I watched the documentary
El sendero de la anaconda (The path of the anaconda, 2019) over the weekend, mere days before it's set to leave Netflix, mainly to feast my eyes on the sweet, sweet drone shots of the Colombian Amazon, not primarily down where I was, but up further north, where lie the absolutely stunning waterfalls of Jirijirimo and the massifs of Chribiquete. (The subtitles were not crooked; it's that I was taking snapshots of my computer and then I cropped the photos, etc. etc.)
The documentary went here and there, but one thing it touched on is rubber plantations, and in the story of these is the black swan event. The story goes like this:
In spite of torturing (completely literally) the local population to try to cultivate rubber commercially in the Amazon in the early years of the twentieth century, efforts were unsuccessful because of a pest of rubber trees endemic to the region. But the seeds were spirited out and taken to Southeast Asia, where successful plantations
were established--and that's where all the world's commercial rubber came from.
Come World War II, Japan conquered the area and took control of the rubber plantations. Bad news for the Allies! They were desperate for any alternative source of rubber, so they sent an ethnobotanist down there--Richard Evans Schultes, in fact, the guy who's fictionalized in
Embrace of the Serpent (review
here). They wanted Schultes to locate a specimen of rubber tree that was (a) productive and (b) resistant to the pest. And he did find one!
Meanwhile, however, the Allies had developed synthetic rubber, and that was how they supplied themselves for the rest of the war. And then after the war ... "the clonal gardens that had preserved the germ plasm that had been collected at tremendous cost of blood and treasure were cut to the ground [on the orders of the US Department of State]. The files were seized and classified. Was it some kind of crazy conspiracy? No; it was just bureaucratic idiocy. That, plus faith in the future of synthetic rubber," says Wade Davis, the film's narrator, a writer, anthropologist, and student of Schultes.
Aye but there's the ... rub. Because along came radial tires--they need natural rubber. And then, even more important, along came airplanes that fly at 30+ thousand feet. "Only natural rubber has the qualities that allow it to go from the subzero temperatures of high altitude to the shock and impact of hitting the tarmac at 250 kilometers per hour within ten minutes. And because of that we use more natural rubber than ever before."
And it all comes from Southeast Asia, from trees that are all clones of the trees grown from the original smuggled-out seeds. "A single act of biological terrorism or the accidental introduction of the spore into Southeast Asia would completely disrupt the industry."
So that's fun!
The film leaves Netflix on November 14. It's a little bit unfocused, and even though it wants to uplift an indigenous worldview, it's VERY heavy on White Guy Talking, but it does have a few local voices. Still: it's very, very beautiful.
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