In the Realm of Rubber - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 210

of Kew Gardens and South Asian planters, the outcome of Wickham's transfer of wild
Hevea seeds to that institution in the 1870s. But Hevea has a deeper and more complex
history of domestication, one that didn't begin with Kew's botanists or Ceylonese plant-
ations.
Domestication, as it is usually understood in the temperate zone, emphasizes changes
in edible parts of plants (increased size, oiliness, or sweetness, reduction of toxins, het-
eroploidy) 28 as well as an inability to persist unaided by human intervention. Usually
studies of domestication evaluate gradations from more primitive to more domesticated
genotypes, providing hallmarks for documenting the differences between tame and wild
species. Geneticists for the most part have concentrated on annual crops and generally
viewed the large array of tropical trees that are widely used (and largely with multiple
uses) as wild trees with “gathered products,” part of the world of “non-timber forest
products,” or NTFP, in current resource development argot. 29 Tropical fruit trees were
thus seen as more or less “self-domesticating,” 30 more like weeds or random processes
than outcomes of local cultural and agro-ecologies. Like early explorers who viewed
tropical abundance as uniquely part of nature's bounty, this view of useful tropical trees,
often found in groves with high densities of individual species and frequently associated
with other useful trees (a classic mix involves rubber, Brazil nuts, cacao, and suites of
beneficial palms), as an outcome of biotic history—as wild, accidental, “natural” rather
than as results of life shared with human communities. Recent research, such as that of
botanist Charles Clements, has focused on tropical fruit domestication through a gradi-
ent from a wild state to incipient domestication to semi-domestication, and finally to
domesticated species. 31 In Amazonian ethnobotany, the “binary” mindset of the wild
and tame has increasingly given way to the ideas of domesticated landscapes where hu-
man activities influence and “enable” plant communities on various scales, where oth-
er organisms (like animals) participate in planting and distribution, and where selection
mayinvolveanarrayofattributesincludingpersistence without intensiveintervention. 32
Plantdistributions,especiallyofoligarchicspecieslikeBrazilnut( Bertholethiaexcelsa ),
Buriti palms ( Mauritius flexuosa ), babassu ( Attalea speciosa ), piquiá ( Caryocar amer-
icanum ), and açai ( Euterpe oleraceae ), among many others, express the conditions of
ecological possibility and human selection, as well as conscious and unconscious hu-
man shaping of environments. 33 These plants are described by indigenous populations
as highly useful, often with multiple uses, culturally significant, integrated into ritual as
well as economic life, and as markers of human landscapes even though our science of-
ten doesn't assess them as necessarily “domesticated.” 34
Many scholars view the upper Amazon from the Baurès area of Bolivia and a swath
northtoEcuadorasapossible“Vavilov”site,acenterofdomesticateddiversityandwild
ancestors. Surprisingly, many of the economic plants that were the tribute of the Central