"the most valuable birds in the world": international conservation SCIENCE AND THE REVIVAL OF PERU'S GUANO INDUSTRY, 1909–1965

GREGORY T. CUSHMAN

EXCREMENT IS NOT considered a topic of polite conversation, yet it is a fundamental and unavoidable part of biological existence. Such attitudes have ancient roots in taboos governing religious purity. The Mosaic law commanded: "Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. For the LORD your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you." But in our secular age, these attitudes are more a reflection of how divorced urban, industrial existence has become from natural cycles and humanity's agrarian roots. Thus, the ecologically enlightened in our disposable society now have to read special books about "how to shit in the woods" to protect the wilderness from harm. There is even a book to teach children that "everyone poops."1	1
This separation is due, in large part, to the great success experts have had at manipulating natural processes for the rest of us. A major task experts have been asked to perform over time has been to hide, wash away, and otherwise protect us from the scourge of our own excreta. As a consequence, the fundamental significance of merde en l'histoire has been largely hidden, with one major exception: The extraction of guano, the accumulated droppings of marine birds, is a dominant theme in Peruvian history. In fact, the period 1840–1880 is known as Peru's "Guano Age."2	2
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, European scientific travelers appropriated Andean knowledge of vast natural sources of nitrogen along the Peruvian coast for use by farmers in the Northern Hemisphere. From 1840–1880, Peru exported an estimated 12.7 million tons of guano from its islands with a sale value in the range of £150 million ($13 billion in today's dollars, see Fig. 1).3 This bonanza inspired a global rush to colonize even the remotest specks of land in order to exploit any bird colonies—or kanaka laborers—who might help produce this valuable fertilizer. Peru's ruling elite tried to use this geographical advantage to engineer a modern nation, but their project ended in tragedy, as one of the world's great mining booms turned bust. In 1879, after exhausting Peru's major guano deposits, the nation's leaders went to war with Chile over a second coastal resource, immense deposits of inorganic sodium nitrate in the Atacama Desert. This devastating war over the wealth of nature—one of the largest armed conflicts in the history of the Americas—practically demolished the "fictitious prosperity" created during Peru's Guano Age.4	3
Figure 1. Guano Production in Peru, 1840–1975. Chart by author.   . . . There are about 15992 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.