Breadfruit and rubber in the movies: What might we learn?

by Richard Frazier, Ph.D.
Central Missouri State University

"You would have made an excellent historian, you have a profound contempt for facts."

Previews:

In the opening of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), Brown, the gardener from Kew, explains the mission to the future mutineers in a few short statements. In the 1962 version, Brown serves as narrator and opens the film with a prologue. He thinks to himself:

Brown: 	What could be more vital than to find and cultivate a nourishing new food that costs nothing to grow. A blessing for the poor.

The prologue is transformed quickly into dialogue as Brown encounters a group of seamen. The Bounty is being loaded in Portsmouth in December, 1787 for the voyage to Tahiti. After making an inquiry about where to sign on the ship, Brown unties a scroll of botanical drawings and records.

Seaman:	What you got there?
Brown: 	Be careful, they're agronomy records.
Seaman:	They're what?
Brown:	They're scientific records, agronomy records. They're sketches, sketches of breadfruit.
Seaman:	Breadfruit?
Seaman:	You mean where we're going bread grows on trees?
Seaman:	That's daft enough for a shipload.
Brown:	There's nothing daft about breadfruit. It's a very real food, a staple, like wheat.
Seaman:	Goofy looking wheat.
Seaman:	It's funny no one's ever heard of it.
Brown:	It's funny that no one ever heard of it. No one ever heard of the potato until Sir Francis Drake brought it from South America. It altered European economy. Breadfruit may alter it again. The West Indies Company plans to feed it to the slaves in Jamaica. If it becomes popular, they'll feed it to the world.

	After the Bounty has reached Tahiti, Brown and some of the crew are out in one of the traditional gardens looking for breadfruit specimens. One seaman makes a misidentification. As Brown corrects him, Fletcher Christian (played by Marlon Brando) successfully points to a breadfruit sapling. 
Brown comes over, touches the distinctive lobed leaf and comments:

Brown: 	Artocarpus incisus. Isn't it amazing? Such a delicate sprig with the power to feed a continent. You know there's evidence to prove that a diet of breadfruit can sustain life all by itself.

	In the opening of Red Dust (1932) the plantation owner Dennis Corson is seen walking with swift determination beside a trusted older employee in the movie set version of a Hevea plantation. The scene is presumably set in the late 1920's. They stop beside a tree of considerable girth with the bark peeled away in a pattern suggestive of rubber tapping. A small ceramic collecting cup is fixed to the bottom of the cut. 
The bark indicates that the trees used on the set are not actually Hevea. Corson lifts the cup and drinks the contents. He rolls the ostensible latex around his mouth like a wine taster, screws up his face, spits, and throws the collecting cup and contents violently on the ground.

Dennis: 	I thought so! This flow isn't worth a dime.
Mac:	I told you Guidon tapped them too young.
Dennis:	It will take them 3 years with the best of care to get them back in shape.

	The scenes change rapidly in the next few minutes of the film. Corson scolds and kicks some workers, a windstorm erupts, evening sets in, and a semi-regular riverboat arrives.  Corson and Mac find 
Guidon drunk at the dinner table when they get to the house and then discover the unexpected and unknown guest, Vantine (played by Jean Harlow), who has come from Saigon to escape some trouble with the police. As Mac and Corson sit at the table, Corson speaks condescendingly to the comic houseboy as he serves them supper. Corson only pours himself whiskey and becomes reflective:

Dennis:  Mac, did you ever want to quit?  
Mac: 	Oh, sure. I quit your old man once, and when I sobered up in Singapore, I saw an old 
	Britisher loading rubber and I turned around and came back.  
Dennis: 	The company's made me a swell offer. I could sell out pretty.  
Mac: 	But you won't. You was born smelling rubber and sweating to get it, and you'll die that way.  
Dennis: 	You think so? You think I'm going to sink my whole life in this dry rot just so the rest of the world can go around on balloon tires?  
Mac: 	Sure you will.  
Dennis: 	Who says so? Why should I spend the rest of my days worrying about guys like Guidon, kicking a herd of crawling coolies around, fighting fever, swallowing dust one month, wading in mud the next just so some old lady can take a hot water bottle to bed with her.
Mac: 	Yeah, and just as long as there's one baby to suck on a rubber nipple.

Short subjects:

	When I was in the sixth grade on the eve of what we thought was the Apocalypse, we were taken to the film room of our red brick schoolhouse. The aim was not to hear the promise of the nucleus but rather to view old scratched black and white images of forest people sputtering through the very latest in audiovisual hardware. These half-dressed women of the Amazon basin were squeezing grated tubers of manioc in some fibrous contraption. (Manihot esculenta or manioc is also known as tapioca, cassava, yuca, mandioca, ubi kayu, etc. in various countries around the tropical world.)  The narrator made his comments with the same avuncular calm used to report the aborted invasions of far-off tropical isles or the kidnappings of national heroes of newly independent African nations or assassinations or the price of soybeans and winter wheat on the noon report. What he actually explained was that such primitive technology had to be used to render the plant product not poisonous.

	A summer before, my mates and I hung out on the movie set of Roger Corman's only work of social commentary (The Intruder, 1961, aka Shame). Before he was Captain Kirk, William Shatner visited our small community on the edge of the American South, as Adam Cramer, whose mission was to organize whites against the efforts of African Americans to integrate the public schools. All I wanted to do was get a part in the movie. We ran errands, did chores, and pestered the movie people to death to give us parts. They must have thought us as onerous as the mosquitoes that still lingered on in what had been a vast forest in the part of the state called Swampeast Missouri. I am startled now when I watch the film, caught between nostalgic recognition of those who did manage to get parts and painful disgust at the realities of a time barely understood by me and hastily sketched in a low budget movie. 

	That same summer a cousin and I spent several weeks with an aunt and uncle in San Antonio, 
Texas. Our uncle was assigned to the Strategic Air Command. Of the few things I remember was a visit to the shooting location of a favorite film, The Alamo (1960). In fact, we had visited the "real" Alamo downtown and were greatly disappointed that it had not matched our own film-engendered imagination. 
We were only satisfied after a trip to the filming site.

Home movies:

	I was not sure what the point was then to hearing about rainforest people while we sat in schools in southern Missouri named for literary characters like Mark Twain and Eugene Field. During this period there were sand bags and rations that we saw during bomb drills to the basement. My father had dug a fallout shelter in the backyard. I am sure that somewhere in Cuba at that time someone was digging a heap to plant manioc. Columbus may have thought Cuba was Japan; in the Caribbean he had eaten bread that he called after the local name, casabe'. The recipe for the bread was the first one brought to Europe from the 
Americas. (Sokolov, 1992) The missiles were never launched; Cuba was not invaded. In junior high where the building was named after some local school administrator from the past, we were the first to participate in a racially integrated school.  The African American students who came had left a building named for a president. The events, too, could be considered part of the great chain of consequences precipitated by Columbus' landfall. While we in the American South had been segregated scholastically, we shared gastronomically in a common cuisine shaped by the traditions of African and European kitchens and foodstuffs from both the old and new worlds. I grew up with stewed greens, cornbread, fried fish and hush puppies, black-eyed peas, okra, sweet potatoes, and barbecue. Occasionally there was tapioca pudding, usually instant.

	Years later, I found myself in a village in West Africa at the end of the road. Living the small town life was not so unfamiliar; everyone knew or wanted to know everyone else's business. And there was a natural but unexpected politeness and neighborly concern. Agriculture was, of course, life.  Human affairs revolved around the rhythms and concerns of farming and food.  In the cycle of greetings, one might inquire, "Have you eaten food today?" It was understood that food was rice.  The daily rice meal was topped by a palm oil stew, seasoned with onions, chilis, and dried fish, and thickened with a vegetable base, like peanut paste, sweet potato leaves, pumpkin, eggplant, fern tips, other greens, or the ubiquitous cassava leaves. Sometimes the dish was supplemented with animal protein of diverse origin. In the Krio language of Sierra Leone, a stew for rice is called plasas, a contraction of 'palaver sauce', so named because all the ingredients are shouting with one another to be heard. I must have eaten cassava leaf on rice almost every day for two years. Occasionally, we had boiled cassava root, or as a special treat, a fermented dough-like food called fufu. Fufu was most often accompanied with okra stew, a close cousin of Louisiana gumbo. 
Everyone laughed how a fufu meal demanded a nap for desert. At one bus stop on the main road to 
Freetown, the capital, hawkers sold fried fish served on a flat tortilla-like bread made from cassava root flour.
	One of the images I have of my time in Sierra Leone was taken in Shenge, a coastal town in Shebro country. Some of the family names in the area sound English—Coker, Tucker, Caulker, and so on—for the area had been an established trading post. A small island sits near the coast and houses the remains of a fortress that once held slaves bound for the Americas. We stayed in a house rented for Peace Corps volunteers right on the beach during our visits. One morning we happened to find and dig up an old cannon from the sand. It was too corroded to yield easy identification, but it fired our imaginations. (A comparable occasion came after a day on Goree Island, site of a more notorious slave fort, near Dakar. That tropical evening in the courtyard of the colonial hotel, someone was playing a recording of Etta James singing "Sail Away" by Randy Newman.) Later in the day, we photographed an old Sierra Leonean man, eyes clouded with cataracts, who was peeling a slightly green breadfruit for us. We fried breadfruit chips in freshly extracted coconut oil. The tropical fruit was poignantly delicious, the corroded cannon rested nearby.

