11
Henry Ford’s Jungle
Like a swarm of annihilating grasshoppers, the inhuman gang of rubber barons continue to press forward.
—Dr. Theodor Koch-Grünberg, quoted in
The Domestication of the Rubber Tree
by Richard Evans Schultes
Nature foils and surprises. No one—no country or culture, no person—is immune to its laws. Not even Henry Ford.
Henry Ford’s legacy is part of our modern agricultural story in many ways. He turned cities into suburbs, sent us sprawling out on vast networks of roads, roads across America that shaped where and how we grew food. Ford’s cars and tractors helped make the Green Revolution possible. But the relationship is mutual. Cars also depend on agriculture; they require rubber, and rubber grows in trees.
Cars require oil and steel. Wars would be fought over oil; steel, too. Cars, though, also require rubber. Rubber should have been the easy part. It grows in the tree Hevea brasiliensis, native to parts of the rain forest south of the Amazon River. The rubber that comes from Hevea brasiliensis is the tree’s defense against herbivores. Bite a leaf or stem, and the rubber will ooze out and coat your mouth with a gluey toxin that flows just beneath the bark’s surface in wide veins. In many Amazonian cultures this goo was used to make waterproof objects, bags and balls, but the tree was more important for its food. The seeds can be eaten.1 For the first few hundred years of colonial rule Europeans ignored the seeds and saw no value in the rubber. Then in 1770, an enterprising British chemist, Joseph Priestley (who would also go on to discover oxygen), noticed that he could erase his pencil scribbles with the latex once it was coagulated, which is to say, turned into rubber. This created some demand. In Brazil some people made shoes and other items out of the rubber, but they were of poor quality. They were brittle: they broke in half, or if it was really hot, the shoes melted onto the city streets.
Two inventions changed everything. The first was the raincoat. Charles Macintosh figured out a way to make cloth, and eventually coats, waterproof by layering fabric sandwich-style on either side of a piece of thin rubber (hence the word mackintosh as a synonym for “raincoat”). The second was vulcanization. Vulcan is the Roman god of fire, the fire of invention and hard work, the blacksmith’s flame. Vulcanization was invented in 1839 by Charles Goodyear, a poor man with rich dreams. He spent years of his life trying and failing to make rubber more durable. One day he mixed rubber and sulfur and put the concoction on the stove. It boiled and spat. He pulled it off and let it cool and then noticed that the rubber was no longer sticky. Yet it was still strong and bendable. The sulfur, Goodyear would come to realize, added elasticity and resistance to the rubber, making it more stable. With vulcanization, rubber could be used to make many products, including, eventually, tires.
The rubber market boomed, and the boom sent boats down each of the main tributaries of the Amazon—the Xingu, the Tapajós, and the Madeira—in search of more trees and people to tap them. The tapping process began with a diagonal cut made toward the bottom of the tree, from which the latex wept down into another cut, this one vertical. The vertical cut led to a cup or bucket into which the latex poured. Rubber tapping started early in the morning, and the tappers would go in a circuit quickly, covering hundreds of trees before the temperatures climbed and slowed down the flow of latex. With time, each cut in the rubber tree would heal over. When it did, another, higher cut was made. In many places in the Amazon today one can find trees with cuts extending twenty feet up, a measure of the hard work of the tappers. Those who did not work hard enough had their hands or fingers chopped off.
For years the demand for rubber increased. The price of rubber rose tenfold in the decade leading up to 1870 alone, and with it the horrors perpetrated on Amazonians, until in much of the Amazon nearly every tree was being tapped. The Europeans and Americans, meanwhile, got rich on rubber.
Everything would soon change. In 1876, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, commissioned Henry Wickham, an explorer and entrepreneur for whom success had proved elusive, to gather the seeds of rubber trees in the hopes that those seeds might be planted in the British colonies in Asia. Wickham gathered seventy thousand rubber tree seeds from a single site in Brazil—Boïm, where the Tapajós River flows into the Amazon River.2 He sent them via steamship to Liverpool. From Liverpool the seedlings traveled by train to Kew, where the director (and close colleague of Charles Darwin), Joseph Hooker, anxiously awaited their arrival.3 When the shipment arrived, seven thousand of the small plants were still alive. The staff at Kew continued to grow the seedlings. Of the seven thousand, twenty-eight hundred were in good enough condition to be sent on a barge down the Thames to be loaded onto a British India liner.
