Tsing uses this term to refer to the separation of people from the truths and realities of their existence, particularly by capitalist modes of being. She describes it as the “ability to stand alone, as if the entanglement of living did not matter (5). She argues that it has profound implications for the relationship between humans and nature, as only what is convertible to profit matters and “everything else becomes weeds or waste” (6). Occasionally, she uses it in the sense Karl Marx did when he created his theoretical frameworks for describing capitalism and its destructive consequences. Alienated workers lose a close connection to their work, because they perform it only for the wages that enable them to survive. Tsing stresses that matsutake undergoes this alienation from its original environments once the mushrooms are packed away for sale. She declares, “the freedom that brought those mushrooms into the warehouse is erased” (127).

Tsing also points to moments where alienation may be resisted, by properly understanding how ecosystems work and their interconnection. The Japanese matsutake crusaders she interviews “hope that small-scale disturbance might draw both people and forests out of alienation, building a world of overlapping lifeways […] might yet be possible” (258).