	The student work that appears in another section of this paper was collected during my time as a science teacher in Singapore at a school for expatriate children. When I first moved to Singapore, I was surprised at seeing cassava growing wild along highways, in abandoned gardens, at the edge of the forest reserves. One Thanksgiving (the American holiday) while I was marooned by floods in a settlement of Orang Asli (people of the place) on the edge of one of the last great expanses of Malayan rainforest where a few tiger, rhinoceros, and elephant still roam, we ate boiled cassava root and 'well-aged' mousedeer. Half a world away from its original home in the neotropics, cassava, manioc, tapioca, yuca, ubi kayu was being consumed at the edge of the world's oldest virgin rainforest. It began to dawn on me that there were significant questions about the plants that are coupled to human lives. How had the tapioca, for example gotten to the edge of the Endau-Rompin forest? How had cassava become an 'indigenous' food in Africa? 
Who were the dispersers, the propagators? 
Much of the original forest in Malaysia has been replaced by trees from other lands—the oil palm from West Africa and the rubber from Brazil. When I would ask my students how they had come to be in 
Singapore, they would usually answer because of their parents' jobs. If I would ask why the jobs were in 
Singapore and would continue pressing why (becoming the penultimate bore), we would turn up at the end of the fifteenth century, when the products of the Malay archipelago, the cloves and the nutmeg and mace, were the fuel of the world's economy. I put forth to my expatriate students that they were in Singapore ultimately because of plants, because of the tremendous desire in Europe for the tropical products of the Indies. When Columbus set sail, the world was changed forever. Sugar came to the Caribbean; its original home had been New Guinea. Africans followed through several centuries of the horror of slavery. The economies of Europe fattened as slave labor and sugar both changed the human diet, and in a sense, financed the Industrial Revolution. (Mintz, 1986) American tapioca, manioc, cassava became established in the very regions of West and Central Africa where slaves were taken.
	What a strange notion to propose to middle schoolers, that their lives are intimately intertwined with the lives of plants! While they may have been subjected to a premature and didactic vocabulary of photosynthesis, few are foolishly susceptible to the scientific image that plants grow out of water and thin air. "Plants are boring," many students will say. My question as a teacher often centered on how students could be roused to consider the coupling of human life and the vegetable kingdom. We tried taste. We tried the bizarre and looked at plants that would lure and trap insects. A favorite middle school project involved a survey of the diet of a patch of Nepenthes gracilis, and included as part of a class presentation, an analysis and showing of Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors (1960). And in addition to proposing that plants were responsible for the presence of my students in Singapore, I would push the view past the comfortable chauvinism of human superiority and suggest that we humans have been domesticated by plants. Our role in the fabric of life is to serve the plants that have chosen us, our cultivars, to protect and propagate them. 
The ecological transformations wrought by humans on both global and local scales have many times been connected to the dispersal and enlargement of range of some plant. I would pose to my adolescent students that they consider the biological magnitude of the claim that no human culture that has ever tried sucrose has ever given it up.  How coincidental is it, for example, that the invention of the motorcar and pneumatic tire and the expansion of the Brazilian rubber to the old world came at the same time?  Cars need tires to go on roads that go deeper into the forests that are cleared to grow rubber to make tires to go on cars that go on roads deeper into forests that are cleared, and so on, until the forests are gone.  How do we know, I asked my students, that our various addictions to foods and drinks and drugs, of course, but also to products like rubber with its roads and insulated wires and even to paper are not part of the master design of plants to exploit us humans? We laugh at the hardworking ants carrying seeds or the busy bees pollinating, but are we any different?  It is interesting and perhaps very important for middle schoolers to play with points of view. Some students were disturbed by the prospect that humans may not be the masters of the web of existence. Others were invigorated by new ways of looking at the world and by new navigations of one's place in it.

	Recently, I had the privilege of spending a few days in La Selva Lacandon in Chiapas, Mexico. 
We slept in the house of the family of an important patriarch of the Lacandon, a Mayan people who had never surrendered to Europeans. I was surprised at the number of plants I could identify from having spent time in Southeast Asia in comparable settlements. In fact it would be possible to take indistinguishable photographs of forest gardens in Malaysia and Mexico if the photographer were careful. The Lacandon are dwindling in number but have been described as having achieved the ultimate in sustainable tropical agriculture. (Nations, 1988) Our first meal consisted of beans and giant tortillas made from yuca (or manioc, cassava, tapioca, etc.). We also visited Palenque, a site of splendid Mayan ruins set in tropical forest, a wonderful place to watch birds and plants. On the site is a ball court where a game was played with balls made from the latex of various plants. Columbus took the rubber balls back to Europe just as he did the recipe for and samples of manioc bread. In the courtyard between several of the important temples at Palenque grows a breadfruit tree, shading the tourists and standing as quiet witness to magnificent journeys that have changed the earth forever.

Titles: 

	"What we know and how we know it" is the conference theme under which this paper has been submitted. The introduction to the theme explains admonishingly that, "It is time to take back the ball, to weigh in on what we know best, to assume control again of this enterprise within which we work and live." Deep epistemological questions are raised in the introduction, questions that could challenge the very premise of this paper. But the metaphor of taking the ball back does have intertwined cultural links to objects and substances relevant to the researches from which this paper emerges. A major theme involves the movement of plants and people and the ideas and consequences such movement engenders.  

	"Breadfruit and rubber in the movies: What might we learn?" is the title of this paper. The plants are exemplars. They represent new and old world species engaged in mutual movement and exploitation with humans. The specific story of an attempt to transfer the breadfruit (Artocarpus atilis) occupies a well-known niche in stories about the sea, loyalty, mutiny, justice, and temptation. The story has been rendered in film five times. Four versions are still available on videotape. They are In the wake of the Bounty 
(1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and The Bounty (1984). Four other movies involve the premier rubber plant, Hevea brasiliensis. Two of the movies are set in the Amazon basin where the Hevea species is native. They are Fitzcarraldo (1982) and The Burning Season (1994) and are set respectively during the rubber boom of the early 1900's and the devastating stages of tropical deforestation during the 1980's. Fitzcarraldo is the name of the main (fictional) character who dreams of bringing opera to the jungle and of striking it rich by exploiting inaccessible forest of its latex. The Burning 
Season tells a version of the 'true' story of Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper and union organizer. Mendes has become a hero for those who promote rainforest conservation through the sustainable extraction of jungle products. The forest retains its value as it is instead of being transformed through fire to plantation and pasture.  The other two rubber movies are set in Indochina. Red Dust (1932) takes place during the second generation of rubber planting in the region. Reference is made to the lead character's father setting up the plantation. Hevea was introduced into Vietnam in the early 1900's. According to Drabble's history, Rubber in Malaya (1973), only 1000 acres were devoted to the crop in French Indochina in 1908.  The 'red dust' refers to the lateritic soils of the tropics. Indochine (1992) spans a longer stretch of history from the 1930's to the 1950's and ends with the expulsion of the French from Viet Nam. Oddly, World War II makes no appearance in the film. In every movie the plants play an important role though the portrayals may range from explicit scene to tacit subtext. In places the plants used for filming are authentic, in others they are replaced with other species or artificial models. In all the rubber movies, the main characters are present at scenes of latex extraction and/or processing.
	
The title of the session in which this paper is included is "Young peoples thinking, community-based learning and the development of environmental responsibility." Allusions to how young people think appear in this paper at several points. Some recollections of film-based images, stories, and places have already been mentioned. The recollections suggest that film can be a potent medium for raising questions and provoking both investigation and reflection. My own motivation to explore the intertwined history of plants and people arises from long experience working with young people and from an effort to comprehend the sweep of history in the context of the biosphere and noősphere. (Crosby, 1972, 1986; Vernadsky, 1945). Writings composed by young people will be offered as examples of how the themes and questions derived from exploring 'breadfruit and rubber in the movies' can lead to new awareness and perhaps to new ways of thinking. I have most often used the 1962 version of the Bounty story in my science classes to raise questions about the role of plants in human history.
	Community-based learning does stand along side the themes and questions explored in the movies. All of the students, whose writngs are used as examples, had wandered in the patches of forest and abandoned plantation in Singapore, visited Malay farms, forests, oil palm and rubber plantations, and the historical spice entrepot of Malacca, surveyed local markets for plant products, interviewed adults of various backgrounds for their knowledge of plant use and lore, and studied a school forest that had a good stand of Jakfruit (Artocarpus heterophylla). Various students had planted Hevea in the school forest from seeds collected on outings in the neighborhood. A Cub Scout den acquired and planted a breadfruit tree in the schoolyard. 
	No claim is made here that the path is easy to follow from plants in the movies to environmental responsibility. A multipli-faceted emphasis on important plants in history and culture in our school program did seem to result for the students involved in an increased ability to recognize plants in various settings. 
During my time at the school, an environmental club got started and grew into one of the largest and most active of all student organizations. The club has a program that includes recycling and environmental education in the school and community projects like the development and adoption of a nature trail for the visually impaired in a national park. I remember a core group of students during the early stages of the club being captivated by Chico Mendes' story. The Burning Season is certainly not the root of the activism of the students and club, but the climate of the school did involve attention to the local environment, growing knowledge of the importance of plants in the lives and history of people, and recognition of the connections between local and global issues and events.
	 
Credits:
	
	Where to begin? Perhaps with a few important plants in the background. I grew up where I did because of the boll weevil. My grandfather grew and ginned cotton and moved his family from further south to the delta land in southeastern Missouri to establish a cotton business where the weevil could not survive the winters, but a cotton crop could flourish in the summers that were sufficiently long and hot. My connections to Africa, as one of European descent, began with a childhood in a racially segregated society. In an intense two years teaching in rural West Africa, I noticed similarities between the cuisines of my youth and of my hosts. The realization that the Southern cooking of which we were so proud had African roots was real revelation. My hosts mirrored pride in talking about peanut butter stew (groundnut stew), sweet potato leaf sauce, cassava leaf sauce, cassava root (gari, fufu, etc.), and the ubiquitous chili peppers. 
Not one of my Sierra Leonean friends could fathom that these foods of nostalgia and ethnic-national pride were mostly likely brought to Africa from the New World by slave traders. 
	What plants required the African slave trade in the New World if not cotton and sugar? In the rice growing regions of the Carolinas, slaves from Sierra Leone were particularly sought for their expertise  and knowledge of rice growing. I first ate breadfruit in remote Sierra Leone. I first walked through a rubber plantation (and did not know it) in Sierra Leone.
	I was pleasantly surprised when I recognized cassava growing in Singapore. Surprised that it was growing there and surprised that I recognized it (after not having seen it for many years). When I asked my 
Singaporean colleagues about it, they would giggle shyly, and say that it was Occupation Food. During the war, the Japanese took all the rice and left the citizens to forage for themselves. Cassava is easy to grow. I have used it extensively as a species for study in my science classes.
	During an attempt to acknowledge the 500th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage, colleagues and I developed an all out effort to bring our students into contact with the objects of Columbus' desire. 
Malacca, a major spice entrepot conquered by the Portuguese in 1511, became the goal of an annual pilgrimage for seventh grade. Through science, social studies, and language arts we found, planted, tasted, investigated, and contemplated nutmeg, clove, pepper, cinnamon, and more. 
	Once, while lost with friends in a rubber plantation in southern Johor looking for the ruins of a 
British outpost from World War II, we found our way using a huge durian tree that stood high above the canopy of Hevea. At the base of the durian was a trail that led back to a main trail. At once, with a clarity equal to finding our way out, came a revelation of magnitude that the Malayan rainforest had been transformed into an anthropogenic, monospecific forest of a tree transported from Brazil. I had grown up in and oak-hickory swamp forest transformed into stands of soybeans, an Asian plant. The magnificent prairies of the Midwest had been transformed into prairies of wheat from Europe and the Levant. The entire flora-sphere had been transformed, and Columbus stood as a major landmark in the terrain of botanical and ecological change. 
	One of my sisters-in-law is Thai and owns and operates a wonderful Thai restaurant. We have had interesting and polite debates about the idea that chili originated in the Americas and not in Thailand. Such a thought seems incomprehensible to many Thais who are proud of their fiery cuisine.
	Coffee, cacao, corn, tea, potato, tomato, the list goes on of plants that contribute to an awareness of the coupled lives. Examples abound in terms of both emblem and essence. Plants, tasted, ingested, touched, preserved, collected, planted, admired, exploited, killed, and cursed all serve in their contribution to the idea that human history and human culture are inextricably entangled with the lives of plants.  
 
