The first Polynature introduced a stark distinction between the meaning of the term “nature” as found in contemporary dictionaries and everyday usage - nature as “all that is untouched by humanity” or external to human society - and the relationships that really exist between humanity and the rest of the “natural” world today - that is, relationships of intense exploitation, manipulation, enclosure, and internalization so long-standing and seemingly irreversible that identifying anything on Earth beyond human influence is simply impossible.
This, the second Polynature, will look briefly at one of the primary processes through which the internalisation of “nature” into human society has occured - capitalisation/commodification - through the specific prism of one of the oldest and most basic ways in which humanity interacts with “nature”; the collection of plants (what follows is an extremely condensed version of several chapters of my ph.d thesis (Christian; 2007).
Today, the collection of plant material is subject to international law. When plant collecting is legal it is known as “bioprospecting”, when it’s illegal it’s known as “biopiracy”. These terms came into usage in the early 1990s, amid the debates that resulted in the signing of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The original collection of samples of thousands of garden plants and the economically, environmentally, geo-politically and biopolitically significant collection of plantation crops such as cotton, cinchona, tea and rubber by Europeans in the colonial era would all be classed as illegal biopiracy by the CBD if they occured today. In response to a 1980s resurgence of interest within the wealthy nations’ bioscientific corporations in collecting potentially valuable plants in the Amazon the signatories of the CBD were motivated by the wish to prevent any repeat of these major acts of biopiracy.
The aim was admirable (and, it should be noted, the solution was effective), but the CBD had the result of marking all biological material as property at the national level. The logic behind the CBD went something like this: in order for the governments of the poorer nations to classify plant (and animal) collections made without permission and without provision for financial compensation as “theft” there needs to be something to steal; because (at least, in a capitalist society) one can only “steal” something that is owned by another legal entity (individual, organisation or nation) plants (also now known as “bioresources”) need to be legally defined as “property”.
The text of the CBD did not state it outright but this meant that the entirety of “nature” was no longer categorized as the “common heritage of humankind” - as European defenders of colonial-era biopiracy used to argue it should be - but became legally recognised as the property of nation-states. Not every nation signed the CBD but a significant majority did. The CBD remains to this day the definitive document in disputes regarding the justice or otherwise of the movement of plant material from one nation to another.
In this case, as in all others, the writing of law marks the end-point of a process of social change, not the beginning; the CBD simply recognised in international law that the process of the capitalization of all the non-human resources on Earth is complete.
It is no coincidence that the CBD’s signatories’ marking of all plant life as national property - the completion of the long process capitalisation of “nature” - was directly and explicitly an effort to restrict unjst profiteering from the international movement of botanical specimens. The relationship between botanical research and commerce is long and close. It’s impossible to locate a point in space and time when the process began but it’s certain that the systematic collection, identification, study and trade in plant materials began in at least the 17th century among European apothaceries seeking medicinal plants (Allen, 1994: Thomas, 1983).
In the 18th century the motivation for plant-collecting went beyond these local and professional limits and was seen as a matter of potentially national importance. The wealthy British landowner Sir Joseph Banks (famous for funding and travelling with the 1768-1771 Cook voyage to Australia and back) was as aggressive in his funding of plant-collecting missions to the end of the earth as he was in his conviction that the British could turn itself into a world power by means of locating the already internationally-valuable plants such as cotton, tea and mulberry, and founding large-scale colonial plantations (Brockway, 1979: Drayton, 2000: Gascoigne, 1998, Mackay, 1985). Karl Linnaeus (famous of course for establishing the botanical classification system we use to this day) sought the same plants with a misguided, but then-plausible view to establishing plantations of them in Sweden (Koerner, 1999).
