In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Mahogany is a species of many parts, and one of Paul’s tasks is to ensure that the fetishized aura of its wood is displaced by the (differently fetishized) integrity of its tree-ness. Out of a particularly crushing and disabling anonymity—the absence even of a convincing life history—the FMP aims to produce a cosmopolitan tree with a localized meaning and specificity, a richly situated yet mobile identity. Deep in the interstices of instrumentalism, holding it all together in fact, it turns out that this Project is an affective work of creation: for Paul, a collaboration built on affinities both human and non-human; for Umberto, a moment of curiosity, and, perhaps, in a haphazard way, of redemption.

  These, though, are alliances born and raised in contingency. By the time I arrived in Redenção in July 1999, Umberto’s stormy relationship with his ex-wife had degenerated into wrangling over filial inheritance. The FMP became just one of several parcels seized on by impatient daughters, and—over Umberto’s ineffectual objections—immediately sold to Coutinho, a much larger regional lumber concern. Paul, unceremoniously, had been given one more year to wrap up and leave. Unless, that is, he could come up with U.S. $1.7 million and exercise his option to purchase the Project.

  WOOD OF WOODS

  Mahogany is no longer what it was in the early 1900s, when Allan Carman, “biographer to His Majesty,” wrote the Monarch of Mahogany Visits Schmieg-Hungate & Kotzian.34 Schmieg-Hungate & Kotzian were an Upper East Side Manhattan furniture-maker, and this royal tour begins with a grainy photo of the Monarch’s arrival in New York: a very large log lowered on a very muddy dockside, heavy metal hooks in each end, an anonymous man in hat and black gloves looking impassively on.

  The arrival of the Monarch of Mahogany at New York

  What now seems a rather desultory image takes us to a time and place in which the extraordinary reach and persuasiveness of capital was a cause for confidence rather than anxiety. The Monarch, Carman writes, is now over 300 years old. He was raised in the forests of Cuba, and has been located with only the greatest difficulty. He must be “induced” to leave his homeland. He must be informed that “suitable arrangements [will] be made for his comfort,” that the most up-to-date facilities have been prepared, that the finest craftsmen await him, and, rather ominously, that “a most interesting program of usefulness [has been] outlined.”35 For Carman, Schmieg-Hungate, and their Manhattan clients, the Monarch’s life is just beginning. All that went before—those stately centuries—was mere preparation. In a truly modern inversion of the environmental narratives with which we are now so familiar, fulfillment and self-realization lie in the bourgeois transformations of the commodity form: a reproduction Chippendale armchair, a tripod table, and a “lovely” period commode, each purchase verified by a certificate of authenticity and the evidential tactility of that image of arrival on a rainy New York morning.

  In his arch attempt to manufacture biography, Carman parodies the localizing strategies of the metropolitan agents who handled specimen sales for the traveling Victorian naturalists. Unlike the butterflies and beetles of the mid-nineteenth-century collection—whose aesthetic appeal was closely correlated with their structural integrity—mahogany’s apotheosis relied on its radical physical transformation through milling, turning, carving, staining, filling, and polishing. Though the species certainly also had a scientific career of its own, its primary induction into the metropole was via circuits of exchange quite distinct from those inhabited by the biological specimen. Thus, in addition to the exoticism of the king’s provenance, Carman takes pains to draw attention to the exceptional quality of the craftsmanship through which the Monarch was to be domesticated and in so doing, he marks a critical source of value.

  Although singled out for its resilience and workability much earlier, mahogany had been a dominant presence in European markets since only the mid-eighteenth century.36 Its buoyancy and reluctance to splinter on impact had made it an early choice for naval and transoceanic shipping, yet it was later, during what the British commercial histories call mahogany’s “golden age,” that the wood became so highly prized. The century from 1715 saw the displacement of native oak and walnut in furniture- and cabinet-making as mahogany’s great tensile strength enabled lighter and more delicate innovation, and the distinctive styles of the period—Chippendale, Adam, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton—emerged out of the technological breakthrough of the new material. This British presence in both furniture and shipbuilding became decisive, enabling Britain to regulate the expanding world markets in a resource it had claimed from as early as the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada. Unsurprisingly, given his opportunistic talents, it was Walter Ralegh who had brought one of the first shipments to Europe on his return from Trinidad in 1596.

  It was only in the first decades of the twentieth century that U.S. buyers, capitalizing on their proximity to the source, succeeded in capturing the bulk of the trade. By the 1960s, over 90 percent of American mahogany was passing through U.S. ports. In the meantime, both supplies and demand were becoming erratic as standing stocks depleted. The popularity of the wood declined with escalating costs, changes in taste, and the undermining of its reputation through the passing off of lower-grade substitutions.

