Geoforum 75 (2016) 210–219
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Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Securing forests from the scourge of chestnut blight: The biopolitics of nature and nation
Christine Biermann
Department of Geography, University of Washington, Box 353550, Seattle, WA 98195, USA article info abstract
Article history: Bringing a biopolitical framework to bear on historical geographies of nature, this article traces the recent Received 26 October 2015 history of the American chestnut, with a focus on the pivotal time period in the early 20th century Received in revised form 7 July 2016 (1905–1925) during which the tree’s ecological, economic, and cultural roles changed dramatically. Accepted 18 July 2016 Once an ecologically dominant and culturally important forest tree in eastern North America, the Available online 10 August 2016 American chestnut was rendered functionally extinct following the accidental introduction of a fungal pathogen, known as the chestnut blight, at the turn of the 20th century. Calling attention to the historical Keywords: ties between nature and nation, I demonstrate how blight control, chestnut breeding, and restoration Chestnut efforts were formulated in conversation with broader anxieties about the fate of the American nation Plant breeding Biopolitics in the wake of social, environmental, economic, and racial change. Through an exploration of three Nationalism themes distilled from archival research—chestnut blight as national threat, fear and desire for exotic Race nature, and the shared histories of plant breeding and racial improvement—this paper illustrates the Eugenics role that nature has played in the construction and circulation of biopolitical discourses, nationalist sensibilities, and gendered and racial logics. Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
‘‘This was the tree that built America.” dentata). Like the unassuming fields of the memorial, the Amer- [Mark Double, West Virginia Chapter of The American Chestnut ican chestnut was once an ordinary and commonplace tree in Foundation (Teslis, 2015)] the eastern U.S. but has over the past century come to serve as a symbol of the American nation. In 2009, Bryan Burhans, then President and CEO of The American Chestnut Foundation, 1. Introduction wrote, ‘‘If you think of all of the ecological devastation in this country—we lost the buffalo, we lost the passenger pigeon—but Since 2012, over two thousand volunteers have planted more this is one thing where we’ve stuck a flag in the ground and than 70,000 native tree seedlings on an unassuming field in the said, ‘Not this tree’” (The American Chestnut Foundation, 2009, hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, marking the transformation p. 4). The species is now widely revered as an ‘‘icon of hope of a ‘‘common field one day [into] a field of honor forever” for our children to look to” (Rutter, 2007, p. 261) and its restora- (National Park Service, 2004). These plantings serve a dual pur- tion has been called an ‘‘American dream that is close to becom- pose: to heal the land, which was cleared of its forests, stripped ing a reality” (Case, 2007, p. 3), with celebrated plantings at not of its coal, and reclaimed as non-native grassland, and to heal the only the Flight 93 National Memorial but also the White House American nation in the wake of September 11, 2001. It was on this grounds, the Kentucky birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, and field and former surface mine that United Airlines Flight 93, the numerous other sites of national significance. As such, the case fourth plane involved in the 9/11 attacks, crashed. A decade after of the American chestnut raises a series of questions about the 9/11, the U.S. National Park Service dedicated the Flight 93 material discursive traffic among nation and nature. What role National Memorial and initiated the multi-year Plant a Tree at do nonhumans play in securing the nation and ensuring its Flight 93 project, with the goal of reforesting hundreds of acres flourishing? By what processes do certain species become satu- of former mineland using native trees. rated with socio-political meanings and national identities? While numerous species have been planted, the crown jewel And how might we look to the past to glean the residual logics of the reforestation project is the American chestnut (Castanea and histories that haunt human relations to other species, sum- moned here when Americans ‘‘[stick] a flag in the ground” and E-mail address: [email protected] say ‘‘not this tree”? http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.07.007 0016-7185/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. C. Biermann / Geoforum 75 (2016) 210–219 211
Bringing a biopolitical analytic to historical geographies of nat- environmental politics in early 20th century America: first, that ure, this paper draws on archival research to revisit the pivotal conservation went hand-in-hand with nation building, and sec- time period in the early 20th century (1905–1925) during which ondly, that natural resources and the environment were key sites the American chestnut’s ecological, economic, and cultural roles in which Progressive Era biopolitical discourses were articulated. changed dramatically. In so doing I examine how the American I then turn to the specifics of the American chestnut and chestnut chestnut and chestnut blight were rendered legible through racial- blight, emphasizing the multiple narratives that these two storied ized and gendered national imaginaries while the nation was fig- species have come to embody. Drawing on archival research I illus- ured as a ‘natural’ body to be secured, purified, and strengthened trate how chestnut breeding and blight control efforts have been in the face of threat. In the first decade of the century, chestnut marked by and have indeed helped to constitute notions of nation- trees in the New York City area began showing signs of infection hood, threat, purity, and security since the early 20th century. I by a fungal pathogen that came to be known as the chestnut blight conclude with a reflection on this case’s relevance to the politics (Cryphonectria parasitica). The blight swept through the species’ of restoration and conservation today. range and killed virtually all mature trees in its path. Drawing on historical evidence from policy documents, newspaper articles, sci- entific publications, and conference proceedings, I lay bare the 2. Biopolitics of nation and nature in early 20th century social and intellectual subsoil out of which the chestnut blight America emerged as a national threat and the American chestnut a symbol of the nation. While previous accounts of the American chestnut By the turn of the 20th century, U.S. elites were increasingly have focused on the tree’s material history (Freinkel, 2009), chang- calling for environmental conservation. No longer immediately ing ecological role (Paillet, 2002), significance in rural Appalachian threatened by the perils of nature, new urges to protect the envi- culture (Davis, 2006; Hepting, 1974; Lutts, 2004), and tensions ronment and wisely use resources emerged. At the same time, con- among restoration methods (Curry, 2014; Freinkel, 2009), here I cern for the nation’s nature intermingled with other Progressive foreground the ways in which early 20th century blight manage- Era issues, among them urban living, hygiene and sanitation, food ment and chestnut breeding were interwoven with nationalist sen- purity, immigration, eugenics, and national character and morality sibilities and racial and gendered logics. The framing I employ (Bobrow-Strain, 2008; Domosh, 2003; Farmer, 2013; Rome, 2008; contextualizes these sensibilities and logics within a broader Spiro, 2009). While these concerns varied in their material biopolitical project—the project of defining the national population emphases, they shared an implicit commitment to the protection, as a ‘natural’ entity (‘‘man-as-species (Foucault, 2003, p. 243)) and expansion, and efficiency of the nation-state and crucially, the distinguishing between perceived threats and advantages to the vigor and health of the population. It is here that Foucault’s nation, all the while authorizing particular subsets of the popula- (1990, 2003) work on biopower and biopolitics is relevant; I posit tion to act as promoters and defenders of the general well-being. not just that environmental anxieties and interventions can be In particular, I show that responses to the blight hinged on ques- analyzed through this lens but that nonhuman nature was central tions of what it means to be American, who or what counts as to the Progressive Era construction of the American nation as a bio- internal to the nation and who or what constitutes threat, and logical formation—a national body—to be regulated, policed, and how to best protect and improve national stock in the age of improved. empire. This argument builds on a longstanding tradition in nature- By unearthing these dynamics and bringing them into conver- society research that considers the environment as a terrain of sation with ongoing chestnut restoration, I do not aim to suggest power, hardening particular social formations into truths and that particular socio-political logics are inherent to or uniformly uprooting others (e.g. Cronon, 1996; Haraway, 1989; Moore sedimented in the discourses of native and non-native species. et al., 2003). Specifically with regard to plants, scholarship has Nor do I contend, however, that recent charges of nativism and explored the moral, patriotic, and political economic dimensions xenophobia in invasion science and management (e.g. of horticulturalism and tree culture (Farmer, 2013; Pauly, 2008), Subramaniam, 2001) are merely the result of rhetorical cross- perceptions of nativeness, invasiveness, and belonging (Coates, breeding among the terminology of human and nonhuman immi- 2006; Head, 2012; Head and Muir, 2004; Lien and Davison, gration, or that ties between conservation projects and racial 2010), and trees and forests as constitutive of regional or national thinking, ‘‘once substantial, have largely dissolved” (Coates, 2006, identity (Campanella, 2003; Rutkow, 2012; Samuels, 2005) or ani- p. 10). Instead, I begin with the assumption that historical dynam- mated by the dynamics of settler colonialism, race, and class ics of biopower, empire, and race tinge everyday nature-society (Bowcutt, 2015; Braun, 2002; Cohen, 2004; Kosek, 2006). A partic- relations in the present—and here I consider relations with native ularly vibrant debate has emerged around the extent to which and non-native species—and I take up the charge of postcolonial native and non-native species management and discourse are scholar Stoler (2008), echoed by Collard et al. (2015) and marked by nativism and xenophobia (e.g. Eskridge and Alderman, DeSilvey and Edensor (2013), to ‘‘keep an eye on the past to reckon 2010; Hettinger, 2001; Subramaniam, 2001; Warren, 2007). While with how we got to this place of ruination and ecological impover- some call for new ways to judge species other than geographic ori- ishment” (Collard et al., 2015, p. 323). This paper thus looks back- gins (Davis et al., 2011), others defend concerns about exotic spe- ward to excavate a set of themes from the 20th century history of cies as rooted in material ecological and economic impacts the American chestnut and blight—the blight as national threat, (Simberloff et al., 2012), and still others promote the restoration fear and desire for exotic nature, and the shared logics and histo- of native species as a means of decolonization (Mastnak et al., ries of plant breeding and racial improvement—themes that are 2014). rarely included in narratives of the tree’s downfall and resurgence. At the same time but largely separately, nature-society scholars In so doing I grapple with the roles these species have played in have begun to consider species conservation through a biopolitical struggles to secure a particular vision of the American nation and analytic that foregrounds how certain species are made to live ensure its flourishing. while others are allowed to die (or killed) in the name of fostering In the sections that follow, I first bring scholarship on biopoli- life in general (Biermann and Mansfield, 2014; Braverman, 2015; tics, nature-society relations, and racialized and gendered nation- Collard, 2012; Holloway et al., 2009; Lorimer and Driessen, 2013; alisms into conversation with the history of U.S. conservation Rutherford, 2007; Srinivasan, 2014). Bringing this analytic to bear and environmentalism. I highlight two fundamental insights about on the American chestnut and chestnut blight deemphasizes the 212 C. Biermann / Geoforum 75 (2016) 210–219 question of nativism in environmental discourse and management environmental conservation ostensibly represents a form of and instead considers the nativist impulse part of a broader biopo- biopolitics designed to protect and defend life (to make live), it also litical formation in which non-native species serve simultaneously necessarily involves death, is underwritten by an ‘‘implicit racial as a foil for American nature, a threat to it, and a source of new nat- grammar” (Stoler, 1995), and is bound up with a politics of exclu- ural riches for the nation. As I will show, responses to the chestnut sion (all of which encompass letting die). As the case of the chestnut blight were marked by a potent combination of nativist fear of and blight and Progressive Era conservation indicates, nonhuman nat- cosmopolitan desire for exotic nature. Rather than operating in ure is not merely itself a target of biopolitical interventions but opposition, these racial sensibilities worked together toward the also a key figure in the construction of the national population as broader project of securing and strengthening the nation. a biological entity to be protected, policed, and promoted by priv- ileged national subjects. 2.1. Foucauldian biopolitics 2.2. Progressive Era conservation, nationalism, and biopolitics For Foucault, biopolitics refers to the management of life at the level of the population or species, in contrast to disciplinary power, The history of environmentalism is deeply intertwined with which operates at the level of individual bodies and behaviors. The histories of nationalism, imperialism, eugenics, and nativism population is managed as ‘‘at once scientific and political, as a bio- (Allen, 2013; Brechin, 1996; Kosek, 2004; Pauly, 2008; Stern, logical problem and as power’s problem” (Foucault, 2007, p. 245). 2005; Wohlforth, 2010). In early 20th century America, for exam- The conflation of the biological and the political presents a popula- ple, the burgeoning conservation movement was as much about tion that seems to exist outside of history, a pre-given entity gov- nation building as it was about environmental protection. Like all erned by biophysical processes with clear rather than constructed nationalisms, the nationalist sensibility that pervaded conserva- boundaries. This conflation thus helps to fashion the ‘‘fiction of ‘i tion was gendered, racialized, invented, and dangerous nnateness’” that both ideas of Nature and nation rely so heavily (McClintock, 1995, p. 352), even as it presented as natural, univer- upon (Mayer, 2000, p. i). Together, biopolitics and disciplinary sal, and beneficent. As a paradigmatic example, conservationist power (or anatomo-politics) constitute a form of power ‘‘bent on Theodore Roosevelt embodied a ‘‘racialized, imperial masculinity,” generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather where ‘‘adventurous but civilized white men” (Nagel, 1998, p. 251) than... impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” are charged with defending the nation and its native nature, both (Foucault, 1990, p. 136). In promoting and safeguarding the health of which are typically feminized and depicted as in need of protec- and