Next time you walk through a forest, look down. A city lies under your feet. If you were somehow to descend into the earth, you would find yo...
"I might think about the plantation as an ecological form. Donna Haraway came up with the word “Plantationocene” to describe the world that’s been created by this kind of violent ecological simplification. You might think of New World plantations after the invasion of Europeans as the model, where you had displaced, coerced, and violently brought-in labor, and displaced, coerced, and violently disciplined plants. You put these together, and all kinds of terrifying ecological effects are created. One of the ecological effects is the ability to get a profit for distant investors who don’t have to see what a mess they’re making on the ground. The plantation also nurtures another ecology—it becomes a nursery for all kinds of plant pathogens that spread off the plantation into the world.
That’s why we were playing with this term “Plantationocene,” because the plantation form has many effects beyond the plantation itself. A lot of scholars have argued that the plantation historically helped to create industrial capitalism. According to anthropologist Sidney Mintz, who studied the history of sugar-cane plantations in the Caribbean, factories were modeled on the disciplines of the plantation. Enslaved workers, forced into inhuman coordinations, formed a model for factory workers. According to historian Sven Beckert, the cotton plantation helped develop industrial capitalism; it generated the easy profits that allowed industrial capitalist technologies. So, the plantation is a big piece of the story, the consequences of which we’re living out today.
A lot of plants can be disciplined to react, to behave as industrial resources. For example, cotton is a perennial, but it is treated in plantations like an annual for the purposes of disciplining labor. It’s treated that way in part because of the conditions of enslavement of Africans who were brought to tend it. They were treated as machines, basically. It is under those conditions that cotton went from being one kind of plant to being a different kind of plant. So, you can see how plants can be brought into line as industrial resources."
