The guano banks have a powerful smell reminiscent of bus-stop bathrooms. This is because as much as a sixth of the guano consists of uric acid, a main ingredient in human urine. Farmers have known for thousands of years that adding urine and feces, animal or human, to the soil helps crops to grow. In the past, Europeans often used poudrette, a cocktail of human excrement, charcoal, and gypsum. Other soil additives included ashes, compost, blood from slaughterhouses, and (in China) cakes of soybean residue. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did scientists learn that these substances benefit crops because they put nitrogen into the soil. Soon after, a chemist in Peru informed the government that guano had very high nitrogen levels. The nation’s barren, excrement-laden islands were, so to speak, a guano gold mine.
A few bags of Peruvian guano went to Europe. Farmers sprinkled the contents in their fields, saw harvests rise, and demanded more. It was the world’s first high-intensity commercial fertilizer. European ships flocked to the barren Peruvian littoral and filled their holds with ancient excrement. To satisfy the demand, Lima gave guano-mining concessions to European companies. They stripped the islands as fast as they could, importing bondsmen from China to do the actual mining. Birds from South America were supercharging plant growth in Europe via slave labor from Asia. Guano dust is laden with toxic ammonia and potassium chloride; slaves wrapped their faces in cloths but still died in droves. Meanwhile the Peruvian government cashed checks. Despite the islands’ tiny size, they were responsible for as much as three-quarters of government revenue. To capture the guano trade, Spain seized the most important islands from Peru in 1864. Fearful of losing their guano supply, Britain and the United States threatened to retaliate. At the last moment a global war over fertilizer was avoided.
The entire crazy system depended on the birds that actually produced the guano, of which the most important was the Guanay cormorant. Long-winged and long-necked, black on the back and white on the breast, adorned with an orange-red bandit mask around the eyes, Guanays are noisy creatures, gregarious beyond imagining; their colonies, clustered on the sea, form dark, raft-like masses hundreds of yards on a side. Robert Cushman Murphy, an ornithologist who traveled through Peru in the 1920s, saw Guanays returning to their home islands: “a solid river of birds, which streams in a sharply-marked unbroken column, close above the waves, until an amazed observer is actually wearied as a single formation takes four or five hours to pass a given point.” A drizzle of excrement rained below. “The Guanay is in effect a machine for converting fish into guano,” Murphy wrote. Every year, a typical cormorant produces about thirty-five pounds of it.
At the end of the nineteenth century the guano-bird population declined. By 1906 their numbers were so low—and the guano industry in such a panic—that Peru sought advice from a U.S. fisheries scientist. He recommended that Peru turn the islands and the surrounding waters into sanctuaries, protecting both anchovetas and guano birds. Following this advice, the islands were nationalized in 1909; control was awarded to the newly formed Compañía Administradora del Guano. Entry to the area was forbidden for months on end, with armed guards stationed on the major islands. The measures were one of the first programs of sustainable management in the world. And they worked—until they didn’t. In the 1930s the number of birds again fell rapidly. Apprehensive guano administrators again sought help from the United States.
Robert Cushman Murphy, who had seen the “solid river” of Guanay cormorants, was the world’s leading authority on South American seabirds. The Compañía Administradora del Guano naturally approached him. Would he be interested in discovering what was happening to the birds? Murphy declined—he was happy in his position as curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Instead he recommended a friend who had recently lost his job. The Compañía took Murphy’s advice. The friend took a ship from New York and arrived on the guano islands on January 31, 1939. His name was William Vogt.
From today’s perspective, Vogt was an improbable candidate for the task of teasing out seabird population dynamics on remote islands. Thirty-six years old, he was a handsome, bushy-haired man with a resonant, actorish voice, piercing blue eyes, and a manner that was confident to the point of imperiousness. But he had no academic training or credentials as a biologist—indeed, he had sedulously avoided mathematics and barely passed his required science courses in college. He did not speak Spanish. He had never been to a foreign country. He had never seen a Guanay cormorant. He didn’t even have a sun hat. He was a French literature major who had fallen into birdwatching and befriended a number of professional ornithologists, Murphy among them. Fired from his previous two jobs, he had accepted the guano position in part because he had no alternative.