well-being of the population, biopolitical interventions have in tion (Mayer, 2000). Roosevelt (1908) framed conservation as turn fostered economic expansion, productivity, and efficiency by national duty and emphasized that ‘‘the safety and continuance adjusting the population to better align with economic processes of the Nation” hinged upon the stewardship of resources by Amer- (Foucault, 1990, p. 141). In the case of trees and forests, for exam- ican farmers (unmarked but presumably white and male). A pro- ple, we might understand the cultivation of mixed-age and mixed- ject of ‘‘home building for the nation” (Pinchot, 1910, p. 21), species stands as simultaneously a project of ‘making live’ and a conservation was understood as part of ‘‘a greater problem to means to extract value from the resource over a longer time period. which this Nation is not yet awake...and with which it must here- Considering nonhuman nature as an object of biopolitical concern after grapple if it is to live” (Roosevelt, 1908)—the problem of social thus allows us to view ‘‘preservationist and capitalist logics not and biological reproduction. Rather than solely an end in itself, merely as opposing forces but as connected through the vast net- conservation was a strategy intended to reproduce a particular works in which power circulates” (Biermann and Mansfield, vision of American society into an unknown future. To use the lan- 2014, p. 260). guage of biopolitics, the unpredictability of the future coupled with Crucially, the objective of biopolitics is not to foster all life the desire to propagate the nation in the wake of escalating threats equally but to channel the dynamism of life to advance the broader implicitly underwrote environmental interventions. population, often understood as the nation. Foucault associates Indeed, the America evoked in early 20th century environmen- changing patterns of circulation in Western Europe in the 18th tal discourse was a nation at risk of erosion and contamination, a and 19th centuries with the rise of biopolitics. Walling off towns, nation that required the weeding out of undesirable bodies to pro- separating populations, and cutting off the circulation of people tect and promote its body politic. This national narrative not only and goods were no longer the primary modes of operation; instead, emphasized gendered cultural themes of duty, vulnerability, and biopolitical states attempted not to obstruct circulation but to reproduction but was grounded in notions of racial superiority, organize it, ‘‘eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division informed at the turn of the century by evolution, social Darwinism, between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circu- and Lamarckism, and by the 1910s increasingly by Mendelian lation by diminishing the bad” (Foucault, 2007, p. 18). The central genetics, plant and animal breeding, and eugenics (Brechin, premise of biopolitics is thus not to eliminate all threats to the 1996; Degler, 1991; Dikötter, 1998; Ordover, 2003). As Stern’s nation but rather to distinguish between the population to be fos- (2005) history of the American eugenics movement shows, similar tered and threats to be diminished in order to use circulation to concerns about degeneration, racial decline, and species endanger- augment the health and wealth of the nation. According to ment, along with notions of selective breeding, motivated both Foucault (2003) in his 1975–1976 lectures at the Collège de France, early 20th century environmental organizations and eugenics pro- this process of distinguishing between the national population and jects.1 It was not uncommon for conservationists to frame environ- threats constitutes state racism. Further, this separation of the mentalism and racial improvement as ‘‘attempts to save as much as population to be fostered from enemies to be minimized repre- possible of the old America” (Madison Grant, quoted in Spiro, 2009, sents, he argues, the break between what lives are made to prolif- erate and what or who are left to die or be killed (Foucault, 2003). While Foucault himself did not bring his theory of biopolitics to 1 The origins of Northern California’s Save The Redwoods League embody these bear on environmental thought and management, nature-society links, as Allen (2013), Spiro (2009) and Stern (2005) all discuss. The League was scholars have marshalled these ideas to theorize how the protec- founded in 1918 by three eugenicists, Madison Grant, John C. Merriam, and Henry Fairfield Osborn and supported financially by Charles Goethe, the founder of the tion and improvement of nature—from domesticated livestock Eugenics Society of Northern California. The redwood was viewed as a symbol of ‘‘the (Holloway et al., 2009) to endangered species (Braverman, great race”, ‘‘imperiled by a similar process of ‘race suicide’ from rampant logging, 2015)—embody the imperative to make live and let die. While urban encroachment, and human ignorance” (Stern, 2005, p. 148). C. Biermann / Geoforum 75 (2016) 210–219 213 p. xiii), from the professedly superior bloodlines of early settlers to nese chestnuts (Castanea mollissima) with the hopes of establishing declining native species like the American bison or American commercial markets for the trees (Powell, 1898). These foreign chestnut. chestnuts were among many species enthusiastically introduced Thus Progressive Era conservation melded together a nostalgic to augment ‘‘the agricultural wealth of the nation,” in the words desire for cultural, racial, and environmental purity with a of David Fairchild, the first head of the U.S. Department of Agricul- future-oriented project aimed at securing resources into an ture’s (USDA) Office of Seed and Plant Introductions (Fairchild, unknowable and dynamic future. In this biopolitics of nature and 1906, p. 180). The collection of foreign plants and seeds reached nation, ‘‘certain kinds of boundary crossing would damage the... its zenith in the first decades of the 20th century in what has since superior character of the American nation” (Gerstle, 1999, p. been called the USDA’s ‘‘golden age of plant hunters” (Lemmon, 1281), while other forms of circulation—both of human and non- 1968). Introduced species were distributed to elite agricultural human bodies—would strengthen the nation, politically, economi- societies and molded into new forms by farmer-breeders; these cally, and biologically. In the role of arbiters of circulation, the state introductions of foreign species and land races to the American and privileged national subjects came to serve simultaneously as landscape proved crucial to U.S. economic expansion and empire environmental stewards and ‘‘protector[s] of the integrity, the building (Kloppenburg, 2004). superiority, and the purity of the race” (Foucault, 2003, p. 81). Yet even as the introduction, cultivation, and improvement of Meanwhile, nature and the environment functioned as key sites foreign species generated wealth and power, the circulation of through which ideas about race and nation circulated. Returning plants at times materially threatened the nation, as the networks now to the American chestnut, I discuss the historical significance by which plants were introduced also facilitated the circulation of the species and begin to work through the nature-nation rela- of pathogens. The devastation wrought by the chestnut blight fun- tionship at the heart of blight control and chestnut breeding. gus quickly became emblematic of the dangers posed by foreign bodies; rhetoric and imagery of the blight smacked of warfare and defense. It was a ‘‘silent enemy” that ‘‘took no prisoners,” 3. The American chestnut and chestnut blight attacking ‘‘all chestnut trees alike, whether in a millionaire’s park or a farmer’s woodlot” (‘‘Mysterious blight,” 1910). Its spores shot At the time of Euro-American settlement of the Appalachian out into the air like ‘‘a miniature regiment of soldiers with auto- mountain region, the American chestnut was a dominant canopy matic rifles” (‘‘Chestnut blight plant,” 1913), and its destructive tree, relied upon for its abundant nut crops and ample, rot- capabilities required a commitment to ‘‘repel the invader, using resistant timber. In some Appalachian forests, chestnuts comprised every means known to science and practical experience” over a quarter of all hardwood trees prior to the blight (Keever, (Pennsylvania Blight Commission, 1912, p. 17). 