The World Was Their Garden: Plant Introductions at the US Department of Agriculture, 1898-1984
Item
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Title
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The World Was Their Garden: Plant Introductions at the US Department of Agriculture, 1898-1984
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Description
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In 1898, the US Department of Agriculture established an Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction (SPI) to systematically collect and introduce plants of economic interest to US soil. Employing a cadre of trained “agricultural explorers” to collect plants from all over the world, the office is credited with establishing a dazzling array of multimillion-dollar industries—mangos, avocados, date palms, and soy, to name just a few—as well as securing staple crops against diseases, pests, and drought with infusions of genetic material for breeding improved varieties. However, in the histories of US plant introduction, a persistent American exceptionalism obscures the USDA’s dependence on, and contribution to, imperial scientific networks, as well as its operative role in facilitating settler-colonial expansion.
This thesis thus resituates the SPI’s administrators and explorers as actors in the US imperial “environmental management state” emergent at the turn of the century by examining their living and non-living material traces. First, I attend to the SPI’s exhaustive record-keeping system—bulletins, inventories, photographs and films—as constitutive of its scientific authority and reputation, but also productive of a modern national identity. Then, I situate federal plant introduction work in the specific geography of Southern Florida, mapping out its impact on the landscape through the creation of the Fairchild Tropical Garden. Finally, with soy as perhaps the most significant crop introduced to the US in the 20th century, I follow the soybeans collected from the Dorsett-Morse Expedition of 1929-31 to East Asia to explore how living plant germplasm endures across changing institutions and landscapes. In so doing, this thesis elaborates how the SPI—and all its institutional complexity—serves as a conceptual and material precursor to our contemporary agrobiodiversity preservation initiatives and environmental politics.
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Creator
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Li, Anny
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Subject
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Biodiversity conservation
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Environmental history
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Landscape architecture
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Paper technologies
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Plant introductions
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USDA
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Environmental studies
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Science history
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Agriculture
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Contributor
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Eigen, Edward
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Date
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2022-06-09T03:58:36Z
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2022
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2022-06-08
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2022-05
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2022-06-09T03:58:36Z
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Type
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Thesis or Dissertation
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text
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Format
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application/pdf
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application/pdf
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Identifier
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Li, Anny. 2022. The World Was Their Garden: Plant Introductions at the US Department of Agriculture, 1898-1984. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
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29211399
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https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37372329
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Language
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en