open enough to be surprised.

Thinking with Cage, Tsing analogizes the attention required to grasp the relationships that form a given landscape to the attention required to listen to difficult music, especially polyphonic music (Reference Tsing, Harvey, Krohn-Hansen and Nustad2019, 233). Polyphony features the “intertwin[ing]” of autonomous melodies; the novice listener must be trained to “pick out separate, simultaneous melodies and to listen for the moments of harmony and dissonance” (233). Our landscapes feature similar moments of harmony and dissonance, as diverse beings pursue their lifeways, engaging, consciously or unconsciously, in surprising collaborations. In Mushroom, Tsing writes like one trying to get a friend to listen to a difficult genre of music: She wants us to look, listen, and smell carefully because she loves Matsutake, and wants us to love them too, and knows that our attentional powers will only be heightened once we learn to love. She is convinced that mushrooms will sweep us off our feet if we only learn how to pay attention—after all, “a good many of those few who do notice fungi love them with a breathless passion” (Tsing Reference Tsing2010, 192).

Many feminist and queer theory scholars criticize love-based ethics for authorizing subordination in the household. In an environmental context, emphasizing the loves we have for features of our landscapes may raise fears that such loves are contingent on human mastery. Tsingian love is responsive to these concerns; indeed, Tsing (Reference Tsing2012) acknowledges, “domination, domestication, and love are deeply entangled” (141).Footnote ² Mushrooms are found outside the garden or plantation, amid “the bounteous diversity of roadside margins” (2012, 141). Mushrooms are the mirror plant to cereals: mushroom affection models undomesticated love of nature, while love of cereals—“one of the great romances of human history”—domesticated us (145). Mushrooms, unlike cereals, cannot be cultivated using the techniques of plantation agriculture, a model of multispecies relationship that is deficient because it “remove[s] the love” (2012, 148). One cannot properly love a mushroom unless one refuses the domestication of the other. Rather, the mushroom lover, upon encountering the object of affection, reacts with delight at “the undeserved bounty of the gift,” embracing within our indeterminate landscapes “the pleasures of the unasked for and the unexpected” (2012, 142). Central to the ethics of undomesticated love are practices of self-restraint, and mushrooms—with their resistance to domestication—teach us self-restraint. “For those who love wild mushrooms, full mastery is not the goal; indeterminacy is part of the point” (Tsing Reference Tsing2010, 201).

This love is undomesticated in another sense: it is achieved through practices of landscape wandering. Wandering, after all, is an essentially non-instrumentalizing orientation. The wanderer seeks only surprise and delight at her surroundings, not control. “Wandering and love of mushrooms engender each other,” Tsing (Reference Tsing2012) writes. “Walking is the speed of bodily pleasure and contemplation; it is also just the speed to look for mushrooms” (141). Loving mushrooms teaches us how to react to the shocking with an orientation toward awe, rather than a drive to control. Mushroom lovers teach us how to let our eco-affections wander.

We began this paper by offering reasons to doubt that local eco-affections could ground an emancipatory eco-politics. Ursula K. Heise (Reference Heise2008) criticizes traditions that emphasize a “sense of place”—an ethic of curiosity and care for one’s proximate landscapes—as the core environmentalist sensibility. These traditions celebrate rootedness as a “founding ideological principle” for bringing us closer to nature (2008, 21). But Heise thinks this is a mistake: there’s nothing essentially more natural about staying put—mobility is just as much a part of human history as staying put (Reference Heise2008, 31). But mushroom lovers complicate Heise’s suspicion of local eco-affections. While their affections are often rooted in a particular locale, the expression of undomesticated love is mobile, activated by wandering. Take Hiro, the Matsutake enthusiast for whom the forest is an archive of memory—Tsing takes pains to insist that his is a “kind of memory [that] requires motion” (Reference Tsing2015, 245). Undomesticated love is not the passive appreciation of a stable landscape; it’s a nomadic intimacy, close to the ground but on the move.