1953). The species was not only ecologically dominant but also In the century following the initial blight outbreak, conserva- economically and culturally valuable. Chestnut timber was used tionists, plant breeders, forest pathologists, and geneticists have by settlers for split-rail fences, cabins, barns, furniture, and musical indeed used nearly every means known to science and practical instruments, and the nuts themselves provided food for livestock experience—quarantines, seed irradiation, biological control, and wildlife and were a source of cash income for semi- breeding and hybridization, and genetic engineering, among other subsistence farmers (Lutts, 2004). By 1900, the American chestnut techniques—to suppress the blight and restore the tree. Since 1983, had also become a vital source of commercial timber for the bur- The American Chestnut Foundation has been at the forefront of geoning forestry industry of the Southeast, and its tannic acid these attempts. Using a technique called backcross breeding, the was extracted and processed for use in leather making (U.S. foundation has spent over three decades working to produce a Tariff Commission, 1921). blight-resistant tree that possesses all of the aesthetic and func- Just as the American chestnut was increasingly integrated into tional traits of the American species along with the blight resis- the industrial capitalist economy, an invasive fungal pathogen fun- tance of the Chinese chestnut species. Breeders believe that damentally altered the character and structure of eastern forests recent generations of chestnuts—which are considered ‘15/16 and with them the societies and economies that made use of the American’ and ‘1/16 Chinese’—are indeed both blight resistant tree. But despite these profound long-term impacts, it remains and ecologically competitive. These seedlings are now being uncertain exactly when and where the fungus first arrived and widely planted on both public and private land throughout the whether the blight epidemic was caused by a single source or mul- eastern U.S., including at the Flight 93 National Memorial. tiple introductions. What is known is this: sometime between From the history of the American chestnut and the chestnut 1876, when Japanese chestnuts (Castanea crenata) were first blight two distinct but related parables emerge, each about the imported to the U.S., and 1904, when native chestnut trees in biopolitics of nature and the American nation. First, the blight New York City began to show signs of infection, an inconspicuous works as a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of the nation fungus gained passage from overseas, perhaps hidden in the bark and its native nature in the face of harmful invaders. It thus justi- of Japanese chestnut nursery stock. The fungus then spread rapidly fies the need to actively defend against and manage perceived throughout the tree’s native range, killing nearly all mature Amer- threats to the population. But even as the chestnut warns of the ican chestnuts within decades.2 By 1950 thousands of standing dead dangers of freely-circulating foreign bodies, its resurgence is also ‘‘ghost trees” remained where four billion giants once stood (Keever, viewed as an ‘‘American dream” (Case, 2007, p. 3) and ‘‘icon of 1953). hope” (Rutter, 2007, p. 261) for the nation. As such, the species Not only was the fungal culprit admitted to the country without has come to embody a second, more optimistic narrative about documentation or inspection, but its spread was facilitated by the ability to rebound from ostensible defeat and make a popula- plant breeders clamoring for novel nut- and fruit-bearing plants. tion live even in the face of ineradicable threat. In these two racial- From 1876 onward, American breeders imported first Japanese ized narratives, the chestnut’s downfall and resurgence are both chestnuts and European chestnuts (Castanea sativa) and later Chi- functions of ‘foreign’ genetic material. It is the economic demands of plant breeders and horticulturalists coupled with the biological 2 While the blight killed the vast majority of mature American chestnut trees, it left threat posed by the foreign fungus that set into motion the chest- the root structures of trees intact and alive. By the middle of the 20th century, nut’s fall from grace, yet it is also foreign genetic material—this chestnut seedlings began to sprout from still-living roots, but were generally infected and killed by the blight long before reaching maturity and reproducing. This process time from the Chinese chestnut—that is tamed by breeders and of dieback, resprouting, and eventual re-infection continues to occur today. brought into the fold through hybridization, thus apparently 214 C. Biermann / Geoforum 75 (2016) 210–219 cleansing the American chestnut of its taint and securing the bio- do nothing, when catastrophes are upon us” (Pennsylvania Blight logical advantage of blight resistance. Understood together, these Commission, 1912, p. 20). Still others emphasized that securing narratives highlight the ways in which nativist fear and cosmopoli- forests from blight would inevitably fail without a unified national tan desire for the ‘exotic other’ are bound together in efforts to front: ‘‘We have national organizations, national parties, national safeguard and improve the nation. co-operation to make a meal even, and now we have got to make a national organization to fight a tree enemy just as we would to 3.1. Blight as biopolitical threat: the Pennsylvania Blight Commission fight a man enemy” (Pennsylvania Blight Commission, 1912, (1911–1913) p. 148). This crisis moment and call for centralized coordination lent When the chestnut blight arrived on American soil, it quite support to the budding conservation movement’s assertion that literally attacked the very heart of the emerging conservation the environment is most effectively managed through national, movement. Evidence of the fungus first appeared in 1904 in population-level interventions. With clear material evidence of the native forests exhibit at the New York Zoological Park the vulnerability of the nation’s natural resources, the blight fur- (now the Bronx Zoo), which was itself a landmark achievement ther justified their protection, management, and defense by newly of the conservation movement. Promptly infecting over 1400 established federal entities such as the U.S. Forest Service. For American chestnuts and stymying the Park’s chief forester, the many conservationists and Commission members, blight control chestnut blight foretold dramatic threats to the nation’s forests was explicitly linked to the broader project of nation building: and further justified the need for a national movement to protect ‘‘When we look back,” a Pennsylvania botanist predicted, the war America’s iconic landscapes, species, and resources (Freinkel, against blight ‘‘will be held up as an example of a patriotic move- 2009). The fungus also arrived at a time rife with anxieties about ment” in which the entire nation came together to ‘‘prevent the the economic, socio-cultural, and racial future of the nation. In destruction of our native forests” (Pennsylvania Blight focusing on the initial response to the blight crisis by the Commission, 1912, p. 106). Pennsylvania Blight Commission (1911–1913), here I elaborate The Commission thus rendered the blight a national cause and the context out of which the blight emerged as a threat to be sought to wage a war of attrition against it—a metaphor that controlled, if not eradicated, for the good