Slate, the original and still my favourite online ‘zine, has a wonderful article by Johann Hari on Rose George’s The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.
The article, and I assume the book, is full of wonderful little nuggets like this one, on London’s sewers:
Her journey opens by tramping down at midnight into the place where that road began—the sewers of London. This city beneath the city can be deadly: Stinking clouds of hydrogen sulphide—the “sewer gas” that forms when sewage decomposes—will suffocate you if you get caught in them. Before these tunnels were built, London had “on-site sanitation.” This is a polite way of saying people shat in a covered-up, set-aside space, and their feces were collected and sold to farmers as manure. But in the early 19th century, London’s population rapidly doubled, and the city’s buildup of excrement became unsustainable. The cost of having your private cesspool emptied spiked to a shilling, twice the average workers’ daily wage. So, people took to emptying their cesspools into the Thames, which soon ran brown. By 1848 cholera outbreaks were killing 14,000 people a year, and then came the “Great Stink” of 1858. London reeked so badly people were vomiting in the streets. The drapes of the House of Commons were soaked with chloride in a (failed) attempt to disguise the stench.
It seems we are living in a golden age – somewhere between a time when humans wallowed in their own excrement and a not-too distant future when the world will drown in shit – unless we can come up with an alternative in the next few decades. Where’s Joe the Plumber when we really need him?