by Jane Jacobs
Wherever imperial agrarian powers conquered, they took along with them the arts of plantation organization. Practices perfected in the vineyards and grain, flax, olive and almond plantations of the old world were transferred to other climates, as plantations for sugar, cotton, indigo, tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, coconuts, pineapples, rubber, opium poppies, peanuts, bananas, spices, soybeans, and much else, along with herds, some with summer and winter pasturage as large as small nations. Vestiges of that ancient dynamic continue still. Numbers of North American family farms continue dwindling, year after year, while numbers and sizes of the modern plantations we call agribusinesses and factory farms continue to increase. Even cranberry bogs have become efficient plantations. Musician friends tell me that the reeds used worldwide for oboes and other wind instruments come from plantations in southern France where canes grow thickly to heights of forty feet. Papyrus plantations, now long extinct in Egypt, may once have presented scenes similar to these modern cane plantations.
A century ago Americans were not as sentimental about agrarian life as we are and as we teach children to be.A century ago Americans were not as sentimental about agrarian life as we are and as we teach children to be.
When I was a schoolchild in the 1920s, textbook anthologies of English literature typically included a poem entitled “The Man with the Hoe,” by Edwin Markham. On the facing page was a depressing reproduction of a painting called “Man with Hoe” by Jean Francois Millet. Markham, an Oregon educator, was inspired to write the poem in 1899 by the painting made forty-six years previously.
Millet was a peasant himself. As a child he worked on wheat plantations of a French estate. As a mature painter he made a record of that life. A critic remarked that he neither softened nor exaggerated his scenes. Millet was a documentary maker ahead of his time, using memory and canvas instead of camera and film. Markham neither softened nor exaggerated what the painting documented. I will read you a few lines from his long, indignant poem:
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground…
The emptiness of ages in his face…
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
Stolid and stunted, a brother to the ox?…
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?…
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?…
There is no shape more terrible than this…
More packed with danger to the universe…
Both the poem and painting are almost forgotten now, scorned as moralistic preaching.
The Plantation Age is no longer supreme. It has become the turn of agrarian cultures to be defeated by warriors using ingenuities of the Age of Human Capital.
Some people call the young post-agrarian age the Knowledge Age, implying that we now know everything needful. Of course we don’t. Every age has used whatever information and misinformation its people have acquired, for better or worse. Trying to make out what post-agrarian life portends for the future by noticing what has already happened, many people pessimistically expect ever more cruel and dangerous ingenuities punctuated by uncontrollable epidemics, irreversible climate changes, interminable civil wars and other catastrophes. Other people optimistically expect an unprecedentedly creative age, grounded in the emerging science of complexity which recognizes that everything is connected inexorably to everything else, whether we like that or not, and recognizes also that we cannot understand biology or social sciences, or for that matter physics, by means of the old and inadequate science of bivariant simplicity and the statistics of disorganized complexity. The optimists looking at what has already happened still manage to find plausible portents that constructive creativity is in ascendancy and will win out. Maybe this is wishful thinking, and the only definitive thing to be said echoes Charles Dickens’s introductory comment to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the worst of times and the best of times.”*4
Despite the Plantation Age’s many remaining ugly residues, such as racism, that age was slowly but inexorably undermined by skills, observations and cultural changes that gradually accrued during the past thousand years.
For one thing, breadbaskets that formerly fed much of the world are no longer economic assets to their nations, but have become, instead, serious drags on national economies: for instance, rural Sicily, rural Argentina, Uruguay and Ukraine. In their time, the great North American prairies rendered many smaller breadbaskets redundant, such as New England, upstate New York and the Ottawa Valley and Atlantic provinces of Canada. Now redundancy threatens even the prairies; already they soak up such huge protectionist subsidies that these led to complete breakdown of the latest attempted round of world trade negotiations.
Of course we still need to eat and clothe ourselves, and millions are not well fed or well clad, but attempts to solve or even to understand that enigma as a simplistic flaw in distribution are no longer credible in poor countries receiving foreign aid, nor to increasing numbers of aid-givers either. If nothing succeeds like success, it is equally true that nothing fails like failure.
For another indication of the Plantation Age’s demise, an exorbitant share of a population is no longer needed to produce food and fiber for itself and others. In advanced economies like America’s and Canada’s, only about four percent of the working population actually farms or herds, and even some of those only part-time. In poorer economies, where traditionally as much as eighty or eighty-five percent of the population was destined to work with crops or pastures, as soon as tractors and irrigation pumps and pipes become available, abundant farm work decreases drastically.Land can be held exclusively. So can other natural resources like oil wells, fisheries, and gold ores be held. Ingenuity cannot be.
Thus wars of expansion or colonization can no longer be won in the same sense as in the Plantation Age. In the past, victors could and did consign losers to plantations, ordering them to do as they were told and shut up. But because of agrarian redundancies—an unimaginable luxury in the Plantation Age—plantation making has lost its point for conquerors. It doesn’t pay. Furthermore, some military losers have adopted or created horrible ingenuities of their own. Land can be held exclusively. So can other natural resources like oil wells, fisheries, and gold ores be held. Ingenuity cannot be.