of the nation. This his- remains striking in contemporary chestnut restoration rhetoric tory demonstrates that the project of making the chestnut live (as the President and CEO of The American Chestnut Foundation was, from its very beginning, also about advancing a racialized stated in a speech at the 2013 Annual Meeting, ‘‘This is war. and gendered American nationalism premised on a politics of We must use every tool.”) The construction of blight as national exclusion and warfare. threat was driven home by likening the work of the Commission One of the earliest organized responses to the blight crisis, the to previous victories over both human and nonhuman adver- Pennsylvania Chestnut Tree Blight Commission was established in saries. For Governor Tener, the task before the nation was no less 1911 by Pennsylvania Governor John Tener to wage ‘‘active significant than the recent Spanish-American War: ‘‘As Admiral warfare against [the] parasitic disease in order to prevent the Dewey... at about the outset of our war with Spain was threatened total extermination of the chestnut tree” (Carleton, directed... to seek out the Spanish fleet and destroy it, so it might 1913, p. 59). The Commission appealed to the ‘‘masculine allure be said that the only direction given... is to find this dread chest- of adventure” (Nagel, 1998, p. 254) through its discursive imagin- nut bark disease, and destroy it” (Pennsylvania Blight ing of blight control as strenuous but virtuous work, in which Commission, 1912, p. 18). In another instance, a scientist develop- men were expected to scout 50–100 acres of woodland per day ing a treatment for the blight compared his work to the while rapidly traversing difficult terrain, climbing high into trees attempted eradication of sleeping sickness on the African conti- to identify blight, and felling and burning infected specimens. Yet nent by European colonizers: ‘‘The white man did not say ‘Let this work was simultaneously depicted as a civilized and moral them die’ but rose up, as a man, the rebel in nature, and said ‘I endeavor, supported by ‘‘judges, school teachers, ministers, farm- will not die, but I will destroy that which is destroying me.’ ers, business men, and prominent men interested in the welfare And I am taking that position now” (Pennsylvania Blight of the State” (Francis, 1912, p. 234). While physically demanding, Commission, 1912, p. 191). This blurring of the distinction scouting required discipline and precision in identifying and map- between blight, sleeping sickness, and the Spanish fleet signals ping the locations of all infected trees; indeed ‘‘the most impor- a racialized, imperial masculinity that emphasizes bravery, hero- tant factor governing the number of new infections [was] the ism, duty, and aggression while casting white men as both ‘‘rebels character and quality of the man who scouted the area” in nature” and privileged defenders of nation and nature (Nagel, (Detwiler, 1913, p. 86). In 1912, this work was undertaken by 1998). In short, this conflation of threats makes clear that over two hundred field agents who spread across the state in responses to blight were formulated in conversation with anxi- small crews. Scouts flagged blighted trees, applied healing salves, eties about who or what is advantageous to the nation, who or performed tree surgery to excise blight cankers, and removed what must be actively suppressed for the greater good, and thousands of trees to establish a quarantine zone between who or what is authorized to do the suppressing. infected eastern Pennsylvania and yet largely uninfected western So the spirit of the Pennsylvania Blight Commission embodied Pennsylvania. In 1912, the Commission gathered in Harrisburg at the biopolitical imperative to make live and let die not only in the Chestnut Tree Bark Disease Conference to rally national sup- its efforts to protect the chestnut by eradicating the blight, but port for their efforts. also in that it promoted a racialized and gendered image of Steeped in nationalism and hegemonic masculinity, blight con- the American nation as rich in resources and committed to their trol was framed by the Commission as moral obligation, national defense. Yet despite the Commission’s patriotic optimism and duty, and biopolitical imperative. In his opening address Governor paramilitary techniques and rhetoric, the blight continued its Tener stated, ‘‘It is... entirely in accord with the American spirit rapid expansion. In 1913 the Commission lost funding and dis- that we make every effort to destroy or check the advance of this banded. In the years that followed, the blight fungus was held blight” (Pennsylvania Blight Commission, 1912, p. 16). Similarly, up as an exemplar of the hazards posed by the circulation of the conference chair, Mr. R.A. Pearson, railed against inaction and human and nonhuman bodies across national borders and thus cowardice as ‘‘un-American” and argued that ‘‘it is not the spirit became a key figure in nativist and anti-immigration rhetoric of the... great States that are represented here, to sit down and of the early 20th century. C. Biermann / Geoforum 75 (2016) 210–219 215
3.2. Policing porous boundaries: the circulation of exotic nature Zoological Park, where conflict had broken out between immi- grants and park rangers over the illegal hunting of songbirds Even as the war against blight appeared futile, the chief of the (Grant, 1906; Rome, 2008). William Temple Hornaday, conserva- USDA’s Office of Forest Pathology plainly advised, ‘‘This is the... tionist and director of the Park during the blight outbreak, exem- great lesson to be learned from the invasion of the chestnut bark plified the nativist perspective, claiming that Italians would ‘‘root disease. It is too late to exclude this undesirable citizen; but we out the native American and take his place and his income” and can at least redouble our efforts to see that no others get a foothold that toward the natural environment ‘‘the Italian laborer is a on this continent” (Metcalf, 1914, p. 18). Here, I analyze discus- human mongoose” (Hornaday, 1913, p. 101). In this sense, the sions around the geographic origin of the blight and explore how immigrant body was perceived as a threat to both the ‘native’ body the fungus was established as a racial ‘other’ and ‘‘serious source politic (i.e. white Americans of northern and western European of danger” (Metcalf, 1914, p. 13) for the nation. But as this history descent) and native American nature—a sentiment that was rein- demonstrates, the nativist impulse toward exclusion was not cir- forced by the Italian origin theory. culating in isolation, and responses to the blight were marked also Nearly as quickly as it was presented, however, Farlow’s theory by a racialized desire for the exotic ‘other’.3 Indeed, there emerged a was largely abandoned as evidence mounted that the blight was profound ambivalence about how to effectively manage and disci- native to East Asia. In 1913, a plant explorer commissioned by pline the circulation of foreign bodies, particularly when such bodies the USDA collected fungal samples from Chinese chestnuts in simultaneously represent both economic promise and risk, biological northeastern China, and by 1914, it was widely believed that this advantage and threat. fungus was indeed the chestnut blight and had been introduced At the time of the initial outbreak, the geographic origin of the from East Asia by way of plant imports. By the mid-1910s, the ‘‘sin- blight was disputed. Was it a native species that had existed on the ister spread” (Van Fleet, 1916, p. 54) of the Asian blight was a key continent for centuries, only to spread rapidly as forests fell into justification for federal regulation of flows of plants across the unhealthy conditions? Or was the blight an alien from afar, a for- nation’s borders. On the heels of the blight outbreak, Congress eign pathogen that had crossed oceans alongside the huddled passed the Plant Quarantine Act (1912), which established