At breakfast the tour guide warned us, “Ladies and gentlemen, take some croissants and pastries with you and a couple bottles of water because there’s not going to be food or anything to drink where we’re going today. Also remember to bring suntan lotion. In addition to direct photon bombardment there’s also the reflection from the water surface.”
The ocean was flat as a pond and paddling our sea kayaks at a good clip we reached the mysterious island in less than an hour.
“No human, and probably no other mammalian, has ever set foot here,” announced the guide. “The island is made up of irregular columns of lava rocks, so tall and steep they make the place uninhabitable. Except for birds, of course. Tens of thousands of them nest here, all kinds.”
“What’s this bitter stench?” a woman asked.
“Guano, bird droppings. Some scientific types have estimated there’s a fifteen to twenty foot layer of guano covering the rocks. That’s the reason the island is nicknamed NPK.”
“That’s a strange moniker if ever there was one.”
“Apparently guano is the best fertilizer there is, definitely the most natural. Until the synthetic ones,were developed in early 20th century, guano was used in agriculture worldwide. N stands for nitrogen, P is phosphorus and K is potassium. The last one doesn’t make sense, at least not in English. It’s probably the Latin or Greek word for potassium. Anyway, that’s the story.”
It took us four hours kayaking around the beautiful but stinky place. Then we paddled back to our hotel standing on a real beach where the air smelled fresh and the sand felt smooth, caressing the feet.
Proposal
Background: During my recent vacation in the Pacific I found out about a large uninhibited island, nicknamed NPK. It is made up of volcanic rock and guano, the latter a highly valuable fertilizer. I asked the statistics department to roughly calculate the amount of guano. They estimate it could be over one hundred thousand metric tons. Organic-vegetable farmers are willing to pay up to ten dollars a kilogram (2.2 lbs) for good quality guano.
Plan A: We flatten NPK by bombing until it becomes manageable, i.e., flat, so workers can enter and surfacemine the guano. Finding manpower will present little to no difficulty; all the islands near NPK have large numbers of unemployed, healthy young men. The current average wage over there is below a dollar an hour; if we pay them two fifty, we’re going to be able to pick the crème de la crème. While the functional illiteracy rate is also relatively high, it may not matter, and in a way advantageous, since the work involves only shoveling and heavy lifting. Health services are provided by the islands’ medicine men and elderly female quacks, two-three members of Doctors Without Borders and a dozen or so young volunteers (mainly nurses) from the western world. In short, no health coverage need be provided. Icing on the cake, the natives are self-involved individualistic types and as a result their labor unions are rather primitive and fragile.
Plan B: If members of the ruling elite become greedy and demand excessively high cuts for themselves, we foment an uprising among the destitute masses, overthrow the regime, and install loyal, less greedy leadership. Next step, go to Plan A.
The post NPK first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by J.S. O’Keefe.