In the face of a dual crisis of climate change and economic uncertainty, humanists and social scientists have actively integrated the concept of nature into their analyses. They reframe existing assumptions of ontology to move beyond the overtly representational and anthropocentric tones of the cultural turn. Relational ontologies and interspecies entanglements are emphasized. Cartesian dualism, epistemologically separating humans from nature, becomes the anathema. Anna Tsing's much-anticipated book is a recent accomplishment building on these efforts. But Tsing takes the discussion further by exploring ethical concerns and possibilities for practical action. More than giving us yet another critique of environmentalism or eco-Marxism, she wants to enrich our imaginations through her extraordinary ethnography and remarkable talent for storytelling. Taking a break from "railing at" (3) the capitalism that has failed us, she invites us to follow her, to walk through forests, forage for mushrooms, and most important, listen and notice. In this way she shows us concretely the relationships between humans and nature that are too often only abstractly captured by the concepts of"'interspecies entanglements" (vili) and "polyphonic assemblages" (23 -24) coined by her precursors. Holding such ontological assumptions or, in her words, engaging in "alternative world making" (159), she wants us to be less occupied by the rhetoric of progress that has blinded us and to sense the precarity and indeterminacy of "patchy landscapes" (20), "multiple temporalities" (21), and "shifting assemblages" (20) happening around us. By noticing "latent commons" (134), she believes that new possi bilities for "collaborative survival" (19) may be opened.