Once the seedlings arrived in Asia, eager farmers planted the subset that had survived densely, so that the trees would grow up close together, side by side. They were planted in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and Malaysia on land where coffee rust had destroyed much of Asia’s coffee production.4 Planting trees in monocultures had led to coffee’s demise in the region. But no one seemed to be paying attention to history.
The trees grew dense and profitable, much more so than the plantations that had been attempted in the Amazon.5 Initially, few gave much thought to why this might be. It was a sort of miracle. Production of tires—and, by extension, cars—boomed. Seeds were later distributed throughout tropical Asia to former Dutch and British colonies (Queen Victoria would eventually knight Wickham). Throughout tropical Asia forests of rubber now grow as a result, forests with trunks so close that their canopies touch and shade the ground.
From Wickham’s original trees, seeds were chosen that grew into trees that produced even more latex. In natural forests, the latex of rubber trees eventually stops flowing once the latex, like blood, begins to coagulate. Isoprene droplets fuse together and clog the specialized cells, lactifers, through which latex flows. But seeds were chosen each generation from trees on the Asian plantations that were increasingly unlikely to clog and more likely to bleed white, their veins perpetually open. Soon 90 percent of all the rubber in the world was being produced in tropical Asia (not far, fatefully, from Japan), at far greater volume per acre than anyone in the Amazon ever imagined possible. In 1912, 8,500 tons of latex were being produced in Asia. In 1914, 71,000 tons. In 1921, 370,000 tons.6 By the time Henry Ford started making cars with rubber tires, essentially all the rubber in the world was coming from Asia, from the descendants of a tiny subset of Wickham’s seeds.
Henry Ford didn’t like being dependent on tropical Asia in order to make cars. He wanted to control the chain of production. To achieve that, he needed to grow his own rubber. He decided to create a giant plantation, one unlike any that had ever existed. It would be a utopian plantation where the workers lived in harmony, ate good food, refrained from sin, and were healthy, free of jungle parasites and pathogens.
Ford ordered this new civilization, which came to be called Fordlandia, to be hacked out of the rain forest in Brazil. The area cleared was one million hectares in size. It took hours to drive from one edge to the other. He had hundreds of houses built and hired more than two thousand men to plant, from seeds, two hundred thousand trees. Anyone could be hired to do anything, Ford knew, and so he could not conceive why his plantation would be any different. He wanted Fordlandia to mirror his Michigan assembly lines, which were described in 1914 by the journalist Julian Street:
Fancy a jungle of wheels and belts and weird iron forms—of men, machinery and movement—add to it every kind of sound you can imagine: the sound of a million squirrels chirking, a million monkeys quarreling, a million lions roaring, a million pigs dying, a million elephants smashing through a forest of sheet iron, a million boys whistling on their fingers, a million others coughing with the whooping cough, a million sinners groaning as they are dragged to hell—imagine all of this happening at the very edge of Niagara Falls, with the everlasting roar of the cataract as a perpetual background, and you may acquire a vague conception of that place.7
The assembly lines were as riotous as a jungle. Now Ford wanted to turn an actual jungle into an assembly line, one that began with soil and ended with rubber, one where all the machinery he really needed was trees. To do this, Ford imagined that the chief task was not reinventing the machine, the trees, which could just be planted, but instead reinventing the people, the society responsible for the work. Ford’s two thousand men lived on the plantation in houses and barracks; the plantation’s population would ultimately rise to twelve thousand. In order to ensure the health of their community, the men were forbidden to drink or smoke, and those who were not married were forbidden to bring women to their houses. They were fed for free, but their food came from the midwestern United States rather than Brazil—wheat and potatoes rather than corn and beans. Diversion could be found in churches, a recreation building, a golf course, and a library. Ford, who never visited the site, seems not to have considered that none of the men played golf, that most were only nominally Christian, and that many could not read. He seems not to have considered that not all men were the same as he was. As Greg Grandin notes in his book Fordlandia, “With a surety of purpose and incuriosity about the world that seems all too familiar, Ford deliberately rejected expert advice and set out to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination.”
