Abstract
This article argues that our environmental crisis partly originates in the transformed Western sensorium. From the later eighteenth century, increased levels of disgust toward organic waste, and excrement in particular, were reflected in increased use of water as a sanitary medium. The water closet emerged as a key technology of sensibility, sustaining new perceptual norms by immediately removing excrement from the home, which in turn became a capsule sealed from the (dirty) environment. The article argues that the rise of the water closet foreclosed alternative pathways of waste management, particularly the earth closet or, in its twentieth-century form, ecological sanitation. Such waste technologies were marginalized in the Western world because they maintained proximity to excrement and organic effluvia. Today waterborne sanitary systems have become a global norm, but their expense and heavy water consumption means that they are often quite unsuitable for many parts of the developing world. However, the globalization of Western sensory norms can make ecological sanitation appear like the enforcement of backwardness. The article thus suggests that personal hygiene has an environmental and even geological history: our sensory norms contribute to environmentally problematic attitudes such as heavy water use and disgust for organic waste.
What does the Anthropocene smell like? This might perhaps sound like a peculiar question. Anthropocene scholarship has typically addressed two major themes. One explores the precise dating and mechanisms of earth system transformation.1 A second investigates the Anthropocene’s causation, consequences, and phenomenology, issues particularly associated with capitalism, fossil fuels, and colonialism; hence the coinage of alternative terms like Capitalocene or Plantationocene.2 This article approaches the Anthropocene question from a different perspective, building on the work of environmental humanities scholars who have written and theorized on the senses and the emotions.3 It asks: Is there a relationship between transformations in senses and emotions, on the one hand, and the emergence of the Anthropocene, on the other?
To answer this question I turn to the work of Alain Corbin. Corbin noted of the nineteenth century that “in a century too hastily defined as that of money the major cleavages were ordered around the distinction between immediacy and the imposition of delays, submission to direct contact and the capacity to keep a distance.”4 He argued that nineteenth-century transformations in how people viscerally experienced and responded to organic odors created novel, enduring forms of disgust and distance, particularly toward other bodies and their excrement. This transition was facilitated and made durable by infrastructures that flushed away human waste. Corbin’s work invites profound rumination on the human sensorium’s mutability and a reframing of the affective history of pipes and toilets. At the precise historical moment when capitalism, colonialism, and industrialization were transforming global environments, white, bourgeois Westerners were withdrawing into sanitized capsules using historically unusual quantities of water.
This article argues that these two developments—the Anthropocene transformation in earth systems and Corbin’s sensory revolution—were not coincidental. In nineteenth-century Europe, transformed feelings of disgust and new technologies of waste removal were mutually reinforcing. The more sanitary technologies obscured the smell of feces, the more disgusting feces became and the more sanitary technologies were built. The waterborne sanitary systems that maintain such feelings are, however, expensive, high-maintenance, and frequently wasteful. They are, moreover, not the only sanitary technologies available to us. During this period alternative technologies using air and earth rather than water were marketed as solutions to the same problem. They failed not because they did not work but because new sensibilities demanded water as a sanitary panacea.
Adequate sanitation became a global problem. Colonial regimes attempted to foist waterborne systems onto their subjects, whose toilet techniques (and, by implication, bodies) they found repulsive. The postcolonial toilet question remains globally central. Twentieth-century ecological sanitation techniques provide a cheaper, less resource-intensive model. They are more adaptable to inhospitable terrain and arid climates. But if waterborne systems are regarded as the most “civilized” technology, other forms remain backward, fit only for those lacking Western sensibilities. The Global South thus forever fails to become “truly” sanitary, its subjects denied the cleanliness of the water-hungry West.
This article proceeds as follows. First I summarize Corbin’s “perceptual revolution.” Second I explore the history of nineteenth-century earth closets, particularly in Britain. Third I trace the earth closet’s failure and the dominance of waterborne systems. Finally I explore the global consequences of making such waterborne systems the ne plus ultra of toilet technologies. The overall argument is that the Western—or Anthropocene—sensorium is potentially a trap, implying an impossible commitment to high water usage while vilifying ecological alternatives as backward and disgusting.