The great achievement of the Plantation Age was the stupendous multiplication of members of our species. The good-growing successes on unprecedentedly large scales may have saved our species from early extinction that could have followed extinctions of wild crops and food animals.
The Plantation Age did not generate many economic ideas valid for our times and economies. Those taken for granted were based only on what worked for agrarian imperialists. The biggest idea came directly out of agrarian experiences of poor harvests. This idea is that relationships exist among supply, demand and prices. What is abundant is cheap and can be disposed of with little or no regret, in distinction from rarities. Forests were seen to be abundant. Also, ominously, soil, water, and fresh air were abundant, therefore cheap and disposable. Many people still think this way.
Abundant human life could be construed as cheap and disposable. Otherwise ordinary patriotic citizens came to accept and even to glorify prodigious slaughters such as trench warfare, mustard gas attacks, contrived famines, blitzkrieg, kamikaze and napalm attacks, genocide, ethnic cleansing, jihad, suicide terrorism, land mines and wholesale lethal dislocation of people from their homes when their presences had become inconvenient to crazed visions of crazed but persuasive super-patriots.
The attempt to escape difficulties by invoking death, instead of by calling up the powers and resources of life, was the great shame of the Plantation Age during its own dying throes.
The Plantation Age was a lengthy and durable epoch. I’ve harped on its chief social and economic prop. Generations of plantation workers were bound in place by peonage of some sort, and kept in place by force and threat of force. They fell into these miserable situations as pris
oners of war or conquest; as foundlings, orphans, and kidnapped young people sold into slavery; as serfs, feudal tenants, indentured servants; children born into slavery or into families of sharecroppers shackled by discrimination, forced ignorance, fear and debt.
Peons are seldom enthusiastic workers. Three master plantation precepts made peons productive.
First, a successful plantation was organized as a monocultural enterprise specializing in one product.
Second, a monoculture was made still more efficient by enlarging its scale.
Third, an expert planned the end result in advance. The object was to anticipate everything needed, and thus avoid unexpected adaptations, alterations and improvisations.
Plantations adhering to these three precepts: specialization, large scale, and anticipated end results—could succeed. Those that flouted them failed.
When something succeeds for time out of mind it is not much questioned, except by such imagined options as utopias. Thus the plantation model guided much of the infancy of the Industrial Revolution. In England, Manchester and its large conurbation of industrial towns turned out flabbergasting quantities of thread, yarn and cloth. The industrial experts who shaped these mass-production monocultures used their improved power sources—running water, coal-powered steam—merely to increase the scale of operations, not to alter the vision itself. They were actually shaping a dead-end industrial economy. But it took a couple of centuries for England to recognize that disaster, and though many a demand-side and supply-side nostrum has been applied in the century since, a cure for the abused industrial economy of northern England has still to be found.
The first American efficiency expert, F. W. Taylor, was in total thrall to plantation mentality. He showed his large industrial clients how to break down work into such simple and repetitive bits that workers could be used as if they were cogs in production machinery or peons on a plantation. Taylor and his many imitators called the method “scientific management.”*5 Workers could be trained in a trice and were as quickly disposable and replaceable. Charlie Chaplin memorably satirized such workplaces in his film Modern Times.
However, because American steel, automotive, meat-packing, coal-mining, garment-stitching and other industrial workers were not actually bound as peons, “scientific managers” and rebellious workers pitted themselves against each other.
Probably the earliest industrial mass producers to abandon plantation mentality were the thousands of printers who rapidly proliferated in sixteenth-century European cities. They could not predict what would fall into their hands, and therefore what they might be printing a year or even a month in the future. So they had no choice but to abandon monoculture. Along with tried and true products—books of sermons, translations of scripture, translations of learned works of philosophy and science, they took on travel reports, scripts of plays, pamphlets of invective, scandal, doggerel, and political attacks smuggled past government censors, and in due course periodicals, news reports and novels.
Publishers, who developed from printers, also broke loose from the precept that favored larger scales of production to grasp larger profits. Publishers noticed that enlarged production scales could be ruinous. To be sure, a larger printing of an edition would predictably bring down the cost of each item in the edition, but it was more economical for publishers to estimate the limited demand for each edition and second-guess themselves, if necessary, by heeding feedback on sales, as publishers, and for that matter manufacturers of hay balers, do to this day. This was a radically new and original model of mass production, owing as much or more to craft practices as to plantation precepts. For those using this model the remaining third plantation precept was meaningless. There could be no finished end result. Instead, at every stage of production, what was needed was nimble current knowledge of markets and, for publishers, of writers and illustrators.
Manufacturers of mass-production skirts, blouses and dresses and of cut and printed tissue-paper patterns for home dressmakers also realized that they could use mass production but not monoculture.*6 By hindsight the new model would seem to be inevitable for fashion industries, but in a world of custom couturiers and tailors for the haves, and rags for the have-nots, it was not adopted for fashions until almost three centuries after the printers had shown the way. This time the insight came to fashion and women’s-interest journalists in mid-nineteenth-century New York. Foreigners marveled at how fashionably New York shopgirls dressed.
