ABSTRACT

Chapter 1 traces a small quantity of guano fertilizer used to enrich the lawns of Central Park in the 1860s back to the Chincha islands of coastal Peru. As powerful urbanizing centers like New York City expanded in the mid-nineteenth century, so too did the scale of their peripheral agricultural lands, and their appetite for high-potency, foreign fertilizers. Landscape Architect Frederick Law Olmsted experimented with the new fertilizer (alongside other composted wastes) in Central Park, designed as a microcosm of the agricultural experience for urban populations alienated from the countryside. As the global trade in mineral fertilizers supercharged the industrialization of modern agriculture, guano deposits on the Chincha Islands were quickly exhausted, extracted by enslaved Chinese workers under horrific conditions. The case of guano illustrates the growing metabolic rift of the nineteenth century, anxieties about disconnections from local organic cycles, and interwoven narratives of the exhaustion of both soil and enslaved workers.