1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [220]
For visitors the most notable feature in Luzon’s mountainous interior are the rice terraces. Long, skinny rice paddies, the terraces ladder up hills for miles in every direction. Tourist brochures say they were built two thousand years ago by refugees, Miao people from southwest China fleeing an ethnic purge. The Miao built terraces like those in their homeland, but even more spectacular. When the sun stabs through the clouds the young rice shimmers in a grass-green band along the stony edges of the terrace walls—the sort of impossibly beautiful sight that makes visitors clutch reflexively at their cameras. So many tourists have clutched at their cameras that UNESCO selected Ifugao, the most photographed area, as a World Heritage site. Some Ifugao terraces wrap completely around hills, making them look like wedding cakes fifty layers high. Women in ankle-deep water were weeding the paddies when I arrived. Below them the terraces fell and then gleaming fell. Two boys were fishing in a stand of rice. The terraces stepped up and down with the crazy order of an Escher drawing.
A man I had met on the bus to Ifugao walked with me for a while. The terraces were dying, he said, all four hundred square miles of them. Giant earthworms from somewhere overseas had invaded them. He spread his hands two feet apart to indicate their size, complicated tattoos weaving in chains over his upper arms as he gestured. Water sluiced out of the paddies through their huge tunnels, killing the rice plants. The worms, foreign intruders, were making the terraces porous and sponge-like. “Porous” and “sponge-like” are not adjectives that should ever modify the noun “terrace.” The terraces that had lasted two millennia would disappear in less than a decade.
That wasn’t the only introduced plague. The golden apple snail (Pomacea canaliculata) was sent from Brazil to Taiwan in 1979 to start an escargot industry. The industry never got off the ground, because would-be escargot magnates discovered that the snail was vulnerable to rat lungworm, a parasite that can infect humans. Also Taiwanese didn’t like the snail’s taste. Not long after their arrival, the snails escaped from their snail plantations and into the countryside. Farmers who grew other crops discovered to their dismay that golden apple snails are omnivorous, fast reproducing, surprisingly mobile, and very hungry. Proliferating along rivers and streams, they ate fish and amphibian eggs, other snails, many insects, and countless types of plants. They had a special liking for rice stalks—a big problem in an East Asian country. Despite this record the Philippines government asked U.S. Peace Corps volunteers to introduce the apple snail into the country’s rice paddies in the early 1980s. Again the hope was to start an escargot industry. Again the hope proved delusory. Soon snails were eating everything in sight.
The man from the bus told me that his name was Manuel. We came to his home and sat on the pieces of striped cloth that seemed to be everywhere in people’s houses. Jars and cans were stored in bamboo baskets. Rice was steaming in a pot. Manuel saw me looking at the pot and asked if I wanted some—it was his own crop. One bite would have been enough to convince even the most casual diner that Ifugao’s terraces produced something special. I stuck my nose above the plate and took a deep breath. Into my nose rose an odor good enough to be called a perfume. It had more to say than any rice I had encountered before.
On the terraces grow more than five hundred different traditional varieties (landraces) of rice. Farmers constantly mix and match them in an effort to develop better-tasting, better-growing varieties. People