Managing the Unknown: Essays on Environmental Ignorance

By Frank Uekötter and Uwe Lübken

Information is crucial when it comes to the management of resources. But what if knowledge is incomplete, or biased, or otherwise deficient? How did people define patterns of proper use in the absence of cognitive certainty? Discussing this challenge for a diverse set of resources from fish to rubber, these essays show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress: these essays suggest more of a dialectical relationship between knowledge and ignorance that has different shapes and trajectories. With its combination of empirical case studies and theoretical reflection, the essays make a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debate on the production and resilience of ignorance. At the same time, this volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781782382539

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Guayule Fever

Lost Knowledge and Struggles for a Natural Rubber Reserve in the American West

Mark R. Finlay

Soon after the 1929 stock market collapse, U.S. President Herbert Hoover and a rubber company executive met in the White House and hatched a plan to create a vast natural and living reserve of an obscure rubber-bearing desert shrub called guayule. George Carnahan, president of the Intercontinental Rubber Company (IRC) persuaded Hoover to support his vision that vast reserves of guayule should be planted in the American West as an alternative source of natural rubber, one that could ameliorate a rubber shortage emergency caused by war or economic crisis. ¹ To confirm the plan’s feasibility, the United States Army sent a young major, Dwight D. Eisenhower, on a month-long, five-thousand mile expedition that took him from his Washington desk job through the IRC’s experimental, agricultural, and processing operations in California, Texas, and Mexico. As they had intended—particularly with the Plant Patent Bill about to pass the U.S. Congress—the IRC officials impressed upon Eisenhower the confidential and proprietary nature of these knowledge systems, and that only they had the expertise, experience, and seeds necessary to make guayule a viable alternative source of American rubber. ²

In the confidential report that Eisenhower and his traveling partner, Major Gilbert Van B. Wilkes, submitted on June 6, 1930 (exactly fourteen years before D-Day) the officers endorsed guayule almost unequivocally. No other desert plant, they asserted, has been made the subject of so much research and study and offers such possibilities for the American Southwest. The two majors recommended government support for a new industry based upon the shrub for several reasons: it offered potential employment to thousands of needy Americans; it could provide an alternative crop for American farmers whose overproduction of cotton and grain crops commonly brought low prices; it could help consumers through an overall reduction in the demand for imported rubber; and it could become a permanent addition to the rural economy in arid regions of the United States. Further, because guayule required four to six years to reach maturity, they argued that the time had already arrived for the United States to establish a permanent and natural domestic rubber reserve. Thus they endorsed price guarantees that would encourage the planting and maintenance of a living reserve of about 400,000 acres of guayule. If harvested on a rotating basis every four years, the scheme could contribute about 160,000,000 pounds of rubber annually, or about one-fifth of the nation’s annual consumption. "Under real encouragement, Eisenhower and Wilkes boldly concluded, the production of guayule would develop rapidly into an important industry in the United States."³ Despite these persuasive arguments, however, it seems that this report gathered dust in government filing cabinets, and its existence was forgotten or ignored until 1943, when the nation faced a very real rubber crisis.⁴

The repeated demise of this kind of environmental knowledge fits a model that historians Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger have recently described as agnotology, or the social construction of ignorance. Competing and dynamic social pressures, they argue, ensure that at least some scientific knowledge is continually suppressed, censored, or never learned in the first place.⁵ This project also borrows from Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, co-authors of the recent work Merchants of Doubt, which reveals how many participants in scientific discourse are more interested in obscuring, confusing, and obfuscating scientific facts than in uncovering them.⁶ The case of guayule shows elements of these roots of scientific ignorance, but perhaps an even more prominent thread is that of scientific amnesia. In this essay, the active suppression of knowledge is apparent at times, but so is a continual pattern of ignoring and forgetting what previous scientists had learned, forcing another generation of scholars to re-learn much of the same material.⁷

The history of guayule also serves as a lens through which to examine connections between sustainability and national defense. Although underappreciated in most historical accounts, efforts to control strategically important plants have been fundamental tools of economic and political power since the very origins of western hegemony. As historian Joachim Radkau has shown, the triumph of an inorganic economy has been slow and incomplete as modern farmers and industrialists continue to maximize their mastery of organic resources. Many plants and agricultural products remained at the core of Western power and wealth well into the industrial age; cotton, sugar, timber, flax, hemp, indigo, madder, wheat, and other plants proved as vital to western industrialization as coal and iron.⁸ Because synthetic substitutes for many of these natural products did not exist until the twentieth century, agricultural shortages could be devastating to the industrial economy or to military operations. Cognizant of this risk, western leaders and entrepreneurs used various strategies of trade, plunder, exploitation, and investment to get their hands on valuable botanic and agricultural resources, particularly those native to their colonies and other tropical regions. In the words of historian Philip Pauly, many also envisioned a future of horticultural independence and embraced proposals to develop domestic resources for valuable plant material that might yield essential raw materials.⁹ In many cases, although with few successes, they also called for the establishment of natural reserves of strategically important crops and biomass resources, living botanical stockpiles that might sustain the industrial economy in the case of military or economic crisis.