Sensory Transition
In The Foul and the Fragrant, Corbin charted “the lowering of the threshold of olfactory tolerance” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, which was inseparable from class formation and racial differentiation.5 These changes were accompanied by transformed attention to “the confined, enclosed area of everyday life, the aerial envelope and the atmosphere of bodies.”6 For the aspiring bourgeoisie, excrement, bodily odors, and organic decay became increasingly repulsive: “Experts emphasized more than ever the harm caused by crowding or proximity to excrement.”7 When explaining historical shifts in human behavior, Corbin urges, historians should investigate “the expression of emotions” and “people’s elementary reactions,” not simply economic motivations.8
This is not to imply that the premodern people were somehow ignorant of or impervious to organic smells. Medieval and early modern cities attacked foul odors in multiple ways.9 Corbin’s perceptual transition involved intensification of preexisting aversions, their gradual democratization, and their material embedding in new sanitary systems. This produced historically specific modes of cleanliness, focused on regular body-washing with water, a practice primarily about hygiene and self-discipline, not pleasure or religion.10 Hygienic bodies were cultivated within increasingly sanitized domestic spaces, “separate from the dirt of the outside world.”11 William Tullett has traced an increased eighteenth-century concern for “the atmospheric, circumambient, agency of smells on places, objects, and people.”12 Regular washing and deodorization viscerally signified respectability and self-control, a process accelerating with the avalanche of twentieth-century cleaning products. Sustaining cleanliness, however, required investment in large-scale sanitary technologies. This “far-reaching anthropological transformation” was an autonomous causal phenomenon, irreducible to capitalism or the advent of germ theory.13
Disgust is evident across human cultures, but its visceral expression displays considerable historical plasticity. Odor perception “can be influenced by learning and memory.”14 Disgust is a social emotion evoked by other people as well as things.15 In East and Southeast Asia, human waste was long considered essential to farming. Human urine and feces fertilized rice fields and vegetable gardens.16 Western visitors often experienced China through “the pungent odor of human body wastes.”17 In Japan human waste was “deemed critical to agricultural productivity.”18 In India, by contrast, human excrement was not used for agriculture, and this was one reason why Indian rice yields lagged behind China’s.19
By the mid-nineteenth century certain modalities of disgust were becoming inseparable from normative Western selfhood. In 1874 John Simon, the British public health reformer, declared that “FILTH” was something that “any average man or woman should be disgusted at: such as, eminently, the presence of putrescent refuse-matter, solid and fluid, causing nuisance by its effluvia and soakage.”20 By contrast, the absence of such feelings implied limited self-awareness and discernment. Henry Mayhew recalled a cesspool sewer worker who stated that “there’s no smell—least I never found no smell.”21
More or less contemporaneously, we can observe an increased attention to comfort, that “sense of contentment brought about by the enjoyment of one’s physical surroundings,” a meaning acquiring currency in the eighteenth-century Angloworld.22 Like water-based cleanliness, comfort required apparatus: pillows, fireplaces, ventilation.23 The physicist-inventor Count Rumford noted that “those who know what comfort is . . . are worthy of the enjoyments of a clean hearth and cheerful fire.”24 The new doctrine of political economy encouraged a world replete with technologies of comfort. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith discussed clothes, beds, and furniture.25 The accumulation of domestic goods was fueled by growing international trade in cotton, sugar, and tea, a process driven by demand as much as supply: the “industrious revolution” was driven by shifting desires (and emotions) as well as global capitalism.26 Thresholds of tolerance for discomfort fell, as evinced in contemporaneous discourse on, for example, bedbugs.27 The tightening alignment of comfort, cleanliness, and intolerance suffused domestic manuals. By 1900, the smell of domestic air became “a valid measure of the physical comfort and social conformity of conditions within a room.”28 This required an “educated nose,” constantly detecting organic corruption.29
Water was essential to this sensory-somatic transition. Water consumption was assumed to rise as nations progressed, being “a valuable index of social as well as of hygienic progress.”30 The water closet occupied the system’s core. John Harington’s 1596 version was a sensory technology designed to ensure that users were “not annoyd with stinch of any Jakes.”31 Toilets would be linked to a wider system.32 The water closet’s evolution was complex, with multiple eighteenth-century forms, many of which hardly sustained emergent bourgeois sensory norms. However, the nineteenth-century invention of odor-sealing S-bends, effective traps, and commercial disinfectants divested the act of defecation from olfactory intrusions and definitively brought the toilet within the home.33 “No dwelling can be considered complete,” announced architect Andrew Jackson Downing in 1842, “which has not a water closet under its roof.”34
Excrement should no longer accumulate in pots, pails, and pits. It must be immediately flushed away, a practice that had to be promoted and learned.35 Its rapid removal became technologically, legally, and sensorily embedded. Flushing provided a solution to the confluence of rising levels of urban filth and falling levels of tolerance for it. Flushing and fecophobia were mutually reinforcing. “Distance from shit, facilitated by a connection to a centralized, waterborne, linear end-of-pipe system,” became central to “imaginaries” of urbane progress.36 These systems made contact with excrement and organic smell increasingly repulsive.
