[-empyre-] II.

[lucian o'connor]

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.