  In their efforts to maintain their share of the high-end market, U.S. timber companies—operating in a strongly vertically integrated industry—worked on two fronts. Through their trade organization, the Mahogany Association, they repeatedly lobbied to restrict use of the name “mahogany” to specific taxonomic groups. With the Caribbean species now commercially extinct, and, of the three American species, only Swietenia macrophylla retaining economic significance, this should have been fairly straightforward. But the cachet of mahogany was such that it was necessary to distinguish these “true” American species (and a few, principally African, allied members of the Meliaceae family) from other, often botanically unrelated, hardwoods sold as what we might call hyphenated mahoganies (Burma mahogany, Borneo mahogany, etc.).37 Competition over the politics of market transparency between divergent taxonomies (variously derived from trade custom and practice, properties of the timber, and botanical definition) thus produced some inconclusive wrangling lasting from the 1920s through to congressional hearings in 1963.38

  Alongside this legislative agenda, the industry demonstrated a facility for conjuring a potent mahogany imaginary. In a series of publications that span the first half of the century, the tree and its timber are skillfully placed center stage in a narrative of tropical empire that enhances the accomplishment of the purchaser of drawing-room furniture. Deep in the intimacy of the home, resplendent from the knife, the feminized king is offered explicitly as a material testimony to the subjection of colonial nature.39

  Whether or not consumers invested in its penny-novel plotting of provenance, the industry had a story to sell. “Mahogany hunting,” wrote William Payson in 1926, “is almost as much of an adventure as big game hunting”:

  The work of finding and felling the trees in their native jungles and of shipping the logs to the world’s markets is still an enterprise scarcely less primitive than in the days when the mariners of Cortez and Raleigh first came upon this sovereign timber three hundred years ago in the wilds of tropical America.40

  The outsize plates in Payson’s book detail the perils of the jungle logging expedition, dramatically placing pith-helmeted European timber merchants—as if in postcards home—among bare-chested natives, towering trees, and enormous logpiles. The images show a modernized industry with rail links, customs posts, and heavy equipment. But though proud of colonial accomplishments, Payson cautions the reader against these signs of contemporaneity:

  This lovely commode is an original design in the style of the creators of furniture fashions of the late eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries. Like the other pieces shown, it can be fashioned from the wood of the famous log and suitably used for hallway, living or dining rooms

  One of the main reasons why the colour and romance of mahogany logging still sur
vive wherever it is undertaken and why the adventure is still primitive and frequently even dangerous, lies in the fact that what might be termed the mahogany frontier has steadily receded, ever necessitating a deeper penetration into the bush on the part of the mahogany hunter. As the timber near the coasts and navigable rivers has gradually been cut away new trails have had to be blazed further and further into the tropical forests. The work thus constantly requires pioneer effort.41

  Still a charismatic species, mahogany is today a key emblem for environmental mobilization. But it is clear that the tree and its timber have long been implicated in other types of world-making enterprises. Mahogany was there so often in those formative spaces of metropolitan history, holding things together and keeping them afloat: the piety of the early New World cathedrals, the capture and breakup of the Spanish Armada, the grandeur of Philip II’s Escorial, the elegance of Chippendale, the swiftness of the PT attack boats in the Second World War. The species’ particular symbolic capital is deeply tied to the successful discursive work of the logging and furniture industries, to the stories that confer distinction and value and that—acknowledged or not—continue to underwrite the affect the tree commands. This is yet one more entanglement of conservation with the realpolitik of nature; one more site at which the unfolding histories of environmental governance condense and converge; one more ground prepared for pragmatic alliance.42

  IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE WALKING THROUGH A FOREST

  Imagine that you are walking through a forest of interarticulated branches. Some are covered with ice or snow, and the sun melts their touching tips to reveal space between. Some are so thickly brambled they seem solid; others are oddly angular in nature, like esplanaded trees.

  Some of the trees are wild, some have been cultivated. Some are old and gnarled, and some are tiny shoots; some of the old ones are nearly dead, others show green leaves….

  Your job is to describe this forest. You may write a basic manual of forestry, or paint a landscape, compose an opera, or improve the maps used throughout. What will your product look like? Who will use it?

  —Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star43

  By July, the mahogany fruits are falling in Fazendinha. Large, pendulous, pear-shaped, and woody, they burst open like stars and the long, elegant seeds break free and spin, scattering downwind, burying themselves in the forest floor.

  Monday to Saturday at this time of year, Paul and his field crew—Luiz, Jaime, Ana, Paulo, Gato, and Mandioca—leave camp early, when the wet of the morning still makes you shiver, and drive the pickup out to one of the talhões. Paul has allocated tasks the night before in conversation with Luiz or Jaime, and all is subdued and businesslike.

  After three years of concentrated activity, this is going to be a short field season for Paul. A fourth year’s data is something of a coup, providing an exceptional longitudinal depth to what is already, with over 600 subject trees, the largest study of neotropical mahogany in progress. Armed with maps that locate each tree in the talhão, the crew sets about recording growth increments, fruit and seed production, mortality, and phenological behavior (the timing of leaf-flush and reproductive activity). Although this is the central piece of the Project, there are numerous supplementary studies in place, some of which involve researchers with other specializations: comparative treatment plots manipulating light, moisture, and nutrients to simulate specific types of disturbance; ongoing measures of climate and water table; regular monitoring of the effects of pests and vines; and detailed investigation of both pollination mechanisms and population genetics.

