RESEARCH
My second book project examines contemporary climate change through the competition between natural and synthetic rubber. This project takes as a starting point the most severe disease outbreak ever recorded on the Asian natural rubber belt, which scientists claim emerges as a result of climate change and the shifting behavior of microorganisms. Yet, Southeast Asian scientists and economists identify a more unnatural, politically-charged cause for this disease, namely the US petroleum-based synthetic rubber industry. They argue that, in addition to its unsustainable modes of extraction and production, the consolidation of the US synthetic rubber industry since the 1950s has consistently strained natural rubber-producing countries. By suppressing the natural rubber price, the US inadvertently motivated a rubber tree breeding race, which left plantations vulnerable to pollution and weather fluctuations. Building on ethnographic research with rubber scientists, economists, and smallholders in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, and archival research in Malaysia, the UK, Singapore, and the US, this project traces the socio-political, economic, and ecological interrelations between these complementary modes of extraction and resources. Based on preliminary research, I argue that this disease——and climate change itself——is not just a multicausal event, but rather a synthetic affliction—namely, the harmful compounding interactions between scientific breakthroughs in chemistry and biology, the shifting poles of powers in the aftermath of formal decolonization, ethnonationalist agendas, the geopolitics of oil, and racialized consumerist trends.