Today marks the sesquicentennial of the first public debate on the topic of evolution at the Linnean Society of London. It was an event planned in haste and set off by a letter received by Charles Darwin on 18 June 1858. The letter came from Ambon in the Ternate, a group of islands known as the Moluccas, between Sulawesi and Papua New Guinea. Writing to Darwin was a young English ornithologist named Alfred Russel Wallace who had been collecting specimens throughout the Malay Archipelago. Wallace would collect over 125,000 different specimens, over 80,000 of them beetles alone. Over a thousand of them were new to science. More importantly, Wallace noticed a distinction between the fauna of islands closer to the Asian mainland and those closer to Australia, the zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line.
Recovering from a bout with malaria in 1858, Wallace took the time to write to Darwin about his observations.
The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals?
Darwin read Wallace’s maunscript with alarm for he had sat on his ideas (he had discussed them with others but had never set them to paper) on natural selection since his return on the Beagle in 1841. It is thus in the fortnight between 18 June and 1 July, 1858 that Darwin wrote a quick paper that together with the Wallace manuscript were presented to the Linnean Society of London.
For the next year and half, Darwin would write feverishly and in November 1859, The Origen of Species would be published. It is, without a doubt, the greatest book ever written.
We entered the Age of Oil in 1859 and now on the eve of that sesquicentennial, it is clear that the Age of Oil approaches its end within the course of another human lifetime but thankfully not mine. I wouldn’t want to be around for the end of the Age of Oil. It’s going to be a bloody mess. There is no subsitute for oil. Parts of it can be replaced by sources of energy and parts of it cannot be replaced by any known substance. But even if we could replace oil with another magic elixir, it is likely that we can not replace it in sufficient quantities nor as inexpensively to propel humanity to the lifestyle to which it has been accustomed.
We take so much for granted. We believe it our birthright to hop in a motor vehicle and have it deliver us to our destination of choice at speeds of up to 75 miles an hour. What’s more we can we traverse the planet in comfortable (well at least on international flights these days, domestic not so much) jetliners that take us from continent to continent in hours. In short, oil conquered the tyranny of distance for humanity, well at least for the better part of what now looks to be a century-long human enterprise in human prosperity, hedonism, excess and waste that wasn’t even shared by all though it certainly made all our numbers possible. Oil changed everything, it made us what we are today. This is the Age of Oil.
Note: This story, while perhaps amusing, has serious consequences because what underpins the revival of guano is related to the demise of oil.
I wrote a paper back in college on the Peruvian guano trade of the 1840s and the 1850s and I never thought I’d write another piece on guano ever again, but here I am writing on guano. The guano trade was responsible for the first real agrarian revolution where crop productivity increased dramatically. It allowed European farmers to feed a growing European population in the mid nineteenth century.
Guano is accumulated bird dung and it is found on bird islands and coasts around the world that also happen to be dry. In a wet enviroment, the excrement of birds simply runs off and gets washed away or it just gets absorbed into the detrius. As the bird extrement accumulates and dries, it becomes a dense organic material that is very rich in nitrate and phosphate. Around the world, guano deposits are usually found on dry oceanic islands lying in the middle of oceanic upwelling regions that support very rich fisheries. Living off the fish, and concentrated in great numbers by the small areas of available nesting sites, literally millions of seabirds, each excreting about 20 grams of dung a day, can generate massive amounts of guano.
As an organic fertilizer, guano has no substitute. It packs a punch in terms of density and fertility. The trade came to dominated by the British and led to a commercial boom in Peru. It also eventually led in 1879 to the War of the Pacific between Peru and Bolivia versus Chile. As a result of this war, Bolivia lost its outlet to the sea. While there are numerous islands that are guano islands (Nauru, Howland, Palmyra Atoll), no where else is there a greater concentration of guano and so readily accessible as in the coastal islands and desert coasts of Peru.
