Meehan: You’re listening to the LRB podcast. I’m Meehan Crist, and welcome to the second episode in a special four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice. In our first episode, I spoke with activist and scholar Loretta Ross, one of the co-creators of the reproductive justice framework, about the intersections of race, reproduction, environmentalism, and the politics of white nationalism. Today, I’ll be exploring the intersections of science, culture, and feminist thought, as well as the dangers of biological determinism, with evolutionary biologist and feminist scholar Banu Subramaniam. Trained as an evolutionary biologist and plant scientist, she helped establish the field of feminist science studies, and today is professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work explores the philosophy, history, and culture of the natural sciences and medicine as they relate to gender, race, ethnicity, and caste, and her books include Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variationand the Politics of Diversity, and Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism, as well as the co-edited volume Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation. It’s a pleasure and an honour to have her as our guest today. Banu, welcome to the LRB Podcast.
Banu: Thank you, Meehan. I'm honoured as well to be invited here. Thank you.
Meehan: Excellent. Let's get started with talking a little bit about your own history. So you grew up in post-colonial India and originally trained as an evolutionary biologist and plant scientist. I think you got a PhD in genetics and then you turned your scholarly attention to feminist theory. And this is not, shall we say, a typical intellectual trajectory. So could you tell us a bit about what led you into science and then what led you into feminist science and technology studies?
Banu: I would like to think I have not left biology or evolutionary biology and that I work at the intersections of feminist studies and biology. So as you said, yes—after an undergraduate in biology in India, I came for a PhD in evolutionary biology. And one of the things of the post-colonial British-inherited system is after 10th grade, one begins to specialise. So in 10th grade, you have to choose whether you want the science, arts, or commerce. And then when you go into an undergraduate, you choose a specialisation within the sciences. And so I really came to a PhD with a very, very narrow background, right? Completely sold on the idea that science was objective, that subjectivity didn't matter, culture didn't matter. And first time out of India into a graduate program in the United States, there was a lot of culture shock, but I had no language for it. And I think I felt increasingly alienated and at that time I met the director of Women’s Studies and said, ‘you do realise this is not an unusual story at all, that a lot of people who are minorities within departments have similar experiences.’ And so as a result, I started taking courses in Women's Studies and that completely transformed my life in every way. It transformed in the sense of giving me a language of culture to understand what was happening in the hallways of science, and so I could recapture my fascination with science and understand the various comments for what they were. So I stayed on to finish my PhD. It also gave me a language to talk about scientific culture as something that shaped experiences within sciences. And here I love Sharon Traweek’s word of scientific culture as the ‘culture of no culture’ that my colleagues would constantly say, ‘oh, but that doesn't matter.’ But in fact, the very denial shapes scientific culture. But most importantly, it opened up the space that scientific knowledge itself is embedded within society, within politics. And that really blew my mind as someone who had grown up very much in thinking of science as objective. And so I began asking myself—my doctoral work was on morning glory flower colour variation—so why am I asking this question? Why was this the most obvious question? And as I started looking at the history of evolutionary biology, I came front and centre into the history of eugenics and recognised how centrally intertwined they are. And that’s what much later gave rise to Ghost Stories for Darwin. But after that, I think it was impossible for me to, you know, practice science as though all of this didn't matter. But I feel I needed to get the tools and the interdisciplinary frameworks to do biology a different kind of way—to do biology as a feminist, and that's been my quest.
Meehan: I did want to ask you about your first book, Ghost Stories for Darwin, because you do write about your PhD work and sort of coming to the realisation that what you had thought you were doing was maybe not what you were actually doing. And you write about how you came to see how the concept of variation, which is critical to ecology and evolutionary biology, actually connects biology, women's studies, and the history of science. So could you talk a bit more about these connections and how you came to understand the concept of variation specifically?