Flushing and comfort permeated late nineteenth-century public spaces. Small, capsular spaces became subject to increasingly rigorous, energy-intensive, environmental control via air conditioning, water, and ventilation. Indoor space (controlled, clean) became firmly perceptually differentiated from outdoor space (capricious, filthy). The toilet’s odor decomposition rate became calculable and factored into ventilation design.37 Such milieus invited philosophical speculation. Lieven De Cauter calls this “the capsular civilization,” Sloterdijk the “great introversion.”38 This does not mean that smell per se was expunged: synthetic perfumes, scented soaps, and air fresheners have proliferated, as have unpleasant new smells like those from cigarette smoke and car exhausts.39 This phenomenological shift is vital to any understanding of the basic ways in which most people in the developed world engage with their environment.
The majority of Westerners now inhabit enclaves of atmospheric control sustained by giant, energy-intensive technological systems. Sanitized environments unevenly globalized, permeating airports, hotels, and offices, allowing rich Westerners to negotiate the world without encountering organic smells. Immense quantities of water and fossil fuels maintain climates demanded by historically unique modes of sensibility. Intolerance of discomfort, dirt, smell, and cold is ecologically demanding, connecting our homes and sensibilities to vast anthropogenic sinks: plastic oceans, aquatic dead zones, urban heat canyons, and a changing climate. The materials we flush away, however, are returning to haunt us. As Timothy Morton argues: “For some time we may have thought that the U-bend in the toilet was a convenient curvature of ontological space that took whatever we flush down it into a totally different dimension called Away, leaving things clean over here. Now we know better: instead of the mythical land Away, we know the waste goes to the Pacific Ocean or the wastewater treatment facility.”40
Waste Media and Toilet Technologies
Today, in the developed world at least, flush toilets are the hegemonic technology of excrement removal. Their affordances—speed, scentlessness, awayness—align precisely with capsular civilization’s sensory needs, allowing us to inhabit excrement-free spaces where synthetic odors eclipse organic ones. The transition to waterborne waste disposal systems was, however, neither inevitable nor uncontested. In the nineteenth century, water was not the obvious medium for waste disposal. Air and earth were also used, suggesting alternative technological futures. This was a fertile era of waste media experimentation.
Engineer Charles Liernur installed his pneumatic system in Amsterdam in 1871.41 It used a vacuum to suck domestic waste to drying facilities for poudrette manufacture.42 The “atmospheric shock” produced by opening valves on street reservoirs reduced excrement “to a consistency resembling that of the thinnest of chocolate.”43 “No water whatever is needed,” boasted Liernur.44 It was particularly appropriate for flat Dutch terrain, which lacked the gradients exploited by gravity-driven hydraulic systems. Between the 1870s and 1902, over 120,000 Amsterdam residents were connected to the system.45 Vacuum systems were built in numerous European cities, including Prague, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.46 One commentator found them “positively sweet and pleasant.”47 While the system never became widespread, it remains a niche technology, utilized in trains, airliners, and spacecraft. Vacuum closets are used today in parts of rural Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Serbia, and Germany.48
Earth has a long history as a waste medium, but nineteenth-century innovators devised new ways to harness its qualities. In the late 1850s a British vicar, Henry Moule, created an earth closet consisting of a square wooden base, galvanized iron pan, hinged seat, and earth receptacle. Excrement and urine were sprinkled with deodorizing earth, producing fertilizer.49 Earth was “a medium for bringing together the offensive ingredients of this product, and the world’s great scavenger, oxygen.”50 The system required a regular earth supply, and synchronized recovery by scavenging teams.