This ethic, while containing practices of self-restraint, is an ideal that is completed in activity. Ecological love is ultimately a work of collective action. Matsutake mushrooms cannot be cultivated, and they only tend to grow in ecologies that have been disturbed—by glaciers, volcanoes, or human beings. Mushroom lovers recognize their dependence on more-than-human processes, but this need not “enforce paralysis” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 257). Take Kyoto’s Matsutake Crusaders, a group of volunteers engaging in a “perhaps-useful landscape disturbance” in a particular beloved landscape (258). By actively participating in their landscape, they hope to “stimulate a latent commons, that is, an eruption of shared assembly,” Tsing writes, “even as they know they can’t actually make a commons” (2015, 258). The Crusaders must forge new relationships with an abundance of landscape denizens; thus, undomesticated love starts with Matsutake for the Crusaders but travels beyond. Over time, these Crusaders begin to delight in the diverse bounty emerging in a disturbed forest; a narrow mushroom fever transforms, through non-instrumentalizing practices of disturbance and attention, into a more capacious environmental sensibility.

As this volunteer models, undomesticated love is not a dyadic mutualism between human beings and Matsutake. It encompasses embedded practices oriented toward the stimulation of multispecies collaborations. Crusaders collaborate with one another; the revitalized soil facilitates the return of pine; and pine stands ready to support the life of Matsutake. Importantly, the active disturbance practices of the Crusaders counterintuitively habituate volunteers into a deeper self-restraint: Crusaders learn to “mix with multispecies others without knowing where the world-in-process is going” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 264). Such practices both require and deepen attentional capacities. Tsing (Reference Tsing2010) describes an afternoon disturbing the forest with the Crusaders that left everyone with a heightened capacity for landscape attention.

Notice that our discussion of undomesticated love began with—and now returns to—sensory receptivity. Notice, too, that landscape attention is both a precondition for, and a product of, undomesticated love. Landscape disturbance counterintuitively produces an ethos of self-restraint. The virtue of undomesticated love is the result of a reciprocal dance between dispositions (a sensory receptivity to indeterminacy), capacities (for an “open yet focused” attention), and habits (the cultivation of mutualistic collaborations in the landscape).Footnote ³ The virtue of undomesticated love aims at flourishing, and it’s a virtue that moves, mobilizing wandering practitioners into ethical environmental action. Taking this virtue seriously requires a transformation of quotidian eco-affections—and an embrace of environmental love without the promise of stability.

Why is undomesticated love genuinely an account of love, rather than merely the acceptance of indeterminacy? Although acceptance is an important component of Tsing’s ethic, hers is a love concept for three reasons: practitioners have a passionate affection for multispecies others, will the good of those others as others, and actively seek out mutually beneficial relationships. The acceptance of indeterminacy does not, by itself, require the practices of affectionate engagement that distinguishes Tsing’s love concept. Undomesticated love may even occasion felt obligations to multispecies collaborators—obligations that make love resilient in “blasted” landscapes where pleasure cannot always be relied upon as a basis for ethics.Footnote ⁴

Is undomesticated love a radical departure from classic understandings of human love? At first glance, we should think not. This ethic contains erotic elements (a passionate yearning for ecological intimacy) as well as elements that resemble friendship love (a desire to live alongside multispecies others on a reciprocal, respectful basis).Footnote ⁵ Undomesticated love puts elements of classic love accounts on the move, in the muck of disorienting landscapes. That said, my account raises concerns around asymmetry: is it a problem for love if the more-than-human objects of our affection cannot love us back? I do not think asymmetry precludes love. After all, many love concepts in human relations do not require reciprocity: King’s (2000) account of agape—an overflowing goodwill for all, seeking nothing in return—is defined precisely by its lack of reciprocity (121). Non-reciprocity does not make agape any less a love concept. The possibility of asymmetry also exists in “traditional” dyadic love relationships between human beings: one lover will never know if their beloved loves them as they do (Cavell Reference Cavell2015). The possibility of asymmetry is a general characteristic of love; to speak of love without possible asymmetry is to speak of perfect unity, not love. Undomesticated love requires accepting beings with which I am entangled as they are—which is to say, being sufficiently self-restrained to accept their incapacity to love me back, as I nevertheless will and work toward their good.Footnote ⁶

