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So what do this and this and this and that have in common.
Well they’re all part of this—the United States.
Now I know I’ll get plenty of comments like these and for that I’m sorry but this is
going to be another one of those episodes—the America centric ones.
Now, what really binds these islands together is that they’re all part of the US because
of this—bird poop.
In the 1700’s everyone was farmers.
At the time the world population was starting to increase faster and faster but the share
of people working in farming was staying roughly the same.
All around the world the soil was loosing its nutrients from centuries of farming so
growing was becoming less efficient.
That was all until a guy named Alexander von Humboldt went to Peru and discovered guano
and by discovered, we mean he saw natives doing something and decided he invented it.
Now, sidebar, guano equals bird poop.
According to the beginning of every bad valediction speech in history, the Merriam-Webster dictionary
defines guano as “a fertilizer containing the accumulated excrement of seabirds or bats.”
This guano was a miracle fertilizer thanks to its high nitrogen content and the world
became crazy about it.
By the 1850s guano was selling in the US for as much as $75 per pound.
(2017 dollars) That’s almost a third the cost of Silver.
People were making their fortunes by importing bird poop and the market in the US was dominated
by only a few key players who spiked up prices.
So, William Henry Seward, the same guy who bought Alaska, introduced a bill in the Senate
which would allow any US citizen to claim any uninhabited island for the US as long
as it had guano.
Guano mania continued.
Businessmen went all around the world to find remote, unclaimed islands with guano and once
they did, these islands were added to the US no matter where they were.
This is how the country ended up with places like Howland Island, a 1.5 mile long piece
of land in the South Pacific and Kingman Reef, a gathering of shells reaching no more than
3 feet out of the water.
So the question was, how do you fit these places into the US.
These islands were not close to the US.
Some were over 4,000 miles away from the mainland.
It didn’t make sense to add them as states.
Most had no permanent population.
It didn’t even make sense to add them as territories.
The US had to come up with an entirely new classification of land just for these guano
islands: the insular areas.
Any insular area of the United States was considered officially, by the federal government,
a non-integral part of the United States.
They had no path to statehood and no independent government.
In fact, by law, the US didn’t even consider these areas as land, they were ships.
Any crimes committed on these guano islands were prosecuted under US Maritime Law.
The only real benefit of these islands being part of the US was that, if another country
tried to claim these islands, the US military would come knocking.
As it turned out, most islands claimed ended up being pretty useless for Guano mining.
Many were like Palmyra Atoll, too wet for the guano to dry into useful fertilizer.
But they weren’t completely useless.
They gave the US an enormous exclusive economic zone.
You see, these zones extend 200 miles out from the territory of any country and within
the EEZ, the owning country has exclusive rights to fishing, drilling, and all other
economic activity.
Still today, Americans have these exclusive rights all around the world thanks to bird
poop.
The most fascinating part of the Guano Islands Act is that it is still in place today.
You can still go and add an island to the US if it has bird poop to mine.
Just 20 years ago an American came across Navassa Island between Haiti and Jamaica and
there was guano, so he put in an application to the Department of the Interior to claim
it.
They, however, swiftly rejected the claim since they claimed it was already claimed
a century earlier, but that makes sense since today there are no known islands worldwide
that aren’t already claimed by countries but that doesn’t mean there will never be.
Small volcanic islands appear all the time and so, if the time is right, you could use
this antiquated law to add your small bit of rock to these United States.
If you do claim an island for the US, you won’t want to waste your money on trivialities
like building and setting up a school.
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