99% Invisible - 239- Guano Island

Episode Date: December 7, 2016

In 2014, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, making it the largest marine preserve in the world at the time. The expansion closed 490,000 square miles of largely undisturbed ocean to commercial fishing and underwater mining. … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 2014, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Island's Marine National Monument, making it the largest marine preserve in the world at the time. The Pacific Remote Island's Marine Preserve is farther from human settlement than any other US territory. The President's expansion of the reserve today will close 490,000 square miles of largely undisturbed ocean to commercial fishing and underwater mining. And if you look at a map, the preserve really is nowhere near the United States. It's thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland.

That's reporter Emmett Fitzgerald. It's not even that close to Hawaii. Yet somehow President Obama was able to protect this piece of ocean in the name of the United States. And to understand how the United States has jurisdiction over these waters in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we've got to go all the way back to the 19th century. When, for a brief period, US sailors scoured the oceans looking for rocky islands covered in Guano. Which a lot of people think of as just bad poop.

I think most people think of Guano as bad poop, but in this case we're talking about birds and sea birds, so sea bird poop. That's Paul Sutter, I'm a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the mid-1800s, the United States became obsessed with the quest to find and sell Guano to use as fertilizer on farms. People believed it would revolutionize farming, and it did, at least for a little while, but the quest for bird poop ultimately had even bigger ramifications.

The use of sea bird poop as fertilizer starts in South America. Well, it originates with deposits off the coast of Peru, off southwest Peru, and particularly three islands there called the Chinchah Islands. The Chinchah Islands are in the middle of a nutrient-rich current with tons of plankton and massive schools of fish. And there are sea birds that live on the islands, getting fat off all these fish.

They're gorging themselves on anchovies, and they're defecating all over these islands across hundreds if not thousands of years. And it almost never rains on the Trench Island, so over time the Guano just keeps piling up. And as a result, these deposits built up to almost a hundred feet deep in places. That's the size of a ten-story building of poop. For centuries, the Ketchua people in Peru would mine these Guano mountains and spread the bird poop out on their fields. And it worked. They were really successful farmers. And the Spanish who colonized the region began noticing this and really dabbled in it. But scientists in Europe didn't really get interested in Guano until the famed Prussian

naturalist Alexander von Humboldt visited the Peruvian coast in 1804. He saw laborers unloading ships full of bird poop, and he took a sample and brought it back with him to Europe. In the early 19th century, a German chemist named Eustus von Liebig began arguing that soil fertility basically came down to just a few critical nutrients. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. And that soil fertility can be restored or maintained by adding those nutrients, those chemical or mineral nutrients, back to the soil.

Peruvian guano had really high concentrations of all three of these nutrients, especially nitrogen. It was the agricultural analog to discovering gold. The Peruvians began to mine guano on a commercial scale, and they struck deals with British merchants to sell Peruvian Guano back in Europe. And they set up shop on the Chinchot Islands, and they initially rely on local semi-coarse labor, but eventually they get into importing Chinese laborers. This is a form of bonded contract labor, so they're also paid very little.

It's a very abusive labor system. They're misled in terms of the terms of this deal. The miners lived on the islands, intense and bamboo shacks. And they hacked away at the Guano deposits with shovels and pickaxes for up to 17 hours a day. They're chipping away at this Guano. They're sending it down giant shoots, often right into the holds of ships.

This is incredibly accurate, caustic stuff. It gets in their lungs, and it's really debilitating. But soon, farmers all across Europe were using Peruvian Guano on their fields. Two of the companies profiting the most off this new trade were WJ Myers from Liverpool, and Gibbs' sons from London. There was a little slogan that said, the house of Gibbs made their dibs selling the turds of foreign birds. Word of the fertilizing power of seabird poop eventually reaches the United States.

