ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Proving” a Species: Postcolonial Techno-Forestry, Waste Utilization, and the Making of Rubberwood in Malaysia

• In Event: Resource Management, Defined and Redefined

English Abstract

In 1877 the British introduced Brazilian rubber trees to Malaysia to bolster colonial supply of latex. Over the course of the twentieth century, Hevea brasiliensis “proved” itself—a forestry term that refers to a species' capacity to adapt to a new environment—as a plantation species valuable not only for natural rubber, but also for postcolonial economic development, ethnonationalist affirmative action, and, perhaps even more unexpectedly, timber. Because of the high sugar content that makes rubberwood susceptible to fungi, and the relatively thin diameter of mature trees, Hevea trees were traditionally discarded as fuelwood after 25-30 years, when latex production drastically reduced. Yet this changed in the 1980s. Motivated by a timber crisis in the Global North against a backdrop of rapid industrialization, FAO and UN Development Programme pushed for the harvesting of small-diameter timbers and the utilization of wood waste for forest products beyond sawn timber, such as particleboard and medium-density fiberboard (MDF). In this context, Malaysian forestry and rubber industry scientists were quick to prove the potential of rubberwood: they innovated both a chemical timber-drying process and a timber-latex clone. As a result, rubberwood became not only the most economically valuable national timber product, used to support a burgeoning industry manufacturing household furniture for export, but also a pioneer in small-diameter timber processing and forest plantation cultivation that fundamentally changed the global history of forestry and the timber industry. In this paper, we examine the postcolonial history in which Hevea was “proved” as a new kind of economic asset, not so much through environmental adaptation, but through dovetailing, multiscalar histories of technoscientific development, ethnonationalist politics, and postwar industrial development aid.

Authors

• Aida Arosoaie, University of Wisconsin–Madison

• Elizabeth Hennessy, University of Wisconsin–Madison