Marine, Public Servant, Kansan by Dennis Raphael Garcia, AWA

This fishery was carefully supervised by experts, but they proved unable to prevent its collapse during the El Niño of 1972-1973.

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. Their studies legitimated the decision to let the guano birds pass into oblivion so their food, the anchoveta, could be processed into animal feed. To serve this demand, scientists helped engineer for Peru the largest industrial fishery on Earth. 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. Ultimately, technocrats enriched and empowered a new ruling class for Peru. 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. 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. This knowledge led directly to international recognition of the global importance of the El Niño phenomenon. 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. 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.

During the early twentieth century, environmental scientists reoriented the guano industry for Peruvian use. During the nineteenth century, scientific travelers appropriated Andean knowledge of vast, ancient deposits of nitrogen fertilizer for use by farmers in the Northern Hemisphere. In another sense, this is a social history of an elite type-the environmental technocrat-and those they served. This 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.

Marine, Public Servant, Kansan by Dennis Raphael Garcia, AWA