	Specific works have inspired and shaped my thinking and deserve the credit for new and sometimes 'stretched' perspectives. An author who has pioneered integration of the biological into the historical is Alfred Crosby. His works, The Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological imperialism 
(1993) provide argument and example of the very themes, questions, and perspectives to which this paper aspires.  Raymond Sokolov's essays on the history and ethnography of food during the 1980's and early 
1990's in Natural History demonstrate that attempting to understand culture through food need not be trivial and can, in fact, be profound. (see, for example, Sokolov 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993) Greg Dening's 
Mr. Bligh's Bad Language (1992) examines the story of the Bounty in a style that is engaging, reflective, wide-ranging, and provocative. His treatment of the Bounty story in the movies caught my sympathetic attention since I had already used the 1962 version with my classes. Lucile Brockway's Science and colonial expansion: The role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (1979) strongly supports the perspective that the drive for political and economic power on a global scale involved conscious exploitation of plants and that the lives of plants reciprocally shaped the politics and policies of colonialism.  A work that explicitly uses a feature movie to venture into larger, richer realms of reflection is Steven Caton's (1999) 
Lawrence of Arabia: A film's anthropology. Caton (p. 143) explains his use of the movie, "I do not mean by it anything more complicated than a narrative that can be used for didactic purposes." Caton's version of the didactic involves a variety of interpretive practices that emerge from multiple and even contradictory perspectives. Caton even weaves his own experiences in Yemen into the discussion of what we can begin to learn about anthropology, Arabia, cinematic representation, racism, history, and so on from a movie. 
	A most valuable resource is James Folsom's (2000-draft) Plant Trivia Timeline. In a concluding comment, "Pursuits not so trivial," Folsom provides support for the orientation promoted in this paper (and even admonishes us to look beyond the story of the Bounty):

The typical story of civilization will say little or nothing about plants.  History focuses on powers and potentates, on seminal events in the lives of individuals and nations, seldom acknowledging the roles of plants in the daily lives of humans, much less in great matters of economy and culture.  World history is different from a green perspective.  It started with the formation of carbon, oxygen, and other elements in the hot fury of big bangs and supernovae billions of years ago.  Anaerobic bacterial life reigned until the revolution brought about by photosystem II - the unleashing of free oxygen.  Advanced life forms, evolving in this newly oxygenated and reactive world, were aerobic.  They were not only dependent totally on photosystem II for oxygen, but like many of their anaerobic comrades, dependent on 
photosystem I and the dark reactions for fixed carbon and available energy.
The entire breathing world evolved so completely in the context of green services that ever present plants have become as unseen as air itself.  To most humans plants are static natural fixtures, growing, but somehow un-living.  The truth, from a botanical perspective, is predictably contrary.  Plants are green makers of life, utilizing the raw ingredients of a physical world, the legendary earth, air, fire, and water, to create oxygen and sugars, cells and materials, landscapes and habitats.  
This vegetable milieu underwrote the evolution of humans as hunter gatherers and then created the basis for agrarian settlement, many would say the basis of civilization.  Through many changes in culture, human nature remains unaltered.  We are all farmers and bandits, on one hand cultivating the living world to create value and life, while at the same time robbing the farm and Earth's natural resources for one-time gain. The examples and lessons that support this thesis are legion. 
But such a simple idea is not the stuff of standard history texts, and it is broader than conventional economic botany.  The wealth and benefits afforded to the animal world by the vegetable universe have indeed provided the stage and resources for human activity, but it's not all the high drama of mutiny on the Bounty.  Civilization is the story of grains: wheat, rye, rice, corn, barley, and oats.  It has turned on the value of spices and other exotic plant products, goods that fired the engines of imperialism.  Sugar cane and cotton demanded the toll of slavery.  Tall white pines masted British ships and stoked a revolution.  Tea and opium led to wars and addictions, a story played out with the return of Hong Kong to China at the end of the 20th century.  Potato famine in Ireland changed the fabric of North American society.  Far from commanding the plant world, rulers have quietly fallen victim to chance and poor stewardship.  Armies march on their stomachs, the fossil energy of coal and oil power the modern industrial world.  Plants represent much more than our daily bread and a green pharmacy; the vegetable kingdom is indeed Earth's living mantle and the mother of us all.
The TimeLine represents a search for information, for factoids, even trivia, that mark advances and turns in the relationship between plants and people, documenting the idea that plants have provided the foundations for human wealth, health, and pleasure.  Entries range from basic to whimsical, chronicling the interaction between plants and humans as well as enlivening the way we view plants.

My students, who responded to unusual ideas with creativity and youthful insight, deserve credit for finding purpose in the narratives they rewrote from new points of view. Their works will be offered later with the hope of speaking for themselves.

	Lastly, I found a source that convinces me that the stories of these plants are powerful ones and that efforts to explore the myriad truths and contradictions arising from the coupled lives of plants and humans are worthwhile. Rubber Jungle (1998) is a film about a story that appeared in film. The author-photographers had been recruited as cameramen to work on a movie about Chico Mendes. The project never materialized, but Bill Day and Terry Schwartz decided to tell Mendes' story alongside the story of rubber in Brazil. The making of the film itself, the plot, the setting and the characters became interwoven with the life of the plant, the flow of the Amazon and its tributaries, the role of rubber in the world's industry, economy, and politics, the history of Brazil, the past and future of the forest, the story of the rubber tappers, the life and work of Chico Mendes, and the various versions and consequences of other efforts to tell the story of Chico Mendes (like The Burning Season).  The film is available for shipping costs only and can be viewed on the internet. The telling is both adventurous and moral in its questioning of motive, action, and consequence on both local and global scales.  
	
Plots:
	The plots that drive the narratives in the eight films are themselves intertwined with the lives of plants, the fortune and misfortune of history, the coincidence of invention, and the aspiration, vision, despair, disappointment, bonanza, and tragedy of humans. There are plots behind the scenes, plots involving the actors, the extras, the sets, the writers, directors, cameramen, and so on. There are the plots set down in the appropriated stories, plots conflated and constrained by various points of view that are in turn shaped by promotion and contradiction.
	The Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis, A. incisus, A. incisa) and Rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), belong respectively to the Mulberry or Moraceae and the Spurge or Euphorbiaceae families. Both of these large families exhibit great diversity among species and are overwhelmingly represented by species in the tropics. There are fascinating interconnections among species and stories in these groups. For example, 
Castilla elastica is a member of Mulberry family and was an early candidate for industrial rubber. The name of the plant in lowland Ecuador is heve. The name was transferred to the species that became preeminent in the production of industrial rubber, Hevea brasiliensis. Many species of both families exude a milky latex; it is easy to see how a distinctive spot characteristic could give rise to variations in naming. 
The story of breadfruit involves a plot to find a cheap source of calories for slaves whose labor was used to concentrate the energies of Saccharum sp. into sugar and ethanol. A member of the Spurge family, Manihot 
esculenta, has become the exemplar of a famine food in the tropics. The role of cassava in the traditional cuisine of West Africa has been mentioned previously. The Portuguese undoubtedly transferred the plant from its native home to Africa and Asia as part of their efforts to control the global trade of plant products. 
The Portuguese brought African slaves to Brazil and in ironic reciprocation took cassava to Africa. A species of Manihot glaziovvii was introduced into Sri Lanka in 1877 for its latex (the same time as the transfer of Hevea brasiliensis) and proved to be economically viable. Rubber in pre-Hispanic America occupies a curious place in many cultures as the material used to make balls for a family of indigenous games. (Stern, 1949, 1966) Columbus carried a rubber ball back to Europe along with a recipe for bread made from cassava. Thus the food represented in the first European contact with the new world was from a member of the Spurge family and the rubber (most likely) from the Mulberry family. (Stern, 1949, 1966)
	The breadfruit tree occurs today throughout the tropics. The original home is thought to range from New Guinea through the vast archipelago to the west and to Micronesia in the east. The Polynesians on their migrations through the Pacific carried the breadfruit along and are surely responsible for the dispersal of the plant and for its introduction into Hawaii. (Morton, 1987) There are many representatives of the genus Artocarpus in the Malayan forests, a fact consistent with the theory of the breadfruit's original range. The distinctive lobed shape of the young leaves makes it possible for the novice to identify a member of the breadfruit family from the bewildering diversity of rainforest flora. The tree is one of the most magnificent seen in 'forest gardens' from Malaysia to Mexico. The leaves are large, lobed, and a luxuriant waxy green. The tree can grow to twenty-six meters. The fruits are borne on the tips of the branches, not exhibiting the distinctive cauliflory of the related jakfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus). (Corner, 1965) The fruit is spherical to ovoid and has a diameter up to thirty cm and a length to forty-five cm. The fruits are covered with a rind that can vary among types in color and texture. The typical breadfruit is greenish with a rough, bumpy rind. The fruit can be prepared in many ways; recipes depend on ripeness. At the earliest stage of edibility the flesh is hard, white, and starchy. The flesh eventually becomes softer and even mushy acquiring a distinctive aroma. Recipes range from frying chips, to baking, to roasting, to boiling, to fermenting. According to Morton (1987):

. . . In Samoa, seed breadfruits are skinned, washed, quartered, and left to ferment in a pit lined and covered with layers of banana and Heliconia leaves, and topped with earth and rocks. The fruits ferment for long periods, sometimes for several years, and form a pasty mass called masi. The seeds are squeezed out, the paste is wrapped in Heliconia leaves smeared with coconut cream and the product is baked for 2 hours. There is a strong, cheese-like odor, but it is much relished by the natives." 