Banu: So part of what I discovered in looking at the history of evolutionary biology and population genetics is that all the key figures I studied—in my biology classes and in the history of biology and the key people that I cited in my work—were actually very involved in this question of whether variation was a good thing or bad thing. So some geneticists believed that our ideal society should be a society only of brilliant people. We should have the Einsteins and Beethovens and Mozarts, and we needed to control the fertility of those who were not brilliant. Another set of biologists said that variation was the key of evolution. You know, environments change, and we need the variation to be able to adapt, so a heterogeneous society was the one that was best. And yet even though I had studied this as a scientific argument, I had not understood that these were actually also political debates that were going on. And in looking at the context of these debates, in recognising that variation in biology was intimately connected to diversity in the cultural space. And so these were two words in two different spheres, which is why I'm very taken by Donna Haraway's idea that rather than talking about nature and culture, we put them together to talk about nature-cultures—that really, variation and diversity are one in the same thing. And part of, to me, the power of academia or disciplines is that we only learn one thing. We don't see those connections with each other. And disciplines, to me, really discipline our minds in very, very profound ways. And whether it's purposeful or not—we can talk later—it prevents us from seeing these connections between nature and culture, science and society.
Meehan: And in your second book, Holy Science, you wrote about the rise of Hindu nationalism and its relations to science and religion. Could you describe the similarities and differences you see between the rise of the far right in India and the rise of the far right in the US and particularly their respective relationships to science and religion?
Banu: I visit India every year or two years—at least, before Covid. And what was very striking in India was—in seeing the rise of the far right—was their very different relationship with science than what I was seeing in the US. As someone in evolutionary biology, it is very contested terrain in the US, right? People who contest that it’s only a theory, it shouldn’t be taught in school, we should teach intelligent design alongside. And so it's very, very potent. But in India, this is not a question at all. And part of the reason is that Hindu nationalists are not against science. They embrace science, and in fact, they embrace modern science as an offshoot of an ancient Vedic science, of an ancient Vedic civilisation that colonialism has erased, that colonialism has appropriated, and colonialism has invisibilised. And so they want to reclaim that ancient Vedic science and meld ancient Vedic sciences with the modern sciences. So it's what I call an archaic modernity because alongside those claims of modernity, they also have very regressive ideas about gender, about women's roles, about sexuality, about caste. And so both that modernity and those more regressive cultural ideas come together in their ideology. But they're very much for modernity, for science, for technology, for globalisation. A lot of economic policies have been growing increasingly neoliberal. So it's a very interesting formation and it is really a contrast to the US. But what they both share, I think, especially with the far right here, is a nostalgia for the past. A nostalgia for an idyllic past where things were really great—and we can ask who they were great for and, you know, who it was not great for in the past. Those similarities exist between both, but there are these contrasting differences in their relationship to science and modernity.
Meehan: I’m curious, as you know, in the intersection of science and politics and reproductive justice, and there seem to be some very troubling developments going on in India right now. Fertility rates are falling in India, as they are in many places around the world, but the country's population is still growing. And in recent years, proposals for something like China's one-child policy have been moving from the fringes into the political mainstream, such that you had in 2021 a senior government minister actually proposing a national one-child policy. But overall, these policies clearly seem targeted at Muslim and lower-caste families. So already I think four Indian states with very large Muslim populations have passed versions of a two-child policy with incentives built in for families to have just one child. And so I sort of wonder if you think these proposals for population control coming from Hindu nationalist Indian politicians today are serious or political theatre or some of both—or what you see as maybe the greatest threats to reproductive justice in India today.
Banu: I would say some of both because at the same time there's also a lot of talk about what they call the ‘demographic dividend.’ The idea that over half of India's population is of working age—they’re young. And this is in contrast to China, where people argue it's a more aging population. There's the legacies of that one-child policy, you know, coming home to roost.
Meehan: In case there are folks listening who don't know what the demographic dividend is, could you just describe what that is?
Banu: So the demographic dividend is the argument that the majority of the population is young and able to work. So in contrast, an aging population that cannot work takes up resources, but does not contribute labour and to the development of the country. And in India now, I think over half is young and of the working age, and they expect that to be true for the next 20 years. And so I feel that, you know, the world over this is really being heralded as why India is particularly poised.