a Fed- masses? In 1908, the USDA’s Office of Forest Pathology observed eral Horticultural Board and granted the USDA authority to initiate that Japanese chestnut trees were far less likely to be killed by quarantines and regulate plant and plant product imports. the blight than their American chestnut counterparts, leading to Over the next decade, debates about plant regulation occurred the now-accepted hypothesis that the fungus was introduced from alongside and in conversation with nativist arguments for federal Japan by way of imported nursery stock (Metcalf, 1907). immigration policies (Coates, 2006; Pauly, 1996). Just as plant Yet some remained unconvinced that the blight was Asian. At and animal flows were increasingly monitored and regulated, so the 1912 Pennsylvania conference, Harvard mycologist William too were human immigrants counted, monitored, and tracked Farlow presented his theory that the blight had been introduced through the establishment of a system of quotas (Emergency Quota from Italy. The fresh fungus ‘‘recalled a specimen [he] had seen Act of 1921 and Immigration Act of 1924), which restricted immi- in an Italian collection,” and upon comparing the blight fungus gration of particular ethnic groups with the goal of maintaining the microscopically with the Italian specimen (Endothia radicalis), Far- existing ethnic and racial composition of the national population. low could find no visible difference (Pennsylvania Blight At the same time, the chestnut blight continued to serve as an Commission, 1912, p. 71). This theory was buttressed by the fact archetype of the ‘‘many undesirable immigrants that the American that a recent wave of Italian immigrants had settled in the Bronx farmer must board and lodge forever” (Federal Horticultural Board, neighborhoods directly surrounding the New York Zoological Park, 1922, p. 20). As the Federal Horticultural Board counseled, ‘‘What where the blight was first noticed. In support of the Italian origin the United States wants to do now, if it can, is shut the doors to theory, a University of Pennsylvania botanist shared an anecdote their brothers and their sisters and their cousins and their aunts” about the concurrence of tree deaths and Italian immigrants; he (Federal Horticultural Board, 1922, p. 20). quipped that such a phenomenon might be called ‘Dagoeatis,’ ref- But despite this nativist rhetoric of exclusion and closure, there erencing ‘dago,’ an ethnic slur for Italians in early 20th century existed a deep ambivalence about foreign species within the USDA America: of the early 20th century (Pauly, 1996). Many among the agency continued to support the introduction of as many foreign species A friend of mine, a botanist in New York City, said that he had as possible, with the goal of enhancing the economic clout and bio- often noticed that around the settlements of Italians in the logical resources of the nation (e.g. Fairchild, 1906), while others neighborhood of New York and Brooklyn, and Jersey City...that viewed foreign species as primarily threatening to the national the trees always died or were killed, and he thought there was economy and landscape (Pauly, 1996, 2008). What resulted from some relation between the death of the trees and the settlement this simultaneous fear and desire for exotic nature was an increas- of Italians nearby. So he suggested rather a curious name for ingly liberal project of policing porous boundaries—not cutting off this malady which attacked the trees—he said it was a form of circulation completely, but distinguishing between desirable and ‘Dagoeatis.’ So perhaps, if Professor Farlow’s views are correct, undesirable specimens and allowing those specimens that held the trees which were killed... suffered from a form of ‘Dagoea- the most economic and biological promise to pass through the tis.’ nation’s porous borders as a way to cancel out the ‘‘inherent dan- [Pennsylvania Blight Commission, 1912, p. 107] gers of this circulation” (Foucault, 2003, p. 65). This shift away from ‘‘locking up life processes” (Dillon and Despite limited evidence, Farlow’s theory gained steam as it fed Neal, 2008, p. 15) and toward the regulation of flows is apparent off anxieties about Italian immigrants as economic, environmental, in early responses to the chestnut blight. While initial efforts moral, and racial threats to the nation. Indeed Italian immigrants (e.g. the Pennsylvania Blight Commission) emphasized warfare had already been deemed enemies of conservation at the New York and total annihilation of the fungus, responses quickly evolved to promote control rather than eradication, and regulation rather 3 As discussed by Stoler (1995), Said (1978), and other postcolonial scholars, fear than exclusion. By the mid-1910s, the USDA increasingly advo- and desire—and the racial imaginaries they arise out of—work together in imperial cated for techniques such as the inspection of imported nursery and colonial discourses to distinguish the colony from the metropole, and in this case, to define the national population, affirm privileged national subjects, and secure the stock. Inspectors were instructed to ‘‘take special care that no ship- future health and wealth of the American nation. ment, however small, escapes their rigid inspection,” and orchar- 216 C. Biermann / Geoforum 75 (2016) 210–219 dists and nursery owners were expected to ‘‘watch continually and and placed in the skilled ‘‘hands of American plantsmen” with the utmost care their own nurseries and orchards, and to (Detlefsen and Ruth, 1922, p. 305), where they could then be destroy immediately by fire any trees that may be found diseased” molded into biologically and economically superior forms. A cru- (Metcalf, 1914, p. 16). Still, chestnut stock continued to be cial part of American economic expansion in the early 20th cen- imported, and the goal of these new policies was to facilitate and tury, breeding would ‘‘accelerate one-hundred-fold the age-long secure—not stop—the circulation of plant material. process of making ourselves new riches from new plants” (Smith, Indeed some at the USDA even advocated for increased intro- 1907, p. 228). duction of foreign chestnuts alongside a federal system of plant By the late 1910s, chestnut breeding was pursued by both inspection. Together, these strategies aimed not to keep foreign expert and lay horticulturalists, and breeders were hopeful that material out of the nation but to use non-native material to blighted American chestnuts would soon be replaced by a superior improve the blight resistance, performance, and marketability of hybrid. Chestnut breeding was lauded as civilized and profitable, a the American chestnut. In this way scientists and horticulturalists ‘‘highly promising occupation” for American men (Van Fleet, 1914, exhibited both anxiety around foreign bodies and desire for poten- p. 25). Embodying overlapping masculinities, breeders were at tially valuable and exotic plant varieties to augment the health, once refined agrarian citizens who cultivate nature, heroic fron- wealth, and power of the American nation. Chestnut grower and tiersmen who conquer it, and innovative scientists who perfect later president of the Association of American Geographers J. Rus- it. Whether capable American plantsmen or ‘‘soldiers who cam- sell Smith expressed this ambivalence in a speech at the 1916 paigned with the armament of a plant breeder to defeat the blight” Meeting of the Northern Nut Growers Association. Smith possessed (Lord, 2007, p. 26), breeders became privileged subjects in the con- ‘‘little doubt that we are now in a period of great activity by plant struction and policing of nature and nation in early 20th century enemies,” yet he recognized that this period was ‘‘indeed a bypro- America. duct of the splendid work now being done in bringing to us the The specific task of the chestnut breeder was to develop ‘‘a race plants of all parts of the world” (1916, p. 60). In this view, to reap of tall, hardy, blight-resistant