William T Hornaday’s All That Remained of Them Were Several Acres of Bones, 1913, is mainly about the over exploitation of natural resources. The resource in question is Guano and bird wings of albatross and gulls. Hornaday, a zoologist, speaks on the horrors of the depletion and destruction of habitat on the Hawaiian island of Laysan. On this island a man named Max Schlemmer and a gang of his men brutally murdered about half of the albatross population on the island in a small amount of time before a zoologist from the University of Hawaii Honolulu messaged the United States government. When the Navy arrived, they found around three hundred thousand bird carcasses and three truckloads of wings, feathers and skins. Shortly after, President Roosevelt made several Hawaiian Islands sanctuaries for birds. This proceeded the 1856 Guano act where American citizens could go to islands and claim them for use of guano harvesting or mining. Furthermore, Paris had a demand for pacific bird feathers which is where Schlemmer got the idea to kill all the birds on the island, which he nearly succeeded in doing.
This source is included in the book because it shows the merciless accumulation of resources by the white man and depletion of wildlife. In Hawaii, many natural species of plants and animals are extinct because of the reckless behavior of just a few white men. These men brought vermin and bugs to the island to specifically hunt the precious birds on the island. Hawaii was also one of the places America took interest towards because of sugar production and Naval advantages in the Pacific. The main reason I chose this was because I noticed that the feathers were specifically for Paris. Although it did not mention it in the source, the feathers were used for dress making and high fashion for aristocrats and the wealthy. The depletion of resources is a massive ordeal in the fashion industry because it is a leading contributor to climate change and because of increasing international demand for vestments of all different makes. This source helps me understand the greater impact of the illegal and ruthless ways in which the industry operates and has operated for hundreds of years.
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