The earth closet was promoted as a technology that avoided water pollution, reduced smell, and replenished the soil. Users’ proximity to their waste was an advantage, not an emotional obstacle. Waterborne systems, meanwhile, “heedlessly cast [waste] out of sight” into a tangled network of subterranean pipes and “monster tunnels,”51 forming an “an enormous laboratory of pestiferous gas” that was routinely regurgitated back into houses, necessitating the construction of air shafts, cowls, and traps.52 Earth, declared engineer Thomas Hawksley, was “the natural deodorizer and transformer of all materials which to our senses have become hateful.”53 One medical officer of health positioned his nostrils “in close contact” with earth closet soils without taking the slightest offense.54 Concerns about infection were assuaged by reports that quicklime rapidly destroyed soil bacteria.55 In 1871, The Earth Closet Company announced that its product “enable[d] nature’s wants to be attended to in COMFORT instead of the usual disgusting surroundings.”56
This system, crucially, recycled waste. George Vivian Poore, whose earth closets fertilized his crops, thought Britain, heavily reliant on imported food and guano and discarding its human waste into the sea, was “living on its capital.”57 London, he calculated, wasted ten million pints of urine daily.58 Nitrogen and phosphorus leached into the “never-restoring ocean.”59 If water was a dissipative medium, earth was a conserving one, producing a closed loop, not entropic loss. “All that is needed to answer Malthus is human excrement,” declared political economist Pierre Leroux.60 He called this the “circulus between production and consumption.”61 The sewage farms sprouting around European cities, by contrast, produced diluted fertilizer.
In Capital, Marx described “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself,” a “metabolic rift” severing urban and rural areas.62 Water closets widened this rift. For Hawksley, they created “a great sluice for the outpouring, without possibility of return, of the nation’s wealth, and the people’s food; while at the same time it was invoking the birth of a monster that should overshadow every city with its baneful and destructive influence.”63 The economist Henry Carey called waterborne disposal a “robbery system” spawned by urbanization.64 Humans were the only animals to break this link with the earth. Cats buried their waste rather than hoarding it in “tanks and vaults.”65 Nutriment flowed immediately to plants: “Earth . . . fixes the unstable elements, and refuses to part with them except to vegetable life.”66
The earth closet would create thousands of domestic guano mines. Francis Taylor claimed that they produced something “portable and inodorous, [which] . . . has lost its disgusting appearance, being more like a coprolite or dung-stone than anything I can describe.”67 Turntables and heating apparatus accelerated fossilization. Moule suggested that repeated use of soil magnified its fertilizing powers and that it might approach “the value of guano.”68 Taylor estimated that Great Britain and Ireland would save nearly six million pounds annually by reusing their solid excrement.69 Sympathetic studies, however, critiqued these claims, noting that inflated fertilizer prices reflected “exaggerated” faith in “the money value of human excreta.”70
Promoters waxed biblical. George Waring, America’s leading sanitary engineer, was hardly alone in citing Deuteronomy and emphasizing biblical precedent: “Thou shalt have a place without the camp; and it shall be when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee.”71 “All things are born out of the earth, and back to the earth all things must tend,” opined J. Donkin at the beginning of a dry sanitation treatise.72 Another text acclaimed God’s creation of an antientropic “natural alchemy” through which waste was “perpetually renew[ed]” to generate “food for man,” a cycle obliterated by the pernicious introduction of water.73
Finally, the earth closet was low-tech and small-scale, involving “no expensive machinery.”74 It was neither damaged by cold nor disabled by inappropriate objects, and it greatly reduced domestic water consumption.75 Little could break as long as humans operated it correctly.76 Earth closets were examples of what would later be called “appropriate technologies”—robust, uncomplicated devices suitable for challenging environments.77 However, earth closet users could not simply flush and forget. They had to engage with their own waste, which remained proximate. Excrement removal could not simply be delegated to technology: “Everyone should be compelled himself to abate the nuisance he creates.”78
The Water Closet Triumphant
The earth closet attracted bold predictions. One 1867 report predicted that it “promises to be as useful in the departments of public health and national agriculture as the Rev. Cartwright’s invention is in the cotton manufacture.”79 In the 1860s they were adopted in remote locations: camps, prisons, workhouses, signal boxes. The system reached India, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Many villages and small towns introduced earth closets. At Tring, thirty-six cottages were fitted with Moule’s system, with earth delivered weekly and the “almost inodorous” product removed.80 Earth closets were useful for cottage inhabitants averse to outdoor perambulations in inclement weather.81 Waring thought the system ideal for rural areas.82 He used them himself, stating that he “would on no account exchange them for the water-closet which is so universally used among my neighbors.”83
Larger settlements presented greater problems. The chemist Augustus Voelcker thought earth closets “preferable” for “villages or suburban districts” but waterborne systems more appropriate for towns.84 Samuel Gocher found it “very useful in its proper place,” like “the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire,” but “for towns like Reading it is simply inadmissible and impracticable.”85 In 1874, Lancaster Corporation was the only English sanitary authority that had introduced public earth closets, along with domestic ones for around one-seventh of the town’s population.86 They were less offensive than water closets and markedly reduced typhoid and diarrhea deaths.87 Urban areas, however, required plentiful earth, and as they became more paved and extensive, supply difficulties emerged. Networked, hydraulic solutions came more easily to populations already becoming disconnected from immediate contact with soil. Nonetheless water closets and earth closets might potentially coexist as different systems, one urban and one rural.