Vogt in a promotional image for the guano firm taken soon after his arrival Credit 5
All of the above is true, but unfair. Vogt was more than an unemployed bird fancier. He was a man who was feeling the first stirrings of a mission—a spark at the nape of the neck that would become a flame. In the previous few years he had become convinced that something was wrong with the way humankind viewed the natural world, or at least the way Americans viewed the eastern half of the United States. To make people listen to his message, Vogt was trying to transform himself into a professional ecologist by performing research so stunning that it would win him a doctoral degree even though he had not attended any classes. He had three years to do all this before his contract with the Compañía Administradora del Guano expired.
Improbably, he succeeded. Although he would never win his doctorate or even formally publish his research, this amateur scientist’s time on these faraway islands nonetheless led to what the historian Gregory Cushman has called “an astounding application of advances in ecological theory to practical problems…one of the pillars of modern environmental thought.” What Vogt saw in Peru would crystallize his picture of the world and the human place in it—a vision of limitation. They would bring him to the Prophet’s essential belief: humans have no special dispensation to escape biological constraints.
Remake the world! That became his goal, which he pursued with remarkable single-mindedness. To change how people think. To impart a message. He sounded the alarm for years, but died in the conviction that nobody had listened and that he had failed—an astonishing notion, in retrospect. His work marks the beginning of modern environmentalism, the most abiding intellectual and political ideology of Vogt’s century and ours.
“The Pleasures of Solitude”
Everything began with the birds, Vogt would admit, but he also drew inspiration from his childhood home in central Long Island. He was born, he liked to say, on a different Long Island, a Long Island of fields and pastures, a Long Island before “the automobiles, the airports, the mosquito control commissions, the shopping centers, the billboards, and the hot dog joints.” (This quotation, and others like it, come from unpublished autobiographical jottings in his papers.) Manhattan was just twenty miles away, but young Bill saw it only once a year, during a ritual visit to Santa Claus. The crowds in the stores frightened him—an early memory was of being mashed into the back of an elevator—and he returned with relief to his home.
Vogt spent his first years in a cluster of three small, interconnected villages—Mineola, Garden City, and Hempstead. He lived in a row house in the center of Garden City, two blocks from the train station. A planned community built by a wealthy dry-goods merchant, Garden City had the station, four stores, a tall Episcopal cathedral and its associated school, and the opulent Garden City Hotel, designed by the famed architect Stanford White. To the north was the county fairgrounds, with its horse track and touts. To the south a scatter of homes quickly gave way to farms and ranches. To the west was the cathedral, its acres of greensward tended by the ladies’ auxiliary. To the east was a spur rail line that went north to Mineola, and then to Long Island’s North Shore. On the other side of the tracks was the green-gold expanse of the Hempstead Plains, mile upon mile of butterflies, bir
ds, and tasseled grass—a vastness, he said later, that gave him “something of the sense of limitless space felt by the newcomers to the plains of Nebraska.” Shy and solitary, the boy was ever going into the fields, walking for hours, his only companion his grandmother’s St. Bernard.
It is possible that the fields were a refuge from the tensions of his history. Vogt’s father, also named William Walter Vogt, was the son of a warehouse clerk in Louisville, Kentucky. The family was respectable: upwardly mobile German immigrants. Vogt senior took a different path. He was charming and fun and untroubled by scruple. He joined the naval hospital corps during the Spanish-American War and lolled about occupied Cuba after his discharge. In August 1900 he traveled with two navy pals to New York. Within hours of their arrival they were arrested, drunk, in the Tenderloin, Manhattan’s red-light district. Shrugging off the arrest, Vogt quickly acquired a job and a fiancée. The job was working behind the counter at a drugstore in Mineola. The fiancée was a high school junior from Garden City named Frances Bell Doughty. Fannie, as she was known, had just turned eighteen. Liking the drug business—in those days, selling patent medicines of dubious efficacy—Vogt borrowed money from friends and set up his own drugstore in the first weeks of 1901. He married Fannie, suddenly and quietly, at her mother’s home the following Halloween. The sole guest was the bride’s mother. Fannie dropped out of school. Six and a half months after the wedding, on May 15, 1902, Vogt’s son came into the world. Twelve days later the proud father disappeared.
