1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [136]
The driver was walking with me. He said he had not been to this area since he was young. The hills had been full of mammals and birds then. All had been replaced by rubber. Even the insects were still. It may have been the quietest forest I had ever walked in. Every now and then there was a quick breath of wind and the leaves rippled like tiny flags, momentarily exposing their satin tops. “There’s nothing left,” the driver said, visibly upset. “People want to cut and cut and plant and plant—damn them.”
More than a century ago, a handful of rubber trees had come to Asia from their home in Brazil. Now the descendants of these trees carpeted sections of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and this part of China. Across the border H. brasiliensis was marching into Laos and Vietnam. A plant that before 1492 had never existed outside of the Amazon basin now dominated Southeast Asian ecosystems. Indeed, rubber reigned over such a wide area that botanists had long warned that a single potato blight–style epidemic could precipitate an ecological calamity—and, just possibly, a global economic breakdown.
Guide strips for latex and collection cups mark this rubber plantation in Xishuangbanna, China, an autonomous southern area near the Laotian border. (Photo credit 7.7)
In Longyin Le I wandered from house to house, talking to farmers about rubber. To a person they were thankful for the opportunities it provided. Rubber was putting food on the table, paying for children’s education, building and repairing roads. Just as the potato played a critical part in helping Europe escape the Malthusian trap (though perhaps only for a time), rubber had helped bring about the Industrial Revolution, the transition from an economy based on manual labor and draft animals to one based on mechanized manufacturing. The people in Longyin Le were its latest beneficiaries. As I looked over the lush miles of birdless trees I could still hear their grateful voices. And rising like vapor were other voices, the countless men and women whose lives, for better and worse, had become entwined with this plant: hapless slaves, visionary engineers, hungry merchants, obsessed scientists, imperial politicians. This landscape of alien trees was the creation of countless different hands in many places, and it was much older than forty-five.
“GREASE CHEMISTRY”
In May of 1526 Andrea Navagero, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, attended an entertainment in Seville staged for the royal court. Seven years earlier, Hernán Cortés, acting without the authorization of the Spanish throne, had invaded Mexico and toppled the Triple Alliance (Aztec empire). The king and queen had to decide what to do with their millions of new subjects. Some argued that they should be enslaved, because they were naturally inferior; others, that they should be converted to Christianity and made full citizens of Spain. To demonstrate the intelligence, skills, and noble demeanor of the peoples of the Triple Alliance, the antislavery faction of the Spanish church had imported a group of them to Seville. The Indians divided into teams and played a showcase version of the Mesoamerican sport of ullamaliztli, which the Venetian ambassador attended.
Navagero was an insatiably curious man who translated poetic and scientific classics, wrote a history of Venice, and performed biological experiments—he created a private botanical garden in 1522, among the first on the continent. He was mesmerized by ullamaliztli, which he seems to have thought was a performance akin to a juggling act (team sports had been played in the Roman empire but were then almost unknown in Europe). In ullamaliztli two squads vied to drive a ball through hoops on the opposite ends of a field—an early version of soccer,