ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Breeding for Performance: Hybrid Poplars and Vegetal Labor

• In Event: Producing Landscape

English Abstract

When late nineteenth-century silviculturists like Augustine Henry advocated for responding to the problems of timber supply with selectively bred hybrid forest trees that were taller, denser, and faster-growing than their straight species counterparts, they inaugurated a new relationship between humans and plants. With hybrid forest trees, scientific forestry expanded its focus to not just management of population, but to include intervention at the organism level. While hybrid fruit and nut trees had long served agricultural purposes, applying cross-breeding to forestry marked a conceptual shift: trees became organisms engineered specifically to labor at human-defined problems. This paper argues that hybridization created new ontological categories of forest trees—categories predicated on performance and instrumental utility rather than taxonomic difference.
Following hybrid poplars from early twentieth-century reforestation experiments through mid-century biofuel programs to contemporary phytoremediation projects at USDA Forest Service stations, I trace how breeding practices enacted an industrial logic of vegetal labor decades before "ecosystem services" provided theoretical vocabulary for it. Hybridization contributed to a increasingly technological or industrial view of plants that would underscore the conception of ecosystem services. Hybrid poplars became living technologies whose existence depended on their capacity to solve successive environmental crises such as overcut pulp forests, energy shortages, and contaminated landscapes. By examining how silvicultural experimentation transformed poplars into both technology and sources of vegetal labor, this paper traces the material and experimental prehistory of frameworks that now dominate environmental governance, showing how plants became legible as service providers through the technoscientific practices of plant breeding.

Author

• Lois Nguyen, Virginia Tech