A monoculture, by definition, is a homogenous environment with little to no diversity, in which “every organism follows the same path of development.”
According to Malcolm Gladwell in his book Revenge of the Tipping Point, a monoculture can refer to a group of cheetahs in the Oregon safari in the 1970s, or a small American town called Poplar Grove. A cluster of organisms bred in a uniform environment, a monoculture is rare, unnatural, and often created—by parents, teachers, zoologists—until they notice a strange pattern of deaths among the very creatures they established a system to protect.
The epidemic of early mortality in cheetahs in zoos worldwide began in 1970. Although many animals were bred in captivity, cheetahs were the only species that couldn’t breed, or did not survive when bred. Zookeepers from many countries held a meeting in Virginia, all with the same concern. They studied blood and skin samples from cheetahs from South Africa and Winston, Oregon. They found that unlike other animals with healthy genetic diversity (and healthy breeding patterns), cheetahs showed no genetic variation at all. They were uniform.
This genetic uniformity was then traced to a certain point in history. Cheetahs must have been close to extinction at one point, geneticists reasoned, perhaps down to a single female. To survive, sisters had to mate with brothers. Incest was necessary to prevent the population from dying out. When the cheetah population returned to normal, there remained little to no immune diversity, forming a monoculture of cheetahs unable to fight the spread of a disease. Around this time, it was also discovered that Florida panthers had a lack of diverse antibodies, having undergone a similar near-extinction some time ago.
Poplar Grove, a pseudonym given to a specific American town known for its high-achieving students, is a monoculture of children. Poplar Grove kids are ambitious, athletic, and scholarly all at once. Sociologists Abrutyn and Mueller visited Poplar Grove to study it. They found the dangers of monoculture, expressed as unhealthy inbreeding and weak immune systems in cheetahs, wreaking psychological havoc on the young Poplar Grove students, especially in high school. What happens when high school, the very place for being “different”—nerdy, emo, goth, popular, preppy, etc.—becomes uniform, like the Poplar Grove High School, in which kids have been raised according to the same high standards since elementary?
“A monoculture … offers no internal defenses against an outside threat,” says Gladwell. “Once the infection is inside the walls, there is nothing to stop it.” (89)
The first suicide in 2005 kicked off the tragic epidemic of suicide clusters at Poplar Grove. A bright, outgoing, high-achieving junior jumped from a bridge. Between 2005 and 2016, several youths jumped off the same bridge each year, often within the same six-week period. And somehow, suicides became almost normalized in Poplar Grove.
South Korea is a leading country in youth suicide. Some of the reasons for suicide are startling: second place in the whole school, rejected from university, failure of an entrance exam. It isn’t fair to call Korea a monoculture, but when an entire society strives for the same goal of high achievement, that shapes the walls of the system to resemble the gates of the cheetah enclosure or the motto of Poplar Grove High School: to “achieve academic, social, emotional, and physical success” (102). In sacrificing diversity for uniformity, especially where sensitive adolescents are concerned, lives are lost. Korea, my home country, didn’t start off wanting to make all their kids the same. That was hardly the goal. Neither did Poplar Grove parents intend to pack all their kids into the same mold. Yet they were all driven by the same ideology—that there’s only definition of a successful life—and that created a society obsessed with achievement, resulting in a kind of monoculture.
Iatrogenesis is a term for when a medical intervention, intending to save the patient, goes wrong and the patient dies. Youth suicide is probably the most devastating outcome of such a procedure: an infrastructure is set up with the intention to help kids thrive, but is helpless to protect the ones that die within the system.
Somehow, the Pied Piper story seems an apt conclusion for these thoughts. In the story, the only boy in the village to survive is the one with a crippled leg, the very thing that set him apart from the rest of the children. Being different saves his life. It is a kind of bittersweet ending. A bit of a real-life happy ending, then, for the Florida panthers at least, is the plan enacted by zoologists in 1992: to crossbreed Florida panthers with Texas cougars. Despite strong opposition from private breeders, the resulting offspring panthers grew stronger, interbred among themselves and were very fertile. The monoculture was broken up, and the epidemic stopped spreading.