Some aspects of Ford’s plantation were visionary—just as they were in Michigan, where a great deal of what was challenging in the auto plants (the monotonous work, the terrible noise, the banging tedium) was made palatable by a dependable living wage. Similarly, Ford paid relatively well in the Amazon. He also established a new kind of tropical medicine, and both malaria and parasitic worms were largely eradicated from Ford’s plantation, even though the same could not be said of almost anywhere else in tropical Brazil—or the tropical world in general—at the time. This achievement depended on good medical care as well as investment in public health, including, for example, a water filtration system that provided, daily, half a million gallons of clean, chlorinated water to the plantation. Then there were the trees.
Disregarding the conditions and the tendency of rain forests to thwart the ambitious delusions of white men, Ford estimated that, once mature, his plantation’s trees would yield enough rubber for the tires of two million cars. At first they seemed to be growing flawlessly. The trees produced latex in the first few years. It bubbled from them. And why not? Rubber trees grew on Asian plantations. It was the growth of the rubber trees and the prosperity they implied, along with the healthfulness of Fordlandia, that kept people there. Healthy families, healthy trees. Also, this healthy life was made more tolerable for the workers thanks to the emergence of a cluster of businesses that opened on an island upriver that provided those recreations unavailable in Ford’s utopia: Brazilian food, Brazilian drink, cigarettes, and Brazilian women. Compared to neighboring communities in Brazil, Fordlandia seemed almost too good to be true.
Ford did not know enough about rubber trees to know what to worry about. Nor had he sent a botanist, a plant pathologist, or an entomologist to the Amazon. He sent engineers and businessmen. As a result Ford did not understand his most likely foes. But many scientists did. In the Amazon, they knew, rubber trees contend with parasites that the trees planted in Asia escape. Among them is a species called South American leaf blight (Pseudocercospora ulei), an ascomycete fungus.8 The rubber trees invest heavily in repelling and resisting insects, but because of history and chance, they invest little in avoiding fungi. The men working the trees, though, had heard about the blight. It was a primordial monster, a jungle demon that lurked in the deep forest, beyond the power of ordinary explanation. It was a monster, they believed, to be feared.9
Ford did not fear the jungle; he did not fear biology. His senior staff reported to him that in the forests of the Amazon the rubber trees looked healthy. Ford’s trees looked healthy, too. What Ford was missing, and what anyone who had previously tried to establish a rubber plantation in the Amazon (and there were many) could have told him, was that leaf blight, the worst pathogen affecting rubber trees, does not strike until trees are mature, and it strikes worst where trees are dense.
Many rain-forest trees, including cacao, mangos, avocados, and coffee, have evolved fruits that attract vertebrates who carry them elsewhere in the forest. Trees, it turns out, tend to be bad mothers, or at least bad mothers to live near. Seeds that fall right beneath their mothers compete with them for sun. They also stand a high likelihood of catching whatever pathogens their mothers have. Stay by Mom and risk getting her disease. Stay by Mom and risk suffering a dark and pestilential life. As a result, species in which mother trees drop their seeds to the ground unaided have tended to go extinct. Those, on the other hand, that give their seeds wings so they might fly or fruit so they might catch a ride have prospered. The advantages of escaping one’s mother seem especially pronounced in the tropics, where pathogens and pests are exceptionally diverse.
The fruits of the rubber tree have evolved what biologists call ballistic dispersal. As the rubber tree fruit dries out, it twists, explosively; during the explosion its seeds are flung as far as a hundred meters (328 feet). Many seeds land in rivers and are carried even farther. Tens of kilometers. Dozens of miles. This is far enough for the seeds to survive and avoid infection at least once out of every thousand attempts. But on his plantation, Ford was working against the grain of nature. He was doing exactly what mother rubber trees fight so hard to avoid. He was planting seeds if not below their mothers then right next to their siblings. The effect was the same. There was a high chance that if the tree next to you had a pathogen, you would, too. This is what had happened in other rubber plantations in South America. In Suriname, forty thousand trees were planted in 1911. By 1918, leaf blight arrived, spread from tree to tree to tree, and all forty thousand trees had to be cleared. If Ford knew about this history, he ignored it. And anyway, his trees continued to look healthy as late as 1934. The canopies of the trees were so full that they almost touched each other. Somehow Ford was defying the ancient tendencies of nature; perhaps he was just that powerful.
