textThis is an ecological history of a development project planned and managed
by technical experts: the origin, decline, spectacular revival, and tragic fate of the
Peruvian guano industry. In another sense, this is a social history of an elite type--
the environmental technocrat--and those they served.
During the nineteenth century, scientific travelers appropriated Andean
knowledge of vast, ancient deposits of nitrogen fertilizer for use by farmers in the
Northern Hemisphere. During the early twentieth century, environmental scientists
reoriented the guano industry for Peruvian use. They oversaw the development of
perhaps “the greatest of all industries based upon the conservation of wild
animals.”
This project had both global and local repercussions. The two-way
exchange of personnel, ideas, and technologies between Peru and the rest of the
world revolutionized scientific understanding of the Peru Current ecosystem. This
knowledge led directly to international recognition of the global importance of the
El Niño phenomenon. Through the issue of human population control, Peru’s
experiment inspired the emergence of an environmental movement that spanned the
Americas after World War II. In Peru, technical experts fundamentally influenced
the political process, input-intensive agriculture, artisanal and industrial fishing, the
organization of “big science” institutions, as well as the guano birds and their
ecological community. Ultimately, technocrats enriched and empowered a new
ruling class for Peru.
Beginning in the 1940s, the specter of an impending catastrophe in the
global food supply gave impetus to the exploitation of the world’s fish stocks. To
serve this demand, scientists helped engineer for Peru the largest industrial fishery
on Earth. Their studies legitimated the decision to let the guano birds pass into
oblivion so their food, the anchoveta, could be processed into animal feed. As a
reflection of persistent global trends of food distribution, rather than feed the
world’s undernourished, this fishmeal enabled affluent northerners to consume
more meat. This fishery was carefully supervised by experts, but they proved
unable to prevent its collapse during the El Niño of 1972-1973. This ecological
disaster reveals how fleeting “sustainable growth” can be, even for the bestmanaged
development projects.Histor
