----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- II. Over 400 years ago, colonizers brought a few strains of potatoes from South America back to Europe, where they had never grown before. These individuals became the genetic parents of the vegetables that would nourish my Irish ancestors who were dispossessed of their land and driven to survive on tubers, which grew discretely underground.
What a life-saving gift these Native American plants were to my ancestors, for a time. But growing multitudes of potatoes from only a few progenitors yielded crops that lacked genetic diversity and had relatively weak symbiotic relations within the exotic ecology of the “British” isles. The vulnerable potatoes that once saved human lives were in the mid 19C decimated by a microbe with whom they had not coevolved. Nobody was prepared. The Potato Famine -- a terrible multispecies event -- would kill about one million Irish people, and prompt about two million to leave their occupied homeland. Their suffering hardly reached the magnitudes of the Holocaust, the Transantlantic Slave Trade, or the Native American Genocide. But it was significant. My presence in North America was made possible by a violent clash between a fungus and a tuber. _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