He was not. Precisely when the canopies began to touch each other, leaf blight arrived. In 1935 it showed up at one edge of the giant plantation. At first it began to afflict the most mature trees, the ones producing the most latex. It turned the leaves pocked, green-black, then rotten, whereupon they fell to the ground, leaving the trees naked, as though the plantation were a Michigan forest in the fall. The trees would try to grow again, but the shoots would stunt, able to produce only small leaves that also blackened and withered. From the old trees, the blight spread to the younger trees, then even to the nurseries of small trees and saplings. Within the year, the blight had defoliated every tall tree and most of the others, too. But the trees were of several varieties, including those repatriated from Asia, those especially good at producing latex. For a moment, the hope as the blight spread was that the repatriated Asian trees would be spared. This was a naive hope, and it was in vain. They were not resistant. In fact the most remarkable thing about them was just how quickly they lost their leaves and then, without a spot of green, just how quickly they died. Henry Ford’s industrial model worked inside a factory. It worked in realms where nature was not a factor and men could be controlled. It did not work in nature; nature obeys rules, but they are different from those of the assembly line.
But nobody messes with Henry Ford, and so in 1936, just a year later, Ford had his enterprise moved to another site, where he once more had a hunk of rain forest cut down, an even bigger hunk; it was near to the town where Wickham had first gathered his seeds. Ford called the new plantation Belterra. It was flatter and less susceptible to morning mists than was Fordlandia, which seemed to encourage the blight. The soils were better, too. In Belterra, Ford’s team built a city modeled even more directly on a Michigan town. The Cape Cod houses matched those Ford had built in northern Michigan. The hospital bore similarities to the Henry Ford Hospital in Michigan and was, in some respects, even more modern. Then the trees were planted in even greater numbers—five million seedlings and seven hundred thousand trees. This time the trees grew even better. Straighter. Faster. With more latex. Then disaster arrived. It was not the blight (not yet) but rather a plague of insects and other pests, pests that ate the trees from one end of the plantation to the other. Lace bugs. Red mites. Whiteflies. Small black ants. White weevils. Leafhoppers. Treehoppers. Moths. Thousands of people were tasked with picking off the pests by hand. New pesticides were developed, based on fish poisons used by the workers. Then a molelike animal chomped at the roots. It was as if some jungle god had cursed the trees and called in the attack. The trees lost their leaves again and again. Were replanted. Were tended to, triaged, and protected. In 1937, James Weir, one of the Americans working at the site, was charged with finding seeds of other varieties of rubber, varieties able to deal with the pests or with the blight if it came back. Weir pretended to look for seeds but instead fled back to the United States, to Cape Cod. Then the blight reappeared. Once more the leaves disappeared from the trees, and this time they did not grow back.
Ford was done. He’d lost millions of dollars, to no avail.10 He was able to grow neither a utopia nor a plantation. Nature won. The jungle was not just another assembly line, a reality we are still coming to terms with. As a result, Ford and the rest of the auto industry were, at the end of it all, as dependent on Malaysia, Singapore, and Asia in general for rubber as they had been when Ford first started cutting trees. Just a few years later, in 1942, as Hitler’s troops were surrounding Leningrad and Norman Borlaug was traveling to Mexico to start breeding wheat, Japan cut off the supply of Asian rubber to the United States. If daily life and, perhaps more important, the war were going to continue, the United States desperately needed more rubber. Desperately. No new supply was forthcoming. Belterra was shut down, and no other plantations of any scale existed in the Americas. The president ordered rubber conservation. Those few places that produced any rubber at all were squeezed. Fortunately the US government had just enough foresight to prevent absolute pandemonium. It funded attempts to create synthetic rubber, which had always been the dream of Thomas Edison, Ford’s longtime friend.11 The government also hired biologists to look for more wild rubber near the Tapajós and along each of the other tributaries of the Amazon—the way people had done before Wickham took seeds to Asia, the way they did in places where the inhabitants were poor enough for the low price of rubber to get them back on the footpaths.