Where commercial farming, and particularly unslave plantations in the south, had stripped the soil of a lot of its nutrients. Historically, farmers would plant cover crops, practice crop rotation, or raise cattle for manure production in order to keep their soil healthy, or they would just farm a field until they had exhausted its nutrients and then move on to a new piece of land. But British merchants began advertising a new product that would help American farmers stay in one place and maximize their yields. Peruvian guano. Planners begin to experiment with it as a way of increasing their yields, and in some

cases have really good results. Soon agricultural publications in the US were praising guanos' magical properties, and farmers throughout the country began using it to fertilize their fields. By the late 1840s, the United States was in the grips of what historians have called Guano Mania, importing tens of thousands of tons of bird poop every year. The US was bird shit crazy. But because British firms had a monopoly over the Peruvian guano trade, guano was expensive. And so farmers began to petition Washington

to help them get cheap guano. At one point, the president of the United States millered film more in his 1850 annual address, makes guano security a kind of important point of that address. Peruvian guano has become so desirable and article to the agricultural interests of the United States that it is the duty of the government

to employ all the means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price. But, Philmore was mostly talk, and guano prices continued to soar. And so US businessmen start to take matters into their own hands. They begin going out looking for other islands with new sources of Guano. And these bird poop prospectors come across an uninhabited island in the Caribbean, called

Abyss. In 1854, a group of Americans landed there to mine the guano and attempted to claim the island. That's Christina Duffy Ponsa. And I'm a law professor at Columbia. In Ponsa says that U.S. guano mining on Ava set off a minor diplomatic crisis. Venezuela felt that the island belonged to them and they ended up sending a warship to kick the guano company off the island.

But when they got home, the guano prospectors asked Congress to pass legislation that would protect them as they try to claim new islands. So, US citizens could feel like they had the backing of the US government if they encounter a controversy. Like military backing, meaning you guys can go out, take these islands, and if anyone shows up with warships, we'll bring ours too. And in the debate over this legislation, politicians argued about guano prices and other details, but there were also some senators who expressed a larger concern. They worried that by taking over islands for the purposes of mining guano, the United States could be perceived as having imperial aspirations.

Secretly trying to set up colonies and engage in territorial expansion by claiming islands in the Atlantic and the Pacific and all over the world. And a little context is important here. This is all happening against the backdrop of European colonialism. Great Britain is about to establish its colonial government in India, and various European countries will soon colonize nearly all of Africa. The United States had taken over much of North America and violently stole territory from indigenous people.

But political leaders at the time didn't think of this as colonialism because the US always incorporated new territory into the country, rather than maintaining colonies. The US also prided itself on being a nation born out of a revolution against an imperial power. So the United States did then and has always conceived of itself as an anti-imperialist country and distinguished itself from European powers who in this period in the 19th century were acquiring territories all over the globe. And so even though in the case of the Guano Islands, they're talking about claiming uninhabited rocks,

some senators think that this looks a little too close to colonialism for comfort. So they work on developing language that will mitigate any fears that the US is trying to set up overseas colonies. So eventually, as the Senate goes through a series of drafts, the way that the islands are described is not as part of the territory of the United States or subject to the sovereignty of the United States. Those words drop out. They are described as appertaining to the United States as in a sort of fancy old-fashioned way of saying belonging to? Appertaining. The thing about that word was that at the time no one really knew what it meant from

a legal perspective, but it was softer than saying, we own this, it's ours. The Senators also included an abandonment clause, which said that the United States could relinquish possession over the islands once the guano had been exhausted. And with all these cabyats in place in 1856, Congress passed the guano islands act. And at that point, American citizens start claiming islands all over the place. This is really companies that want to mind this guano. Start sending people out and telling them to claim these islands. In total, US companies claimed over the place. This is really companies that want to mine this guano. Start sending people out and telling them to claim these islands. In total, US companies claimed over 70 islands throughout the Pacific and the Caribbean.

Indigenous Polynesians and Hawaiians mined guano for US companies on bar-flung Pacific Islands. And after the Civil War, guano companies recruited free black men to mine guano on Caribbean islands. Like in Peru, mine Guano on Caribbean islands. Like in Peru, US Guano mining was brutal, and workers were often coerced and horribly mistreated. Guano Mania didn't last all that long in the end. By the 1870s, the vast Guano deposits

on the Chinchu Islands were almost gone. Many of the islands the United States took didn't turn out to have very good Guano deposits on the Chincha Islands were almost gone. Many of the islands the United States took didn't turn out to have very good guano. And synthetic fertilizers were just around the corner. And while the history of the Guano trade isn't often talked about, it had lasting impacts that are still incredibly relevant to this day. The Guano trade introduced the idea

that soil fertility could be bought and sold. Instead of carefully tending to their soil on the farm, farmers could just buy this guano supplement and sprinkle it on their fields. This paved the way for the fertilizer-fueled industrial agriculture that we see today. And the Guano Islands Act set a precedent that would help enable future acts of American imperialism

on islands that were very much inhabited. Around the turn of the 20th century, the United States goes to war with Spain over the occupation of Cuba and the US winds. So after the Spanish-American war, what happens is the United States takes Puerto Rico and the Philippines and Guam, as basically part of its war booty for defeating Spain in Cuba. And to be clear, these territories were taken as spoils of war, not as part of the Guano Islands Act. But when the U.S. annexed these island territories in 1898, it sets off a huge debate about what to do next. You could make these places into states, but the white political establishment wasn't too excited about absorbing a bunch of islands full of people of color.