There are two categories of breadfruit, one with seeds and one without. The seedless breadfruit presents an important plot that intersects with the story of the breadfruit in the movies. Suckers develop spontaneously from the roots of the mother tree and can be pruned. Survivability of the suckers depends on a regime of root pruning that can take several months. The time scale on which propagation occurs becomes the complicating circumstance in the story of transferring breadfruit from Tahiti aboard the Bounty. The story of the Bounty's voyage to procure breadfruit for transfer to the West Indies has been recounted and discussed ever since Bligh returned to England to face court martial and to accuse the mutineers. The fact that the story still inspires discussion, study, criticism, and revision is evidence enough of its importance. Briefly, the Royal Navy buys a ship, refurbishes it to carry plants, renames it the Bounty, and commissions William Bligh to captain.  Sir Joseph Banks promotes the mission in collusion with sugar cane planters in the West Indies. Banks and the planters recommend Bligh and David Nelson, the botanist from Kew.  Bligh, Banks, and Nelson had all sailed with Captain Cook on earlier voyages in the Pacific. 
Bligh intends to repeat Cook’s circumnavigation and directs the Bounty to Cape Horn after leaving 
Portsmouth in December, 1787. It takes ten months to reach Tahiti after a failed attempt to pass through the 
Straits of Magellan and a rerouting east past the Cape of Good Hope. The Bounty lands in Tahiti in 
October and remains until the beginning of April of 1789. The time in Tahiti is spent preparing the plants for transfer. The plot pivots on the time spent ashore, and all the film versions feature Tahiti as an exotic paradise deeply contrasted with the spartan life aboard ship. The mutiny occurs on April 28th, 1789. Bligh is cast adrift in a small boat with a group of loyal sailors. He makes a heroic voyage of nearly three thousand miles to Timor and eventually makes his way back to England. Bligh's accounts provide much of the information used in telling and retelling the stories. The mutineers take the Bounty and alternate for a few months between Tahiti and another island. By September, 1789 the Bounty has left Tahiti for the final time. Some of the mutineers have decided to remain in Tahiti and will be captured in March, 1791 and tried for mutiny back in England in September, 1792. The Bounty and crew of nine remaining mutineers and several Tahitian women and their male relatives eventually reach an uncharted island, Pitcairn, and land. 
The Bounty is burned and the group attempts to survive a difficult period of conflict and murder. Within a few years all the mutineers have died, but John Adams, who lives until 1829. Pitcairn Island today hosts a community of descendants of the Bounty. Bligh makes a second successful voyage in 1791-93 aboard the Providence and delivers breadfruit and other plants to the West Indies. 
The story has been rendered in film five times. Mutiny of the Bounty  (1916) was a silent movie, but no prints remain. In the wake of the Bounty was made by Chauvel and released in 1933. It is an interesting piece. Michael, the blind fiddler hired by Bligh to provide exercise through dancing while at sea, serves as narrator. The movie begins with a group of old sailors drinking in a pub and spinning yarns. One of the sailors makes a request, and perhaps captures an irony in the goal of finding new perspectives, "Michael, tell us the story of the Bounty; I've never heard the truth of it." Chauvel uses vignettes of the story to highlight a visit by the filmmaker to Pitcairn Island (the final destination of the mutineers). Errol Flinn plays Fletcher Christian in his first starring role. The breadfruit is not featured during the reenactments but takes its place alongside several other plants when the descendants of the mutineers demonstrate their daily lives on Pitcairn. 
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) stars Charles Laughton as Mr. Bligh and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. The 1935 version has been well received by critics. Bligh is cast as a mean spirited captain, a tyrant, and Christian as champion of a just cause. Roger Byam, a fictional character probably modeled after Peter Heywood, serves to frame the moral lesson of the movie. The movie begins with a rolling text narration. The point is made that although the mission to transfer the breadfruit failed, a new British navy emerged from the failure. The first action takes place as Christian leads a press gang into a pub to recruit the crew of the Bounty. A young wife screams, "Two years!" as the gang drags her husband away. The scene next changes to the first appearance of Sir Joseph Banks. He comforts Byam's mother, who is also concerned about the time her son will be away, with the explanation, "This is England's new venture in science, trade, and discovery." In the course of the voyage, Byam is a friend to Christian, a victim to Bligh's cruelty, and what could be called, "a good sport." Once on the island he sets about with eager determination to fulfill Sir Joseph's charge--to develop a dictionary of the Tahitian language. His informant is first the chief, Hiti Hiti, and then a lovely granddaughter or grandniece of the chief. Constant among Bounty stories are the relationships between the British sailors and the Tahitian maids. Byam makes enthusiastic observations on the language to Hiti Hiti while engaged in flirtation with his new love. Breadfruit suckers are potted and delivered to the ship as preparations are made with the islanders for a feast. Fish are caught in a communal trapping exercise, coconuts are grated, music, eating, and dancing ensue. Byam's role would make it seem that the stay on Tahiti revolved around his work with the dictionary. Morgan, the botanist from Kew, is portrayed in the film but delivers few lines. He sits at the captain's table, appears in a brief scene transplanting breadfruit, and informs Bligh in a cabin full of potted plants that there may not be enough water to keep them alive on the return voyage. Bligh then designs the plan to reduce the crews' water ration in order to keep the breadfruit alive.  The plants' need for water becomes the biological complication that precipitates the mutiny as conditions worsen aboard ship and are exacerbated by Bligh's cruelty.  Byam becomes victim in the mutiny plot as he disapproves of the action but stands accused by Bligh. After the mutiny, the Bounty returns to Tahiti and the mutineers are shown living in an Eden-like paradise. They sing Christmas carols at the door of Christian's hut, while a newborn swings in a hammock decorated with flowers. Christian and Byam are seen making amends as they cavort in the tropical splendor with their Tahitian mates. Suddenly, someone spots a ship and the Bounty makes a run for it. Some of the mutineers and loyalists who had remained on the Bounty choose to stay and meet the ship. The scene switches to England. In the final scenes Byam delivers a rationalization of the mutiny as he addresses the court and pits Bligh's foul acts of tyranny against Christian's sense of justice and freedom. Sir Joseph Banks appears again to plead Byam's case. Not only is the fictional character pardoned for the mutiny, but he is reinstated in a new navy where fair treatment of sailors becomes the order of the day. 
The 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty stars Trevor Howard as Bligh and Marlon Brando as Christian. The film is an extravaganza with a musical overture and interlude as well as an intermission. This is the version I first remember seeing, thrilled by the sailing and the exotic mystery of the tropical island. The film opens with a narration by Brown portrayed in this version as the gardener from Kew. A Brown was the assistant gardener under David Nelson on the historical Bounty. Brown in the 1962 telling establishes the context for the voyage. The botany of the breadfruit plays a more prominent role in the 1962 version. Brown is concerned about the dormant period. It is not clear whether he is referring to a dormancy associated with the life cycle of the adult trees or some aspect of the development of the root suckers. None of the references consulted here speak of a dormant period. Several do describe root pruning and other plant husbandry practices to prepare root suckers for transplantation. (Morgan, 1987, MacMillan, 1991-revised)  The 1962 telling is the only one that provides a logistical reason for the Bounty staying in Tahiti for several months. The time ashore permitted the sailors to engage in relationships with the local women and to indulge in the other pleasures of island life. A single potted plant takes up one significant camera shot. Despite the criticisms of the film, the affected style of Brando, the historical inaccuracies, and the attempts to remake Tahiti in Hollywood's image, the importance of the life of the breadfruit in turning the plot is commendable. Human fate and destiny play out as mythic mystery in many stories. The 1962 Mutiny of the Bounty actually features breadfruit, almost character-like, in shaping an alien destiny.
	The Bounty presents a Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) and a Christian (Mel Gibson) drawn with more inner turmoil than moral outrage. Bligh introduces the idea of a breadfruit voyage to Christian. They  appear as old friends and the proposal to sail as a bit of a lark. Christian asks, "Why take breadfruit to 
Jamaica?" Bligh makes a somewhat cavalier response, "Why? Cheap fodder for these slaves on the plantations there. Bananas are very expensive there these days."  This most recent version of the story uses a series flash backs where Bligh gives testimony at his court martial and the remembered events are played out. In some ways the characters and events in the 1984 film correspond most closely to historical characters. Bligh discusses his ideas on keeping the crew healthy in a few scenes and Christian becomes desperate in his love for the chief's daughter. The motivation for the mutiny grows acutely when Bligh reveals his plan to get to Jamaica by way of Cape Horn. Bligh had been charged to pick up other plants in 
Java, so it seems likely that the return by Cape Horn was invented by the writers/director. David Nelson speaks lines during the first meeting with the chief. In what is portrayed as a traditional gift exchange from 
King George, the chief inquires as to what the king would like. When he mentions breadfruit, Bligh brightens and asks Nelson for confirmation. In the condescending register one might use with a child, 
Nelson explains that King George is fond of gardening and would like some breadfruit plants very much. 
Nelson is shown later at the nursery where Christian has also been seen. The nursery is where encounters take place with the chief's daughter and Christian, where Christian is seen being tattooed, and where 
Christian is ordered back to the ship. Nelson is cast adrift with Bligh and other loyalists. He becomes gravely ill and offers his own flesh to the survivors. Bligh declines his offer saying they will live and die as men. The story ends with the Bounty being burned at Pitcairn. A rolling text suggests that no one really knows what happened to Christian. One legend has him returned to England. The accepted view is that he was murdered within a few years of landing on Pitcairn. 
	