Engineers worked frantically to produce synthetic rubber that was cheap enough to be mass-produced and strong enough to be used in tires, which at the time were made entirely of natural rubber, both on the surface that contacted the ground and the tires’ sides. Not only was synthetic rubber produced, an entire industry also sprang up in order to produce it in huge quantities, enough to put tires on every plane, truck, and car needed in the war. Here was a victory for technology! We often seem to imagine that technology can do this, that it can produce a solution in the nick of time. Humanity is, it is said, infinitely ingenious. Synthetic rubber was the proof. But this ingenuity knows limits, though they would not be felt immediately in the case of rubber. The most immediate consequence was that synthetic rubber helped win the war.12 In fact without it, the war would have been lost. Before the war, basically all rubber used in the United States was natural rubber grown in Asia. But after the war, synthetic rubber became the mainstay of industry, and by 1945, more than 90 percent of the rubber used in the United States was synthetic rubber, made in America.
Natural rubber, derived from plant latex, is complex stuff. It is an emulsion of large molecules composed of carbon and hydrogen. The building blocks of these large molecules are units of isoprene. In H. brasiliensis, the individual molecules contain thousands of isoprene units chained together, a great chain of carbon and hydrogen called polyisoprene. The length and complexity of these chains make natural rubber strong. Vulcanized rubber is even stronger in part because vulcanization actually links multiple molecules of polyisoprene together in even longer chains. To break vulcanized rubber apart, one must break apart the polyisoprene. Synthetic rubbers, on the other hand, have far shorter molecules, which makes the products they comprise more brittle and easier to break.
It should, it seems, be easy to make a synthetic rubber that matches the natural polyisoprenes in their size and complexity. It is not. As a result, synthetic rubber is neither as strong nor as long-lasting as natural rubber. Tires made of synthetic rubber wear out quickly. One can drive to California and back on natural rubber tires. With synthetic tires, one would be lucky to get to Colorado. Tires made of synthetic rubber are also too brittle to be used safely on airplanes (though during World War II, they were anyway). Yet the success of early synthetic rubber suggested that even greater successes were on the horizon. Surely synthetic rubbers that truly matched natural rubber in quality and utility could be invented. It wasn’t to be.
In part the problem was the oil crisis brought on by the embargo against the United States by oil-producing countries in 1973. Natural rubber requires some oil to produce in terms of shipping and processing, but synthetic rubber requires much more. As a result, when the oil embargo hit, the price of synthetic rubber went up drastically, as did its price relative to natural rubber. When it did, the use of natural rubber increased. The use of natural rubber might have been reduced at the end of the oil embargo, but it wasn’t. The reason was something entirely unanticipated—radial tires.
In the earliest rubber “bias-ply” car tires, cords of rubber were laid down like braids, running roughly parallel to the direction of the tire’s movement. In radial tires, the cords were laid down perpendicular to the tire’s movement. Radial tires were invented in the early 1900s but did not become popular among car manufacturers or consumers in the United States until the late 1960s. Eventually they took over the market, and now only antique cars are made with the braided bias-ply tires. All this would be one more detail of the history of cars—a sort of boring detail, at that—if not for a key feature of radial tires: they require natural rubber in their sidewalls in order to be strong enough to be used on cars. If you go out and kick one of your car tires right now, the part your toe hits will have come out of a tree grown in Asia. As a result, with the switch to radial tires and the continuing increase in the demand for cars, the consumption of natural rubber increased dramatically in the 1970s. It has increased every year since then, for the last four decades. The demand for natural rubber in 2016 was twelve times what it was in 1940. It is expected to double by 2025. And the rubber is still nearly all from a single variety of rubber tree grown in tropical Asia.