In an earlier case of an act of law signalling significant changes in the human relation to the “natural” world, in the 19th century, specifically in 1815, the British Apothaceries Act made it a requirement that all practising medicine-men demonstrate their ability to locate and identify the plants that were the tools of their trade. This effectively institutionalized plant-collecting and had the unintended but historically crucial consequence of igniting a furious market in surplus plant samples. By 1845 botanists and botanical collectors were complaining that “every inch of ground has been trodden and re-trodden by experienced botanists” (quoted in Short, 1994) and that to procure samples of “new” plants they needed either to travel beyond Europe or purchase samples from collectors who had done so. To paraphrase Raby (1996; 75) Europe “had been collected”. The market in European specimens very soon merged with the market in samples from the early European colonies to create an international market that was supported by overlapping networks of academic, horticultural, medicinal and purely commercial institutions well before the turn of the 20th century.
It was during the 20th century that the Banksian/Linnaean dream of colonial governments profiting economically and geo-politically from systematic plant-collections became a reality. Large-scale plantations of cash-crops such as tea, cinchona and rubber were founded from samples identified by plant collectors employed by establishments such as Kew Gardens. Though these created entire new landscapes and ways of life in the colonies (students of Foucault would be justified in talking of these social changes in terms of biopower) the initial collections themselves had no lasting impact on the environemnts the collectors operated in; for example, although no-one could mistake a rubber plantation for a “natural” environment it is plausible that a modern visitor to (or photographer of) the parts of the Amazon from which the plants that were moved to British plantations in South-East Asia were sourced would detect no trace of this infamous act of biopiracy, if, that is, they have somehow avoided subsequent deforestation in the 21st century.
In relation to the stated aim of Polynature - to introduce a variety of the many ways in which we can and do interact with the non-human environment and offer suggestion as to how and why we are able to retain such an innacurate definition of “nature” - Polynature #2 makes the following suggestion:
One of the fundamental ways in which the everyday definition of “nature” as “that which is untouched by humanity” has become untenable is through the making-available of all plant life to capital (or, students more familiar with Deleuze than Marx may prefer to use the concept “deterritorialization” here). Similarly, one of the primary ways in which all plant life on earth has become available to capital is through the collecting of all plant life into libraries of samples, “herbaria”. The suggestion has two related aspects: 1) the long history of the process of the capitalisation of nature is effectively complete and as such, is largely invisible to the contemporary eye 2) the collection of (samples of) plant life has in itself not had long-term impact on environments.
This means that it’s entirely possible to stand in (or view a photograph of what appears to be) a pristine landscape and not be able to see that all the plants found there are in international law owned by the government whose territory one is standing in and that the majority of the plant life there is “known to science” through the combined historical efforts of very many plant collectors. This invisibility of the parallel historical processes of commodification and collection of plant life contributes to our continuing ability to imagine that (some) landscapes (though of course excluding all the urban and agriculatural land) can still be described accurately with the adjective “natural”. In turn we are therefore able to succeed in persisting with a dictionary and everyday definition of the term “nature” as meaning “all that is untouched by humanity”, even though we do not need to delve very deeply into the social history of the botanical sciences before we begin to question that definitions’ accuracy and to wonder which powers would prefer us not to ask the question too vehemently.
References
The Convention on Biological Diversity.
Allen, D. E. 1994. The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History [2nd edition]. Princeton University Press. Princeton.
Brockway, L. H. 1979. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Botanic Gardens. Academic Press. New York.
Christian, N. D. 2007. From Biopiracy to Bioprospecting: An Historical Sociology of the Search for Biological Resources. Doctorate thesis. University of Warwick.
Drayton, R. H. 2000. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the `Improvement’ of the World. Yale University Press. London.
Gascoigne, J. 1998. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Mackay, D. 1985. In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780-1801. St. Martin’s Press. New York.
Raby, P. 1996. Bright Paradise: Victorian Scientific Travellers. Pimlico Press. London.
Short, P. 2004. The Pursuit of Plants. Timber Press. Portland.
Thomas, K. 1983. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800. Allen Lane. London.