individuals” (Graves, 1947, p. 87)by the horticultural benefits of empire necessarily involved risk; the separating ‘‘the individuals possessing desirable qualities from promise held by foreign plants was materially inseparable from those possessing undesirable and to reproduce only the former” the perils caused by ‘‘plant enemies”—a theme that continues to (Smith, 1907, p. 227). Foreign chestnut species were presumed motivate biosecurity and globalization debates in the 21st century inferior to the American species in their nut crops, timber, size, (Hinchcliffe and Bingham, 2008). hardiness, and overall aesthetics, but their value lay in their resis- This profound ambivalence toward foreign life forms—this tance to blight. Of the Japanese chestnut, a breeder wrote that their potent mix of nativist fear and cosmopolitan desire—epitomizes nuts were ‘‘almost without exception undesirable” and ‘‘so worth- the biopolitical imperative to make live and let die. In a world less that a well-bred American hog will let them lie on the ground where the circulation of life holds such promise, we see the emer- from September to Christmas” (Smith, 1907, p. 228). But by sepa- gence of a new problem that is ‘‘no longer of fixing and demarcat- rating the desirable blight resistance from other characteristics, it ing..., but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling seemed that it would be ‘‘a simple task for the hybridizer to blend them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always these strains and receive as a result a marketable nut, possessing in movement, constantly moving around, but in such a way that all desirable qualities” (Smith, 1907, p. 229). The colorful names the inherent dangers of this circulation are canceled out” given to early chestnut cultivars and crosses—Daniel Boone, Para- (Foucault, 2003, p. 65). In this logic, the solution to the problem gon, Connecticut Yankee, Abundance, and Reliance among them— of the chestnut blight is to channel foreign materials for the benefit illustrate not only that breeders were confident in their abilities of the nation—to draw upon the biological and political economic to produce a strong and near-perfect American tree but also that promise of foreign bodies to ward off, dilute, and build immunity breeding was clearly both racialized and gendered. An early cross to the invader. This is the underlying logic of chestnut breeding. that showed particular promise was the offspring of an American chestnut and Japan Giant, a prized Japanese chestnut cultivar. 3.3. Breeding better bodies: plant and racial improvement The hybrid specimen was strongly self-fertile and produced six burs in its second growing season, which is exceptional for chest- Turning now to early efforts to produce a blight-resistant chest- nut. Impressed with its strength and fecundity, Illinois breeder nut, I consider the shared logics and histories of plant breeding and George Endicott named the tree ‘Daniel Boone’ after the American racial improvement. Following the failure of the Pennsylvania pioneer hero (Taylor and Gould, 1914). Despite such promising Blight Commission in 1913, hopes for immediate victory over the crosses, breeders were not immediately successful in producing a fungus waned. Attention shifted first toward the management of blight-resistant chestnut with similar timber and nut qualities to circulation and the inspection of chestnut nursery stock and later the American species. The crosses they generated, however, pro- toward the improvement of the American chestnut through breed- vided valuable material for subsequent breeding programs by ing and hybridization. If the blight fungus could not be killed, the The American Chestnut Foundation, the Connecticut Agricultural American chestnut would be made to live in spite of it. Experiment Station, and the U.S. Forest Service. Because the Japanese and Chinese chestnut species exhibited Early 20th century chestnut breeding was part and parcel of a blight resistance, many breeders sought to produce hybrids by broader impetus to manage and improve species, populations, crossing the American species with these foreign chestnuts. That and races through the application of insights from Darwinian evo- such trees were non-native does not appear to have vexed breeders lution and Mendelian genetics. Established in 1903 by the Associ- significantly; blight resistance rendered foreignness desirable ation of Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, the rather than threatening. Non-native chestnuts represented the for- American Breeding Association (ABA) was a ‘‘movement for eign body at its best: a possible source of wealth that was both improving the heredity of all useful living things” (Hays, 1907, p. exotic and familiar, and whose circulation would help to secure 3). For ABA leaders and breeders, improvement through breeding forests, improve landscapes, and promote markets for chestnut was both a practical undertaking and a moral duty linked to pro- timber and nut crops. To provide breeders with necessary raw tecting and promoting the superiority of American culture, land- materials, plant explorers, some commissioned by the USDA, scape, and race (Kimmelman, 1983; Stern, 2005). In this context, scoured East Asia in search of promising chestnut germplasm to plant breeding occurred in direct conversation with work on amass for future use. Organisms and seeds were collected overseas eugenics and racial improvement, and the ABA (renamed the C. Biermann / Geoforum 75 (2016) 210–219 217
American Genetic Association (AGA) in 1914) became one of the Breeding functioned to naturalize and authorize eugenics cam- first national organizations to actively promote eugenics research paigns, and in so doing the breeder himself emerged as a key figure in the U.S. In the ABA’s Journal of Heredity, for example, manu- in securing and enriching the nation and its nature. Certainly not scripts on chestnut breeding were interspersed with eugenics texts all breeders were eugenicists, and not all eugenicists believed that entitled ‘‘How to Improve the Race” (Bell, 1914), ‘‘Eugenics and the methods of plant improvement could be directly applied to the Breeding” (Cook, 1914), and ‘‘Prenatal Influences” (Jordan, 1914). human race (e.g. Cook, 1914). But the significant intellectual traffic Indeed eugenics as a radical human engineering program would among chestnut breeding and racial improvement, along with the ‘‘spring not from the medical schools and health clinics of America, social and scientific milieu they coinhabited, signify the centrality but from the pastures, barns and chicken coops—because the advo- of everyday nature-society relations to the Progressive Era con- cates of eugenics were primarily plant and animal breeders” (Black, struction of the American nation as a biological population to be 2003, p. 32). secured, optimized, and propagated in the wake of escalating In the logic of genetic and racial improvement, just as chestnut threats. ‘‘seeds should be selected from the best individual representatives of a species” (Smith, 1907, p. 225) to allow the tree to survive 4. Conclusions blight, so too should the breeder ‘‘promote the marriages of the desirable with one another” (Bell, 1914, p. 7) to ensure the optimal If the chestnut is ‘‘the tree that built America” (Double, quoted reproduction of the nation. In other words, chestnut breeding and in Teslis, 2015), it is also now a tree that America has built. A cen- racial improvement were both undergirded by a biopolitical logic tury after the initial blight outbreak, a backcrossed chestnut is and racial sensibility, where life is secured by channeling desirable making its return to the national landscape. Its restoration is her- genetic material and diminishing the capabilities of bodies that alded as a story of socioecological redemption; at the Flight 93 pose no advantage or serve to threaten the nation and its nature. Memorial in Pennsylvania, for example, the chestnut’s ‘‘quiet But despite