This article focuses on a handful of efforts to establish natural reserves of strategic rubber plants. Unlike traditional ecological reserves, these buffer zones were to be artificial creations, collections of plants that could be tapped to sustain local and traditional economies in time of need.¹⁰ In an era before Americans turned in the direction of nonrenewable and non-sustainable resources to serve industrial, military, and consumer demands, the soil was the first place to look.

The twentieth-century search for permanent natural rubber resources fits into such questions, for virtually all natural rubber, then as now, comes from a small corner of the world in Southeast Asia. Latin American rubber production collapsed early in the twentieth century and never has made a successful comeback. Synthetic rubber derived from petroleum products emerged since World War II as an apparent panacea, one based on a steady stream of raw materials unaffected by weather, seasons, or other variables of nature. Yet only natural rubber has the qualities and properties necessary for airplane tires, portions of automobile tires, condoms, surgical gloves, and scores of other applications. As a result, natural rubber—now mainly from Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia—still captures about forty percent of the market, and natural rubber production continues to set new records every year.¹¹

But new agricultural crops like guayule faced countless cognitive, political, and economic challenges, and they continually encountered problems of lost, ignored, and suppressed knowledge. Despite the confidence that Carnahan, Eisenhower and Wilkes, and other guayule enthusiasts expressed, they remained ignorant of a great deal. Virtually any attempt to introduce a new agricultural crop is fraught with profound problems, for even the best-designed research project generally requires an entire growing season to yield meaningful results. Bringing new crops into the commercial marketplace is even more difficult, for it has taken decades, if not millennia, to develop the confluence of breeding, planting, harvesting, and marketing technologies that make just a few crops account for the majority of the entire globe’s agricultural production. At least in the United States, political pressures exacerbate the problem, as only five crops—corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans, and rice—account for ninety-three percent of the direct subsidies in the 2007 U.S. farm bill.¹² There is little incentive to investigate, promote, or invest in the crops about which little is known. As this case will show, and despite several outbreaks of guayule fever, repeated efforts to make American rubber crops viable fell short of their goals.

The Plant, and the Idea of a Natural Reserve

Like Eisenhower and Wilkes’s report, this chapter focuses on the desert plant guayule, (Parthenium argentatum Gray). Guayule is a woody shrub, about two feet tall, with silvery-olive leaves, small yellowish flowers, and deep and extensive root systems. A drought-resistant native of the elevated deserts of northern Mexico and a small corner of southwest Texas, guayule is a long-lived plant that matures and reproduces quite slowly. During a guayule boom of the early twentieth century, it took little time at all for aggressive harvesters in Mexico and Texas to make the extinction of wild guayule seem imminent. Then the Mexican Revolution brought the issue home, as revolutionaries continually attacked American-owned guayule operations like the IRC, in part because of this industry’s impacts upon native societies and environments. To keep the industry afloat, the IRC hired botanists and agricultural experts who tried to engineer new propagation techniques, cultivation methods, and new habitats within the borders of the United States, first in southern California, then southern Arizona, then northern California. Other Americans intermittently sought to create a guayule rubber industry in South Texas. After decades of trial and error, IRC experts developed tedious and expensive strategies to germinate selected seed in nursery beds, to carefully transplant the seedlings to the field, and to maintain the plants for years in semiarid and isolated environments. Because the plant could live in lands that competed with few other commercial crops, guayule enthusiasts argued it could be an important addition to the agricultural economy of the American Southwest, one that might even bring profit to farmers during times of high rubber prices. Alternatively, some argued that the plant could become a permanent and natural reserve that stored valuable rubber in an untended biomass, left idle in western deserts for some unknown future need.¹³

The unknowns that surrounded guayule were extensive and significant. Because the plant requires four to five years to reach maturity, guayule reserves would have to become part of an ambiguous, minimally-developed landscape. Planners had to imagine a resource that could be planted in arid lands and left to fend for itself for an indeterminate length of time, under some form of quasi-public management, with loose assurances of government purchase during some unpredictable future emergency. Further complicating matters, the IRC, the firm that controlled virtually all of the nation’s guayule seeds and know-how, held out the hope that guayule could become a viable commercial product and earn dividends for its Wall Street investors. In an era when no patent law could protect the company’s work with guayule germplasm, the IRC called for an artificial kind of natural reserve in which one company controlled both the cognitive and physical environments. Power over the knowledge it had accumulated could not have been more important to the IRC, even as its proposals for private and public investments tested others for their tolerance of the unknown.