 	 Hevea brasiliensis ranges throughout the Amazon basin from annually flooded ground to well-drained soils. In the native forest this rubber species (sometimes called Para rubber after the port from which it was exported) can occasionally attain heights of forty meters. In plantations, trees seldom grow taller than thirty meters. The leaves are composed of three distinct, lance shaped leaflets. Leaves are dropped seasonally. Male and female flowers are found in the same bunch. The fruits are three-lobed, woody capsules. One seed about the size of a large marble is found in each lobe. The seeds are beautiful, shiny, and mottled with brown and black. Interestingly, the capsules explode when the seeds are ripe, sending them some distance away from the parent tree. All parts of the tree contain milky latex. 
Hevea seeds were collected by several agents of the British Empire in the 1800's. Henry Wickham perpetrated the most famous case in Santarem at the mouth of the Rio Tapajoz. He was able to collect around seventy thousands seeds in a very short time and get them on a steamer for Kew Gardens. 
Legend surrounds his methods for dealing with the collectors he employed and the officials he had to appease. The genetic stock of nearly all the trees in Asia is thought to have come from Wickham's effort.  
Schultes (1990) points out that although Wickham did not select seeds from the best rubber-producing populations, "spectacular improvements have nevertheless been made in the century since domestication of the species." The intrigue and drama involved in the transfer of rubber from the Amazon to Asia rivaled that of Bligh's voyages to transfer breadfruit. However, there have been no efforts to dramatize Wickham's story. In fact there seem to be no other stories in film about sensational plant transfers.
	Unlike the breadfruit movies, the plots of the four rubber movies vary considerably from one another. However, there are common elements. In each plot human aspirations revolve around the life of the rubber trees and are swept up in the events of history. In each movie at least one scene is devoted to tapping and processing. A main character actually touches the latex. Full casts of extras serve as workers; their oppression is presented as a taken for granted part of the systems involved in rubber economy. Red Dust contrasts wild nature with the transformation of the tropical forest into plantation. Both Fitzcarraldo and The Burning Season pit the human desire to extract wealth from the forest against wildness. In The Burning Season the forest is threatened by transformation into pasture for beef. Indochine contrasts the wealth derived from colonial economies like rubber with the oppression that leads to rebellion by the local people. While the stories of the Bounty recount a specific event in the history of colonial plant transfers, the four rubber movies span the old and new worlds and the period of ecological change from the end of the 1800's to today. 
	Fitzcarraldo is set in the Amazon basin inside Peru. The opening scene shows Brian Sweeney  
Fitzgerald  (played by Klaus Kinski) making an epic journey down the river to catch a legendary (and apparently fictional) performance of Enrico Caruso in the ostentatious opera house in Manaus. The movie takes place at the end of the 19th century during one of the boom cycles in the wild rubber trade. The demand for rubber had increased dramatically since the 1850's. The market for wild rubber would soon change however as plantation rubber in Asia, derived from seeds taken out of the Amazon in 1877, would come into production almost simultaneously with the advent of Ford's Model T. Fitzgerald is typical of the foreign nationals who deigned to collaborate in various schemes with local businessmen. His failed efforts have involved a trans-Andean railway and ice production in the jungle. His real dream is to build an opera house (modeled after the one in Manaus—built by the rubber barons) in the far reaches of the Amazon. He is, to say the least, obsessed and beguiled by opera. Several dramatic scenes show Fitzgerald wielding an opera-playing phonograph like a weapon to win over investors and to calm distrustful forest people. The plot revolves around the distribution of Hevea brasiliensis in particular watersheds. A valuable and untapped stand of trees exists along a river made inaccessible by fierce rapids and falls. Fitzgerald figures he can strike it rich if he can get a steam boat into the valley and then collect the wild latex. A second navigable river bends close to the promising drainage. Fitzgerald's scheme would take the boat he has bought on borrowed money from investors and from his friend (the madam of a brothel played by Claudia Cardinale) over the divide between the two rivers. Stations would be built on both rivers near the bend, and humans, pack animals, and eventually machines would carry the rubber over the pass. The scheme is attempted and the boat actually is carried over the divide between the two rivers only to run downstream out of control. Fitzgerald returns to his starting point in mixed triumph having succeeded in the outline of his scheme but having failed in the outcome. The filming is dramatic and beautiful, shot on location in the Amazonian rainforest, and enhanced by ethereal and majestic music. Local people are used as extras to carry the boat. The stories of the filming sound as adventurous and tragic as the movie itself. There was illness, death, cultural incident, cost overruns, anger, and mixed reviews. In the one scene in the movie where Fitzgerald observes the rubber tree, he finds a tree being tapped in a herringbone pattern. The 
tapper's knife looks like those used today on Malaysian plantations. The tapping pattern is very similar to one developed by Ridley in Singapore. (Wright, 1906; Ng, 1985) According to Wright, "The native collectors in the uncultivated forests of Brazil use an axe-like implement, with which a heavy blow can be inflicted and all the tissues from the bark to the cambium be cut in one stroke." (p. 52) 
	Red Dust was made in 1932 and set on a rubber plantation in French Indochina. The time period must be close to that of the filming. The main character refers to his father and mother in developing the plantation. Rubber was introduced into Vietnam and Cambodia (French Indochina) in the early 1900's. 
Michelin began investing in the plantation agriculture in 1906. Red Dust and The Burning Season thus share the characteristic of telling their stories in contemporary settings. Denis Corson, played by Clark 
Gable, is cast against Jean Harlow who plays Vantine, a prostitute on the run from the Saigon police. Mary Astor plays Barbara Willis, the wife of a novice manager. Hollywood held the plot in greater esteem than the setting as Gable was cast in a remake called Magombo that was set in Africa. The complication turns on Corson's falling in love with his new employee's wife while Vantine falls in love with Corson. 
Corson sends Gary Willis out on a difficult, contrived task, so that time can be spent with Barbara. Vantine expresses her disapproval with great wit, but lacks status because of her history. Corson eventually changes his mind just in time to salvage the Willis' marriage with Gary none the wiser. Vantine and Corson seal their relationship as the movie ends. The role of rubber in the movie is set in the early dialogue that introduces this paper. Corson tastes latex, complains that the trees were tapped too young, kicks and curses at the coolies. Later on a trip around the plantation, Corson demonstrates the coagulation of rubber by adding (acetic acid?) to the raw latex. The effort to provide authentic processes is interesting in that the movie must have been filmed on the studio lot. The trees are obviously not Hevea. The pre-climax occurs when Corson and Willis are sitting in a tree stand waiting for a tiger. The shooting of a tiger is presented as casually as the way Gable's character degrades the Asian workers. What may be more authentic than the set is the orientation toward wild nature and different people reflective of the times.   
Indochine follows Fitzcarraldo and Red Dust in the period in which the film is set and extends into the 1950's. In the film, Eliane Devries (Catherine Deneuve) adopts the daughter Camille (Lin Dam Phan) of her Vietnamese friends who had died in a plane crash. With the adoption she receives the holdings of her friends, and the plantation she and her father then own is one of the largest in French Indochina. The first scene must be set in the 1930's. The plot resumes after Camille has become a teenager. What seems to be a fault of the film is the absence of any reference to World War II. French Indochina was first administered by the Vichy government and in essence capitulated to the Japanese. Resistance to the Japanese was fostered by alliances between the Communist Chinese and the Vietnamese. Allied forces also cooperated in supporting the resistance. The movie turns on a series of plots involving love between Eliane and a young naval officer, Jean-Baptiste Le Guin (Vincent Perez), and later between Camille and Jean-Baptiste. At the same time France is losing hold on the colony. In an eerie and even odd scene, tappers move in the predawn to their trees. A segment shows a cut being made with a knife just like that used in Fitzcarraldo. Next, someone is being beaten. The camera turns to the strikingly beautiful Deneuve who is lecturing the tapper she has just beaten for trying to desert his job. He admits in acquiescence to her cool tirade, that she is in fact his mother and father. Deneuve's character must be meant to represent France and her daughter, Vietnam striving for independence. Before the affair has begun with Jean-Baptiste, Camille asks her mother what it is like to love. Camille is worried about her boyfriend's upcoming trip to France and fears that he will forget her because of French girls. She asks her mother if all French girls are so beautiful. 
Eliane answers that she is not really French, someone who has grown up only tasting apples. Rather, she is 
Asian, "a mango." Eliane begins an affair with the younger Jean-Baptiste. It ends badly and through a shooting incident on the street, Jean-Baptiste rescues and meets Camille. Camille becomes smitten. Eliane is horrified and through her connections has Jean-Baptiste reassigned to a remote post in the north. Camille is forced to marry a childhood friend under the pressure of the mothers. Camille and her husband conspire to deceive their parents and arrange for Camille to try to find Jean-Baptiste. On the journey Camille learns about the Vietnam hidden from her by colonial privilege. When she finally finds Jean-Baptiste, she has been ensconced in a holding pen for laborers to be picked and bought by plantation owners with the sanction of the colonial government. At the moment she and Jean-Baptiste see each other, she finds that the family who have befriended her have all been tortured and executed. She reaches the breaking point and shoots another naval officer. Jean-Baptiste makes his choice and takes Camille on another journey of escape. They are befriended by the new anti-colonial resistance and given refuge and hiding. Camille has become pregnant. After the child is born, they are asked to leave and attempt to make passage to China. Along the way, while under the guise of a Chinese Opera troupe, they are intercepted by French soldiers. Jean-Baptiste is captured with his son, and Camille escapes to become a famed freedom fighter. Jean-Baptiste is returned to Saigon and is interrogated. He gives his son to Eliane for care, and for the second time in her life she becomes mother to a child who is not her own. Jean-Baptiste dies either from assassination (the communists or the French) or suicide. The movie ends as Eliane takes her grandson to Geneva to see his mother for the first time. She is a member of the peace talks that will end French colonial rule in Indochina. The timeframe is tight for Camille to be adopted at three or four in 1930, to give birth to a son, and to have the son reach adolescence by 1954. In the film rubber is clearly the source of Eliane's wealth and power though her beauty and will are positioned to make Camille's radical conversion bittersweet as well as ironic. A favorite scene involves Deneuve tapping a rubber tree with deep nostalgia. She uses a knife just like the one used in Fitzcarraldo. 
In the first scenes of The Burning Season a young Chico Mendes goes with his father to watch him sell the bundle of smoked wild rubber to the local buying agent. Coincidentally, a new face appears at the depot and observes the transaction. The agent purposely records a lower weight than actual and then proceeds to deduct expenses that had been ‘loaned’ to Mendes’ father. In the end he receives only a pittance for the forest product. The stranger strikes up a conversation and a deal with Chico. In exchange for learning to find the wild rubber trees and tap them, the stranger will teach Chico to read. After spending some time with the Mendes’ family, the stranger is dragged out in front of rubber tapping community and set on fire by the rubber barons to teach the tappers a lesson. The stranger had been trying to organize the workers. The scene shifts to Chico Mendes as an adult and his growing involvement in the labor movement. He assumes a leadership role after Wilson Penheiro, another organizer, is assassinated. Mendes advocates non-violent methods and negotiation. These methods are tested by brutal beatings and killings at the hands of local ‘pistoleros’, hired by ranchers and landowners, and even government soldiers. In the meantime, rich businessmen and politicians want a road built through the area and offer a local rancher land in exchange for his ‘help’ in promoting the road. The rubber tappers see the road as a threat to the sustainability of the rubber trees as forest will inevitably be transformed into pasture for cattle. Mendes receives the focus and attention of an academic (who has been studying the rubber tappers) and an environmental cinematographer. Mendes is introduced to the world as a kind of worker-ecologist, a champion of the rainforest. While Mendes is not totally confident with such an image, he uses the fame and attention to fashion an agreement with a state official to designate a considerable section of forest as an extractive reserve with protection into perpetuity. At the height of his success, Mendes is gunned down by the son of the rancher who felt betrayed by the deal made earlier with the powerful politicians and businessmen. The film ends with a rolling text describing the arrest of the rancher and his son and their subsequent escape.  

