Andrew! This type of article is the meat: Significant hitherto unattended economics and history. You fly too close to the sun when you write too much on current USA politics, but you soar unimpeded and unrivalled when you write of guano and such.

Excellent piece, Andrew. I might add that the use of guano by the Brits has led to an early version of unsustainable industrial agriculture and explosive population growth. For example, after 5000 years of steady population of 2 - 4 million people, the Egypt's population started growing for the first time in the late 1850's when the Brits introduced "modern" agriculture to Egypt and told them to grow cotton. Today, Egypt has 80 million people (and counting fast) with nowhere to go, and the soil that is going, going, gone... - Tad

Peru and Chile went to war with Spain in 1864-1866 to keep control over a group of guano islands that Spain was trying to exploit (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War).

Fifteen years later, British mineral interests in the guano and nitrate deposits of southern Peru and western Bolivia provoked the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). The British were fed up with Peruvian controls over the exploitation of their mineral deposits, so they lined up allies in Chile who agreed to be more compliant with their corporate wishes.

The end result was Chile's conquest of the Atacama Desert, Peru's loss of its (nearly depopulated but mineral-rich) southernmost province, and Bolivia's loss of its only outlet to the sea. Bolivia has never forgiven Chile for its loss.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific)

Another bit of history: the word "guano" is Quechua and means "excrement," or perhaps better, "manure." In the Andes it refers most often to the "wanu" of llamas, another good fertilizer. In the modern Quechua alphabet, the word is spelled wanu. (The "g" is an artifact of Spanish pronuncation.) Quechua is the language of the Inca Empire and still the most widely spoken native language in the Americas, with about 10 million speakers from Colombia to Argentina.

In 1972, working with Encyclopedia Britannica Films, I did the sound (and narrated) a film "The Bird Who is a Clown" on the Booby. I thought that was ancient history, the guano islands harvesting, but recall the dropping covered islands off Ecuador with fondness now that the subject has come up here. Blue-footed Boobies, the name conjuring up grade school giggling, are neat little birds. Well, not "neat" in as much as they leave a very slippery trail of "stuff" wherever they migrate.

Let me be the first to point out that in Ian Fleming's novel, Dr. No's underground hideout was located beneath a guano island.

That extractive and commodity based economies are ultimately doomed to failure and collapse. Guano, bauxite, hardwood timber, oil, minerals, it doesn't matter. Because in order to make money you have to eventually relinquish price control as a commodity. And then what happens is that you simply extract more of whatever you get out of the ground until there's nothing left.

The only difference between then and now is today's leaders are bat shit crazy instead of bird shit crazy. Either way, it's still guano.

that should have been "Booby shit" not "bird shit"

*giggle*

Andrew took much delight in slapping "bird shit" smack in the middle of this post -

But I certainly enjoyed reading it.