However, the earth closet gradually became incompatible with new sensory norms, which were becoming more pervasive in urban areas. The “forethought and competent skill” required to operate one contrasted with the “self-acting” water closet, which broke sensory contact between humans and excrement.88 The water closet system removed excrement “with perfect promptitude . . . not having any intervals of delay, nor leaving any residue of filth.”89 Physically handling one’s own excrement, even in dried form, clashed directly with sensibilities demanding immediate distance from organic waste. In 1863, Moule grumbled that “the force of habit,” objection to change, and disinclination to discuss “offensive” things often precluded the earth closet’s adoption.90 Meanwhile the twentieth-century invention of synthetic fertilizers made recycling human waste less necessary or financially appealing.
The earth closet’s popularity waned. “It has taken 60 years of patient trial to get the public to recognize that in a town dwelling all substitutes for water-closets prove in the end unsatisfactory and expensive,” declared Sir John Robertson, Birmingham’s medical officer of health, in 1925.91 Alternatives to water closets disappeared from engineering textbooks.92 Such systems and the new sensibility were mutually reinforcing. Excrement, wrote Corbin, would henceforth be “drowned in a stream of water.”93 Waterborne systems slowly reached remote areas. Earth closets became increasingly associated with the rural, the small-scale, and the backward. They became “abominations beyond description” for people for whom being without water closets was unimaginable.94 Poorly managed, they were little more than miniature cesspools. “Flush and discharge” triumphed over “drop and store.”95 In 1956, the Midhurst District Association of Porten Councils noted that in the absence of waterborne sewage, “householders had to use their small gardens for disposal purposes.”96 This was a problem, not a recycling opportunity; a reversion to “medieval” habits, not a practice appropriate for advanced industrial society.
The emphasis was on “the continuous outflow of refuse as fast as produced” rather than the incremental accumulation of fertilizer.97 What Jamie Benidickson calls the “culture of flushing” was cemented. It was preferable (and legal) to pollute waterways with excrement, agricultural runoff, synthetic detergents, antibiotics, and industrial waste.98 Immediate waste disposal became habitual. In 1873, William Nichols and George Derby concluded that “the temptation to cast into the moving water every form of portable refuse and filth, to be borne out of sight, is too great to be resisted.”99
Water, with its capacities of “dilution, dissolution and absorption,” became the “supreme sanitary agent.”100 The culture of flushing generated manifold polarities: clean-dirty, urban-rural, progressive-backward, Western-non-Western. Water closets and Western perceptual norms globalized. Sewerage systems and water closets were soon constructed in colonial settings, with Western hygienic practices linked to improved moral order.101 American colonialism involved monumental efforts to “inculcate American excretory habits in Filipinos.”102 Native practices of bush-defecation or feeding excrement to pigs were vilified.103 Even the most culturally sensitive Western visitors sometimes struggled with the developing world’s toilets. “I have tried to practice participant observation to the letter, as an anthropologist should, but visiting the toilet has remained my major weakness,” admitted Sjaak van der Geest of his work in Ghana, where fastidious attention to cleanliness exists alongside technological difficulties with the disposal of human feces.104
In 1931, the League of Nations Health Organization declared water carriage to be the preferred method of waste disposal globally.105 Twenty years later, flush toilets were “nearly universal” in western Europe.106 The World Health Organization also promoted water-based sewage systems, while suggesting that night soil was useful as fertilizer.107 But universalizing pretensions were abandoned in the face of global diversity. They are often inappropriate or excessively expensive for dispersed populations, water-stressed regions, megaslums, or marshy terrain.108 Lack of water closets became a defining mark of global poverty: indeed, the water closet has been called “an implicitly anti-poor technology” due to its cost and resource demands.109 Treatment cost means that waste routinely enters waterways in the Global South, where access to waterborne sewerage remains highly socially stratified.110 Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey conclude that the possibility of providing hydraulic infrastructure for India’s expanding urban areas “is remote.”111 The dominance of the waterborne model blocks the implementation of improved, nonhydraulic forms of sanitation.112 “Sanitation” and “water” have become synonymous, inseparable from development, cleanliness, progress.113 Dry sanitation becomes a technology associated with a lower developmental stage and a form of stigma. Water closets remain a dream associated with attainment of global citizenship.