But what of the political upshot of undomesticated love? Tsing may offer us a wonderful ethical ideal, but, as Sharon Krause (Reference Krause2023) rightly insists, “ethical injunctions have never been a reliable check on domination” (74). Tsing consciously disavows the institutional; for her, efforts to institutionalize the latent commons—spaces of undomesticated multispecies love—“do not capture the effervescence” of such niches (255). Krause proposes an ideal of “political respect for nature,” bringing together institutional checks on environmental domination with a “new public ethos” (Reference Krause2023, 74). Tsing’s lack of attention to the institutional in Mushroom is unfortunate because undomesticated love could contribute to a public ethos of environmental respect. Undomesticated love describes the affects and practices that could lead individuals to accept principled constraints on their use of power over nature, a crucial aspect of Krause’s ethos. It trains a sensitivity that could make respect resilient. That said, love is not a requirement for the respect of nature. Undomesticated love is a “warm stream” ethic that manifests in multispecies respect but does not preclude “cool stream” manifestations. Tsing, however, is particularly attentive to the ethical-affective obstacles (disgust, rage, repression) to political respect for nature. Even if we are unwilling to universalize undomesticated love, we can praise Tsing’s effort to temper disrespect for nature while modeling an attractive mode of multispecies life.

That said, the work of the later Tsing has been critiqued for an emphasis on multispecies ethics over radical politics. Lewis (Reference Lewis2017) suggests that Tsing and her friend and colleague Donna Haraway pioneer an environmental tendency characterized by a “barely disavowed willingness to see whole cities and cultures wiped from the planet for the sake of a form of thriving among ‘companion species’ involving relatively few of us.” Ali (Reference Ali2020), discussing Tsing’s emphasis on the indomitable persistence of life in “blasted landscapes,” wonders: “If death contains the seeds of life and life contains the seeds of death, then what need is there for justice?” (6). Perhaps Tsing’s mushroom writings orient us toward multispecies life amid capitalist ruins but offer little to those wishing to prevent capitalist processes from producing so very many ruins. Undomesticated love is an ethic that means to move us, but movements are hardly to be found in Mushroom. Instead, we get latent commons: elusive, undeveloped, fugitive “moments of entanglement” that serve as an “ephemeral glimmer” of political possibility (2015, 255).Footnote ⁷ But if Tsing gives us a sketch of multispecies refuge, she disavows an account of multispecies insurgence. She leaves us with ephemeral glimmers, because, for her, “such glimmers are the political” (2015, 255).

But I think Tsing’s work can give us more than glimmers. In the next section, I work toward a capacious environmentalism that brings together the ethical capacities to form intimate collaborations in blasted landscapes with the political capacities to intervene in our political-ecological conjunctures amid seemingly hegemonic opposition. But for that, we will have to turn to an earlier Tsing.

A politics that moves: discovering the articulative virtues

This section concerns the relationship between ecological love on the level of a landscape and political struggles aiming to transform large-scale institutions. I bring together an account of eco-political ethics with undomesticated love, suggesting that these twin ethics are mutually reinforcing. Toward this end, I reconstruct an account of “articulative virtue” out of Tsing’s 2005 ethnography, Friction. However, the upshot of the argument—that eco-love offers us an ethical preparation for political struggle—is mine, not Tsing’s. On my account, love is a school for environmental movements. In the final section, I treat recent anti-pipeline protests as an exemplary case of environmental love culminating in movement insurgency.