Guayule Reserves: World War I to World War II

Notions of a natural reserve of guayule tended to vary according to changes in the rubber market and threats of war. In 1916, for instance, with American entry into World War I looming, the IRC promised to vastly expand its domestic operations by clearing some two thousand acres near a new company town called Continental, Arizona, deep in the rough and uncharted desert environment of southern Arizona.¹⁴ The slow-growing plant made no impact on the war, but by 1920 the IRC committed to a new round of research that it promised would make their work the most important agricultural experiment ever carried out under purely American auspices.¹⁵ Yet these plans were abandoned just a year later, and the company restarted its research in the much milder climate and more developed environment of Salinas, California. Recognizing that all natural rubber resources were at risk, Department of War officials decided in 1922 to press ahead with projects that could supply rubber in time to meet a military emergency. In 1923, an episode of unusually high rubber prices prompted Congress to fund projects that investigated alternative sources of rubber in several parts of the United States, Latin America, and the Philippines. Government officials found the IRC—the only company with expertise on American rubber—to be absolutely uncooperative, however, as they attempted instead to develop a privately-owned rubber industry based in California.¹⁶

The IRC had become more desperate by 1930, as rubber prices plummeted during the worldwide depression. Because the IRC’s efforts with Hoover and Eisenhower did not yield the intended results, the company then sought legislation that mandated government purchase of American-grown rubber, or policies that guaranteed minimum prices for farmers who grew American guayule. IRC officials also proposed a large rubber reserve in the living tissue of California guayule as a project that could provide worthwhile employment for the Civilian Conservation Corps’ army of underemployed Americans.¹⁷ They similarly tried to tap into New Dealers’ efforts to dispose of excess lands and promote new crops that did not compete with the market crops in oversupply.¹⁸ But a serious blow came in 1934, when Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace’s widely-read book New Frontiers explicitly rejected calls for a tariff to support the guayule industry. Indeed, Wallace suggested that if such a tariff were enacted, those in charge of a domestic rubber industry—obviously implying the IRC and its leadership—would weep continuously for additional protections.¹⁹ Carnahan’s language in response is also significant, claiming that the New Dealers were involved in a Conspiracy of Ignorance intended to suppress the potential of American guayule.²⁰ In any case, the notion of domestic rubber reserves remained conceptually, politically, and economically unfeasible.

The idea of American rubber reserves reemerged as war appeared in Europe and Asia. An unsigned USDA report from April 1940 suggested that government officials should have the foresight to plant rubber trees in southern Florida and guayule in the Southwest as insurance in case a real rubber supply crisis were to arise.²¹ Two months later, a Department of Commerce newsletter endorsed a proposal to establish a domestic living reserve of rubber of one million acres of guayule. According to defenders of this plan, the nation would have an always-accessible and valuable insurance policy if one tenth of that amount, or 100,000 acres, were harvested and replanted each year.²² With threats of war looming in 1941, California Congressman John Z. Anderson, who represented the IRC’s base of operations in Salinas, pleaded with his colleagues to fund a living rubber reserve of guayule, perhaps of 400,000 acres, which could yield some 125,000 tons of rubber annually.²³ The IRC pushed for an additional living rubber stockpile, perhaps in the Big Bend area of Texas, although it recognized that any notion of government-guaranteed prices for a private company would face violent political opposition.²⁴ A USDA official issued a report on June 6, 1941—now just three years before D-Day—that concluded a serious effort to cultivate guayule presented a far more promising solution to the impending rubber crisis than investments in synthetic rubber. The official asserted that the IRC’s agronomic techniques were far advanced, and its improvements in processing machinery were ingenious. Nevertheless, this report, like the Eisenhower and Wilkes report of 1930, had no impact in Washington through the summer and fall of 1941.²⁵ Once again, ignorance prevailed, even if it was not the result of a deliberate cover-up.

Then came Pearl Harbor and subsequent crisis in the Pacific. The government’s perfectly rational decision to bypass guayule in 1941 proved obsolete in 1942. The United States soon launched hurried programs to find alternate rubber supplies: scrap rubber drives, gasoline rationing, speed limits for automobiles, the hasty search for Latin American rubber sources, and the ambitious scale-up in the production of synthetic rubber. Calls for domestic rubber crops resumed, louder than ever, culminating in the creation of the Emergency Rubber Project (ERP). Significantly, the ERP began with a long struggle over one of the vital unanswered questions concerning a natural rubber program: Who would have access to the IRC’s germplasm and intellectual property, and at what price? The company had stockpiled more than eleven tons of guayule seeds, and its scientific and technical experts, notably William McCallum had spent decades accumulating expertise on the plant’s botanical and agronomic characteristics. After extensive negotiations and amid some cries of war profiteering, the IRC sold its seeds and know-how to the United States government for about $1.7 million. With the stroke of a pen, the future of an American rubber crop passed from private to public hands. The ERP’s history is not the focus of this essay, so it may be enough to mention that it eventually cost over $40 million, employed over one thousand scientists, engineers, and technicians, and planted about 32,000 acres of guayule in an intense effort to develop an American rubber crop. Countless scientific publications resulted; in the words of one scholar, the ERP produced a thorough and intense study of a single plant species that was unprecedented in the history of biology.²⁶ Yet it is also worth noting that one of the nation’s rubber experts, David Spence, could say in 1945 that "it is simply too bad that so much time and money have been spent by the [Emergency Rubber] Project in proving methods of planting and milling which were all a matter of record years