ABSTRACT
Conrad Marlow describes how Chester “had discovered—so he said—a guano island somewhere, but its approaches were dangerous, and the anchorage, such as it was, could not be considered safe”. The search for guano went beyond a matter of monetary wealth, for it took place within a larger anxiety about a dying world. The changes in global patterns of guano exploitation were evidently merely a symptom of this greater problem, as public voices began to declare in the decade leading up to Conrad’s composition of Lord Jim. In England, assessments of the environmental changes demonstrated an understanding of the world as an ecosystem in which human intervention was inexorably altering the agricultural basis of human existence. Both the guano island and the Patusan settings present and interpret landscapes as more than backdrops to human activity—instead, as a complex model of ecosystems, species interdependence and nascent principles of conservancy.