relying on the same ‘‘scientific laws” of heredity, the resurgence” is juxtaposed with the steadfastness of the nation in logic of breeding has proven quite flexible when applied to differ- the aftermath of 9/11 (The American Chestnut Foundation, 2012). ent pursuits. While hybridization, for example, was imagined as a All the way down to their 15/16 American and 1/16 Chinese chest- means of strengthening and purifying the American chestnut— nut genetics, the trees planted at the memorial exemplify the even a hybrid could become Daniel Boone, after all—eugenics cam- deep-rooted and knotty connections between nature and nation. paigns by and large conceptualized racial mixing as degeneration, By tracing the early 20th century history of the chestnut blight, defining race by the ‘one-drop rule’, criminalizing interracial mar- this paper has excavated the discourses, intellectual lineages, and riage, and limiting immigration.4 Even as plant explorers scouted social anxieties out of which the American chestnut emerged as for Chinese and Japanese chestnuts to bring to the U.S. for the breed- a national symbol. This retelling offers a novel vantage point on a ing project, Asian immigrants were excluded from the nation under familiar story, calling attention to the ties that bind nature and the Asiatic Barred Zone Act (Immigration Act of 1917). nation and the significance of these ties for the biopolitical project. Despite the conflicting meanings of ‘‘improvement” and varying When the blight fungus arrived on American soil, it occurred in the implications of hybridization, the breeder was seen by many midst of a ‘‘pervasive sense of imminent degeneration on all sides” eugenicists as ‘‘fitted to guide public opinion on questions relating (Allen, 2013) and became embroiled in wider concerns over plant to human heredity” (Bell, 1914, p. 2). As eugenicist Alexander Gra- circulation, immigration, race, and the fate of the nation. In this ham Bell exclaimed, ‘‘What an opportunity for [breeders] to benefit biopolitical formation, the chestnut and its blight helped to render the human race!” (1914, p. 2). The breeder possessed this ‘‘power the national population as a natural body to be actively managed to advise” on racial matters precisely because the same scientific by privileged national subjects. The breeding project too was laws of heredity that applied to nonhuman nature were under- enrolled in naturalizing the logic and discourse of eugenics by stood to apply directly to human societies—to ‘‘man-as-species” attaching it to an image of the nation as a ‘‘domestic genealogy” (Foucault, 2003, p. 243). Selectively extending the rules and logics (McClintock, 1995, p. 357). of plant and animal breeding to racial improvement not only pro- But what, if anything, does this retelling suggest for species vided a scientific basis for eugenics but also helped to naturalize it restoration and conservation today? In the 21st century, the ties into American institutions and culture (Stern, 2005). With the that bind nature and nation are at first glance unraveling on mul- esteemed plant or animal breeder as a privileged arbiter of genetic tiple fronts: first, in the context of globalization and ‘‘an increas- circulation, eugenics projects were yoked to an imaginary of the ingly borderless world, a world that is further undermining old nation as rural and self-sufficient and the ideal citizen as agrarian, certainties about nations, national cultures, national identities, morally fit, and environmentally minded.5 and national nature” (Coates, 2006, p. 10), and secondly, with the Breeding thus served as an arena through which ideas about arrival of the Anthropocene concept marking a time in which fun- racialized and gendered bodies, biological advantage and threat damentally novel socioecologies dominate our planet. Indeed the circulated and acquired meaning in early 20th century America. arrival of the Anthropocene has helped to shift the focus of both ecological science and applied conservation and restoration away from historical ecosystems and toward novel ecosystems that are 4 This is not to say that eugenics and human breeding campaigns would be unproblematic if racial mixing and immigration were extolled rather than lamented. explicitly anthropogenic and fundamentally new in their composi- Whether racial mixing is considered a path to degeneration and moral decline or a tion or structure (e.g. Hobbs et al., 2013; Marris, 2011). In a global- vehicle for achieving a superior race, eugenics projects—while not fundamentally all ized Anthropocene, nature seems to have been cut loose forever the same—share a penchant for the classification, policing, and control of racialized from the prescriptive straitjacket of the past, and as such, it might bodies in an effort to protect and improve a particular vision of the population. be tempting to think of the relationship between nature and the 5 Farmer (2013) discusses the moral and patriotic aspects of horticulture, breeding, and tree planting and describes a vision of an ideal ‘‘horticultural commonwealth nation as passé. Yet it is crucial to recognize that we have not composed of family-run farms with happy children surrounded by diverse flowering arrived at a mythical point where environmental interventions plants” (page 122). Esteemed plant breeder and eugenicist Luther Burbank is an are free from racial and gendered logics and nationalist sensibili- example of the ideal citizen-breeder in this vision, though his philosophy on race ties. The Anthropocene’s socioecologies, the American chestnut differed from many other eugenicists. Influenced by his own hybridization experi- among them, emerge from somewhere, and it is neither possible ments, Burbank believed racial mixing was beneficial when overseen by expert breeders and scientists, and that it would ultimately lead to the formation of a nor perhaps desirable to sanitize our landscapes, sciences, and superior race (Stansfield, 2006; Stern, 2005). companion species of the vestiges of these power-laden histories. 218 C. Biermann / Geoforum 75 (2016) 210–219
The task I have taken up here is to unearth one such history, and Detwiler, S., 1913. Observations on sanitation cutting in controlling the chestnut I do so not to condemn efforts to cultivate blight-resistant chest- blight in Pennsylvania, in Pennsylvania Chestnut Tree Blight Commission Final Report, pp 63–89. nuts as ill-informed or, worse yet, inherently xenophobic, but Dikötter, F., 1998. Race culture: recent perspectives on the history of eugenics. Am. instead to make sense of the traces that remain, the logics that Hist. Rev. 103 (2), 467–478. haunt, and the echoes that resound when Americans ‘‘[stick] a flag Dillon, M., Neal, A., 2008. Foucault on Politics, Security and War. Palgrave MacMillan, London. in the ground” and say ‘‘not this tree” (The American Chestnut Domosh, M., 2003. Pickles and purity: discourses of food, empire and work in turn- Foundation, 2009, p. 4). Nature is always and inevitably ‘‘the after- of-the-century USA. Soc. Cult. 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Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–1976. Allen Lane, London and New York. insights and archival materials that inspired this research. I also Foucault, M., 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their thought- France, 1977–1978. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York. ful and constructive feedback. This material is based upon work Francis, T., 1912. Field Work of the Chestnut Tree Blight Commission. In: supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Pennsylvania Chestnut Blight Conference Report, pp. 233–235. Freinkel, S., 2009. American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. Fellowship. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommen- University of California Press, Berkeley. dations expressed in this material are those of the authors(s) and Gerstle, G., 1999. 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