The impetus was a visit from one of Vogt’s friends and financial backers. Eleven days after the birth, the friend showed up at Vogt’s store to collect a twenty-dollar payment. Explaining that he needed to pick up the money in New York City, Vogt asked his friend to mind the counter while he got the cash. Early the next morning, without telling Fannie, Vogt took the ferry to Manhattan. He failed to return that night, or the next.
That same morning a woman named Mary Schenck drove a horse and buggy to her brother’s house on Long Island’s North Shore. Then, she, too, left for Manhattan. She, too, neglected to inform her family—her husband, a prosperous meatpacker, and their three children—of her plans. And she, too, failed to return that night, or the next.
Naturally concerned, her husband asked his friends if they had seen her. Some suggested, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it, “that the simultaneous leavetaking of young Voght [sic] and Mrs. Schenck is at least a coincidence that Mr. Schenck should investigate.”
The friends were correct. Vogt had long been interested in this woman—wealthy, bored, ready for adventure. He had already obtained from her what the Eagle called “a substantial loan.” A week after their disappearance they were spotted in New York City. Then they were seen in Washington, D.C. To pay off Vogt’s debts, the sheriff seized his drugstore and auctioned its contents.
Schenck returned in October, begging her husband to reconcile. Vogt had taken her from New York to Havana, Schenck paying all the bills. In Cuba her money had run out, and with it, from Vogt’s point of view, her appeal. He left her without regret, and she came back to Long Island. Soon after, Vogt wrote to his mother-in-law, Clara Doughty, asking for a ticket home.
Clara Doughty was proudly descended from Francis Doughty, a seventeenth-century preacher to whom the king had granted much of what is now Flushing, in Queens—the site, Vogt junior later bragged, of the 1964 World’s Fair. The Doughty farm, east of Garden City, had been in the family for five generations. Clara herself was a hardworking woman who had not taken a vacation from her work as a postmistress for twenty-two years. When Fannie became pregnant, she had rammed through the wedding. Now, though, Clara had had enough. She did not reply to her son-in-law’s letter. In a huff, Vogt wrote Fannie that he was never leaving Cuba. It was the last time he contacted his family. Even decades later, his unforgiving son told others that his father had died when he was a baby.
Fannie was stranded. She was still legally married, which under the laws of the day meant that she did not have clear title to her income or custody of her son. Yet obtaining a divorce was difficult, because in New York the sole legal basis for ending a marriage was adultery. Vogt had vanished, so Fannie couldn’t prove adultery unless Mary Schenck was willing to testify about it. One can imagine the pressure that Fannie and her mother exerted to force Schenck to appear at Vogt v. Vogt in March 1908. On the stand Schenck’s memory fled; she couldn’t recall how long she had known Vogt, where they went, or what they did. But she tersely admitted adultery. Two months later Schenck’s husband sued her for divorce.
The scandal had erupted when Vogt’s son, William, was twelve days old. Its last ripples did not subside until he was seven. For that place and time—the early twentieth century, a semi-rural village—the whole business must have been deliciously tawdry, fodder for dinner-table conversations in the village, something to shame the family, to mock the boy.
The temptation in tracing anyone’s line of thought is to look for explanations in their early life. Always there is the risk of overinterpretation. But it is easy to imagine that a child marked by scandal might end up spending time alone and come to view the natural world as a source of solace and meaning. In any case, these were the circumstances that began the life of one of the century’s great crusaders against careless human breeding.