Settings:

The eight films are set in locations and periods that exemplify the remarkable interaction of the intimately local with the profoundly global. The Bounty stories link the world through the sailing vessels that were miniscule in size when compared to the oceans of the world, but magnificent in effect when the consequences of plant and animal transfers are considered. Great Britain, Tahiti, Timor, Pitcairn, and Jamaica are connected in the Bounty’s mission and result. In the wake of the Bounty was filmed on location in Tahiti and Pitcairn. Chauvel, the director, claimed that his was the first cine camera used on Pitcairn. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) was filmed largely on Catalina Island, California. 	Background scenes were made later in Tahiti. For the scenes with breadfruit in Catalina, models were used. While Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) was made on location in Tahiti, the natural black sand was covered with white sand from New Jersey. The authenticity of the setting was made doubly authentic by the effort to transport one part of the world (literally) to the other. The Bounty includes Bligh’s near miraculous arrival in civilized Timor and having survived the vicissitudes of the ocean and inhospitable islands. Ironies of setting can proliferate with recent events in Timor or with movies from recent times like The thin red line (1998) which opens with an intensely local Melanesian idyll and closes with the global and personal horror of a world war. The Beach (2000) is another recent movie where the contorted interaction between art and authenticity created an environmental controversy. Like the Tahiti of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), the Thai beach of Phi Phi Island was recreated. Indigenous beach vegetation was removed and coconut trees were planted to suit the moviemakers’ view of what moviegoers would expect to see on a tropical island. (Redden) (The story of The Beach includes a kind of plant protagonist, too, like those examined in this paper, for the external threat to the utopia full of expatriate world travelers comes from local Thais who are growing Cannabis sativa on national park land for global markets.) The transformation of islands is not the exclusive domain of Europeans (Crosby, 1986). The Polynesians have a rich tradition of colonizing and transforming the Pacific. Intimate companions on the mythic voyages of origin and dispersal were the canoe plants, of which breadfruit is a prominent member. (White, 1994; St. John and Jendrusch, n.d.) As a setting, Pitcairn represents a nexus, where the world transforming practices of Polynesians and Europeans have come together as emblem, parody, and mirror. As a vessel, the Bounty and its successor, the Providence, imitate the Polynesian canoes, down to the very plants sought and carried. (State Library of New South Wales, Plant Lists among the papers of Sir Joseph Banks concerning the Bounty and the Providence)
The rubber movies themselves suggest the dissolving symmetry between Old and New Worlds since Columbus. Vietnam is the setting for Red Dust (1932), which was actually filmed on a studio lot in Hollywood. The tapping scenes that were worked presumably for authentic color actually play like the reconstructed beaches of tropical islands. The carefully constructed set shows trees carefully cut and dripping with latex. The trees are not Hevea. Perhaps the most sobering aspect of the setting is the portrayal of the plantation workers, from the coolies who are kicked and abused by Denis Corson to the comic and bumbling houseboy who speaks a pidgin English of suspect origin. The director of Red Dust, Victor Fleming, goes on to direct Gone with the Wind (1939). The characterizations of those in the background in Fleming’s films run eerily against the three American wars in Asia that follow Red Dust and the civil rights struggles of African Americans during the latter half of the twentieth century. The rubber of Southeast Asia had started with the desire of the British to control world markets. Hevea was transported from a restricted range in the Amazon Basin and has now replaced (along with African Oil Palm) much of the vast forest that once covered Southeast Asia. The imperial model for the control of plant products in Asia had come first from the Portuguese and Spanish desire to wrest the control of the spice trade from the Arabs, and subsequently from the Dutch who sought to fashion a most brutal monopoly on cloves and nutmeg. Cloves, nutmeg and other valued spices are now produced in locations far from their original homes. The Japanese incursion into Indochina and then Malaya in World War II followed the British ideal in the sense of striving to control strategic supplies of rubber. The rationale for U.S. involvement in Vietnam centered on the “domino theory” that communists would gain control of Southeast Asian countries one by one, and would thus, capture their natural resources. 
Indochine was filmed on location in Vietnam and Malaysia. The architecture and ecology of colonialism provide the background scenery for a plot woven through with the hybrid, creole threads of cultures in conflict. Devries dominates her Vietnamese workers with a mix of paternalism and brutality. Her wealth from the control of an imported but strategic resource allows her to enjoy tropical fruits and the latest recorded music from France. She calls herself Asian but lives a life built on forced labor and expatriate ownership of land. Her Frenchness is posed alongside the ruling status of the traditional local elite. The rubber trees are filmed in romantic light, evoking a nostalgia that belies the monumental transformation of wild forest land into agricultural plantations. In the scene where Devries taps a tree, the message seems to be one of bittersweet realization of the passage of an era. Like many of the ironies running through these films, the establishment of the plantations in the first place required catastrophic disturbance. 
	Fitzcarraldo was filmed on location in the upper reaches of the Amazon. Burden of dreams: The making of Fitzcarraldo (1982) was directed by Les Blank and documents the making of the Herzog film. The drama of Fitzgerald’s outrageous plan is repeated in the making of the movie; Herzog actually employed local forest people to haul a life-sized boat over the divide between two rivers. The filming was beset with problems and tragedy as several ‘extras’ lost their lives. The forest is filmed beautifully, almost reverently, but is contrasted (again with great irony) against the passion of Fitzgerald for opera, his schemes for development and transformation—like railroads and refrigeration, and the ruthless exploitation and enormous wealth of the rubber barons. The setting of Fitzcarraldo during the rubber boom at the turn of the nineteenth century brings links to the world changing history of rubber and technology. Roger Casement, an enigmatic and controversial Irishman (like the fictional Fitzgerald), toured the very region where Fitzcarraldo was filmed in the very period in which the film was set. Casement had done much to document the unbelievably horrible story of rubber in the Congo. (Hochschild, 1998) He was sent on a similar mission into the Peruvian Amazon and discovered similar patterns of atrocity. The setting of Fitzcarraldo, especially the scenes traveling up the tropical river, seems like that of a Joseph Conrad story. Conrad’s own tales in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America paint the ironic themes of personal dreams and catastrophe, of individual courage infinitesimal in contrast with the massive power of impersonal nature, and of the terrible synergy of brutality and greed. 
	The Burning Season takes place in Xapuri in the state of Acre in the upper Amazon. The film was shot on location on a private forest reserve in the Mexican state of Veracruz. One wonders at the quest for veracity manifested in a location that is Latin (Spanish but not Portuguese) and tropical (but not Amazonian). While the forest scenery lends authenticity, there are no Hevea specimens to be found in wild Veracruz. Rubber Jungle (1998), the webcast documentary travels the Amazon to trace the complex setting in time, space, and species of the Chico Mendes story. Just as Indochine portrays the rubber trees as if they had graced the background forever, The Burning Season casts the seringueros (rubber tappers) as if they were the indigenous people and not a segment of an invading population. Rubber Jungle outlines the political, economic, and ecological ironies of the different attempts to film Chico Mendes’ story, including the essential irony that the forest in which the story was set is now cleared. 

Characters:

	The main human characters in the examples of breadfruit and rubber movies presented in this paper are all passionate in their wishes to exert power over people and plants. In the Bounty movies, Bligh orders the whip on too many occasions. In Indochine Devries uses a whip on an errant worker. Corson kicks his workers.  Roger Casement documents the use of the whip in the region where the Fitzcarraldo story takes place. The instrument of discipline and torture is strikingly parallel to the one Casement observed in the Congo. Chico Mendes views the execution by immolation of the literate stranger in his childhood. Unique in among the main characters is Chico Mendes who represents a social and economic group typically relegated to the background in the other films. Except for Mendes, none of the characters reflects on the coupling of his or her life history with the life history of the plants. While the botanists on the Bounty are properly interested in the plants, and the rubber plantation owners make a point of demonstrating hands-on involvement with their species of interest, Mendes’ character is the only one who invokes a theme of relationship through the mythical forest spirit who ‘oversees’ sustainable extraction. The historical Chico was probably more entrenched in social politics than the ecological Chico of The Burning Season. The characters of the Bounty stories and of The Burning Season have ostensible links to historical characters with liberties taken by the directors and writers. The various versions of Bligh and Christian may reflect the predilections ascribed to the intended audience as much as attempts to appreciate historical perspectives.
	What about the main botanical characters? How do the roles they play fashion the stories, affect the events, shape the lives of the other characters? In the case of the breadfruit, how did the character of its fruiting, the calories, the timing, the taste, and the display bring it into the symbiosis of disturbance, transfer, and domestication? The breadfruit kept the Bounty in Tahiti for enough months that the crew formed relationships with the local people. Christian’s relationship with his Tahitian wife certainly seemed to contribute to the fated course of the Bounty. The survival rate of breadfruit cuttings required an adequate sample size, which in turn required adequate rations of fresh water, which in turn taxed the water reserve available for the human crew.  The breadfruit had fueled the imaginations of the entrepreneurs and planters who needed to fuel the labor of African slaves who husbanded and harvested sugar. The energetics of tropical plants, the slave trade, and the industrial revolution cascade alongside the more quaintly trickling stories of symbiosis.  Did Bligh successfully steal the breadfruit on his second voyage, or had the breadfruit shown the patience of plants in recruiting Bligh for the trip?
	Hevea, from a restricted range in the Amazon basin, has come to dominate the production of natural rubber. While forest people undoubtedly harvested wild rubber well before Columbus’ landfall, Hevea is one of the world’s most recently domesticated crops. The ecological role of the valued latex from Hevea has been subject to some speculation from inhibiting predation to sequestering toxic waste products. The latex is a complex mix of serum and various kinds of particle; rubber particles are themselves complex structures containing polymers associated with lipids and proteins and other biological molecules. The main polymer is cis-polyisoprene. According to D’Auzac (n.d.), “Rubber belongs to the very important family of isoprenoids constituted of more than 200,000 different molecules which are present in the animal and plant kingdoms.” Around 50,000 products include rubber. At the beginning of World War II, rubber was considered a strategic material as significant as steel and oil. The material is tied to almost all forms of transportation in the way of tires, belts, hoses and seals. The earth has been transformed in conjunction with the exploitation of this plant once of limited range and thinly dispersed population. Seeds from Hevea apparently do form a significant part of the diet of fish during seasonal floods in parts of the Amazon. (Caulfield, 1985) How odd that the mottled seeds feeding monkeys and fish in an endemic forest would be picked up by humans and carried half a world away! How strange for the population and range of Hevea brasiliensis to have increased so dramatically in such a short time! Hevea is the paradigm of a partner plant, dispersed, tended, and propagated by us, a plant whose life has become totally intertwined with our own. Who can sort out the coupling?

Rewrites:

I have suggested already that rewrites to history have been made in the movies of interest. Characters have appeared, disappeared and have been merged. Events have been deleted, invented, and subverted. Settings have been constructed and recreated. Species have been swapped and cultural identities costumed. At this point, I want to review one of the purposes of the paper. What might we possibly learn by taking a look at breadfruit and rubber in the movies--by proposing that our lives are inextricably entangled with the lives of plants? How would children respond to the idea that their lives have been shaped by plants?
The following pieces are the works of twelve and thirteen year olds. In some cases the writing was part of an optional assignment. In others the works constituted elements of projects devoted to Plants and People. Some students had seen Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Some had seen The Burning Season. Some had seen none of the films of interest. But all had been challenged with the proposal that plants are protagonists we ought to consider in both science and story. These works represent sincere efforts by adolescents to consider points of view at a time when their place in the world is in uncertain transit. These writers have the added challenge of living as expatriates, strangers to the cultures of both their roots and their home. Maybe they do find sympathy with the outlandish thought that they themselves are like the rubber trees, having traveled far from home, perhaps at the strange, historical bequest of the very same trees.  