From Earth Closets to Ecosan
The earth closet never disappeared. A voluble minority—composters, organicists, humanurists—continued to laud dry sanitation. In the 1970s, the emergent environmental movement critiqued water closets, emphasizing wasted organic material: “It is possible to quit putting our so-called wastes where they don’t belong (in the water) and to start putting them where they do belong (on the land).”114 While Victorian-era earth closet advocates saw waste as an economic and moral problem, late twentieth-century critics associated the water closet with planetary environmental issues like algal blooms, eutrophication, and excess water consumption. By the later 1970s, American estimates suggested that flush toilets used ten thousand gallons of water annually per person. While more efficient toilets have since reduced this number, toilets consume more water than any other domestic technology.115 Earth closets were reconceptualized as “appropriate technologies,” “simpler, less wasteful, and more ecologically sound,” appealing to an environmentalist DIY ethos.116 They were renamed “ecological sanitation,” or ecosan.
Water closets created a rupture in planetary organic history. The organic pioneer Edgar Saxon described the switch to waterborne systems as “one of the most gigantic breaks in the natural order which our race has made.”117 The Ecologist’s founding editor, Edward Goldsmith, linked the Roman Empire’s collapse to its abandonment of night soil collection.118 In 1976 John Seymour, the self-sufficiency guru, grumbled about our “fear of basic functions,” calling the water closet “a remarkably expensive way to pollute fresh drinking water.”119 Future archaeologists would stare perplexed at “the curiously shaped ceramic bowl in each house” and its labyrinths of pipelines.120 Such technologies would become Anthropocene relics, artifacts of another time and a forgotten sensorium.
Composting toilets were evolving. Buckminster Fuller’s 1946 Dymaxion House used dry toilets, eradicating “piped-in-and-away water and water-borne wastes” and reducing water usage to “quantities equal to milk and fruit juice consumption.”121 The pinnacle of sophistication was the Swedish multrum composting latrine pioneered in the 1930s by Rikard Landstrom.122 One reviewer described it as “sweet as clover.”123 The Swedish government encouraged composting toilets “as valid solutions to their wastewater problems,” offering grants for installation.124 By the late 1970s multiple composting toilets were available in Sweden: they handled a wide variety of organic waste, and the heat generated could warm houses.125 “Urine diversion” would separate nutritionally rich liquid waste.126 Costs could, however, be high, and opponents argued that “cultural—and consumer—preferences are not in ecosan’s favour.”127
Simpler composting toilets offered a solution to the developing world’s sanitary problems, particularly in water-stressed locations. In North Vietnam, thousands of double-compartment vault latrines were built in the 1960s. When one compartment was full, leaves were added, the hole closed, and the other compartment utilized. After around three months, the hole was opened and the decomposed material used as fertilizer.128 In Ghana ecological sanitation is regarded as a technique of empowerment, providing food security while reducing polluted water’s disease risks.129 Ghanaian studies show that when dried and treated, human excrement becomes less disgusting.130 One recent analysis suggests that dry sanitation destroys pathogens in urine and excrement more successfully than other methods.131
This raises a very real problem for ecological sanitation. Human waste, if untreated, can spread infectious epidemic disease including cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A, rotavirus, and multiple helminth diseases. Poor sanitation thus contributes considerably to the global disease burden, particularly among infants and children.132 In China and Korea, where night soil was widely used as fertilizer, much disease was spread by nematode parasites.133 In India, open defecation contributes to the spread of intestinal parasites.134 Waterborne systems promised to remove disease-carrying waste, but merely diverting fecal material into streams and rivers from which drinking water is taken simply diffuses disease throughout the community. Hence the necessity for filtration and purification systems to reduce the fecal-oral transmission of pathogens.135 This model, which prevents polluted water from reentering domestic use, is very expensive, water-intensive, and complicated. Effective ecosan technologies offer a cheaper option that prevents human waste entering water systems while producing valuable compost.
