1493: Our Agricutural Friend, the Potato

In the spirit of expediency, I'm going to paste my journal notes after the summary.

Summary: potatoes were a very big deal for Europe. More productive, better growing season, more nutritionally complete, ended lots of famines, until the big blight one of course. Also led to modern agriculture, with clonal crops and lots of added fertilizer, then pesticide.

( As with the tuber itself, most of the text is hidden )

1493: rubber

People have talked this being the Anthropocene, a geological era shaped by humanity; Mann also uses the term Homogenocene, for the homogenizing effect.

So, rubber. We don't think about it much, but it's said to be a key Industrial Revolution material, along with steel and fossil fuels. Need it for car and bicycle tires; more essentially, you need it for seals unless your parts are very well made. It's also used in machine belts. And where does rubber come from? The Americas, mostly Brazil. Something to think about the next time putative Revolutions in Rome or China get talked about.

And we're still dependent on the plant; we have synthetic rubber, but it's not as good as natural. The market share of natural has been growing, even, as supply increases due to tropical Asian plantations. Nice, clonal, plantations, just waiting for a fungus to come over from Brazil and kill them all.

In 1526 Spain was still debating what to do with the newly conquered Mexicans. Some said "enslave as inferior!" other said "convert to Christianity and make full citizens!" The anti-slavery faction brought some to Seville to show off, and they played a ball game, which introduced watchers to the new concept of rubber. Supposedly Spanish didn't even have a word for bouncing at the time, as Europe had never seen an elastomer before.

Big craze for rubberized garments, which then crashed as untreated rubber is temperature fragile, rigid in the cold or melting in the warmth. You need vulcanization with sulfur to make it really useful.

Southwest Brazil, in the deep Amazon, on the Madeira river, might have been one of the world's agricultural heartlands, with domestication of peanut, broad beans, chili pepper, tobacco, chocolate, peach palm, and manioc/cassava/yuca. Also, strychnine, a tree poison used by the Indians for fishing.

Tapping scattered trees in the jungle for rubber naturally led to labor shortages, and effective slavery of the local Indians. Chief in this was Julio Cesar Arana. In 1907 some Americans stumbled into how bad it was, and managed to escape and report, especially Walter Hardenburg. Arana was incorporated in London, so accusations of British slavery stung. Roger Casement, an Irish born diplomat who'd exposed Leopold's atrocities in the Congo, documented the abuses; Arana died penniless in 1952. Casement was knighted.

Then he devoted himself to Irish independence, and was found to be indiscreetly gay, and hanged in 1916. Arms smuggling got him the death penalty for treason, being gay denied him any chance of clemency.

Henry Alexander Wickham brought rubber seeds to London, to become seedlings in the Kew Gardens, and thence transported to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia. For breaking its rubber monopoly, Brazil denounces Wickham as a bio-pirate, despite there being no law against it, or secrecy on his part. For its part, Brazil's exports have long rested on coffee and sugar, and later soybeans and beef, none native to the country, and coffee was smuggled from French Guiana against colonial law...

Clements Markham did smuggle cinchona out of the monopoly region guarded by Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Cinchona bark was the sole source of quinine, the only effective anti-malaria drug at the time. Biopiracy, or saving more lives than that region could physically produce the quinine for, especially since they were killing the trees in overharvesting?

Xishuangbanna is China's most tropical place. 0.2% of the land, 25% of the higher plant species, 36% of birds, 22% of its mammals. Not sure if those numbers are before or after tropical montane forest shrank from 51% of the prefecture to 10%, being replaced by rubber plantations, which have since spread into Laos.

"Back in the 1990s there was still fog at lunchtime. Now it's gone by eleven." Rubber trees shed their leaves, leaving fewer surfaces to retain dew, the main source of water outside the rainy season. Runoff is up, the trees are sucking water out of the ground to replace that lost in tapped latex, villages are running out of drinking water, and soil erosion is up by 45 times. And all one pest away from disaster.