	Spices	

We use them all the time
But we pay no attention
To their origins,
To their cultivation,
To their harvesting.
We don’t know how our spices 
Get to us.
We guess that they are grown,
But how most of us don’t
Even care at all.
We take them for granted.
We don’t know about
The Wars fought over them,
The struggles to introduce them,
The fight against predators,
By which is meant bugs or
Fungi or general enemies.
Some of us study our spices,
Mostly cause we have to.
We learn about things
We never gave a thought.
But most couldn’t bother
To learn about such small things
That are an amazingly big
Part of our lives.
			S. Bayley (1998)

**********

Reflection

	Now we’re studying the wild world of plants. The video we watched was really weird. If  there is one thing in science I don’t understand at all, it’s the cycle of life. There’s a seed, it grows, becomes another adult plant, and makes its seeds, and sends them away. It’s simple yet so complex when you get closer.
	It’s amazing what some plants can do.  Different plants can do different things. Some can survive just with their trunk. Some eat other than the normal plant food (sugar water). Some have seeds than can just last a long time without starting to grow. Since I’m living in a rain forest, I should be seeing a lot of cool, unique plants. I’m not because I’m not going outside into the jungle that much and I don’t know much about that stuff.
	On a trip to the near jungle, Dr. F. pointed out some Pitcher Plants. I could have seen them on my own because I know what a Pitcher Plant is. It’s just that I have terrible eyesight in the jungle. It’s really hard for me to pick out different plants. Through my eyes all the plants seem just pushed together forming the jungle. It would have been awesome to see Venus Fly Traps. I don’t think they are any more vicious than pitcher plants, but the spikes on the tip of it’s mouth make it look cool. Kind of like sharp teeth. Both eat bugs. They both attract bugs with a sweep syrup and then trap the bug. A bug can’t get out of a Pitcher Plant because the walls of the insides are so slippery. A bug can’t get out of a Venus Fly Trap because its mouth closes and its “teeth” clench together forming a jail for the sorry, little bug that should know by then that it is going to be digested  . . . ALIVE!
	Recently we have been talking about biological invasion. This happens so much most of the time we don’t even notice it. It has led to plagues, famines, and prosperity. It has helped countries and hurt countries. I think without biological invasions, the world would be much harder to live in. The invading plants can get moved by being in an animals’ stomach, catching a ride with humans, or seedlings traveling over long distances.

P. Christmas (1998) 

**********

Reflection

	For the last several days in science we have been presenting our plant projects to the class. The first three people that went were not very organized. I don’t think they spent a lot of time on it. Always start a project a long time before it is due.
	Vincent went fourth and his was pretty good. Better than the first three. His project was on pitcher plants. I got good information from it. That means it’s a good job. I didn’t know that pitcher plants are from the New World and Old World.
	After Vincent it was my turn. I started off by passing around the pictures and talking about how important tapioca is. I think my presentation went very well. I let out all the info I had on the study guide I made. That facts I gave really backed up my saying how important tapioca is to non-developed and developed countries. Something that made me happy was that I could answer all the questions after the presentation with little or no hesitation. I’m pretty sure no one befoe me did that. The next day my mom had found tapioca chips in Cold Storage and gave them to me to share. I wasn’t sure at first because of all the chili on the crackers. It might be no one would like them. I took them to class anyway because in my presentation I had mentioned tapioca chips. To my surprise and delight most people liked them. Vincent and Matt pigged out. Matt ate so many he had to leave class to wash out the chili. I tried the crumbs that were left over and I found it was all right. Not like potato chips though.
	Rohit was next and did a good job. His topic was Simpoh. He had a good presentation except he doesn’t speak very loud. I got lots of info from him. Most of it I already knew, but that’s all right. It was funny at the end when Dr. F. asked him where the word Simpoh came from. It’s obviously not English!
	Something I realized throughout the presentations is that some of the connections were really scrubby. Are you really connected to a plant because it lives in water? A liquid you drink? Are you connected to a plant because you think it’s cool? I think some people should have chosen better topics. One of the things that made me pick tapioca is that I can find it here in Singapore. Same with Simpoh.

P. Christmas (1999)

	**********

	Botanic Gardens

Luscious, green forests, 
Some of the last in Singapore.
Beautiful gardens,
A tamed paradise.

So much like the original world,
Yet so different.

Walking along the path,
You feel like you’re an observer
To the garden of the world.
Not like industrial Singapore.

No hustle and bustle of the city,
A different bustle here,
Birds singing,
Flowers opening.

Things you can’t observe in a single
	Day,
A life time in a day.
Pollination.

Now it’s time to go,
I loathe to leave the place.

I step into my life,
My garden,
Made out of concrete.
I realize now.
My life is artificial.

What happened that the world
		Changed so much?
Why is the forest so rare?
Will we ever know?

L. Freden (1999)

	**********

	Why we know so much about bamboo (excerpt)

“How interesting,” he thought. He saw that the sections were hollow, and that the bamboo was green, so he used it to cook his rice in, peeling back the sections as he ate. Afterwards, he blew through some of the internodes while cleaning them. The different lengths and thicknesses produced different notes, which sounded nice. He decided to fashion a musical instrument out of them, which is common in Thailand today. As he continued traveling, he stored some of his little things in the hollow sections. When he discovered a more bendable species, he tried to weave it into different types of baskets, with increasing success. He found that the young shoots were edible, and he could make weapons to shoot. Slowly, he became more and more dependent on bamboo. When he decided to set up an abode for a while in one spot, he came across a giant species that made perfect walls, and thin types of thatching.
One day when he was out roaming, he came across another traveler. It was actually a god in disguise. “Why are you carrying that worthless plant around?” the traveler aksed. “There is plenty of firewood about.”
Mái Pài was shocked. “Have you never heard of all the uses? This is one of the most valuable plants in the world! The different types have innumerable uses! Why, I should have thought that a traveler such as yourself would be forever in its debt. It is an easily accessible utensil for cooking rice, and there are many ;types of traps and weapons to be used thanks to this remarkable plant. You can actually eat shoots and grind the grain and seeds. If you are homesick, bamboo can soothe you with its own orchestra!” As he was explaining, the full force of his words suddenly struck him. Bamboo was the answer! Bamboo was the answer to all his years of searching! As he realized this, the ‘traveler’ transformed back to a god. (continues)

				B. McCurley (1996)

	**********

	Bamboo world

	I live in a bamboo world. I am writing on paper from bamboo pulp with a bamboo pen. My house is made from the hardiest species of giant bamboo, with a thatched roof of leaves. I am at a desk sitting on a bamboo chair, in fact bamboo is all of the furniture. I have many decorations from this wonderful plant, including a traditional Chinese lantern. It has bamboo spokes and a cover from bamboo paper. I even have a small potted species as a houseplant. One species is in flower right now, so I have flowers on the table.
	I have just finished eating shoots in chop suey, (served on bamboo utensils, of course). I cooked everything with bamboo kitchenware, with bamboo firewood. I had raw shoots as a vegetable. There was also jellied bamboo, and a cake made from the grain, or seed. The main course was fish which I had caught with a bamboo trap and a spear, as I waited on the bamboo bridge. I had water from the bamboo pipe which I had just made. For desert I had candied bamboo. Then I wrapped it all bamboo wood and leaves, because bamboo is a natural preservative.
	I roll up the bamboo blinds (chics) and gave out the window, watching the bats that live in bamboo rid the night air of pests like mosquitoes. I take out my Thai flute of bamboo, and play a nice tune. I start thinking about the fun we had felling bamboo yesterday by making a fire. The air trapped in the lower culms began to expand with the heat and finally burst, knocking the bamboo down. I also think about bringing down fruit from a tree using a bamboo tool. I pick up a piece of bamboo and bend it to start making a bow. I already made arrows, so soon I had a weapon made. I wuld later have a blowgun/popgun fight and then show off the new weapon. For now, I put it in the hollow section, called the culm, of a big species, and se that in a bamboo basket made from the reedy species.

B. McCurley (1996)

**********

How the movement and trade of plants and animals in the world has affected my life (excerpts)

 . . .	Around the sixteenth century, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, and many other spices were located in only several places in this vast sphere of blue and green land and life forms. Now, because of trade, a spice can be planted in someone’s backyard, or bought at the supermarket down the road for only a matter of cents, when a kernel of black pepper used to be worth the land rent. . .
. . . 	Today the world is a very mixed up place, though for the better or worse of it, I am not one to judge. I wake up in the morning by an alarm from a company in Japan, eat breakfast out of a bowl hand painted in Singapore,  cereal from the United States, and milk from New Zealand. . .
. . . 	Christopher Columbus opened up a whole new world to everyone out of Latin America by introducing Tapioca. The tapioca came out of Latin America, then it was taken to India, and then perhaps to China and the Americas and back to Portugal.
After that, a whole new world of trade began to develop. Instead of being isolated, experiencing only what ever they took in mind to experience. Then people started to immigrate to new destinations, causing cultures, beliefs, religions, humans, animals, plans, languages, ways of life, and ideas to both mix and evolve. And from this mixture came me.
(a passage of personal biography)
I have been many places in my life, and seen many things, for all my twelve years. I have a very rich, complex background, and if not for the movement and trade that has been going on for the past few hundred years, none of it would exist.
	
				R. Holaday (1997)

	**********

	The market

Even rows of rounded, succulent oranges,
Citric and sweet.
Corpses of glossy fish lined up like silver candles.
Bloody pieces of cows and pigs hanging from hooks,
Perhaps since the day of their gruesome death.
Fragments of red and bones hang lifeless from the body. 
Asian children smiling at what might become their dinner if the begging works.
Slender cats scrounging with their lanky shoulders moving sleekly.
Lazy apples so undemanding.
Chrysanthemums smiling brightly with each piece of their petal as graceful as a dancer.
The dim lights reminiscing of the days of no electricity.
Ancient Chinese medicines providing ginseng and tiger balm.
American teenagers in uniforms feeling out of place compared to the local people without 
shoes on.
Skinned crimson geese hanging by their necks in an even row of eight behind a thin sheet 
of glass.
Singaporeans enjoying a meal of lunch with chopsticks and styrofoam containers.
Every imaginable fragrance is so unavoidable.
Tropical trees creep through gaps from the wooden structure,
Dodging the many people running with a purpose.
A day where you can feel one with all that lived around you.
Boxes of bananas and clams,
Crates of parsley and garlic.
The day at a Singapore market.

