A Certain Unbeautiful Substance: Of Sewers and the Social Contract

This I wrote as a "Radio-Free Robin," or quasi-political column, not a Bob, for this week's Sentinel.

A Certain Unbeautiful Substance:  Of Sewers and the Social Contract

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Once I was looking at some artist’s conception of a Civil War battle, noble-looking generals on noble-looking horses in a green field under a blue sky, when suddenly it struck  me that, in real life, with that much cavalry the place must have been absolutely oozing in horse poop.

That’s an unromantic view of history but not a patch on what you will find if you read, as I just did, W. Hodding Carter’s book Flushed:  How the Plumber Saved Civilization.  Carter’s portrait of Western society before modern sanitation oozes with a different species of poop altogether.

How did your narrator, a garden writer so Victorian she refers to herself in the first-person plural, become involved in the study of what I’m pretty sure her garden writer avatar would refer to as “a certain unbeautiful substance that is, however, useful in horticulture as a soil amendment?”

Well, anyone who reads the front page of this newspaper will remember that in Dade County we have two ongoing water board issues, Canyon Ridge and Brow Wood, that are enough to keep a local news reporter’s mind firmly in the sewer. 

But it’s more than that. 

People sometimes ask how I stay awake covering county commission meetings.  They’re missing the glaring truth:  Local government is the nuts and bolts of democracy.

Similarly, waste management is the most basic requirement of collective living, which is to say why people consent to be governed in the first place.  These tea partiers who bellow they want government out of their lives, what do you suppose they’d be bellowing if there were fluids swirling around their ankles more objectionable than, say, tea? 

My guess is it would be something along the lines of, “There oughta be a law,” or “Help!” notwithstanding the absence in the Constitution of a single word pertaining to poop. 

In the country, of course, we take care of these matters ourselves, latterly with privately-owned septic tanks, formerly with more rustic accommodations.  Really, depending on how far one lives from one’s neighbors, one could get away with nothing at all, though I must say my own apertures seal shut with a little noise – snap! – as I type the words.

But when people gather in greater concentrations, poop looms larger as a social issue, as Hodding Carter’s book shows us, sparing few details.  To begin with, what, pray tell, do you suppose castle moats were really for?

Yes.  Moats were circular cesspits, and if you swam one to rescue a fair princess you’d probably die of a disease before you got across.  (And if you did get there, she’d probably say “Ick!” and push you back in.)

But cities were much, much worse.  In Paris, householders would empty their bedpans into the streets with the thoughtful if euphemistic warning, “Gardez, l’eau!”  (“Watch it, water!”)  In London, the warning was anglicized to “gardy-loo” and is possibly the reason the English still call a bathroom a loo. 

But this was Western civilization, home of the free market, and it wasn’t long before the trade of “nightman” or “gongfermor” arose to make a buck off the situation.  These nocturnal entrepreneurs collected the unbeautiful substance – which came to be called “nightsoil” – and carted it out to the country to sell to farmers as a soil amendment.

As London grew, there were more people and more “nightsoil.”  Cesspits were built and overflowed, and eventually it seemed sensible to cover up the streams and rivers, build houses on top of them and dump raw sewage into the water.

Result:  an unbelievably polluted Thames, a tainted drinking water supply, cholera epidemics, infant mortality approaching 50 percent – and in 1846 the covered Fleet River exploded from methane buildup, taking three houses with it.

Advocates for the poor had been demanding that the government do something since the 1820s, but the English autocrats didn’t act until they were affected personally.  It was the Great Stink of 1858, when the air in Parliament made members vomit, not the cholera pandemic of 1849 that decimated the population, that finally kick-started London’s sanitation push.

            Now let’s move across the globe to Asia, where the great Ganges –

(Here I cannot help telling you that when I came across the word “Ganges” in a crossword puzzle and asked my husband about it, he male-answered without pausing for thought that it was an embarrassing health condition, as in:  “My Ganges is swoll up so bad, I cain’t hardly zip up my britches.”)

– where the great Ganges, the sacred river of India, is more full of poop than a family-values Republican with a mistress in Argentina.  But the lack of sanitation is more than just a disease vector in India; it is also the instrument of social injustice.  How do you suppose the Untouchables got to be untouchable?

Yes:  Poop.  Someone was needed to carry it out of the crowded villages, and thus the caste was born – a caste that was to be treated with shocking unfairness throughout the millennia because of the despised labor forced upon it. 

The Indians are even now working on this problem, and Carter quoted Prime Minister Nehru as saying: “The day every one of us gets a toilet to use, I shall know that our country has reached the pinnacle of progress.”

In Dade County, sewers are seen as the key to growth, attracting not just new residents but desperately needed industry.  The question is not whether they’re necessary but who will pay for them, and the answers proposed may strike you as being full of a certain unbeautiful substance useful in horticulture as a soil amendment.

A humble substance indeed, but one which seems, nevertheless, to be at the very heart of the Social Contract.

END