Makers of home furnishings and household appliances learned the new model from the example of the New York fashion industries. In only a few more decades, industrialists in New England and Chicago and other Midwestern cities began to catch on. Instead of resting indefinitely on their mechanical harvesters, they mass-produced additional rural labor-saving devices. Automobile makers were slow at learning to use the new model as a key to industrial evolution. Henry Ford’s development of the tractor, and General Motors’ invention of the acceptance corporation, a powerful financing and marketing tool, were the American automotive industry’s last world-altering innovations, both created at about the time of the First World War. This is remarkable, considering the opportunities open to the industry in more than three-quarters of a century since.
Land planners and suburban real estate developers have been even slower than automobile manufacturers to shed plantation mentality. Modern suburbs are caricatures of plantations. Look at them: monocultural housing tracts, erected on ever-larger scales, like so many endless fields of cabbages. Standardized shopping centers multiplying like so many flocks of sheep. All of this framed in imitation of plantation-to-seaport limited access rail corridors inappropriately adapted for trucks, commuters, in-city and intercity travelers needing unlimited access to countless micro-destinations—not limited access to relatively few macro-destinations. Never before, except on plantations, have normal human beings been consigned to planned environments dominated by such poverty of imagination.
Some land planners who predetermine these perfect end results have come to despise the consequence of their own work. But they are caught in a time warp from which they, and their profession, and their teachers seem unable to extricate themselves. Modern land planners’ tool kits consist of prescriptions based on anti-urban assumptions—that high densities, high ground coverages and mixed uses are bad.
The two World Trade Center towers looked futuristic, but they were caught in a suburbanized time warp too. Their heights and volumes proclaimed infatuation with supposed efficiency of great scale. The intention of filling them with enterprises engaged in global trading was a gimmick that shrieked of faith in monoculture. The empty plaza forming a tower platform, so alien to the interesting and unpredictably detailed hurly-burly of adaptable small business on New York’s streets, announced confidence in perfect, predetermined end results.
During the political maneuvering that cleared the way for the planning, some developers and rental agents warned against the disorder that the millions of square feet of rentable office space would bring to limited demand in the city for additional offices. They were correct. Nor did cumbersome size make the buildings economical to operate. The monocultural plan for tenanting them floundered too. The perfect plaza remained bleak and purposeless instead of impressive and popular. New York City, to its credit, is not a congenial context for plantations or plantation mentalities. These towers got by at all only by grace of decades of public subsidies and spin-doctored information.
Among the hundreds of small businesses whose presence was inconvenient to the planners of these towers was the largest cluster of electronic enterprises in the city at the time. It was called Radio Row. The businesses of Radio Row were regarded as pathetically small and their protests about what was to happen to them were jokes to city, state, and federal power brokers and their experts. No one can say whether the ruined Radio Row might or might not have evolved into a major asset in the city’s and region’s economy. All we can know is that it was a sort of prehistoric Silic
on Valley for a time. No more can ever be known because the cluster was not permitted to live and develop in an unpredictable, open-ended New York way.
The planning profession currently showing most promise of liberating itself from plantation mentality seems to be landscape architecture. Perhaps this is because many urban landscape architects and theorists of the behavior of city public spaces have been influenced by the study of ecosystems.
Although the purpose of plantations is crop growing, they could not be more different from ecosystems.
Ecosystems are absolutely never monocultural. Monoculturalism is death to them. Their ideal is size capable of sustaining populations of greatly diverse natural inhabitants that carry direct or indirect benefits for one another. Ecosystems take successions of form from successions of adaptations. Their mature forms are potentially unpredictable. Who could have predicted redwood forests? Ecosystems need protection from specific harms and situations that threaten them from time to time. Identical harms do not threaten all ecosystems at the same time. However, picking ecosystems off, one at a time, weakens the planet’s ecosystems as a whole. Everything connects with everything else. In their modes of connecting, their deep organizational principles, ecosystems are much like cities and not at all like plantations.*7Ecosystems take successions of form from successions of adaptations. Their mature forms are potentially unpredictable. Who could have predicted redwood forests?
Part of the dead and unburied, putrefying Plantation Age is the fantasy that cities and their people are unproductive parasites, idly battening on wealth bestowed upon rural and wild places. Some people still believe this, including some ecologists whose breezy diagnosis of all troubles are “too many people.”*8 It follows from simple bivariant misanthropy—bad city guys, good rural and wilderness guys—that rural places must be morally finer and more nurturing spiritually than urban environments. Thomas Jefferson, for one, believed this, although perhaps more in theory than in practice. Although he was certainly able and intelligent, he was incompetent as a plantation proprietor; but he lavished loving and attentive pride successfully on his architecture and landscaping for the city of Richmond and on his remarkably urbane campus for the University of Virginia.