"1493"

[fiefoe]

Foreword and coda:

• Born in the sixteenth century from European desires to join the thriving Asian trade sphere, the economic system for exchange ended up transforming the globe into a single ecological system by the nineteenth century.
• the exchange brought sweet potatoes and corn to China, which had accidental, devastating consequences for Chinese ecosystems.
• It is strange, too, to realize that globalization has been enriching the world for nigh on five centuries. And it is unsettling to think of globalization’s equally long record of ecological convulsion, and the suffering and political mayhem caused by that convulsion.
• Messing around with the tomatoes felt to me like building a fort as a child: I was both creating a refuge from the world and creating a place of my own in that world.
• Colón’s signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.
• And the song continues by enumerating the contents of an idealized Filipino garden: Jicama and eggplant, winged bean and peanut, String bean, lima bean, hyacinth bean, Winter melon, sponge gourd, wax gourd and winter squash, And there is also radish, mustard, Onion, tomato, garlic, and ginger! And all around are sesame seeds.
• 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.
• “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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The terraces thus were largely the creation of the same great exchange that was now destroying them—they were, in their way, a monument to the galleon trade, created by globalization like the worms that were building the main guest house on the shore. Thelma’s Paradise was going to be a “farm resort.
• But the magnitude of the costs and benefits is less important than their distribution. The gains are diffuse and spread around the world, whereas the pain is intense and local.
• the same people who want to satisfy their desires also resist the consequences of satisfaction. They want to have what everyone else has, but still be aggressively themselves—
• the consequences of their own actions. They make decisions and expend labor; a few months later they discover what they have wrought. Externalities are rare. Gardens are places of constant change, but the changes are owned
• So powerful did Zaytun’s Muslim minority become that some Fujianese converted to Islam, which allowed them to register as foreigners and enjoy foreigners’ privileges.
• Few learned the precepts of the Qu’ran—the book was not fully translated into Chinese until 1927. Fujianese imams, most of whom did not speak Arabic, memorized the original text, declaiming it phonetically in the mosques. As memories faded, the services descended into gibberish, meaningless recitations before uncomprehending audiences. In one way, though, this remote outpost of Islam preserved tradition most faithfully: Zaytun’s Muslim families, old and new alike, were split into quarrelsome factions, Sunni, Shi’ite, and Sufi.