It's about race, more than anything else. White Americans want the nation to be a white nation. So this is the same period of time in which Americans start tightening their immigration laws. But politicians were reluctant to give up territory with real strategic value. In 1901, this question about the status of Puerto Rico and the Philippines makes its way to the Supreme Court, in a case involving goods that are shipped from Puerto Rico to the United States.

The disputarizes around a shipment of oranges from Puerto Rico to New York. When the shipment arrives in New York, the customs collector imposes duties on the oranges as if they were coming from a foreign country. And the company shipping them challenges the duties, saying Puerto Rico is part of the United States. The Constitution says that you can't impose duties on any goods being shipped within the country. This case was about taxing oranges, but to decide this case,

the court would need to answer a bigger question. What relationship do these islands have to the United States? In the end, the court ruled that imposing a duty is okay, because these new places, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, are not fully a part of the United States. But in their decision, the justices make clear that they aren't foreign either. The famous phrase from these cases is that they're foreign to the United States in a domestic sense. It's an odd phrase. At the time, no one really knows what it means. It basically creates a limbo and in-between status.

Some of the justices point it to the Guano Islands Act as a justification for creating this in-between status. And the ruling went on to say that these new territories were a pertinent to the United States, a pertinent as in appertaining. And there's that word, that word, appertaining from the Guano Islands context. When even then and after then, still, lawyers

trying to understand what that word means, can't quite make sense. They're never quite sure what, you know, all we know is this is a way of kind of holding a place at arm's length while still controlling it. It's impossible to know whether this case would have unfolded differently if the U.S. had never gone looking for Guano, but the Guano Islands set a precedent.

And that gives the court a familiar and legitimate mode of reasoning in creating a status that was really an invention, a territory that belonged to the United States, but wasn't a state. And some of these territories still have this limbo status. Puerto Rico still has the status of a foreign, in a domestic sense, territory of the United States. And that's also the case for four other territories, the US Virgin Islands, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. All these places are in a form of limbo.

And the United States ambivalent relationship with extra territorial islands all started with the Guano Islands Act, a legal framework that allowed the U.S. to take control over a place without making it fully a part of the country. Puerto Rico is an estate, nor is it an independent nation. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but they can't vote in U.S. presidential elections. And Professor Ponsa, who is from Puerto Rico, says that being stuck in this colonial limbo, appertaining, but not belonging to the United States, has stalled progress on the island for over 100 years. Puerto Ricans have spent a lot of time in political energy trying to decide whether to pursue

statehood or independence. And it has done a great deal of harm in Puerto Rico because it distorts politics when you're arguing about questions as foundational as should we be a state or not, it really haunts Puerto Rico's political life. The Guano Islands Act is still law. In fact, in the 1990s, a man from California named Bill Warren tried to claim the abandoned island of Novasa as his own private Guano Island. He failed.

But the U.S. still holds claim over a few of the old Guano Islands in the Pacific. Some of these islands ended up having some kind of strategic value as landing strips and they had other kinds of military uses. Amelia Earhart was planning to land on a guano island to refuel when her plane went down in the Pacific. And President Obama used guano island possessions to expand one of the largest marine reserves in the world. The guano islands in the Pacific that the U.S US still controls are now called the United States Minor Outline Islands. They don't have any permanent resonance, a few military officials and scientists live there throughout the year, but these little rocky islands are ongoing projections of the

American Empire, and are a reminder about the time when Guano Mania gripped the world. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, with Sri Fusev, Katie Mingle, Kurt Colstead, Avery, Trouffman, Sam Green, Span, Delaney Hall, Terran Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Professor Dan Margalees of Virginia, Westling College, and our pal, O.K. Akumi, who was a new album of previously unreleased tracks that's up on Bandcamp, and I'm really enjoying it a whole lot right now. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook.

You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Ork. We're on Instagram and Tumblr too. But if you want to be super interesting at your holiday party, I recommend you spend some time reading a few stories at 99PI.org. From PRX.