The Geography Pattern

Goal: After this lesson you can describe the geographic-specificity spectrum and explain why a plant's geography shapes how easily it can be taken. Subject: Geography | Run time: about 7 minutes

Quick recall

Last time we set up the finale. Two quick questions. One: how many plants did the season follow? Six. Two: what single arc repeated for each? Sacred knowledge, extraction, dependency, then a justice movement.

Why this matters

Line the six plants up by how picky they are about where they grow, and something clicks into place. The pickier the plant, the more it stayed tied to one people and one place, and the harder it was for outsiders to take.

The idea

Picture a spectrum from most adaptable to most restricted. At the easy end is tea, which grows across a huge range, from about 42 degrees north to 33 degrees south, in fields anywhere warm enough. Next sugar, which solved geography with two plants, tropical cane and temperate beet, so it grows almost everywhere. Then coffee, which needs mountain tropics. Then cacao, which needs a lowland forest canopy (Coe & Coe, 2013). Then the forest plants, guayusa, which loses about half its potency outside its Amazon cloud forest, and kola, tied to West African rainforest (Lewis et al., 2003). And at the far end, the most restricted of all, kava, which grows only on volcanic Pacific islands (Lebot et al., 1992). Now lay a second line under the first. The plants at the adaptable end, tea and sugar, were the easiest to turn into giant plantations and global commodities. The plants at the restricted end, guayusa, kola, and kava, stayed local and deeply cultural for far longer, and resisted being mass-produced. The pattern is clean: the more specific a plant's geography, the more culturally embedded it stayed, and the harder it was to commodify and extract. That is not a coincidence. A plant you can grow anywhere can be torn from its origin and grown by anyone. A plant that needs one exact forest, or one volcanic island, stays bound to the people who know that place.

Picture it

Look at the map on this lesson. It marks every plant's home, from Ethiopia to China to Mesoamerica to the Caribbean to the Amazon to West Africa to Vanuatu. Now imagine sliding each one along a dial from easy-to-move to impossible-to-move. Tea slides freely. Kava will not budge from its islands. The dial is the whole story.

Remember this

The fact to carry out: the season's plants run from most adaptable (tea) to most restricted (kava), and the more specific a plant's geography, the more culturally embedded it stayed and the harder it was to take (Lebot et al., 1992; Lewis et al., 2003). Geography is not the backdrop to these histories. It is the first cause.

Quick check

Quick check. Which plant sits at the most-restricted end of the spectrum, and why? Kava, because it grows only on volcanic Pacific islands and nowhere else (Lebot et al., 1992).

Key Takeaways

• The season's plants form a spectrum from most adaptable (tea) to most restricted (kava).
• The more specific a plant's geography, the more culturally embedded it stayed and the harder it was to commodify.
• Adaptable plants like tea and sugar became giant plantation commodities; restricted plants like guayusa, kola, and kava resisted longer (Lewis et al., 2003; Lebot et al., 1992).
• Geography is the first cause of each plant's history, not just its setting.

Sources

• Coe, S. D., & Coe, M. D. (2013). The true history of chocolate (3rd ed.). Thames and Hudson.
• Lebot, V., Merlin, M., & Lindstrom, L. (1992). Kava: The Pacific elixir. Yale University Press.
• Lewis, W. H., Kennelly, E. J., Bass, G. N., Wedner, H. J., Elvin-Lewis, M. P., & Fast, D. M. (2003). Ritualistic use of the holly Ilex guayusa by Amazonian Jivaro Indians. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 33(1-2), 25-30.