By emphasizing environmental love’s political-pedagogical potential, I distinguish my account from that of Lida Maxwell. In her 2025 text, Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love, Maxwell develops a powerful concept of multispecies “queer love” that, at first glance, shares much in common with undomesticated love. Queer love responds with wonder—rather than the urge to control—at the mysteries of the natural world. Maxwell argues that Rachel Carson’s relationship with Dorothy Freeman was, in fact, a multispecies achievement, inaugurated through a shared experience of a more-than-human world. What’s more, this experience of queer love spurred Carson to engage in a confrontational “politics of desire”—the desire to protect the multispecies world responsible for her love. Here, the experience of queer love moves us to action once we become aware of the forces standing in the way of multispecies pleasures. So too, I suggest, with undomesticated love. The multispecies collaborations that complete undomesticated love are profoundly fragile in the face of ecological destruction. If we take our eco-affections seriously, we ought to struggle against the capitalist practices and processes ravaging the planet.

But I want to say something more than Maxwell: that love makes us more agile eco-political actors. Undomesticated love means making collaborations amid indeterminacy. The articulative virtues deploy that capacity at a different scale: practitioners survey indeterminate political conjunctures, aiming to link social formations under the banner of a new subjectivity. Undomesticated love is a virtue that moves—it’s a movement of the heart inaugurated through landscape wandering. The articulative virtues, too, are concerned with movement: they are exhibited through “traveling activism,” aiming to cohere political passions into movements in defense of the planet.

Or so I will argue. But here we should introduce Friction, Tsing’s (Reference Tsing2005) study of the struggle for the Indonesian rainforest, which traces the rise of a fugitive environmentalism under the New Order regime of General Suharto. This formation emerged at a moment when explicit criticism of the regime was repressed. Thus, the language of environmentalism—viewed by the state as “nonpolitical”—became a venue for expressing democratic aspirations. “Environmentalism cleared the way for other movements in the 1990s,” Tsing writes, “blossoming into human rights and labor concerns, as these became possible” (Reference Tsing2005, 216). While not explicitly anti-capitalist, New Order environmentalism brought together diverse constituencies to challenge the state-led destruction of the Indonesian rainforest, opening space for more radical political tendencies after Suharto’s fall. This formation emerged in the shadows of the state, but it also aimed to “reconfigure its possibilities,” ultimately contributing to a genuinely democratic opposition (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 215). From the perspective of contemporary American politics, it is hard not to be inspired by the example of these brave activists struggling against forces of environmental destruction, social exclusion, and political repression.

Friction (2005) emerges from Tsing’s fieldwork in the mountains of the Indonesian province of South Kalimantan. However, hers is not some ethnography of autonomous local cultural practices; one of her primary commitments is the view that the “local” cannot be understood absent the influence of the “universal” or “global”—and vice versa (2005, 8). The travel of universals takes place through diverse encounters: the “friction” involved in such encounters are central to contemporary global politics. “Friction,” on Tsing’s account, describes the “productive rubbing together of varied historical trajectories or modes of practice”—productive in the sense that out of frictional encounters, something new is produced. Friction is an amoral concept, but Tsing has a positive project in this text: she hopes to discover the “kinds of social justice [that] make sense in the twenty-first century” (Reference Tsing2005, 2). I read the early Tsing as a theorist of political ethics, interested in the praiseworthy patterns of interaction that could enable struggle against environmental destruction amid cultural difference.

One of Tsing’s primary influences in Friction is Stuart Hall’s neo-Gramscian theory of articulation. Articulation refers to the arduous, conflictual process whereby new socio-political formations and subjects are brought into existence through discursive and material practices that link existing socio-political currents. Tsing glosses Hall’s theory as such: “New political subjects form … as pre-existing groups link and, through linking, enunciate new identities and interests” (Reference Tsing2005, 77). Tsing demonstrates how a New Order project to open the Indonesian rainforest to capitalist development was constituted through partially hegemonic, overlapping articulations at different scales and different times.Footnote ⁸ These articulations, while cohering into a project of state-led capitalist development, enlist discourses associated with nationalism, legality, tradition, and Islam—discourses which are not transparently economic. The struggle against the development of the rainforest located gaps in those partial articulations, which, after Suharto’s fall, made space for economically radical (including Marxist) political currents (227).Footnote ⁹ Ultimately, Tsing’s account of frictional articulation helps us explain why global capitalism appears in heterogeneous ways on the ground—and how non-economic discourses can ultimately break the hegemony of capitalist projects.

