by Jane Goodall
When the Sacred Gets Co-opted
Plants have played a major role in healing and in sacred ceremonies. But alas, the greed and commercialism of the modern world has changed everything. To become rich and powerful, the drug barons will go to any lengths to obtain and push their products, which today are often chemical compounds extracted from the original plants. The corporate greed machine uses any method to advertise and sell its goods, urging teenagers onto the wrong path with corrupting advertising and cheap, often harmful, alcoholic beverages. For years the cigarette was a sex symbol, the pipe a sign of tough manliness.
How tragic that people are killed in the drug wars by bullets as well as by overdose. That there are those who, like my first husband, Hugo, die coughing up their lungs. And how terribly unfortunate that the plants themselves are so often considered the “enemy”—to be eradicated whenever possible. Poor, innocent plants. And when they are uprooted and sprayed, the entire environment is damaged.
We must just hope that somehow the triple evils of drug addiction, alcohol addiction, and nicotine addiction can be tackled at their source and that the plants can be left in peace.
Chapter 12
Plantations
The cotton gin was invented in 1793. It enabled the seed to be separated out from the fiber quickly so that cotton became a more profitable crop. This increased the need for slaves—and over seventy thousand were imported from Africa to mainland North America between 1790 and 1808, when further importation was banned. The slave, forced to turn the handle round and round and round, appears to be grimacing; he probably would be beaten if he stopped. (CREDIT: WILLIAM L. SHEPPARD, PUBLISHED IN HARPER’S WEEKLY, DECEMBER 1869)
Just as the use of plants for drugs has led to so much human suffering, so, too, has the cultivation of plants. With the dawn of agriculture the days of the hunter-gatherers were, to all intents and purposes, over and the gradual changing and destroying of the natural world began. And during the thousands of years from the first simple farms to the introduction of mechanized farming, we had one of the darkest chapters in human history—the slave trade.
The early plantations were the forerunners of today’s industrial farming. They exploited people, and destroyed lush habitats to create unsustainable monocultures. All for the sake of financial gain for the colonial plantation owners and the European countries from which they came. Slavery had a lasting impact on the population dynamics of the countries where the slaves were sent, as the ratio of African slaves to free men hugely increased. And this, of course, has led to many of today’s socioeconomic problems. The brutality lasted for years—and in fact, as we shall see, in some parts of the world slavery in agriculture continues to this day.
Of course the plants were innocent—in many cases they were victims themselves. I remember the first plantation I saw—a sugarcane plantation in Uganda. Miles and miles of what was once tropical forest bulldozed, the trees destroyed, the land forced to host a monoculture of plantation crops. And the plants, marshaled into rows, endless row after row, like prisoners lined up for roll call. Forced to grow on soil poisoned with chemicals, then sprayed with more chemicals, and blamed by environmentalists for greedily sucking up more than their fair share of water. I imagined them humiliated, dejected, ashamed of the harm they were compelled to inflict on the land.
Although slaves were not, of course, forced to work on that sugarcane plantation, I found myself remembering Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the famous antislavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, which, it has been said, helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War. It was a very popular book in England at the time it was published, and my mother used to read it to us on winter nights around the fire. I cried and cried, and it left me with a horror of slavery. It also, in a way, prepared me for the gruesome descriptions of life in the German concentration camps during World War II. Oddly, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was apparently a favorite book of Adolf Hitler—perhaps the horrific cruelty described gave him ideas when it came to the treatment of Jews.
Crimes against Plants and Humanity
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the European powers were hungrily grabbing and laying claim to land around the world. In part this was to plunder the natural resources—minerals, timber, and so forth. But it was also to establish plantations that would allow them to grow economically valuable plants, from different parts of the world, free from any restrictions on exports and costly tariffs. The development of these plantations thus went hand in hand with the expansion of the colonies—particularly those of Britain, France, Holland, Spain, and Portugal—in tropical and subtropical countries, including those in the Caribbean and the Americas.
However, in order to be economically successful, the colonial invaders needed plentiful supplies of cheap labor—and it was this that led to the transatlantic slave trade.
The first African slaves were traded by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, and during the following four hundred years or so an estimated 12.5 million people were abducted from their homes, mainly from West and Central Africa, and shipped to the European colonies. Most were forced to work on the plantations. And those plantations not only led to massive human suffering but were (and still are) extremely damaging to the environment. Large areas of land are cleared, trees felled, fertilizers (chemical today) added to the soil, and monocultures established. Very often plantation crops are greedy for water, and this has often meant severe depletion of natural supplies. All of this results in loss of biodiversity.
Among the plants typically grown on plantations, certain of them were especially lucrative for the planter, such as sugarcane, tobacco, cotton, rice—and for a while, indigo. Other plantation crops include coffee, tea, and cacao, as well as figs, sisal, dates, vanilla, and olives. And there are plantations of trees, too, grown for timber and wood pulp—the fast-growing conifers, notably pine and spruce, and the eucalyptus, which is especially thirsty for water. And, of course, plantations of oil palms are proliferating today, at the expense of hundreds of square miles of tropical old-growth forests, to produce palm oil, not only for inclusion in many food products but also for biofuel.