Meehan: Right, there's this potential real economic boost for the whole country because all of these young people are entering the labour force, working, not taking care of older parents because there are fewer older people and potentially, depending on how many children they have, they may have more or fewer dependents to be taking care of. And so there's a real incentive for the Indian government to get these people working and not actually doing care work inside their families. Right?
Banu: Exactly. That's well put. Yes. And you know, in general, fertility rates across the world have been dropping. The power of Malthusian thinking seems to remain despite the changing demographic patterns that we see. But I think the curtailment—I mean, this is at the heart of eugenics, right? Of which body should reproduce and which bodies should we curtail? Whose reproduction we should curtail? And certainly in India, the idea that Muslims have a higher fertility rate, are having more babies is very much part of the psyche, part of the fear mongering which is the same in the United States about communities of colour having more children than white populations.
Even though, you know, in India, the idea that Muslims can out-reproduce Hindus is just preposterous, you know? But these are very, very powerful ideas.
Meehan: Why do you think Malthusianism is so resilient?
Banu: I think it's a great question and I don't know if I have an answer, but my thinking is—I had co-edited a book with Betsy Hartmann and Charles Zerner called Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. And part of what we were doing there is trying to look at certain tropes that seem to endure, never mind what happens. So for example, the idea of scarcity, the idea of overpopulation, questions of racism—these are enduring ideas. And part of what Malthusianism captures so well is the ways in which it intersects with these very powerful tropes about race, about gender, ideas of scarcity, fears of the future, certain nostalgic longing for the past—that all of these intersect very powerfully with Malthusian thinking. And there's something about that, that those ideas endure on—that there is also a fundamental pathologising of the poor, of taking up too many resources, of certain kind of minorities. The ways in which they get pathologised again as people who take up resources and don't give back. And so again, time and again, even though who the poor are, who the minorities are, might shift across different geographic and national contexts, that fundamental argument resonates.
So we see very similar patterns in that sense in India and the US in this kind of fear of the minority. The people are different, but the ideology is the same.
Meehan: I'm really interested in the ways also that what you're talking about here intersects with environmental breakdown. I don't know—have you seen the movie, the Kingsman?
Banu: I have not.
Meehan: It's not a good movie. You don't need to see it, but it has a plot line that I think is relevant. So, an evil billionaire played by Samuel L. Jackson has a plan to stop global warming by killing the majority of humans on earth, basically. And only those select few that he has chosen to survive will be part of this new world. The idea is that this culling of most of humanity will supposedly avert species extinction due to the climate crisis. So, you know, fewer people, problem solved. He has this moment where he says, ‘mankind are the virus and I'm the cure,’ which will probably resonate in various ways. This is of course absurd for so many reasons. Not least the fact that if most people were wiped out, there's nothing to guarantee that those who are left wouldn't just consume rapaciously or that capitalism wouldn't just drive a new era of colonialism and rapid population growth. However, the reason I bring this up is that there's an increasing acceptance of the idea that ecological limits are real, and it's resurfacing old fears about population growth. On the right, this manifests as xenophobic, ethnic nationalisms focused on, you know, building walls and keeping people out, securing resources. On the left, it manifests as a sort of cautious reconsideration of the question: How many people is too many? So you have someone like feminist icon Donna Haraway arguing for what she calls population stabilisation, which to my mind begs the question of who is going to be stabilised and how and by whom. At the same time, it's true that when it comes to the effects of the climate crisis and ecological breakdown more generally, the larger a population is, especially in high risk areas, the greater the potential for disaster. So you have a lot of folks in the climate world talking about risk and greater risk. You know, if you have a big city on a coastline, there are more people at risk. And I think actually India offers a powerful example of this. So it's the second most populous nation on earth just behind China. And the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi recently reported that on more than 88% of the days from January 1st to September 30th in 2022, an extreme weather event of some sort was happening in one or more of the country's regions. So you had nearly 3000 people that died. Over 400,000 houses were destroyed. 1.8 million hectare of crop area was affected. And this is just extreme weather, right? Environmental breakdown and the climate crisis are doing more than just changing weather. So, you know, one argument says, imagine if the population of these areas were doubled, the damage would be that much more profound. And yet diagnosing human numbers as the problem in India or elsewhere seems to miss the point entirely. And it seems likely to suggest, you know, quote-unquote “solutions” that are proto-fascist at best. So my question to you is, how are we to think of human population in a time of accelerating ecological breakdown?