Clarke (Reference Clarke2015) wisely suggests that Hall’s theory of articulation generates a picture of political virtue, disclosing agilities that open political possibilities in an unfriendly conjuncture. Out of Tsing’s study of Indonesian environmentalism emerges a promising set of articulative virtues—judgment, translation, collaboration, and travel—contributing to an eco-politics that mobilizes the passions. New Order environmentalists displayed the virtue of conjunctural judgment: the capacity to see “weaknesses, confusions, and gaps in business as usual,” and to introduce a “disturbance of everyday subservience” (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 206). This articulative virtue rhymes with Machiavelli’s conception of “virtù,” which describes the ability to recognize gaps in relations of power and make a creative intervention in the political field that produces something new (Hall Reference Hall and UNESCO1980). This is the Machiavelli that is translated through Gramsci and Hall into the notion of “conjunctural analysis”: the practice of “mapping the specificity of the present, of situating current developments historically, of looking out for political threats and opportunities” (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2019, 5). In a departure from Machiavelli, Tsing’s judgment is far from amoral. Rather, it is grounded in an ethical principle: the disturbance of everyday subservience. Tsing is interested in those emerging political forms that bring together rigorous analysis of the political terrain with “utopian visions” (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 215). Grounding this capacity for conjunctural judgment is a particular kind of perception: a grounded, “here-and-now” attention to one’s political landscape in its indeterminacy. Only by paying close attention—to “what connections are already being forged, what threads are being forgotten, and what apparently natural and normal alignments of things are coming apart”—could Hall, in his own manifestation of this virtue, “find the links and the connections that might be built upon to enable a conversation that moved” (Clarke Reference Clarke2015, 10).

Take the emphasis by first-generation Indonesian environmentalists on the legal system. Eco-populists might be wary of an approach to environmental protection that runs through lawsuits; the legal process, after all, is elite-driven and frequently circumscribes more unruly democratic efforts. But, in New Order Indonesia, “law seemed a site of possibility for expanding national consciousness” (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 219). The Suharto regime placed an extraordinary emphasis on lawfulness, and lawyers tended to be strong supporters of the New Order. Legal discourses proliferated under Suharto as more explicitly political discourses were repressed. Lawsuits challenging environmental destruction provided an opening for more popular forms of assembly, such as courtroom vigils (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 219). They also made space for capacious social justice critiques—around “crony capitalism, official corruption, and popular resistance” (220). While the limits to legal tactics were real, they demonstrated sophisticated capacities of conjunctural judgment: environmentalists discovered that what seemed like an element of New Order hegemony was, in fact, an opening for the disturbance of everyday subservience.

Practicing the articulative virtues generates a politics that moves, in two distinct senses. “To move is to travel, Tsing writes. “To be moved is to open one’s heart” (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 213). The work of articulation requires forms of “traveling activism” capable of working at diverse scales, speaking to plural audiences, and articulating “traveling” ideals in particular landscapes. The work of articulation also requires evoking the passions, stimulating potential allies to make “a moving personal commitment of love” (2005, 213). These two valences of movement supplement each other; after all, “there must be mobilization—the movement of the heart—for travel to remake the world” (2005, 214). Now a third sense emerges: the coordination of social formations, achieved through forms of traveling activism that mobilize the passions, into a political movement aiming to restructure large-scale institutions.