Because palm oil is considered a “clean” alternative to petroleum, the demand for it is growing in the United States and Europe. The top producer of palm oil is Indonesia—prices have been steadily increasing since 2009. But the truth about palm oil is that it is not so “clean.” Developers of palm oil plantations are notorious for devastating forests and creating monocultures in previously diverse landscapes.
This situation is a cause for ever-growing international concern, particularly because it is pushing the orangutans to extinction. The only remaining forest habitats of the red apes are the lowland forests of Borneo and Sumatra—the same rain forests that are being bulldozed to make way for palm oil plantations. Birutė Galdikas, the primatologist and authority on orangutans, has been fighting to fend off poachers, miners, and loggers over the years, but palm oil has proven to be the greatest threat of all.
“When you get up in the air,” she once said to a reporter, “you start gasping in horror; there’s nothing but palm oil in an area that used to be plush rain forest. Elsewhere, there’s burned-out land, which now extends even within the borders of the park.”
The plantation crops I have chosen to write about are tobacco, rice, and cotton. Together they illustrate how their cultivation has provided huge economic benefits to plantation owners while causing massive human suffering and environmental degradation.
Tobacco Plantations
I have already discussed the long history of tobacco use among indigenous people, who grew it for its medicinal properties and also used it in their ceremonies. In 1534 the Portuguese colonialists found tobacco in Brazil, where it was being cultivated by the indigenous people. Realizing its value, they enslaved the native tribes, seized their land, and forced them to work on their own fields.
The first North American tobacco plantation was established in Jamestown, Virg
inia, in 1612. When the colonists arrived from Britain, approximately twenty-five thousand Algonquian Indians lived in the region, most of whom were led by Powhatan, father of the famous Pocahontas, who became the wife of the Englishman John Rolfe—and it was Rolfe who was responsible for starting the tobacco plantations.
Rolfe had learned to “drink” tobacco (the term used at the time for “smoke”) before he left England. “Drinking” tobacco had become fashionable ever since Nicotiana tabacum had been brought back from the Caribbean by the Spaniards. Meanwhile, another Nicotiana species was being used by the “Indians” in Virginia. Rolfe despised this local tobacco, so he organized a shipment of N. tabacum seeds to be brought from Venezuela and Trinidad. Pocahontas was a smart and resourceful young woman—and it seems she may have helped Rolfe learn the native methods for growing and curing tobacco. When Rolfe returned from the New World six years later with his wife, he brought with him to England the first samples of this new tobacco. It was an instant success, and the tobacco plantations prospered and proliferated from then on.
I learned about cash crops at school and spent hours making drawings of them. This small drawing of tobacco and the other one later in this chapter of cotton come from a school notebook saved by my mother. (CREDIT: JANE GOODALL)
Jamestown was turned around as a result of the successful method for producing tobacco. In fact, the people of Jamestown went crazy over this new crop. Tobacco was planted everywhere, not only in the fields but in the streets, the marketplace—even the cemetery! Also, most people stopped growing other crops, and in 1637 it was necessary to make a ruling that everyone who grew tobacco must also plant two acres of corn, or else there might have been some very hungry people!
There was another major problem. Tobacco production rapidly exhausts the soil of nutrients, so the colonists had to keep creating new plantations, sprawling out farther and farther, claiming riverbanks and systematically taking over Indian land.
Then, too, initially there was a real shortage of workers, since the land was originally occupied for the exploitation of natural resources rather than for settlement. Before the African slave trade was established, plantation owners took whatever labor they could get, including criminals.
Those early settlers also lured young men from England with promises of riches. Full of enthusiasm, their fares paid, these hapless youths were indentured on arrival and forced to work in the fields. Often they ran away, but in either case they did not live long. And so the tobacco plants flourished and the planters grew rich, even as those working the fields suffered and died. Soon tobacco was a far more profitable crop than sugarcane, and was sometimes used as currency: in 1619 a man could import a wife from England for 120 pounds of tobacco!
Tobacco and Slavery
In 1619 twenty African slaves were sold in Jamestown by a trading vessel that had stolen them from a slave boat. They were the first, but some fifteen years later African slaves were being regularly imported to Jamestown, direct from Britain and the Caribbean. Even so, in 1648 there were still only three hundred or so working there at any one time—because of a high mortality rate. Then, during the 1660s, the crash in sugar prices came, and African slaves were sold off by their owners in the Caribbean to the plantation owners in Virginia, who were still greedy for more and more cheap labor to fuel the ever-expanding tobacco industry.
By the early 1790s one slave ship left Britain every other day. These ships were bound for Africa, where they gathered captives from West African slavers and transported them across the Atlantic. Very many were destined to toil in the tobacco plantations. How ironic that among the items taken out to West Africa from Britain to trade with dealers in exchange for slaves were rolls of tobacco soaked in molasses—tobacco that had been cultivated, harvested, and cured by African slaves in the Americas.