Banu: Such a great question, and there's so much there in what you were saying. So to me, I think there is something fundamentally wrong when we just go with the math, because history has taught us that it’s not the math. People are not being irrational in the number of children they have. So let's start off with the fact that we have enough food to feed everyone in the world today, but we do not. Right? And this has been true for quite some time. So this whole mathematical argument of Malthus—that we produce food and there are so many people and we divide it up—fundamentally misrecognises how stratified populations are across the world. Some people consume a lot and some people have never consumed very much. So the differences between rich countries and poor countries is enormous in terms of the resources they take up. So we can't do that simple math by just dividing food by population numbers and then talk about the caring capacity of the planet. It just doesn’t work that way. And so we have to take into account the stratification. The other thing that also seems clear is that there've been technological innovations. There have been shifts of various kinds, you know? The kind of food that gets produced, the kind of waste that we produce in different parts of the world—and some parts produce much more waste than others, the standard of living in different parts of the world, right? So there are so many variables that shape this calculus that that simple mathematics just doesn't work. The other thing that seems very clear, and here I'm drawing on Betsy Hartmann's work, is that people are rational about the number of children that they have. So if infant mortality is very high, people have more children because they want to make sure some children will survive into adulthood. So programs that have reduced infant mortality—the consequence of that has also been a reduction in the number of children people have.
And so to me, the focusing on the number of children—focusing on population—misunderstands what's happening in the world. That if we can increase everyone's standard of living, if we can decrease famines, if we can decrease poverty, then those things impact the population. So for me, the population is a symptom of larger forces and we should be focusing on those other forces rather than population. And fundamentally, because when we focus on population, at least history tells us, it is always focusing on women's bodies and the curtailing of the fertility of women—you know, poor and marginalised women usually. And so there are deep consequences to that language. And it might be that the reason why these arguments continue on is because the bodies on whom the violence is enacted are people who have the least amount of power in the world. And so this pathologising of the marginalised and the poor, you know, endures on generation after generation.
Meehan: The idea that you can have a quick technological fix by using something like contraception is much easier and I think more appealing to perhaps governments or NGOs than something like solving poverty. Right? Solving poverty is very, very hard. Perhaps putting contraceptives into women's hands is less hard, and so I think there's a real pull in that direction, a real desire for that easy technological fix. And I think we're seeing some of that again now among environmentalists and climate activists. Women's fertility is increasingly being linked with concern about climate change and this resurgence of concern about population growth. It does seem that one reason that discussion of quote-unquote “the population problem” is once again on the rise is the convergence of the climate crisis with evidence that really cuts across all demographic distinctions—including race, religion, class—that very strongly suggest that when women and girls have greater access to education, birth rates drop. So private foundations and governments have become increasingly eager to support women and girls, particularly across the Global South, who want to make their own choices around having or not having children, and who are themselves advocating for the necessary infrastructure that they would need to make those choices. So, some mainstream and progressive organisations are now really promoting increased access to both education and voluntary family planning for women and girls, which will then—they think—result in lower birth rates and ease pressure on the environment as a quote-unquote “win-win” proposition. I'm curious what you think of this proposition specifically, and if you could talk a little bit about how you see this tendency to link women's fertility—which of course often means the fertility of black, brown, and indigenous women—to environmental problems and solutions.