Soon after his father left, Bill and his mother moved into his grandmother’s home in Garden City. Money was tight, but the family was not actually poor. In addition to Clara’s salary as a postmistress, Fannie worked as a part-time clerk; later she taught at a private kindergarten. Despite the scandal, despite his lack of friends, Vogt always described these years as happy—a childhood idyll in a household of women, surrounded by “what seemed an almost unbounded sea of grass.” Walking alone in the Hempstead Plains, he later wrote,
I learned the pleasures of solitude, the unbroken freedom to see, smell, and listen. These hours alone, though never many at a time, nonetheless sensitized me to the open countryside and prepared me for the enjoyment of winds and skies, plains, mountains, forests and the sea, for the rest of my life.
The idyll didn’t last. In 1911 Vogt’s mother married Lewis Brown, a carpet-lining salesman. The family’s new home was in an industrial district in southeast Brooklyn that was becoming residential. Sandwiched between two major streets, the area was everything Vogt hated: noisy, crowded, enveloped by pavement. He was soon “held up at knife point” in a park and relieved of his “total wealth of 17 or 27 cents.”
“As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies,” Vladimir Nabokov tells us, “the little boy was a glutton for books.” Vogt was no exception; he learned to read early and in Brooklyn found solace by imagining himself somewhere else. Especially resonant were the animal tales of Ernest Thompson Seton. Seton’s writing, sentimental and overwrought, has not aged well. Even at the time, his portrayal of animals’ abilities—foxes deliberately poisoning their captive offspring rather than allowing them to live in chains, crows that counted to thirty and marched according to a leader’s instructions—dismayed scientists. Still, Vogt later recalled, the stories “fired my imagination, as they did that of practically every budding naturalist of my generation.”
Seton’s bestiary alive in his mind, Vogt hunted for bits of nature in the city: beaches on Staten Island, oak and hickory copses in the Palisades, the dairy farm in Westchester County, just north of the city, where his stepfather had grown up; the chicken farm run by his cousins on Long Island. Mainly, though, Vogt plunged into Seton’s own organization, the Boy Scouts of America. (Seton was one of its founders and the first U.S. Chief Scout.) “I was an instructor before being old enough to get the freshman badge, almost immediately assistant patrol leader, and long before old enough was running the Scout troop,” he wrote. “I have been running something ever since.” Spending as much time in the woods as he could, Vogt was a healthy, rather bossy fourteen-year-old in August 1916, when he came down with polio at Scout camp.
/> Contagious and incurable, the polio virus attacked much of the United States that summer. New York City alone had almost nine thousand cases; about one out of four was fatal. A disproportionate number of the victims were children; the disease was then known as “infantile paralysis.” To prevent infection, the city had shut down schools, colleges, theaters, and playgrounds. Many of the boys at Vogt’s camp—Camp Leeming, in the Hudson River Valley—had been sent there expressly to avoid polio. Now in the person of adolescent Bill Vogt the disease had appeared. The local health officer, Vogt wrote later,
was about as anxious as anyone could be to get rid of me. My family agreed to have me sent to New York and he promised to move me in an ambulance. He failed to keep his word, and the Camp doctor carried me on his lap for 50 miles in a 1916 car over 1916 roads, and when I got into the Willard Parker Hospital, which was the New York pest house in those days, after having my head bob up and down on the back seat of the car for most of the distance, I was in such bad shape that a wire was sent to my mother saying I might not live until morning.
Vogt survived but was confined to bed for a year: standard treatment for polio at the time. A young librarian in a nearby branch library heard of his housebound situation and sent him White Fang, by Jack London. The other staple of literary origin stories, Nabokov might have observed, is the child turning to the world of books when illness forces inactivity (viz., L. Frank Baum, Elizabeth Bishop, Julio Cortázar, Yukio Mishima, Virginia Woolf). Following the classic pattern, White Fang led Vogt to the rest of Jack London, which in turn introduced him to other writers. The boy spent hours upon hours immersed in everything from mysteries to George Bernard Shaw, from Rousseau to Turgenev. Constant reading, he later claimed, ruined his eyesight. Thick eyeglasses were “well worth it.” The librarian, he said, was “the most influential woman in my life.”