  Not only year on year, but day by day and hour by hour, this field recording of growth and reproduction is profoundly repetitive work. Efforts are concentrated in talhões 1–6, with the most comprehensive data collected in 2, 3, and 4. All live mahogany trees in these 1,100 hectares have been mapped using a compass, clinometer, distance tape, and machete. All stumps and dead stems also—standing and fallen—and all the streams too. Imagine the labor involved.

  Unsurprisingly, the map is the foundational technology of the Project, an artifact that bears a double burden of visibility, structuring the meaning of this forest both here, as we trudge along these many miles of trails, and there, as Paul hawks the FMP around offices and seminar rooms, searching now for backers and buyers. Without the map, this forest could neither leave Pará (at least not in one piece!) nor stay here—and its prospects of avoiding the logger’s saw would be slim indeed.

  Even with the map, though, the gap between ways of knowing (between the forest and the data table) is often too wide and obstructed for easy translation.44 As we clumsily negotiate these abundantly overgrown trails, our enforced dependence on this elaborate, GIS-rich, multicolored image of keyed and differentiated objects-in-space points to a quirky paradox in the mimetics of cartography. The inability of a map to offer anything more than traces of an archaic landscape demands an awareness of the agency of the non-human—something already appreciated by experienced forest-walkers exasperatingly unable to locate a registered but obstinate tree on a numbered path. Mahogany likes to grow apart, at low densities, spread wide across the landscape. The trees enforce a lot of walking, and a lot of map-reading in vegetation thickly matted with bamboo and sawgrass, growing back straggly and almost impenetrable after logging and fire. There are no hill tops, no open fields, no prospect. Moreover, everything moves in a forest, although you need a static scale to make this apparent. “Trees,” Paul tells me as we struggle on, “are very active creatures.” And, imperceptibly but decisively, so are vines, herbaceous understory, streambanks, and decomposers.

  July days follow a similar pattern. We are here to measure. The map leads from mahogany to mahogany, orienting us to the trails. At each tree, a tableau vivant forms: Jaime and Luiz circle the stem with the steel measuring tape and read off at three heights: 160 centimeters, 130 centimeters (dbh), and 100 centimeters. Paulo and Paul stand to the side, peering up through binoculars, counting fruit capsules and making a judgment as to the tree’s phenological status.45 The others—Mandioca and Gato—are bent over, scratching in the leaf litter with their machetes, searching for fallen fruit capsule pericarps and seeds, or else ahead on the trail, locating and reopening our route. Ana—yes, the same Ana of the Bleeding Heart—sitting or leaning on a stump, takes it all down on her clipboard. By the end of the day, upwards of seventy-five trees have been recorded like this and close to 25 kilometers of forest walked.

  This year’s measurements serve to verify those of the previous year. As she enters the new data, Ana compares them with the old, checking for anomalies and occasionally revising the earlier figures to bring them into line. The smaller trees are easier and measurements more accurate. The few big trees still here require makeshift wooden scaffolds and much leaning and reaching across tall buttresses. Many of them have uneven, callused trunks on which the measure refuses to lie flat, or vines that may or may not get hacked away. Very quickly I become fascinated by the infiltration of imprecision and the arbitrariness of numerical coding. Struggling along in this difficult terrain, the moods of the team members shift with hunger and thirst, the intimate pleasures of conversation and shared forest fruits, the increasing tiredness and boredom, and, often, a final, spirited sprint to the finish. As moods vary, so does attention to detail. I assiduously note the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which the softnesses of biological contours become bludgeoned into integers. Yet this analytic soon seems far too obvious. And unhelpful, as the last thing I want is to present this impressive Project as an untrustworthy product of an anomalous “bad science.”

  Nevertheless, an important politics is held in the gap between the utopia of methodological purity and the awkward realities of field practice, a politics that can be found well beyond the FMP. There are, for instance, the irresistible imperatives to data precision, underwritten by anxieties about the relatively low scientific status of ecology.46 One important example in the context of project design is experimental replicat
ion.47 Although a primary disciplinary necessity, replication, Paul explains to me, is often “silly” in a field of this type. This, of course, does not mean he considers it valueless. In fact, he puts tremendous energy into its pursuit. For the sake of replication, he works at three separate sites in south Pará in addition to Fazendinha, tracks the seasonal migrations of deepsoil water across two slopes rather than one, and carries out inventories at four paired top- and bottomslope plots, creating the annual task of measuring an additional 2,500 trees. The difficulty lies in both the inability of replication to absorb variability effectively, and in the porosity of surveillance and control. It is not that replications are unnecessary, but that they are inadequate. They are demanded by an appreciation of the extraordinary heterogeneity of this landscape, yet this same variability produces two significant problems. In the first place, there seems to be no way of truly establishing the identity between distinct experimental units; and, in the second, the basis on which the specific number of replicates is determined involves a decided arbitrariness—and is often dictated by the everyday logic of logistical imperative.48 Nevertheless, precision’s powerful rhetoric arbitrates the Project’s legitimacy, and methodology provides the key focus of the critical interrogation to which the professional review process subjects Paul’s reports and papers.49