Banu: To me, underlying this vision is a very, I would say, elite Western idea—and I think much more recent—where children are seen as a liability rather than an asset. Sort of the whole idea that you should not have children unless you have enough of a bank balance to have a child. And this was not always true in the West. When we had more agricultural societies, children were an asset. And to put that idea of children as liabilities onto cultures across the world seems extraordinarily both Eurocentric and I would say colonialist in some kind of way. So for example, in India, boy children—in terms of Hindus, in terms of religion, you need the child to do the services, the religious rituals, for your soul to reach heaven. Similarly, there is no state-sponsored social security. Your children, boys and girls are your social security for the future, who will take care of you as a future. So there are very different other kinds of social organisation, so that this idea—that if we just get all women working, so they'll be at a job somewhere, not taking care of their children—seems really short-sighted and to me, ideologically impoverished. And fundamentally there is this idea of somehow children being a liability and along with it—I don’t know—a lack of the pleasure, the joy, the playfulness of hanging out with children, of having contexts, you know, where you have people across different ages hanging out together, living in similar families, right? So these are very different kinds of formations and to me it feels rather than appreciating the diversity that exists in the world, that part of what we are trying to do is make everything into a nuclear society, you know, which is what has happened in the West. So I feel it also shows a singular lack of imagination and a lack of appreciation of different kinds of sociality that you know, people may engage with. And this kind of pathologising of children as only liabilities rather than the richness that they bring to our lives.
Meehan: The idea, particularly in terms of international development goals, seems to be that with fewer mouths to feed and a lighter workload in the home, women will have more time and more energy and money, and so this lighter economic burden that results also from caring for fewer children, particularly if coupled with greater opportunities for women to work outside the home, can help lift families out of poverty. So in this way, you get women's rights, poverty, hunger, economic development and environmental breakdown, all being addressed by increasing access to education and increasing access—voluntary access—to contraceptives for women and girls. So it's this like a win-win-win. But it's a very narrow vision of what society can be. And when I hear such arguments, I can't help thinking—is the goal to reduce women's fertility so they can work longer hours and make more profit for, you know, local elites or multinational corporations? This is not my idea of liberation. But what's that quote? ‘The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism’?
Banu: Right, right. And I think along with that vision is also consumption and consumerism, right? Which is that on the one hand there are these kinds of policies—and so especially in India, I hear repeatedly about the low workforce participation of women and how this needs to go up. But part of that vision is they will make money, they will buy more things, and then we are caught up in having too much stuff in the landfills, you know, environmental degradation. So part of what is very interesting to me often about these discussions is sometimes they're at odds with each other, right? So the vision that you're talking about also has negative consequences for the environment that are never addressed when we are talking about this.
Meehan: Right. And then there's the sort of ecomodernist fantasy that improved technology will just make all of this consumption okay somehow.
Banu: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And at the same time, there's also a great fear that as India grows richer, things like, oh they want to eat more meat, they want more air conditioning, and then that is terrible for the environment, right? So those are also arguments and fears of, what if this comes to pass?
Meehan: Thinking again about these kind of international programs, to my mind, ideally these organisations would be working with a different sort of analysis about root causes, as you were saying. You know, one that critiques global capitalism and extractive industries while also centring women and sort of diverse lives and potentials for societies. But this is also a very complicated territory as many of these programs provide genuinely critical services that local women say that they want. So when I've spoken to women involved with running these programs in Pakistan, for example, they're very clear that they are saving women's lives. And for many of them, the sort of analysis or theorising that we are doing here is sort of beside the point. At the same time, many of these programs still include reducing women's fertility—even with specific fertility targets as a goal. So I wonder if you could talk about what you think is at stake in terms of the different approaches that these programs take and the goals that they set out. Do they matter and why?
Banu: I think some of this is also about the scale of analysis, right? What may be happening in the immediate—in the next few years—versus looking at these larger patterns. I'm always reminded of that study that Mahmood Mamdani did looking at when India was pushing contraceptive pills. And so they would go village to village, getting people to do it, and when Mamdani went back and did an ethnography, interviewed individuals—so for example, one person he meets has made miniature sculptures of all the different pills, right? And so that original—I think it was the Khanna study—the original was touted as, ‘See? Contraception helps you go around and if you give people access to it, the birth rates will come down.’ And then when Mamdani asked this person what he had done, he said, ‘I didn't want to break that researcher's heart by telling them I did not take it. You know, it's like they mean well, you know, so I told them what they wanted to.’ And part of what Mamdani argues that is, if you look at the demographic patterns of industrialisation in India, what was happening is that the family was supporting the oldest child or the son usually. And then the son went to college, got employed, supported the next child to go through education. So the age of reproduction was being pushed because of industrialisation, because of what was happening economically, not because there was access to the pill. Right? So, I think often, you know, these kind of on-the-ground interviews or figures come to certain conclusions, but I think—I feel—we have enough evidence. There's so much work been done around these issues that have shown that these are very complex issues of why people make these decisions. That access alone cannot explain the complex patterns that we see.
