The Smell of Progress: A Brief History of Bird Droppings Ruling the World
Guano, global inequality, and the long history of shifting environmental costs from centres of power to distant and expendable regions
There is something both satisfying and slightly uncomfortable, about the fact that modern civilisation owes a huge debt to bird droppings. Literally. The great cities of 19th century Europe, with their wide boulevards, their opera houses, and their self‑assured industrial elites were rested on mountains of seabird excrement scraped from isolated Peruvian islands by men who had no choice in the matter.
This is the story of guano, and in a curious way it is also the story of the modern world itself. It begins, as so many stories of Western “discovery” do, with an intelligent European stumbling upon something Indigenous people had known for centuries. When Alexander von Humboldt, that restless Prussian genius, arrived on the coast of Peru in 1802, he found a series of small island formed almost entirely of seabird excrement called guano, accumulated over many years into towering deposits. The Quechua people called this substance huanu, meaning excrement, and they had long understood its value as a fertiliser.
Humboldt, to his credit, was genuinely curious. He tested guano, documented its extraordinary richness in phosphates and nitrogen, and reported his findings to the European scientific community that was hungry for solutions to one simple problem: the limits of Europe’s depleted soils.
Industrialisation had drawn millions of people into cities and severed the connection between human communities and the land that sustained them. Fields that had been cultivated for generations were losing their fertility, and agricultural societies that imagined themselves as permanent suddenly discovered that even the soil beneath their feet could be exhausted. The farmers greeted guano like a natural miracle that appeared just in time to rescue their fields and industrial civilisation from the consequences of its own success. Alas, temporarily.
And here is where the story becomes interesting, which is to say, where it becomes ugly. Shiploads of sun hardened seabird excrement, scraped from distant islands thousands of miles away, began arriving in European and American ports where they were sold at high prices to farmers anxious to restore the productivity of their failing soils. Harvests improved so dramatically that guano became a kind of agricultural gold rush, inspiring pamphlets, political lobbying, and eventually the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which allowed any enterprising American citizen to claim remote and uninhabited islands in the name of fertiliser. For a brief period the prosperity of a rising United States depended quite literally on the droppings of seabirds. And like many miracles of industrial progress, this one contained the seeds of its own undoing.
As workers became increasingly separated from the natural conditions of production, they gradually adopted the same view of nature held by landowners and industrialists: that the nature existed as a storehouse of resources that can be freely exploited by humans. Extractivism, understood as a logic of capital accumulation at any cost, advanced together with the brutal oppression and violent dispossession. Indigenous populations were displaced from lands that had sustained them for centuries. Chinese labourers -”coolies,” in the parlance of the era - were brought to the islands under contracts that differed little from slavery. And the islands that birds had built up slowly over millennia were stripped bare within the span of a single generation.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: the very resource that restored agricultural productivity was being used up at an extraordinary speed. A solution to one crisis quietly created the conditions for another. The system was consuming its own future.
By the 1860s, the richest deposits of guano were running out. What followed was war. Spain, Peru, and Chile fought over control of the Chincha Islands in the Guano War of 1865 and 1866, and only a few years later Chile and the allied forces of Bolivia and Peru went to war over nitrate deposits in the Atacama Desert. What lay beneath the rhetoric of national interest was a struggle over fertilisers and the agricultural productivity on which modern industrial societies depended.
Karl Marx, writing at precisely this moment in history from the centre of a global empire, recognised something in all of this that many his contemporaries preferred not to see. Capital, he argued, has a tendency to sever the natural conditions of production from the places where production actually occurred, transforming what had once been freely available into something that had to be purchased, transported, and eventually exhausted. What was once the soil beneath one’s feet becomes an import from ten thousand miles away. What was once a cycle becomes a pipeline. And pipelines, unlike cycles, have an end.
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark call this breakdown in the relationship between society and nature the metabolic rift. It describes a rupture in the basic exchange between human communities and the ecosystems that support them. Guano is one of the clearest examples. Nutrients that had accumulated for centuries on Peruvian islands were dug up, shipped across the world, and spread over European and American fields. Harvests rose, workers were fed, and industrial economies grew, but the nutrients never returned to the places they came from. Instead they accumulated in the centres of global industry, while the regions that supplied them were left depleted.
This process is what scholars describe as ecological imperialism: the environmental costs of industrial growth are displaced onto distant regions even as the benefits are concentrated in the centres of power. The exchange is ecologically unequal because it moves energy and materials in ways that prices and trade accounts cannot capture, and because the long‑term damage falls hardest on the places that provide the resources. The prosperous societies at the centre rarely see the ruined landscapes or the exhausted labourers that make their prosperity possible. Distance transforms extraction into an apparently benign form of progress. The violence becomes invisible, which is precisely what allows the system to keep operating.
We no longer fight wars over guano, of course. We have synthetic nitrogen fertilizers now, invented precisely because guano ran out, and their production require enormous quantities of fossil fuels, contributing to a different kind of planetary disruption.
The details change. The structure does not. Some periphery is always being stripped so some centre can remain comfortable, and this same centre often reacts with mild astonishment when this is pointed out. The same pattern is evident today in the global extraction of minerals and rare metals that power our digital technologies. The promises of digital convenience and clean energy rest on foundations of environmental devastation, human exploitation, and persistent suffering which are pushed out of sight to preserve the illusion of a developed world.
There is a lesson in the history of guano if we are willing to see it. Civilisations, like seabirds, build slowly over long stretches of time. But they can be scraped bare in an instant.
The birds, at least, had the good sense not to congratulate themselves on it.
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Sources:
Bärbel Rott, Alexander von Humboldt brachte Guano nach Europa - mit ungeahnten globalen Folgen, 2016, https://doi.org/10.18443/234
Cushman, Gregory T. 2013. Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World. Cambridge University Press.
Guano Islands Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act
Chincha Islands War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War
War of the Pacific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
Notebook V (“The Chapter on Capital”) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htmFoster, John Bellamy and Brett Clark, 2009. “The paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction” Monthly Review 61(6):1-18
Martinez-Alier, Joan. 2002. Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation. Edward Elgar.
I'm astonished I've never once heard of this. I'll confess - I checked your sources to make sure it wasn't a early April Fools. It just goes to show how low the human race will stoop to pillage the planet and turn a profit.