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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Was used in grander imperial projects, destroying the island and the people who lived there:“The conversion of Australia and New Zealand into mirror images of the British Isles and Anglo North America did not happen naturally. It required the systematic destruction of several tropical islands to remake the soils and biota of these southern lands. This is the definitive case of neo-ecological imperialism. Indigenous Banabans fought valiantly to protect their human rights to subsistence and property. Their struggle starkly reveals, yet again, the failure of liberal-minded colonizers to maintain the environmental integrity of conquered territories and to protect the life, liberty and property of subjugated populations.”The close link between guano, imperialism and capitalism, leads Cushman to explore ecological issues in depth — for instance the birds that produce the guano, the food they rely on and the interaction between the fishing industry and bird populations. These issues were not unknown to those who extracted the guano. The Peruvian government, for instance, placed great emphasis on understanding the ecology of the islands in order to protect this crucial (and very profitable) resource. They funded scientists and researchers to understand the guano system in order to prolong it, and this led directly to the development of ecological thinking. In 1909, a US marine zoologist, Robert Coker, calculated that each pair of guano birds had a lifetime value of $14.30 USD, which made Peru’s birds the “most valuable birds in the world.” It is an early example of what we would now call Natural Capital, an approach that direct arises out of capitalist attempts to understand and protect nature.So guano created an scientific and ecological approach to nature, that led to some of the first attempts to protect ecological systems. Some scientists warned of the consequences of industry destroying ecological systems. Cushman explains how, in 1947, Aldo Leopold saw a direct relations between “the level of human violence toward the land population density, and used ‘the guano birds… of the Antarctic seas’ to exemplify the human species’ ability glean nutrients ‘on a world wide scale’ and thus ‘becloud and postpone the penalties of violence.’”But on the part of guano corporations, politicians and many of the scientists they employed, such ecological concerns were mainly motivated by the profit motive. Sometimes they had far reaching consequences for instance in attempts to protect fish stocks by the Peruvian government. Cushman looks in detail at the intersection between fish, guano and capitalist society to explore the ramifications of this. But Cushman argues that one of the most important legacies of these ecological studies in the Pacific was more theoretical.As the quote from Leopold suggests, and the involvement of William Vogt, whose scientific studies were focused on guano
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