The “conceptual work” involved in articulation fleshes out the relationship between travel and mobilization. For New Order environmentalists, traveling activism required arts of conceptual translation. Translation facilitates successful travel, both of persons and ideas. Translation also describes the work necessary to make linkages and alliances across scales. Indonesian environmentalists faced a particularly acute translational challenge around the word “Indigenous” (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 224). In the 1990s, the global environmental movement was increasingly interested in the relationship between Indigenous rights and environmental protection. By framing campaigns as struggles by Indigenous people for their land, many Indonesian environmentalists believed they could translate their situation in a way that made sense to international actors. However, the global language of Indigenous environmentalism emerged out of struggles in the Amazon—a far different ethnic context than Indonesia. Indonesia is not a settler society, and one prominent translation of “Indigenous” (pribumi) functioned to exclude Indonesians of Chinese origin (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 224). In the Indonesian context, Tsing writes, “racial categories are [often] irrelevant, but cultural categories are not” (Reference Tsing2005, 225).

For that reason, environmentalists offered the translation masyarakat adat, which describes “traditional” societies still living according to “customary” law. This translation of “indigenous people” had a number of virtues. Adat (customary law) was described in core pieces of New Order legislation as the “basis” of Indonesian law; thus, the invocation of adat empowered rural peoples against the state (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 225). Additionally, it gave a framework of belonging for rural peoples often described as “isolated tribes.” These peoples could now imagine themselves as a part of an “archipelago” of Indonesians living according to adat (226). This translation gave adat peoples a language—the language of tradition—that they could counterpose to the regime’s language of development. “For these new citizens of adat,” Tsing writes, “tradition formed a critical lens through which to de-naturalize coercive development and demand social justice” (Reference Tsing2005, 226).

The invocation of adat represents an exemplary case of articulative virtue. It flowed from a deep attention to political landscapes at multiple scales, demonstrating an understanding of both “isolated” Indonesian tribes and the international NGO sector. It also disclosed a willingness to work with imperfect tools. The language of adat was routinely criticized within the Indonesian environmental movement (as “romantic,” as exclusionary). Nonetheless, this translation facilitated a conversation that traveled across indeterminate political landscapes, permitting linkages between “embattled rural peoples,” urban Indonesian environmentalists, and international allies (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 226). Critically, adat evoked the passions, even if participants didn’t quite agree on the object of their passion. For the “new citizens of adat,” this language offered a vision of political belonging, united through shared traditional practices, and a basis for anti-regime struggle. International allies could feel passionate about their assistance to adat struggles, understanding them as part of a global effort of indigenous peoples to defend their rights. This is a concept that moves: coalescing a commitment to an inspiring political vision and facilitating new alliances across scales.

Articulation is most successful when it plays hegemonic discourses against one another, thereby creating a kind of productive friction. In translating “indigenous” as adat, New Order environmentalists enlisted nationalistic discourses against international environmental priorities—and vice versa. “Raising political expectations was made possible by finding a critical edge between transnational and national positions,” Tsing writes. “Activists found transnational standards to criticize national policies; they articulated national priorities to refocus transnational initiatives” (Reference Tsing2005, 218). “Transnational standards” contain charismatic ideals: social justice, due process, sustainability, and freedom. These are ideals that inspire, that move. Indonesian environmentalism’s commitment to “revitalize” the nation while protecting its natural bounty was likewise charismatic (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 215). Making friction between these ideals aimed to excite the passion of hope. Conceptual work is far from a dry academic exercise. When done right, it sparks the imagination, offering visions of justice, social change, and individual subjectivity that move plural social fractions to coalesce.

Mobilizing conceptual work also requires traveling activism. The early Tsing is clear: Any formation that disregards the charisma of universal ideals is unlikely to succeed. However, a successful appeal to environmental sustainability looks radically different in post-New Order Indonesia than in Sweden in 2025. Thus, articulative virtue means catalyzing the travel of universals, linking pre-existing groups into heterogeneous alliances. Travel can be literal, involving the delivery of a new message to far-flung places. It also means helping a given articulation land in a new political-ecological terrain. The terms through which universals and ideals are “to be enacted,” Tsing writes, “must be made accessible in new locales” (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 224). If a political appeal is not made accessible, it won’t travel—and it won’t catalyze the linkages critical to the project of articulation.

