Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
14
In the Realm of Rubber
Deep History of the Rubber Rivers
Da Cunha's commission traveled through the heart of the world's richest rubber forests at
the height of the Amazon boom. It is very difficult for us to imagine what transpired in
thoseforestsoverthecourseofacentury,sincethemoderndescriptionoftheUpperPurús
is of untrammeled wildness. What is clear is the fates of millions—in tropical forests and
industrial metropoles—were inextricably woven into the tropical biologies of latex trees,
trees whose history figured in complex ways in native practices, ecologies, Amazonian
geopolitics, and the making of the modern world.
Rubber is the one of the greatest gifts that Amazonia has given us. Tropical latexes
madetheindustrialrevolutionpossible.Itwasforgedfromsteel,cheapenergy,andelastic
gums from tropical forests. Amazonia's manioc expanded food availability in Africa, and
its sweet potatoes came to feed burgeoning Asian populations. The rise of tire-based
transport,cabledelectricity andtelecommunications, tubing,andthevastarrayofgaskets
thatlinkmovingpartsofmetaltogetherinmodernmachinerywouldbelargelyunimagin-
able without this amazing stretchy, waterproof substance. Rubber is now present in our
lives so integrally, so ubiquitously, that it's almost invisible. It has so many unique char-
acteristics—elasticity, plasticity, memory, and resilience—that it was truly a novel mater-
ial for the Europeans who encountered it at the end of the eighteenth century. Rubber is a
polyisoprene, an extraordinary emulsion of complex hyperfolded hydrocarbons. It is the
way that these are composed that gives these gums their unusual properties. By the early
nineteenth century, it already figured in industrializing processes and mass goods. 1
The great ethnobotanist Richard Schultes, whose passion for psychotropic plants was
matchedonlybyhisinterestinlatexes,pointedoutthatonlyseventhousandplantspecies
contain these polyisoprenes, the “caoutchoucs” that provide ausable rubber,andofthese,
only one, Hevea brasiliense , generates 98 percent of the natural latexes in modern com-
merce. This rubber is now mostly produced on Asian plantations.
Amazon Latexes
The term rubber in English embraces a wide variety of different latexes that came from
severaldifferentplantgeneraandhaddifferentdistributions, ecologies, elastic properties,
andregimesofproduction.ThelatexindustrydominatedtheAmazonianexportsectorfor
most of a century and changed its geographic focus, forms of economic integration, and
the ways labor was organized and latexes were harvested. The dramatic terror slavery of
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