![]() ![]() He figured he could bring in hardwoods, exotic fruits and coffee as well. ![]() Rubber was (and remains) as valuable as oil to the automotive industry.īut it wouldn’t just be rubber he’d be aiming to import to the U.S. One of the few pieces of the automotive puzzle he didn’t own was his own supply of rubber, which was needed not only for tires but gaskets, hoses, valves, wires and other crucial pieces of automotive assembly. Metal could be refined in a Ford-owned smelting facility and wood processed by a brand-new state of the art mill. He owned vast stretches of woodlands and copper mines in the upper peninsula of Michigan, for example. Firestone vehemently believed Americans needed a steady, preferably domestic, source for latex.įord already knew the benefits of sourcing his raw materials from his own lands and holdings. Under a foreign cartel the price of the rubber needed for industry could rise from 20 cents per pound to $1.20–an unimaginable sum to the two industrialists. By the end of the ’20s, America was producing 50 million tires a year. The substance was so valuable that exports allowed France and England to pay down their debt from World War I in record time.Īmerica in particular was hungry for the stuff. The Netherlands and France later spliced brasiliensis with other rubber trees to make it hardier and even more productive for plantations in their colonies. Hevea brasiliensis can grow to 100 feet tall and start producing latex sap after seven years with reliable production for decades. The British were the first to surreptitiously get their hands on rubber tree seeds from their native Brazil, planting newly sprouted saplings in tidy crowded rows on plantations in southern Pacific colonies like Sri Lanka and Malaysia. At the time Europe had a stranglehold on the production of latex, which occurs naturally as a sap in rubber trees. While normally fans of a monopoly, the men weren’t thrilled when that monopoly wasn’t their own and threatened to cut seriously into profits. Both industrialists were staring down a potential European rubber cartel. The entire plan for Fordlandia began as a conversation with Harvey Firestone, the founder of the Firestone tire brand, in 1927. ![]() But it is a warning to powerful CEOs who think they know better than everyone around them. Snailbrook likely won’t face what Fordlandia did: disease–both venereal and jungle– death, vampire bat bites, knife fights, children eaten by jaguars, malnutrition, destruction of primal forest, tyrannical middle men, rotten food, riots and strikes–all of which happened before the Ford Motor Company abandoned Fordlandia in 1945. goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. The only thing that is lacking is - is the dinosaurs here. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and. Here’s how director Werner Hertzog described it in 1980-35 years after Ford closed up shop for good: The Amazon, which receives roughly four times the amount of rain that fairly dreary Dearborn gets in a year. Because what worked for Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, would obviously work in the Amazon…right? The Amazon, which Teddy Roosevelt described as a green hell when he nearly died on an expedition just 14 years before Ford set boots down in the jungle in 1928. ![]()
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