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This chapter addresses the first decades of US colonization of the Philippines. The United States established itself in the colony, erecting institutions of scientific research to, among other objectives, survey the profitability of the islands. Contrary to historiography that has only held Spanish colonial botany culpable for its interests in environmental extraction, this chapter examines US colonial botanists’ participation in similar pursuits. It takes as its case study US colonial botanists’ writings on materials of Philippine weaving. Such writings demonstrate how systematics served interests seeking to scale up plantation-scale production. The chapter, nonetheless, also offers a contrapuntal story: it follows a US anthropologist conducting fieldwork among a Bagobo community in the Davao Gulf in Mindanao and the knowledge of weavers this anthropologist obtained. Combined, the contrapuntal narratives offer a sense of the number of thought-worlds surrounding plants, their cosmological import, their utility in lifeways, and their role in plantation development.