Fortunately, even after Ford’s failed project researchers continued to try to find or breed varieties of rubber more resistant to leaf blight. In the years after World War II, Richard Evans Schultes was the key figure in these efforts. Schultes was initially sent to harvest rubber in the Amazon during World War II. He gathered plants on his expeditions that might have immediate use, but he also gathered many more that did not have any obvious value at the time—those he thought might be of use in the future. Assisted by indigenous peoples and their traditional knowledge, he found many different varieties of Hevea brasiliensis: some tall, others short; some with lots of latex, others with little; and, most important, some with no resistance to leaf blight and a few with complete resistance. He also collected seeds of nine species of wild Hevea other than H. brasiliensis, two of which appeared to be able to produce latex that could be used for rubber.13 The other seven, all of which produce latex that is hard to coagulate or in other ways suboptimal, might still be useful when bred with varieties that are strong latex producers. He gathered these species and their varieties from forests that were either conserved or too remote to have been cut for timber or agriculture. He collected them with the wild obsessiveness of a man who thought he was saving civilization. He collected millions of seeds. At great personal risk, Schultes then took these seeds over mountains, down and up rivers, on boats, and on planes back to those who could use them in breeding programs. The breeding programs were scattered throughout the Americas, but the most ambitious effort was in Turrialba, Costa Rica.
In Turrialba,14 the seeds Schultes collected were grown and fiddled with by Ernie Imle, among the very best breeders of tropical plants in the world. If Schultes was the gathering adventurer, Imle was the monk in the garden, slowly, meticulously bending nature’s diversity to society’s needs. Over the course of a decade, Imle and his team planted the varieties brought to them by Schultes. They then bred and rebred the plants. Breeding trees is hard work. Imle had to be creative. He had a sense of urgency about the work before him. His long-term goal was to breed varieties that were fully resistant to leaf blight and produced large quantities of latex. In the short term, though, he had an alternative plan. Imle was working to graft varieties of rubber that had coppices resistant to leaf blight (since blight only attacked the leaves) and stems that produced large quantities of free-flowing latex. Grafting trees together was cheap, and if he found the right combination, it might just work.
By 1951, Imle, as reported by Wade Davis, a student of Schultes’s, had produced grafted trees in which the latex flowed as well and for which the coppices were resistant to blight. This was a major breakthrough. Imle just needed a few more years to get everything right. Such grafted trees could be planted in Asia preventively, but they could also be grown productively in the regions in which the leaf blight was already present. Schultes and Imle had carried out perhaps the most successful and systematic attempt to produce resistant, productive trees in history. Imle wasn’t done, but he had achieved a major milestone. To make this all happen, Imle was necessary. Schultes was, too. As was the knowledge of the indigenous peoples with whom Schultes interacted. As were the rain forests to which Schultes traveled.
If this were fiction, this is where I would tell you that the plants Imle bred are now being used to start new plantations of rubber resistant to leaf blight, plantations that reduce the extent to which the world’s rubber supply is in danger. But it isn’t fiction: it is the very real story of science, nature, agriculture, and politics, and in that story the conclusion embodies disaster as often as it does success. In 1953, because of political fighting in Washington, DC, and a focus on putting out what seemed to be more urgent fires, the budget for the US rubber program was cut entirely.15 The program at Turrialba was shut down. What’s more, instructions were issued that the materials at the site should be removed or destroyed. Employees from the State Department took away notes and data from the breeding program. In other cases of threats to the plants on which we all depend, someone has saved the plants in the nick of time. But no car was waiting to save the rubber seeds from Turrialba, not even the trees. The seeds went missing, as did the files concerning them. The trees themselves were cut down.
As a result, Schultes’s collections sit largely ignored. Imle’s new varieties are gone, and we are more at risk for the loss of rubber today than we were during World War II. Leaf blight poses as much of a threat as it ever has, not because something new has happened biologically but simply because we have made little or no progress in dealing with it in fifty years. During those same years, the amount of natural rubber used globally has continued to increase, with demand expected to continue increasing over the coming decades. The rubber exported annually from tropical Asian countries weighs more than 8.5 million metric tons and is worth more than $20 billion per year, roughly twice the gross domestic product of the entire country of Laos.16 By this measure, the rubber plantations are a country unto themselves, an empire of threatened trees.