Meehan: This is reminding me a little bit of the work of activist and scholar Loretta Ross, who is also a guest on this podcast series, and who has pointed out that when demographers and historians talk about women's fertility, they tend to erase individual women's agency. So, for example, the reproductive labour that black women performed under slavery as well as their acts of reproductive resistance have been well documented. But as Ross points out, it's less well known that in the years after slavery was abolished, black women helped cut their own fertility in half. You know, they increasingly took control of their own fertility using a range of methods, including contraceptives, abortifacients, and possibly infanticide, many of which were rooted in African midwifery practices. And you know, we are all extruded bits of the times in which we live to some degree. But to hear some historians and demographers talk, history and demography really are destiny—you know, the cultural context into which you are born more or less determines how many biological children you will have. And too often in these analyses, agency is just rendered invisible. I'm curious what your own research has revealed about what you're talking about, this complex relations among cultural pressures and baby-making.
Banu: Yeah, so my recent work is on thinking about decolonising botany. So in thinking about the colonial roots of botany and what it means for us to continue to practice botany when we know these histories. So, how might we rethink the disciplines? And part of what you're saying, I think, is exactly right. And this is—the world-over—the amount of local knowledges that existed of ways in which to control fertility, right? But when we see the rise of Western science, it was precisely about tamping down, eradicating, pathologising, the knowledge of women. I mean, if we think of witches in the West, right? So all of these got marginalised as superstition, old wives’ tales. But when you look at Western pharmaceuticals, so much of the knowledge comes from mining, from bio-piracy; it comes from mining traditions of the ways in which people have used plants over the centuries for different kinds of ailments. And so the erasure of that knowledge is everywhere. And I just find that hearing some of the things you're saying is so striking—that within the US there is such a move to indigenous knowledge, to find different relationships between plants and people, rather than seeing plants as property, as things that can be exploited.
So on the one hand, in these global terrains, you see these spaces where women in other countries and cultures are pathologised, while at the same time there's also this fetishising of the indigenous in other kinds of circles. But the kind of knowledge you're talking about, I think has happened the world over—that there have been local cures, whether we call them science or not—you know, ‘ethnobotany’ is the current favoured term—but there are lots of, you know, local knowledges by which women were able to control their resources. But it is the history of colonialism, the history of urbanisation that have taken people away from the land, taken people away from these rooted traditions, that has created a different kind of uprooted society that is dependent often on the state, which is what has happened now.
Meehan: I’d love to talk a bit about your new work. I think as far as I understand, it's a return to botany and an exploration of how we deal with reproduction across species. Could you talk a bit about this new work?
Banu: So I think really—I feel—I have more tools now than I did when I finished graduate school, of imagining science differently. In this work, I’m thinking of three subfields in botany. One is looking at invasion biology. So the question of space, who belongs where. Looking at plant reproductive biology. So why, for example, are there male and female plants? Why have we written plant reproductive biology very much within terms of Victorian sexuality? And finally looking at taxonomy, the ways in which plants had different names that often related to or that described the relationship people had with plants. And then part of what botany did was Latinise everything into a universal nomenclature. And talking about what has been gained and lost through that move. So, you know, particularly to our point thinking of something like invasion biology. So invasion biology is this idea that divides the world of nature in place and nature out of place. So if you belong here, then you are native. If you don't belong here, you are exotic or foreign. And an invasive plant has to be a foreign plant by definition, right? So this idea is that our ecosystems are off-kilter and there are too many invasive plants, you know, taking over everything. And so as a result, what happens now is people go spend weekends pulling out invasive plants. Some cities have rules of what percentage of your garden should be native plants.
