biopirate

chained_bear commented on the word biopirate

"What drove him to particular fury was the suggestion that he had 'stolen' his cochineal from Spain. Even though Thiery was indisputably what we today would call a biopirate (Would we? --Ed.), he maintained that he had behaved justly toward the people of Mexico. Far from stealing anything, he insisted, he had paid Oaxacan farmers very generously for every nopal and insect he had taken. When Spaniards and other enemies continued to call him a thief, he was outraged."

Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 181.

Also, it would be hard to label Thiery with that tag if we aren't going to label, for example, Sir Joseph Banks with the same word.

"Having heard that nopals and cochineal grew wild in Brazil, he instructed Commodore Arthur Phillip, the commander of Australia's first fleet, to stop there before continuing on to Botany Bay. (Banks was aware that wild cochineal and cultivated cochineal were not exactly the same insect, but he did not fully comprehend the extent of the difference.) In Rio de Janeiro, Phillip collected samples of the plant and the insect, which he ferried to Australia along with 'Eight Hundred convicts two Hundred of whom are women.'

"The fate of Phillip's nopal and cochineal samples are a good illustration of the perils of imperial botany--perils that were not well understood at that time. Introduced into a new environment, exotic species can produce erratic and unpredictable results. Sometimes they perish altogether; sometimes they proliferate wildly. In the case of Banks's Australian experiment, the wild cochineal soon died off, but the nopals thrived, becoming the first of several related opuntia species that eventually overran nearly 100,000 square miles of eastern Australia, rendering the land useless for farming or grazing. Only in the 1920s, with the deliberate introduction of yet another exotic species, the South American moth Cactoblastis cactorum, whose larvae fed on the cactus, were the opuntias finally brought under control.* (The moth itself has since become a pest elsewhere....)

*In South Africa, where introduced opuntias also became invasive, cochineal itself--a wild species called Dactylopius opuntiae--proved the most effective means of biological control."

Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 188.

October 6, 2017