Taming Trees: Capital, Science, and Nature in Pacific Slope Tree Improvement

Abstract

This article traces the emergence of industrial tree improvement along the Pacific Slope of western Oregon and Washington. Anxieties about timber famine in the United States prompted research on forest genetics and Douglas-fir provenance as far back as 1913, while diminishing supplies of old-growth timber resources in this region led to tree improvement—systematic tree breeding to enhance commercially attractive characteristics—on an industrial scale beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, tree improvement has been characterized by a preponderance of co-operation among private, otherwise competitive capitalist firms, with considerable support from state agencies and from science in both research and applied settings. Pacific Slope tree improvement is explored as a case study of the social production of nature by capital and science, particularly the ways in which, in response to natural-resource constraints, the reproductive biology of forest trees has been increasingly targeted, appropriated, and subsumed as a source of industrial productivity. The general absence of exclusively private, proprietary approaches to tree improvement is discussed as a reflection of a set of particular biophysical challenges, including the “problem” of biological time. Thus, while biophysical nature is increasingly socially produced through tree improvement, the social organization of tree improvement bears the inscription of biophysical nature. The article closes with an examination of one of the main avenues by which biotechnology—including genetic engineering—is being incorporated into tree improvement. The new technological possibilities and opportunities for establishing exclusive property rights over plant varieties that biotechnology entails may lead to a more complete model of commodification in tree improvement. Some evidence of such change is already apparent. Though forestry biotechnology is subject to regulatory and wider social sanction, its advent reinforces a main theme in the article: that social and environmental change are interlocking, dialectical processes.

Key Words:

• Douglas fir region
• industrial tree improvement
• social production of nature

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Trevor Barnes, William Boyd, Gavin Bridge, Julie Guthman, Dennis Takahashi, Rachel Schurman, Juanita Sundberg, and Dick Walker for their generosity and patience in helping me to work out this argument. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful comments of three anonymous reviewers and of Roger and Jeanne Kasperson. All remaining errors are my own. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

Source: Oregon Department of Forestry (1997).

Source: National Science Foundation(1996).

1. Pomeroy used this as the title for his seminal regional historical portrait (1991), although he intended to include the region west of the Rocky Mountains, including Idaho, Utah, and Nevada. I am primarily concerned with the region west of the Cascade Range, often referred to as the “Douglas fir” region (see, e.g., Mead 1966). Nevertheless, I use the term “Pacific Slope” here in order to capture broader regional tendencies than are suggested by the species-specific connotation of the Douglas-fir region label. Note, however, that Canada is excluded from both Pomeroy's use and my own. In both cases, this is largely because of distinct institutional differences that run through the histories of the U.S. and Canadian Pacific regions, but this exclusion should by no means be considered beyond question. For a different notion of the historical geography of both the West Coast forest sector and scientific forestry in western North America, see, for example, Rajala (1998).

2. In December 1899, Frederick Weyerhaeuser of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company of Minnesota negotiated the purchase of 360,000 hectares of Washington and Oregon timberlands from the Northern Pacific Railroad, headed by Weyerhaeuser's St. Paul, MN neighbor, James J. Hill. The price was U.S.$5.4 million, or about $15 per hectare. Weyerhaeuser then bought a further 152,000 hectares in Oregon and Washington in August 1901, some at $15 per hectare and some at $12.50 hectare (Twining 1994).

3. Munger went on to become the first director of the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Forest Experiment Station in Portland, Oregon, beginning in 1924.

4. Tree improvement is the systematic breeding of forest trees for the purposes of enhancing commercially valuable traits (Daniels 1984). It bears emphasizing that notions of “superiority” and “improvement” in relation to genotypes are a commercial construction in tree improvement. That is, tree improvement refers entirely to traits perceived to be advantageous from a commodity-production standpoint, including, for instance, height and girth, but also straightness of trunk, branch density, branch angle, and others.

5. I also had the opportunity in the fall of 1997 to sit in on the annual meeting of one of the region's most important silvicultural co-operatives. This led to several interviews of attendees and to invaluable insights into the inner workings of the institution, not least its decision-making dynamics.

6. Elmar Altvater (1993) also constructs a specifically ecological notion of capitalism's contradictory tendencies, based in part on the implications of the second law of thermodynamics for the circulation of value.

7. The same may be said of research on the genetic determination of drought resistance (Ferrell and Woodward 1966).

8. The problems “stem” largely from the fact that flowering trees may be fifty to sixty feet tall, making it difficult to reach the flowers. Trees tend also to be widely spaced, meaning that each tree must be accessed individually. Once the flowers are reached, collecting the pollen is a challenge, particularly using mechanized methods. And, since it is difficult to identify the exact time when trees are in flower, spraying pollen on a receptor tree to manipulate crosses produces relatively low success rates.

9. Silen went on to work with the Forest Genetics Team of the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station, located on the campus of Oregon State University.

10. This term is Schumpeter's (1939); Martin Kenney (1998) uses it specifically to refer to the creation of new paths of capital accumulation via the commodification of biological processes enabled by biotechnology.

11. Along with Westvaco, Weyerhaeuser is a leading firm in research on somatic embryogenesis in conifers. Together, these firms accounted for thirteen of the twenty-one patents for somatic embryogenesis issued between 1989 and March 1998 (U.S. Patent Office, Patent and Trademark Center 1998). Weyerhaeuser also holds a total of nine patents related to the production of manufactured seed, a related technology for encasing the cultured embryos.

12. In November 1998, Swiss pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and biotechnology company Novartis signed an agreement with the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California-Berkeley. The deal provided the department with $25 million in funding from Novartis and access to the company's gene-sequencing and DNA resources. In return, Novartis received right of first refusal over licensing patent rights from all research conducted using the funds, and also gained two seats on a five-member departmental panel established to allocate funds to research projects. The deal was and remains highly controversial at Berkeley and in wider circles because of the degree to which it transfers to a single firm governance over research at one of America's leading publicly supported land-grant universities. This is part of a more widespread turn toward exclusive partnerships between universities (public and private) and private companies covering research funding and control over and dissemination of research results.

13. For example, in the United Kingdom in July 1999, protestors destroyed GE poplars being evaluated by AstraZeneca; in July 2000, activists destroyed what they described as GE trees planted by the Mead Corporation near Milo, Maine.