Finally, traveling activism reciprocally reinforces other elements of the articulative virtues. When activists travel, they get better at paying attention to the surprising or disorienting aspects of their social landscape. They become more receptive to indeterminacy. The work of Romand Coles on traveling activism is helpful here. For Coles (Reference Coles2004), when activists visit new areas of their community, they grow comfortable building relationships that are “new, uncertain, challenging, [and] disruptive of the reigning order of things” (688). They begin to do democratic politics without the promise of stability. When activists embrace the indeterminacy of a social landscape, they can attend to perspectives they’d otherwise refuse to hear. “If our listening is poor,” Coles suggests, “perhaps we have not traveled receptively around our city” (688). The articulative virtues work together: when we travel, we pay better attention; when we pay attention, we’re better at deploying articulations that move.

The articulative virtues and undomesticated love share much in common. Both concern movement. Both ethics are grounded in indeterminate landscapes. Practitioners of undomesticated love respond to indeterminacy with pleasure and an orientation towards mutualism; masters of the articulative virtues survey an indeterminate political landscape for possible collaborations across difference. These ethics also offer similar accounts of attention. In Mushroom, attention encompasses an “open yet focused” vision, a receptivity to landscape polyphony, and a sensitivity toward creating livable multispecies collaborations. This rhymes wonderfully with the attention required for successful political articulation: a grounded yet mobile attention, wandering between scales of analysis, foraging for submerged possibilities (see Clarke Reference Clarke2015, 10). Undomesticated love is an ethic both wandering and passionate; the articulative virtues require traveling forms of activism oriented toward inspiring “a moving personal commitment of love,” one which culminates in the creation of a political movement aiming to reshape the polity (Tsing Reference Tsing2005, 215).

Undomesticated love and the articulative virtues are twin. But I want to do more than observe a similarity between these ethics—I want to insist on a mutualism. When our local environmental affections are informed by undomesticated love, we receive an education that is more than ecological. This is an education that primes us for political action—for the practice of the articulative virtues. Undomesticated love contains a passionate desire to maintain relations of mutual flourishing; it also contains the capacity to see our landscapes clearly. Seeing our landscapes clearly means recognizing the practices threatening multispecies collaborations. Our desire to enter into environmental collaborations may transform into a desire to enter politics. Now engaging in political struggle, we have reason to hope that undomesticated love has prepared us well. After all, struggle involves the formation of linkages amid indeterminacy, and practitioners of undomesticated love already know how to do that. Engaging in practices of traveling activism, undomesticated lovers may find that they’re already rather practiced at wandering.

Indeed, the articulative virtues, deployed on behalf of environmental justice, seek a world safe for undomesticated love. Thinking with but beyond Tsing, we can travel from local eco-affections into political struggle—and back again.

Two parables of Tsingian environmentalism

But this may seem rather theoretical. By way of conclusion, I discuss how the dance between these ethics can unfold on the ground. I want to tell two parables of undomesticated love and articulative virtue. These are optimistic stories of a Tsingian environmentalism that combines insurgent politics with eco-love. In the first story—drawn from Tsing herself—practitioners of undomesticated love appear primed to engage in the work of articulation. In the second, I read a powerful recent political articulation—the insistence by anti-Dakota Access Pipeline protesters that Water Is Life (Mni Wiconi)—as grounded in undomesticated love.

In our first parable, we return to the Matsutake Crusaders, the group of mushroom lovers who engage in conscious practices of landscape disturbance in order to “revitalize the forest” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 258). These individuals model local forms of ecological affection. The Crusaders love Matsutake, and they love the forest. As we have seen, they exhibit the virtue of undomesticated love in its mature form, engaging in ecologically grounded practices aimed at stimulating multispecies collaborations. But that’s not all. To my eyes, they appear primed to acquire the articulative virtues. Under the umbrella of the Matsutake Crusaders, they have linked individuals and communities with dramatically different social backgrounds. The organizing work behind the Crusaders brings together urban scientists with rural farmers, linking modern agricultural techniques with “vernacular knowledge” (263). In other words, this organizing work involves alliance-building translational practices that would be familiar to Indonesian environmentalists, with their well-developed sense of the articulative virtues.

