Flowering Exploitation
In May of last year, I’m holding onto a tree’s breeching surface roots trying to keep myself from sliding down a muddy slope in a forest somewhere in western Oregon. I’m surprised by the amount of mud. A week before the local news had flashed warnings of poor air quality due to a prolonged fire season. Even within the confines of the trees, the air feels heavy and the wooded surrounding fragile and susceptible. I dig into the mud with my right forearm trying to preserve the cleanliness of the clear bandage protecting a tattoo I’d only a day before. My hiking shoes, once purple, are now packed and cracking with drying mud, the sole’s traction clogged with wet leaves. I’m here because I told myself I would see a wild orchid. I’m here because just a little farther down the slope is a Cypripedium fasciculatum. A clustered lady slipper.
The orchid’s petals curl in on themselves like the top of an ear, brown tinged with subtle plum. In the realm of supermarket orchids, they are unsellable. They’re dull, diminutive, and culturally unattractive. But in the moment where I finally get close enough to appreciate their detail, I’m confronted by the inadequacy of our language. A part of me feels like I should cry or screech or show some other more vocal and physical form of elation, but since I’m alone, I don’t. I tighten my grip on the tree roots and live in the tension of this moment of shared space. I engage in a silence more potent than language.
In the months after that hike, I’m increasingly bothered by the inadequacy of the language I’ve been given to describe what I’d seen. More so, I am bothered by the common name that has doubled as a characterizing factor for the entire genus of lady slipper orchids. Based on the feminized connotations of its common name, the lady slipper orchid is bound to the analogous link that exists between women and nature. While little attention is paid to the orchid in marketed conservation efforts, the flower has a place within the foundational theories of ecofeminism. As a whole, ecofeminists are concerned with the contradictory relationship between production (male) and reproduction (female) in which individualism and autonomous action are attributed to producers only. This relationship makes up either side of a dualistic structure outlining the seemingly opposing bodies of men and women and the constructs of humans and nature. The exploitation of women and nature is believed to arise from these twin opposites and the link present between the caring and nurturing qualities that arise from a woman’s culturally constructed experiences.
As I understand it in relation to the slipper orchid in particular, both women and orchids share in their degradation by dominating forces, hence women are viewed as fertile and nurturing and orchids as endlessly exploitable and abundant.
As of now, there are at least 25,000 known and documented species of orchid, 168 of which fall within the lady slipper genus. And more astoundingly, orchids as a whole make up more than eight percent of all flowering plants, making them the largest family in that classification. I spoke briefly with Dr. Amy Hinsley, a Martin Fellow and researcher at the University of Oxford, about the conservation of orchids. “[Convention on the Internal Trade of Endangered Species] often focus[es] on elephants and other charismatic mammals, [although] orchids make up over 70% of all of the species listed,” she explained. Simply put, orchids receive little no attention from conservations despite their overwhelming presence on the endangered species list.
Initially, orchids feel comparatively well protected, at least when compared to other struggle species of plant. But like common varieties of grocery store vegetables, a majority of people are only aware of a select handful of the most extravagant hybrid species, curated by supermarkets and home improvement stores. When framed by local floral arrangement counters, orchids appear to be thriving. This is likely part of the reason that orchids have become some of the most poorly conserved plants and receive little to no conservation marketing. As both the legal and illegal wild orchid trade continues growing into a multi-billion dollar industry, nearly every continent is being stripped of their native species of orchid. The price of an orchid’s beauty is extinction.
The exploitation of orchids has a complex history and reached its peak during the Victorian era, predominantly in England. Elite male collectors would hire orchid hunters to travel to foreign countries and pillage the land, gathering millions of orchid specimens to send back to England where some of the first greenhouses were currently in development. At the time, several species of lady slipper orchid were already well known throughout most of Europe and Asia. Although the lady slipper orchis is not a variety made frequently available to the average plant enthusiast, the plant’s name has earned itself a sort of household resonance.
Despite the commonality of the lady slipper’s name, its etymology is obscure. After much late-night internet surfing and pilfering of digital archives, I found that its origins, at least those documented in English, date back to the late 1500s. In 1597 a man named John Gerard, an English herbalist and author, published The Herball or generall historie of plantes. In this publication is one of the earliest known mentions of the lady slipper orchid in print. And while its clear that Gerard didn’t name it (he claims to have heard the name from a friend), he explains the anatomical reasonings behind the flower’s common name. The sack of the orchid, is well, shaped like a woman’s slipper. Rather than giving the orchid a name in its own right, its value is linked to an object of human utility. As the orchid’s common name become more abundantly used, the orchid’s feminization wrote itself into our culture as inherent making it the object of exploitation.
Charles Darwin inadvertently refers to this feminization as well, “I have several plants, all however originally derived from the same piece, but in spite of numerous attempts, I have uniformly failed to fertilise the flowers.” At this time, little was understood about the process of orchid propagation and the language of Darwin’s notes reflects his frustration. Within his writing, the slipper orchid is linguistically depicted as female and has failed to propagate despite Darwin’s numerous attempts to artificially fertilize it. Later, in a letter to a friend, he describes the plants he’s working with as barren, attributing the causality of infertility to the orchid, which seems to become a place holder for the female body.
The terminology utilized by Darwin when describing slipper orchid reproduction is eerily similar to that used to describe the reproductive qualities of women. Through the language of reproduction, we start to see ties between women’s perceived role as caretakers and nurturers and slipper orchids as symbols of fertility and the objects of exploitation. Nature and the female body are, in the ecofeminist perspective, seen as occupying the same side of the dualistic structures of twin opposites. And consequently, they have been treated by the dominant side as expendable and exploitable. This dualistic structure is often understood as male/female, culture/nature, and subject/object in which the object is put on the planet for use by the subject.
Again the issue of dualism is present in Darwin’s work, more specifically within his theory of common descent. While the theory is founded on the notion that all living things derive from a common ancestor, the basis of the theory is often reinterpreted as a means to justify systematic objectification. The theory encourages the grouping of things based on their degrees of similarity, which consequently gives the “subject” implicit permission to treat the “objects” of similarity in an identical fashion. The lady slipper orchid’s common name inextricably links it to women and therefore binds the two together as objects of repeated exploitation.
Orchids are a species of flower that displays as unassumedly hardy and therefore are often treated as overly delicate and are documented as such. Flowers like women are subjected to less than generous descriptions that lead to a cultural devaluing and this can be seen as a direct correlation to the growing endangered orchid crisis. Ecofeminist Val Plumwood has described this objectification as “[a woman is] conceived as lacking any independent value or agency, she does not present any limit to intrusion…thus her boundaries permit or invite invasion.”
Of the 168 species of slipper orchid, twelve are native to the United States. Of those twelve only two have not be placed on the endangered species list. Of course, orchid hunting and direct exploitation is not the only threat to native species. Land development and fragmentation, ecotourism, and the decimation of pollinator species have played a role in growing threat levels. As wild orchids become rarer, their value in the illegal orchid trade increases, encouraging the continuation of this exploitative cycle.
Looking back on my own wild orchid search, I continue to grapple with why I chose not to take a photo of the slipper orchid. Maybe it merely slipped my mind. But I think subconsciously it felt like a violation and a voyeuristic exploitation of the species profound rarity. I left the orchid untouched and hidden amongst the forest’s decaying leaves and unidentified overgrowth. Perhaps, one day, the slipper orchid will propagate unhindered, its overabundance letting it fall into the background of our most familiar landscapes. I like to think this is still a possibility.
*Dr. Hinsley’s complete interview is still in progress and another interview with author Susan Orlean is being arranged, but could not be scheduled before the assignment’s due date.