V. Manglik (1998)

	**********

	Forest fire (excerpt)

Fire:	(interrupting) We have come to destruct. To release our tension. We have come to fight.
Grass: 	Excuse me! You’re interrupting Grandpa Ficus’ story!
Fire:	(beginning to spread) We are her to destroy the forest. We are here to burn away excess problems. We are here to take over Singapore.
Animals:	Grandpa! (fire crackles and laughs, dancing in the moonlight) What’s that crackling sound? Who are they? What do they want? Can they hurt us?
Ficus:	Yes. They are fire. They conquer our night. They are the forest’s worst enemy. They will kill us all.
Dirt: 	Yes, I’ve heard of them. However, in our burned ashes, new plants will grow and live the life to the fullest.
Ficus:	 Right you are, Dirt.
Fire:	Hahaha. Heeheehee. Hohoho.
Grass:	Does that mean we’re all going to die?
Ficus:	Yes, child, yes. But don’t look at it that way. See, we’re giving life to new plants to come. 
Ants:	(scurrying around) But Grandpa! You’ve been here so long. It will take ages for a new Ficus to grow!
Ficus:	Of course, but the point of life is death. It is called the circle of life. We’re going to either go to heaven or be reincarnated to a new creature.
Jackfruit:	I thought of a way to think of it. We are all being cremated like Grace. We were all put on Earth to die.
Grass:	And to bring joy.
Ants: 	Maybe our lives are already planned out by someone else. Perhaps we’re not living this life but just experiencing it.
Ficus:	Perhaps.
(continues)

			V. Manglik (1998)

**********

	Diamonds aren’t forever (excerpt)

	Melati received her area assignment, which was area 72. Since every other day, and  
yesterday they had only collected rubber, Melati realized that today was a tapping day and she had forgotten her knife. Area 72 was on the way to her hut, she dashed into her hut and grabbed the knife on the wall and ran back to join her group.
	She began her work, making a slit along the bottom of the pre-stripped area of the tree. She then replaced the cup full of latex with a fresh one and dumped the latex into her red pail. The other cup she placed into her plastic bag to drop off when she had filled her bucket. It usually took about 50 cups to fill her bucket, so she continued onto another tree. After an hour of this process, her pail was full.
	Eager to get awy from tapping the tree, she headed down the dirt path toward the processing house, aimlessly kicking a stone along with her. She accidentally kicked the stone into the woods, so she figured that she should retrieve it; she had nothing better to do.
	Melati walked into the forest of rubber trees and was about to pick up the stone when she noticed it was sitting in a foot print. It was made by a shoe, so it couldn’t be one of the plantation kids. And it was much too large to belong to Mr. Kelamat or Mr. Rawan. 
(continues)

			K. Russell (1996)

**********

Life and death (excerpt)

Chapter 3. The conversation.
	Norazidah glanced over at Alin. How could he not cry at a time like this. He is, most definitely, brave, she decided.
	Norazidah twisted her trunk so that her ear was at it’s best angle to be able to hear Mr. Asnah’s and Mrs. Mulyani’s conversation.
	“If we don’t do something, we’ll lose a lot of time and money. You know that Pabrik Karet (Rubber Company) expects our rubber on time. And they’re doing so good, we can’t let them down. They might turn to the Usan rubber plantation instead,” Mr. Aznah was saying.
	“I know, but what can we do?” Mrs. Mulyani asked.
	“I was thinking of cutting down all the bad producing trees. There are several out there. We can’t afford to give them space when the latex they provide is useless.” Mr. Aznah decided.
	“But Aznah, we can’t do that,” Mrs. Mulyani debated. “Some of those bad producing trees are the descendants of the first few seeds in Malaysia.”
	“We have to, Mulyani. We can’t lose out to Usan plantation. I’m sorry.”
	Norazidah pulled away from the window. How could it be possible? Her friend, she would lose her best friend!
	Those humans, she thought. They think we have no feelings, all they care about is themselves. Their career, their family, their friends.
	But what about us?! she wanted to shout.
	Norazidah’s tears couldn’t resist, they gushed out her eyes, making her smooth, light-colored bark all soggy and weak. But Norazidah didn’t care, she just kept crying and crying.
	I hate humans! She yelled out in her mind. I-I wish . . .
	Norazidah felt a tap on her bark. She swung around and faced a warm, caring Alin.
(continues)

A. Irawan (1966)

**********

	The students’ works of reflection and artistry reveal their thinking. The pieces speak for themselves to a great extent. Russell comments on her story,

	I think that the child labor in the plantations is terrible. The children in the plantations were treated with no respect at all; they worked hard in the mornings and unlike this story, they had no free time after all the tapping was finished.
	The children were also uneducated. They had no opportunity to go to school, and they were severely punished if they were found with any sort of book. The owner’s children got a good education, though, so one day they could continue the family business.
	Punishment was also very harsh. In chapter 2 of this story, you read that they would go as far as cutting off a foot. The punishment of a whip was excruciatingly painful, as well. In living in Singapore, it could be compared to caning, which Michael Fay could easily compare to. It could be compared to Christ on the cross, when they beat him up.
	Overall, I would not care to be a worker on a Malaysian plantation because of all the work and the fear of punishment.

	Irawan’s reflection explains her experiment with point of view:

	Writing this story was kind of fun. It was quite different writing from a tree’s point of view instead of a person’s, because you can fictionize it more than usual. For example, no one really knows if a tree can think. And if they can, what do they think about? In my story, I used personification. I thought abut how a human would think if he were in this situation, and replaced the human for the tree.
	Researching the information for this story was pretty interesting. Learning about a rubber tree tapper’s life was something different. That go me to think: I know (basically) what a tapper thinks about his life, but what does a rubber tree think about his life: Does he think it’s easy? Hard?
	Thinking this made me come up with the idea to write a story with a rubber tree as the main character. Telling his thoughts, speaking to other trees, etc.
	Overall, I enjoyed writing this story. I also enjoyed illustrating it, because I could sort of tell the reader, from the picture, how the rubber tree in my story sees himself. 

		I am not sure that any claims can be made about how the themes and stories in this paper lead to young peoples’ learning environmental responsibility. I do think the few pieces of writing suggest awakening awareness to various degrees. The danger of cases and stories also rests in their value and beauty. The particular may compel but it can also be dismissed. For me, the wonder of wandering the world has been mixed with sadness at the discoveries of tragedy and loss. When I watch the movies again, I am sure these emotions will govern the inevitable noticing of new details. The beauty of learning (whether from the movies, or the plants, or the people) is in both the discovery and the renewal. I will end with two poems. The first touches me through the South of my childhood and the searching serendipity of new technology. While writing this paper, I wondered if anyone else had ever thought to put breadfruit and rubber together. I conducted an internet search.  The first and fourth stanzas of Margaret Walker’s poem, “Sorrow Home,” are reproduced below. She can be heard reading the poem on the Internet Poetry Archive of the University of North Carolina Press. 

My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown
or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned
in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf,
mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know
me.

I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane. I want to 
walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground.
Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be
gone.
  
Her final stanza ends with a sobering question kin to others that rise out of the histories of breadfruit and rubber. “How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?”
	In conclusion, I offer a poem of my own, not as evidence of any aesthetic competence but rather to serve as an earlier condensation of questions and ideas raised in this exploration of breadfruit and rubber in the movies.

Studying symbiosis in the forests of Singapore

Thinking of you tonight, that you might leave, I remain awake.
A wind full of ice chills my bones.

Last week I took my students to the tropical forest.
There, exotics thrive with natives in textbook harmony.
Pararubber trees, whose great grandparents stood in Brazil
Shade the ginger just raising its blooms through the littered floor.
Local ants carry the black seeds of acacia from Torres.
Birds pluck them hanging from lovely orange threads,
And then go eat figs.
Mimosa, timid and bold, invades and blushes.
We called it shut-thighs and shame-old-lady, in other lives.
The bees don’t seem to mind.
Mynas and tilapia colonize;
They are like us and our kind and do well.

Take the strange case of the rubber tree,
Who forsook insignificance deep within the neotropical jungle,
And chose the road and the wires.
We were convinced to disperse it and care for it.
Now we are insulated and carried and addicted.
By whose invention, whose design, whose idea?

My students drew maps of where they had not been.
They did not know the way home except by breadcrumbs and briarpatches.
We laughed and marveled at a hundred and twenty different maps
Of the same place, the same history.
The diversity of our memory is a puzzle as rich as the forest
That will be no more.

Tomorrow my students will clone tapioca collected from that place.
Maybe we will harvest the leaves after a while and make saki tamboi.
Then perhaps we can really acquire
The genes, and memories, and molecules
Of America, and Africa, and Asia,
And then we’ll call the teaching a true success.

I am still awake and only ask,
“How is it that I came all this way, through all these centuries,
To find you here, to find you gone?”
Obligate extinction, extinguished by obligation.
What shall I do?
What map will you leave me?
What legend should I follow?
What pollen can I taste?

			(1990)

References:

Allen, H. (1937, 1943, 1976-reprint). The house of Goodyear: A story of rubber and of modern business.
New York: Arno Press. 
Brockway, L. (1979). Science and colonial expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New 
York: Academic Press. 
Brunton, P. (ed.) (1989). Awake, Bold Bligh! Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 
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online url = http://www.lareau.org/bounty.html )
Campbell, I. (1995). Mr. Bligh's bad health. . (available online at url = http://www.lareau.org/bounty.html )
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http://www.cronab.demon.co.uk/Pfce.htm)
Caufield, C. (1985). In the rainforest. Picador: London.
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Greenwood Press. 
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Day, B. and Schwartz, T. (1998). Rubber jungle. Webcast video and website with related documents.
(url = http://www.camguys.com/rubjung1.html ) (note: some documents appear under the text only menu)
Dening, G. (1992). Mr. Bligh's bad language: Passion, power and theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. 
Diaz, G. (1998). Camera Guy's new documentary Film tells story of Chico Mendes & rubber tappers of 
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Columbo: A.M. & J. Ferguson. 

Films (all currently available in VHS—NTSC format): 

Breadfruit movies:
In the wake of the Bounty (1933). C. Chauvel, director. Expeditionary Films.
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). F. Lloyd, director. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). L. Milestone, director. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
The Bounty (1984). R. Donaldson, director. Dino De Laurentis Corporation. 

Rubber movies:
Red Dust (1932). V. Fleming, director. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Fitzcarraldo (1982). W. Herzog, director. New World Films. 
Indochine (1992). R. Wargnier, director. Bac Films.
The Burning Season (1994). J. Frankenheimer, director. Home Box Office. 

Student works: 

Bayley, S. (written 1998). Spices. Unpublished poem.
Christmas, P. (written 1998). Reflection. Unpublished essay.
Christmas, P. (written 1999). Reflection. Unpublished essay.
Fredin, L. (written 1999). Botanic Gardens. Unpublished poem.
Holaday, R. (written 1997) How the movement and trade of plants and animals in the world has 
affected my life. Unpublished essay.
Irawan, A. (written 1996). Life and death. Unpublished short story. 
Manglik, V. (written 1998). Forest fire. Unpublished drama.
Manglik, V. (written 1998). The market. Unpublished poem.
McCurley, B. (written 1996). Bamboo world. Unpublished essay.
McCurley, B. (written 1996). Why we know so much about bamboo. Unpublished short story.
Russell, K. (written 1996). Diamonds aren’t forever. Unpublished short story.