Before the importation of Africans was well under way, many Native Americans were captured to work in the tobacco fields. Sometimes the planters actually bought them from the tribes, many of which at that time kept prisoners of war as servants. While most people are aware of the horrors of the African slave trade, many do not realize that tens of thousands of Native Americans were also enslaved during the frenzy of tobacco growing, and the death rate among them was high from new diseases and inhumane treatment. In fact, by the middle of the eighteenth century many of the tribes of the southeastern United States had been virtually destroyed. Eventually some of the remaining tribes formed a confederation to resist capture.
Current Abuses and Hazards
At one time tobacco was called “green gold.” But all that changed after the Civil War, when tobacco could no longer profit from the labor of slaves. The crop continues to be cultivated in the United States, but the world’s major producers are now in China, India, Brazil, Malawi, and the United States. And human rights groups are now concerned with a new form of slavery—child laborers. While some children may work on their family tobacco farms, many are forced to work alone on plantations, laboring for long hours and low pay and enduring abuse from their supervisors.
Because tobacco is sensitive and prone to many diseases, massive amounts of pesticides and herbicides are used to keep it on life support. These poisons also pose health hazards to the laborers who apply them. Children, in particular, are harmed by the herbicides used.
The environmental legacy is dire as well. Tobacco plantations have caused major deforestation in developing countries—in Brazil alone the industry uses sixty million trees per year. In Tanzania I have seen firsthand the adverse effects on the environment of tobacco farming. Tobacco plants quickly deplete soil of its nutrients, so that new lands must be cleared for successive plantings. In central western Tanzania, the Miombo woodlands, which serve to regulate rainfall, have been devastated. Large areas are clear-cut for growing the tobacco and for the huge amount of wood that is needed for curing the leaves. The cultivated land becomes increasingly dependent on fertilizers, which, along with the pesticides and herbicides, causes terrible contamination of water.
Once again we return to the blameless tobacco plant, which was once respectfully cultivated by indigenous people for use as sacred weed for ceremonies and spiritual contemplation. How sad that it was eventually forced into such a horrible industry. For when it became part of the profit-driven colonial empire, tobacco was forever corrupted on the worldwide stage. There is nothing positive to say about the tobacco industry.
Rice—Oryza sativa and O. glaberrima
Rice did not figure largely in our diet when we were children except in the form of rice pudding—which I hated, not because I disliked rice but because I did not like milk! Thus, I would only eat it when it was overcooked (by most standards) and with no trace of liquid milk to be seen.
It was the potato that formed our staple food back then. After all, we did not grow rice in England, and during the war years I doubt we imported very much. But rice is definitely the most important cereal staple for a very large proportion of the global population, especially in the Far East, India, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and parts of Africa. It is highly nutritious, containing many vitamins and minerals, along with carbohydrates that are such a good source of energy. Asian farmers are responsible for about 90 percent of the total global rice production.
Rice is a member of the grass family. The stems of the Asian rice plant (O. sativa) have long, slender leaves growing from each node, and small wind-pollinated flowers develop on branch-like spikes that arch or droop over. The resulting seeds are harvested for rice. It was first domesticated about nine thousand years ago in the Yangtze River region of China; before that there is archaeological evidence that the people were collecting and eating grains from wild rice plants. The cultivation of rice then spread to other parts of China and Southeast Asia, and to India and Nepal. It was introduced as a food to Europe during medieval times.
Even today rice is still harvested by hand in many countries—dried, then milled with a rice husker to remove the outer husk or ch
aff. At this stage it is brown rice. Further processing results in white rice, which lacks some nutrients but keeps longer. It is a crop that is very labor-intensive and needs high rainfall—the traditional method for growing rice is to flood low-lying areas in order to create paddy fields into which the seedlings are planted.
African rice (O. glaberrima) originated in the Niger Delta in West Africa and was eaten there for some 3,500 years. Rice farming spread to the Americas with slavery, and African rice is still grown on a small scale in Suriname. When, somewhere between the sixth and eleventh centuries, Asian rice was introduced to Africa, perhaps by Indonesian traders, the cultivation of African rice decreased.
Rice Plantations—The Worst for Slaves
It was the conditions for slaves working on the North American rice plantations of the eighteenth century that were the most horrific of all. When the first of these were being established in America, most of the slaves were Native American. But they were ill suited to the brutal life, so the death rate was high. In the early 1700s plantation owners started buying slaves from Africa. They discovered that those from the rice-growing areas of West Africa had an understanding of the process far greater than their own. Growers, particularly those in South Carolina, who were prepared to pay a much higher price for these slaves profited, as the productivity of their plantations greatly increased.
In all, they converted some 150,000 acres of virgin land into tidal rice plantations. First they had to clear the land, using oxen to help them move tree stumps and pull loads of soil away. (Probably ghastly work for the animals too.) Next they had to excavate the ditches that would bring tidal waters into the fields—and construct sluice gates that would allow access only to the freshwater from the surface while keeping out the salty water from below that would kill the seedlings.