Flush toilets and development have become inseparable. This is sometimes called the “sanitation ladder,” a process whereby progress is measured linearly from latrines at the bottom to water closets at the top.136 Ecosan can be viewed as complementary, not inferior, to the water closet.137 The tight affective connections linking cleanliness and water closets must be broken. By the late nineteenth century, the WHO was arguing that recycling of human excreta was “modern and tied to ecological responsibility.”138 The Western model of water carriage and purification can no longer be regarded as universal.139
Many challenges, however, were evident in the 2003–11 Ordos Eco-Town project in China, which saw the introduction of ecological sanitation into Dongsheng, a rapidly expanding Inner Mongolian urban community with limited water supplies. It was inspired by Stockholm’s Gebers Urban Ecosan project, where thirty-two families have used dry closets since 1997.140 The Ordos scheme was a scaled-up version for around three thousand people.141 The toilets separated urine and excrement and included a turning bowl “to avoid direct sight of feces by the user.”142 Excrement tumbled down chutes into collection bins that were covered and vented to prevent odors.143
Sensibilities, however, doomed the project. “By far the most important aspect that can make or break this sort of project is the presence of odour,” admitted one report.144 The proximity of excrement tormented users. The toilets required “a certain amount of maintenance effort”145 and were sometimes filled with diapers, condoms, and plastics.146 Flushing waste away was impossible. Corners were cut during construction, leading to mechanical breakdown.147 One resident found the smell “just horrible.”148 Another complained that the stench of ammonia sometimes made his family’s eyes water.149 Fears of sickness erupted.150 The report concluded that only a minority were “very satisfied” with the toilets—most simply accepted them and dreamed of a future with flush toilets: “To do more would entail a long-term process in terms of changing people’s minds and behaviour, something that was not part of this project.”151 Residents associated composting toilets with lower living standards, and some felt ashamed of them.152 Some would not allow others into their homes because of the odor; others removed their toilet and installed flush ones.153 Scaling up remains a problem. The project was canceled in 2009.154
Building technological systems without accounting for perception and tolerance—in short, how users experience technology—is highly problematic. Sensory intolerance and the idea that dry toilets were “something backward” caused the failure.155 As Ordos used its burgeoning mineral wealth to divert water from the Yellow River, flush toilets became cheaper and living standards rose.156 A city on a falling water table, in a place traditionally comfortable with recycling excrement, has opted for an environmentally questionable solution largely because of rising levels of sensory intolerance.157 China has become increasingly dependent on synthetic fertilizers.158 Not all such projects are failures, however. A 2009 “closed-loop” system involving 120 toilets in Songinokhairkhan, Ulaanbaatar, proved considerably more successful in terms of recycling and preventing bad odor.159 Meanwhile in Japan, where night soil was being used until the 1960s, flush toilets were predominant by the 1980s, surely the quickest sanitary transition on record.160 The night soil pails and excremental smells of Tokyo suddenly appeared backward and embarrassing, particularly with the 1964 Olympics looming.161
Progress remains symbolized by and experienced through the transition to flush toilets. In Bangalore, for example, bathrooms with water closets have become “indices to status and status mobility in middle-class households”162 while the puja room, a domestic altar, has declined in significance, becoming “privatized and hidden.”163 In rural India, acceptance of self-composting toilets “has been reluctant and patchy,” with many preferring open defecation to the maintenance ecosan requires.164 Research in Villa Lamadrid, Buenos Aires, shows that flush toilets embody progress, while handling one’s own excrement epitomizes “rural, underdeveloped, and backward lifestyles.”165 Engaging “with one’s own shit” feels “inappropriate, uncomfortable, or, at times, laughable,” while flushing has become “a nonnegotiable feature of an appropriate sewerage system.”166 Switching to ecological sanitation feels like enforced regression and exclusion from the citizenship, cleanliness, and privacy afforded to those possessing flush toilets.167 In Uganda “people dream of toilets that flush. To own one means you’re successful.”168 These emotional responses to handling excrement continue to hamper drives for cheap, effective global sanitation.
