Termite Graveyards and the Globalization of Wood Preservation Research

• In Event: Termite Environments: New Histories of Destruction, Construction, and Knowledge Production

Abstract

This paper asks how the exigencies of infrastructural development drove scientific knowledge of termites. In the late nineteenth century, rapid population expansion and infrastructural modernization caused vast amounts of wood to be planted in the soil in the hot, dry climate of Southern California. Here, housing frames, bridges, trestles, and utility poles—structural timber that represented large sums of capital investment—were observed to deteriorate rapidly, with subterranean termites identified as a major cause of the damage. In an effort to develop means of slowing wood decay, the US government sponsored research into subterranean termites. Yet, in order to obtain results on a useable timescale, entomologists were inclined to seek out test sites further afield than the temperate regions where scientific forestry had developed (the Forest Products Laboratory was headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin). The result was the International Termite Exposure Test, a collaborative effort by US and colonial entomologists to study the behavior of termites. This involved planting native North American wood into tropical and sub-tropical soil. So-called “termite graveyards”—experimental sites containing samples of American fir, pine, cedar, chestnut, and redwood that bore an eerie resemblance to cemeteries—were established in South Africa, Australia, Hawaii, and Panama, in order that entomologists could observe processes of decay and degradation on an accelerated timeline. Although the Test was premised on the notion that termite behavior was universal, the results demonstrated a far more complicated and site-specific reality than entomologists had imagined. Technoscientific responses to the termite problem proved frustratingly elusive.

Author

• Sophie FitzMaurice, University of Cambridge