Discover Top Posts Tagged with #night soil

Night Soil (Fallen Empires) - Drew Tucker

More cards with art by Drew Tucker on Scryfall

#mtg #magic the gathering #tcg #drew tucker #night soil #fallen empires

Real narrow laneway. These lanes were built behind 19th century terrace houses to collect "night soil", before the advent of widespread mains sewerage in the Inner West in the late 1920's. Folks would put their shit cans out in the lane, to be collected by the "night soil cart" each evening. An endless cycle until the proliferation of the flush toilet in the 1930's. The lanes remain. Newtown.

#19th century #terrace houses #narrow #laneway #shit cans #sewerage #night soil #dunny #streetscape #vintage #flush toilets #victorian era architecture #it's a sign #tags #inner west sydney

Least Sanitary Token Generator: Night Soil

#Peculiar Flavor #MtG #Magic #Magic the Gathering #Spurry Awards #Spurrys #Night Soil

Water, Water, Everywhere, but not a Drop to Drink...

When did drinking water become unsafe? We have all heard that, during the Middle Ages, most people drank wine, beer, ale, cider, and mead because water was suspect. Fermented beverages were generally safe, and could be kept for long periods of time without refrigeration. But when did water become generally unsafe to drink without being first boiled?

If we range backward in time in our imagination, we can think of the world long before civilization, when human ancestors were a small and scattered population, and did not stay in any one place long enough for human waste to become a problem in terms of contaminating the local groundwater,.

With settlement and human civilization came the concentration of human wastes, and the need to manage them. The ancient world seems to have done a passably good job at building cities with drainage and sewage systems, running water, and some minimal provisions for public health and cleanliness -- and more than minimal provisions, often extravagant provisions, for pubic bathing. The architecture of baths in classical antiquity rivaled that of theaters in luxury and ostentation.

Then something went wrong with western civilization. The Romans built infrastructure -- public baths, pubic fountains fed by aqueducts, roads, bridges, and cities constructed on a grid plan, a Hellenistic idea that the Romans borrowed and took to a whole new level. But once the Roman Empire failed in the west and was transformed into Byzantium in the east, the construction of infrastructure almost disappeared for more than a thousand years.

Medieval cities grew higgledy-piggledy, often within the ruins of Roman cities. The ancient infrastructure broke down and ceased to function, but the people continued to live in their impoverished hovels, threw their sewage out the door into the street, and accepted the fact that they could not drink fresh water because it would probably make them sick.

Not only did medieval cities grow higgledy-piggledy, but the road network that connected these cities was itself higgledy-piggledy. It is remarkable that the inland, agricultural civilization of the Middle Ages did not even bother to build roads to connect the regions of western Europe with each other. Each manorial estate was self-sufficient, so that the need for roads was not felt, or, if it was felt, it was not deemed of sufficient importance to invest the resources into building a road network. Roman roads continued to be used, but over the centuries these roads were not maintained and they degraded into mud pathways.

In a civilization with so little interest in building infrastructure, it should be no surprise that the cities of classical antiquity were far cleaner and exercised better water and sewer management than medieval cities. And it should be no surprise that in filthy cities, the water wasn’t safe to drink for miles around. While the countryside would have had very clean water once one was away from any human settlements, wherever human beings had settled, they accumulated human waste and contaminated the groundwater.

Probably as long as there have been human settlements, there has been a problem with human waste, and some groups dealt with this problem more effectively than others. No doubt some ancient cities were filthy also. But human numbers in antiquity were lower. There is a famous story (illustrated in the Poussin painting below) that the philosopher Diogenes, who had sworn himself to poverty, saw a youth drinking from a stream with his hand, and in seeing this Diogenes cast away his last possession, which was a drinking bowl. While this is a moral tale, it also points to the fact that, in antiquity, people routinely drank from running water. Water was not yet a health danger at this time.

Some of us have very delicate constitutions. Some people get sick from drinking water from mountain streams because of the rock dust in the water. Our ancestors would not, however, have had delicate constitutions. Only the strongest survived in the times before medical science (which in its modern form is only a couple of hundred years old). Hopefully everyone knows that it is a bad idea to drink from stagnant water, as the things that grow in stagnant water can make even the most robust constitutions ill. But the medieval habit of avoiding water went beyond avoiding stagnant water.

How exactly did this transition to distrusting water come about? One suspects it was a very gradual process. For hundreds of thousands of years, human ancestors had been able to drink at any stream. When human beings settled down, they no doubt rapidly learned that their sewage had to be separated from their water supply. Of course, in many rudimentary agricultural communities human waste is distributed in the fields as “night soil” which functions as fertilizer.

When human civilization had progressed to the point at which large cities were being built, generally these larger civilizations made some effort to manage water and sewer, but when these civilizations catastrophically collapsed, the kind of civilization that replaced it was much less organized, especially on a large scale. By this time, however, human numbers had grown far beyond that of early scattered urban areas, and human waste became a problem. Water become suspect for drinking.

With the Haussmannization of Paris in the nineteenth century, western civilization returned to the large-scale planning of its cities, and today we have come to expect and assume the availability of water to drink -- not without exception, of course. Industrialization not only involved a return to planning on a civilizational scale, it also involved new forms of pollution. We don’t drink from industrialized rivers, but drinking fountains are generally available, and of course everyone also carries a bottle of water around with them now.

When we speak of hydrological civilizations we usually think of those that mastered elaborate systems of irrigation for agriculture, and this part of a hydrological regime necessary to civilizations in dry climates -- like civilizations that began in river valleys in the equatorial belt -- but when civilization expanded into temperate climates, and especially wetter climates like northwestern Europe, irrigation became less of a necessity, and so hydrological works became less essential to the daily functions of society. But when human civilization became so pervasive and involved such a large number of persons that humanity had essentially integrated itself into the hydrological cycle of the planet, it became necessary once again to manage water and sewer flows in a way like that of the most organized civilizations of antiquity.

#water #civilization #hydrological civilization #sewage #sewer #irrigation #human waste #night soil

Existential thoughts I had while in the bathtub. "When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set."

I’ve always liked the quote by Lin Yutang. And at the moment it’s pertinent. Two small men are casting big shadows. You see, whilst everybody is panicking about fuel prices and the cost of petrol, they are missing the real issue. The gulf is one of the main sources of fertiliser. Effectively nitrogen fertilisers can be seen as a by-product of natural gas production. So about 30-35% of global urea…

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#fertiliser #night soil #staple crops #Strait of Hormuz

Not what they seem

I saw the book in Alen Gaetz’s Second Hand Books. It was a remarkably thick tome and flicking through it, the book seemed to be telling the tale of two mages in a city very much like Port Naain. Indeed it was Port Naain but the city as depicted had perhaps deviated from reality slightly at some point in the past. Then I remembered where I had seen this story before. I had been staying with a…

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#backward summersaults over bar tables #night soil #Rum Truffle #second hand books

The justifiable dilemma of Bilholm Tinkwhistle.

Call me old fashioned but I dislike the idea that ‘the rich do what they can and the poor suffer what they must.’ I suppose that as a poet I am a free spirit. Alternatively it may just be that as a poet I know the world of the poor, I live in it. I was reminded of this when I saw Jaysen the night soil collector out on his rounds and he tipped his hat to me and wished me a good day. He cannot…