So it's had tremendous consequences. And some people named this as the number one environmental problem. But when you look at this idea of native and foreign, the first question is, what is native? Fifty years, a hundred years, 500 years, 1000 years, right? So at some point this is a constructed category. When you look at it in the long arc of the planet, we can start with, you know, the old super-continent Pangea, right? And then Pangea breaks up through plate tectonics, moves across the world, and so plants get separated. They move into new environmental zones, new adaptations. Environmental historians say that what colonialism did was re-knit the seams of Pangea. So Charles Mann has a wonderful book sort of tracking it. So what colonialism did is move plants from here to there. They started plantations, they created monocultures of different kinds of crops. They took whatever was beautiful and moved it around, what was economically useful. You think of something like Kew Gardens, right? That has representatives of plants from all over the world, and there are similar repositories all across the world. They created herbaria so that the original type is stored and it's usually, you know, in the West. And so these plants were moved willy-nilly. You know, people brought orchids to show their sense of richness and class by displaying orchids in their living rooms. They created little English tea gardens, you know, wherever they went. So part of what European colonialism did was to create new Europes, wherever they went. And where they went, there is good evidence that, especially in the United States, that indigenous societies died through the spread of various kinds of diseases plus, you know, acts of genocide. And so given this movement of plants and animals across the world—and so even in the United States, you know, if you look 150 years ago, the US Department of Agriculture sent botanists across the world to look for interesting, funny-looking, nutritious, you know, anything of interest and to bring them back. And there are individual botanists that have brought 120,000 different species into the United States. There’s the American Acclimatization Society where someone said, ‘Let's bring every bird named in Shakespeare's plays into New York Central Park,’ right?
So you have lot of episodes where there was clearly no sense that these are national boundaries and we cannot move things around. And then one begins to see you know, independence movements across the different parts of the world. For example, the need for labour in the United States. And then as people come, then you begin to see the creation of borders. And the borders for plants and humans happen within one year of each other, right? So it's this imagination of the foreigner that is really across species. And so you have quarantine laws that, affect animals and plants coming in, and you have immigration laws that shape which humans can come with each other. And so to me, in this long arc, it just seems like hubris, this whole concept of invasive species where we blame individual species as problems. So take something like kudzu, which is called the ‘mile-a-minute plant’ because it grows so fast. So kudzu was advertised in the World’s Fair and the government paid farmers to plant kudzu to prevent soil erosion. So then the plant takes over and now it is seen as an evil plant. Or you take carp that were brought into the Mississippi River to solve some problem. So across the world you have these episodes where a particular plant or insect has been brought to solve a particular problem, but then they take off, right? And to narrate, to make them ‘invasive species,’ ‘evil beauties’—I mean the kind of vocabulary we use around them when we don't narrate the histories by which they come here. So Karen Cardozo and I have called these ‘invited invasions,’ right? And so as long as, you know, workers know their place, then it's okay. So the vast majority of plants we eat, agricultural plants, are foreign. But so long as we can control them, they're okay—much as how we treat human workers. But if they get unruly, if they grow faster, if they ask for things, if they're difficult to breed, then they become problems that we pathologise and then we use this moniker of ‘the foreign,’ ‘the invasive’—as a way to make them other and pathologise them. And so it's the striking similarities I see across you know, different topics in botany—of the confluence in the ways in which we talk about plants, animals, and humans. And looking at it through the histories of colonialism and colonial logics of control and domination explained so much.
Meehan: Well, I look forward to this new work and I think that's a great place to end.
Banu, it's been such a pleasure to talk and to think with you. Thank you so much for joining us on the LRB Podcast.
Banu: Thank you.
Meehan: In the next episode, going out two weeks from now, we’ll turn to historian Alison Bashford to ask some hard questions about the history of population control and the enduring power of its critique. In a time of accelerating climate chaos, is talking about population off the table? How do we think about population in the Anthropocene?