Conclusion
It is tempting to reduce the metabolic rift, and the Anthropocene itself, to an unfolding capitalist logic of profit and economic rationality. However, a purely capitalistic analysis ignores the delicate emotional and sensual shifts that have accompanied, mediated, and even caused more concrete transitions. Aversion to excrement and unease with organic emissions provide a phenomenological explanation of why Westerners have become so distanced from our waste and so insouciant about throwing things away. The “far-reaching anthropological transformation” that Corbin analyzed created historically unique affective priorities and visceral responses. The history of toilets threads basic bodily habits to disturbed biogeochemical cycles, uniting our toilets with vast aquatic dead zones and anxieties about peak phosphorus.169 It draws attention to what Chakrabarty calls “the planetary body”—the human body plus all its connections to the organic world, to putrefaction, disease, and death.170
The flush toilet embodies our deodorized “culture of flushing” in which waste is immediately catapulted away from immediate perception, never to be encountered again. Even speaking of shit is surrounded by “squeamishness” and euphemism.171 Patricia Nesbitt argues that “to most Americans, even the mention of a composting toilet brings turned-up noses in utter disgust.”172 Ecological sanitation keeps shit within sight and mind, and simply knowing that one’s feces are nearby feels like an intrusion.173 Creating this sense of disgust has a long history. It suggests that the Anthropocene is something also experienced in the body, the senses, and the emotions. The Anthropocene has been largely created by people with very historically specific ideas about what is acceptable and what is disgusting. Senses and emotions can be as stubborn and unyielding as metal and plastic. Reversing such sensory sedimentation and making the intolerable tolerable is a daunting task. It is, however, possible, since history suggests that sensibilities are, within certain parameters, mutable. Users report that they soon become accustomed to the different sensory affordances of composting toilets, suggesting, perhaps, that alternative sensory futures are possible.174 Parallel experiences have been reported by those who have abandoned air conditioning and learned to tolerate heat.175
The nitrification and plasticization of waterways is a defining mark of the Anthropocene. Both processes are partly the consequence of a transformed human sensorium that finds human excrement repulsive and plastic alluring. As Eula Biss argues, the fear of filth produced “a retreat into the home, where heavy curtains and shutters might seal out the smell of the poor and their problems. Our version of this shuttering now is achieved through the purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the promise of purity.”176 Capsular civilization encourages sterility. Numerous studies suggest that Western modalities of cleanliness are biologically and ecologically problematic. Jacob Hamblin urges us to abandon our capsular prejudices: “No challenges will be solved by sealing ourselves away from the exposures that sustain us, chasing some ineffable state of being clean.”177 Such theses suggest that humans in the developed world have perhaps lost some emotional and sensory flexibility.
The Anthropocene smells, in the developed world, suspiciously clean. Organic stench is increasingly confined to circumscribed olfactory zones: dumps, factories, sewage works. In its extreme form, humans withdraw into sanitized capsules and watch the Anthropocene unfolding on computer screens. Meanwhile, in the developing world vast numbers of the global poor live without water closets or ecological sanitation. Other modes of sensing exist and thrive. This is not “a unified and homogeneous Anthropocene” but a version of the “patchy Anthropocene,” a “mode of Anthropocene studies that draws attention to human and nonhuman heterogeneity.”178
Moving away from flush toilets and daily showers, however, is as difficult as moving to renewable energy and lower meat consumption, other transitions inseparable from feelings and emotions. The Anthropocene is a sensory phenomenon produced by new technological relationships between humans and their organic and synthetic worlds. This process invites profound reflection on the environmental, even geological, history of personal hygiene and the habits, repulsions, and feelings associated with it.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editorial team for their perceptive and supportive reports. I would also like to thank On Barak and Avner Wishnitzer for inviting me to the Alternative Histories of a Future Catastrophe Workshop at Tel Aviv University in January 2020, when an earlier version of this article was presented. Finally, special thanks to Kristina Sessa for her sagacious suggestions.
Notes
See, e.g., Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life; Malm, Fossil Capital; Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene”; Chakrabarty, Climate of History.
See, e.g., Armiero and Paolo De Rosa, “Political Effluvia”; Flack and Jørgensen, “Feelings for Nature”; Coates, “Strange Stillness of the Past”; Handley and Morgan, “Environment, Emotion, and Early Modernity.”
Quoted in Jørgensen, “Metamorphosis of Ajax,” 14.
A. R. Abbott, quoted in Scott, “Captain Liernur’s Improved System,” 460.
George Faithorn, quoted in Waring, Earth-Closets, 41.
The Earth Closet Company advertisement, 1871, quoted in Sipe, “Earth Closets,” 33.
Quoted in Tresch, Romantic Machine, 248.
Quoted in Tresch, Romantic Machine, 246.
Quoted in Waring, Earth-Closets, 37.
James, quoted in Moule’s Patent Earth Closets, 17.
Quoted in “Water Closet and Earth Closet Systems.”
Quoted in Benidickson, Culture of Flushing, 115.
Berry, foreword.
Rosemarin et al., Challenges of Urban Ecological Sanitation, 17; italics added.
Del Carmen Morales, Harris, and Öberg, “Citizenshit,” 2826; Morales, “My Pipes Say I Am Powerful,” 68.
