1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [219]
A small minority of the newcomers were environmentally or economically damaging and only a very few harmed the ecosystem itself, impairing its ability to filter water or grow plant matter or process nutrients into the soil. But to the scientists in the room almost all the exotics were problematic, because they were helping, in ways large and small, to turn the Philippines from what it had been before Spain into something else—a homogenized, internationalized, airport-shopping-mall version of itself, a vest-pocket version of the Homogenocene. The island landscape, they said with some heat, was less and less what it had been before. Like too many places around the world, it was becoming a nursery of canny opportunists—the sort of species equally at home in an abandoned pasture and at the edge of the big-box parking lot that replaced the pasture. It was no longer the Philippines.
Not until I had left the building did it occur to me to wonder: Why are the species in “Bahay Kubo” not foreign invaders? Surely Filipino gardens must have grown something before Legazpi. Why didn’t Conservation International print wanted posters of tomatoes, peanuts, and string beans? How could this dog’s breakfast of recent international arrivals become a symbol of home and tradition, sung about by school kids before nostalgic parents?
Then it occurred to me: I, too, thought of my garden as a kind of home. Futzing around with the plants was my refuge from e-mail, deadlines, and my office desk. Much like the biologists, I wished more of the local nurseries sold local plants—I had complained in one of them that there was nothing in the entire space that was from anywhere within hundreds of miles. Embarrassing in retrospect, I issued this gripe as I was at the nursery cash register, paying for seedlings of bell pepper (origin: Mesoamerica), eggplant (origin: South Asia), and carrot (origin: Europe). I was simultaneously promoting and denouncing the Columbian Exchange, and the globalization that trailed in its wake. I, too, was an example of fractured cerebration.
STAIRCASES IN THE HILLS
The way I like to put it, my family is partly responsible for the worms. The worms—two species in the genus Pheretima and three in the genus Polypheretima—first appeared about forty years ago in the mountain rice terraces three hundred miles north of Manila. My family in this context means my grandfather, who in 1959 became headmaster of a small private school near New York City. One of the perks of the job was an imposing house on the school grounds. When I visited for the first time my grandfather told me that he had instituted a policy of having breakfast every day with half-a-dozen students. By careful scheduling, he could invite everyone in the school at least once a year. To accommodate his guests, he asked the school to provide him with a bigger breakfast table. The table that arrived was made of Philippine mahogany.
Philippine mahogany is not true mahogany—it comes from two tree species in a wholly different genus. But because it looks like mahogany, especially when stained, importers dubbed it “Philippine mahogany”—much to the anger of the Mahogany Association, a Chicago-based association of furniture manufacturers who used real mahogany, which originated in the Caribbean, and wanted to protect the name. Decades of litigation produced a Federal Trade Commission ruling in 1957 that Philippine mahogany could not be marketed as “mahogany,” without the qualifier. More properly known as