Working alongside one another are retirees, students, housewives, scientists, farmers, and “salaried employees willing to give up free weekends” (Tsing Reference Tsing2015, 259). Plural individuals such as these do not simply appear together on the hillside—they must travel, across geographic space and social difference. Crusader collaborations prefigure the articulative practices of traveling activism. Through this travel, volunteers remake “persons as well as landscapes” (263). In their forest work, Crusaders hope to stimulate a collaboration with Matsutake while understanding that they cannot force one into existence. The work of articulation is similar: an articulation is an invitation to solidarity and struggle—but no articulation can coerce a movement into cohering. Finally, the name Matsutake Crusaders is itself an articulation, a name under which individuals can become a group, possessing a new Crusader subjectivity. Their crusade is, in the final analysis, against alienation and anomie. Their struggle is nothing less than an insurgent effort to “recover the lost sociality of community life” against overwhelming obstacles (262). This insurgency is more social than political—but if I were looking for a comrade in an environmental struggle, I might look for a Crusader.

In our second parable, we look beyond Tsing to the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (often described as the #NoDAPL movement), one of the most inspiring formations in recent Indigenous eco-politics. This movement coalesced thousands of protesters into water protection camps, including representatives from hundreds of tribes (Cuevas et al. Reference Cuevas, Sidner and Simon2017). But this struggle began with love: love of a particular people (the Oceti Sakowin, or Sioux) for a particular place (the Mni Sose, or Missouri River). “Our water is our single last property that we have for our people,” declared Standing Rock Sioux councilmember, “Water is life. Mni Wiconi” (Estes Reference Estes2017, 1). But, for the people of the Oceti Sakowin, loving the river is far more than the passive enjoyment of some lovely natural feature. Mni Wiconi describes a love that travels beyond the Mni Sose, spurring action in defense of clean water everywhere, multispecies flourishing everywhere. Daniel Grasshoper, a Lower Sioux #NoDAPL protester, explains:

This is the assertion of something like undomesticated love: a practice rooted in a particular love but culminating in forms of collective action that travel. Mni Wiconi became a central articulation coalescing diverse actors into the #NoDAPL movement (Johnson and Kraft Reference Johnson and Kraft2018). Mni Wiconi describes a love ethic that travels; Mni Wiconi too represents an articulation oriented toward movement. Protesters, speakers of hundreds of different languages, chanted a Lakota phrase, engaging in risky forms of direct action in defense of a river with which many had little familiarity. Mni Wiconi is a successful slogan because it enables the work of translation: a critical articulative virtue. It grounds protesters in an ethico-spiritual tradition while allowing them to imagine their own sustaining water features—as well as all water on the globe—as being at stake in the #NoDAPL movement. As Johnson and Kraft write:

In other words, what begins in love for the Mni Sose ends in a diverse movement aspiring to the defense of life on earth. Indeed, although protesters were eventually forced to clear the Sacred Stone Camp, many #NoDAPL participants—including online supporters—continued to engage in forms of traveling activism, collaborating as “highly mobile warriors” in opposition to extractive projects around the globe (517). A politics of articulation, translation, and travel flows from a love ethic that puts us on the move.

Ultimately, both parables demonstrate the dialectical relationship between undomesticated love and the articulative virtues. Love on the level of the landscape can move us to insurgent action against the forces destroying our environments. Insurgent political action inspired by eco-love enlists the articulative virtues—virtues which are prefigured in the practices of undomesticated love. Ultimately, such a politics articulates a vision beyond alienation and ruination—a politics offering the hope of messy, imperfect love as a mode of life.