Everything Comes Down to Poo

I have an unfortunate fascination with waste disposal. I don't know why. I hope its just a mildly humorous quirk, rather than a discomforting preoccupation. One of the coolest field trips in my college careers was to the waste water treatment facility at the bottom of the valley here. I just think its fascinating that the city of Logan is using natural processes (oxidation by algae and bacteria and filtering through wetlands) to remove waste from our water. This isn't to say that I would drink the effluent, but I'd be willing to kayak in it. If any of y'all plan on visiting Logan, take a look out toward the center of the valley, the 'square lakes' you can see from campus are actually oxidation ponds where living organisms are removing 'solids' from our waste water. How cool is that?

(I couldn't find a pic of the square ponds, but these are the polishing wetlands, which are also awesome)

Anyways, the thing that spurred this whole train of thought was a book I'm reading for my history class called Down to Earth: How Nature Has Shaped American History. It's a really fascinating read, should anyone have time to pick it up. Anyways, there's a chapter in it called "Death of the Organic City" that is primarily about the way Americans used to deal with our waste. Turns out, back in the day there used to be a thriving poo-vegetable trade between urban and rural areas (that's not exactly the terminology used, but pretty much the gist of it). Before the advent of automobiles horses were the main transportation system both within and between cities, and horses produce between 15 and 30 pounds of manure per day. That's freaking intense! (Another factoid: geese eat about 5 pounds of grass per day, they poop about 4 pounds of that back out in a day) Anyways, there was really no way to make use of it in the city, so there was a network of haulers that would take the poo to nearby rural areas to use as fertilizer for the vegetables that the city would later import. Neat! This system was pretty beneficial for all parties involved, especially because of the pollution that the horse doo-doo would have made- according the book ground up horse manure (it was ground up by horses walking on it, not intentionally) was the early 20th century equivilent of automobile pollution. He added that the respitory effects were similar in the case of both irritants, which makes me even more uncomfortable with the various car-produced -oxides I inhale everyday.

As the automobile replaced the horse this trade decreased, but it was pretty cool. There was also mention of the extensive use of pigs in the city. Until the 1950's pork was actually the primary meat consumed by Americans. And until the 1920's there was pretty extensive pig populations within cities that not only provided extra meat, but also served to dispose of organic waste from households. Unfortunately, pigs are also prone to copulating in public and charging young children, so they were eventually removed from cities. (Another city/wildlife factoid: turns out wolf spiders (a natural desert inhabitant) are 5 times more dense in cities than in the wild, apparently people habitat is good wold spider habitat)

One more fun fact from that article, which I suggest you integrate into your vocabulary as soon as possible, is that human waste used to be called 'night soil.' Not only is it a far more pleasant euphemism than crap, but there's meaning behind it. Used to be, there were people that had to clean out the public bathrooms (this was at a time when all bathrooms were public), and they did this at night, thus the product they carted away was called night soil. It was also used a bit for fertilizer, but not extensively.

So now there's a whole new suite of poo related things for you to think on. And just for fun, here's the "Everything Comes Down to Poo," a musical achievement that I think has only been bested by The Little Mermaid.