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The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters
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Product Description
An utterly original exploration of the world of human waste that will surprise, outrage—and entertain
Produced behind closed doors, disposed of discreetly, and hidden by euphemism, bodily waste is something common to all and as natural as breathing, yet we prefer not to talk about it. But we should—even those of us who take care of our business in pristine, sanitary conditions. For it’s not only in developing countries that human waste is a major public health threat: population growth is taxing even the most advanced sewage systems, and the disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, 1.95 million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable.
The Big Necessity takes aim at the taboo, revealing everything that matters about how people do—and don’t—deal with their own waste. Moving from the deep underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York—an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen—to an Indian slum where ten toilets are shared by 60,000 people, Rose George stops along the way to explore the potential saviors: China’s five million biogas digesters, which produce energy from waste; the heroes of third world sanitation movements; the inventor of the humble Car Loo; and the U.S. Army’s personal lasers used by soldiers to zap their feces in the field.
With razor-sharp wit and crusading urgency, mixing levity with gravity, Rose George has turned the subject we like to avoid into a cause with the most serious of consequences.
Rose George is a freelance writer and journalist who regularly contributes to Slate, The Guardian, The Independent, and the Financial Times. She lives in London.
Produced behind closed doors, disposed of discreetly, and hidden by euphemism, bodily waste is something common to all and as natural as breathing, yet we prefer not to talk about it. But we should—even those of us who take care of our business in pristine, sanitary conditions. For it’s not only in developing countries that human waste is a major public health threat: population growth is taxing even the most advanced sewage systems, and the disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, 1.95 million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable.
The Big Necessity takes aim at the taboo, revealing everything that matters about how people do—and don’t—deal with their own waste. Moving from the deep underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York—an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen—to an Indian slum where ten toilets are shared by 60,000 people, Rose George stops along the way to explore the potential saviors: China’s five million biogas digesters, which produce energy from waste; the heroes of third world sanitation movements; the inventor of the humble Car Loo; and the U.S. Army’s personal lasers used by soldiers to zap their feces in the field.
In this original exploration of a world both familiar and unfamiliar to all humankind, Rose George has turned the subject we like to avoid into a cause with the most serious of consequences.
"In the name of research, Ms. George waded through sewers and checked out latrines all over the globe. On paper, she glides with rueful and articulate poise through the biology, ecology, physiology, psychology and basic hydraulics of her subject, always articulate and persuasive. Even if you are inclined to think health-care dollars should be put into titanium rather than porcelain, you will be hard pressed to put this extraordinary book down."—Abigail Zuger, M.D., The New York Times
"Rose George's The Big Necessity should become a classic in the limited literary annals of coprology. George, who is British, is an ebullient descendant of the virtuous Victorians, including Thomas Crapper, who brought us modern plumbing. With wit and style, she goes to sewage school, ventures into the sewers of London and New York, attends international toilet conferences and visits cities, villages, townships and slums in Africa, Europe, the United States, India, Japan and China. Along the way, she shines a spotlight on unknown but charismatic leaders in South Africa, heroic campaigners in India and industrious Chinese reformers who have converted 15.4 million rural households to biogas digesters: a cheap and inexhaustible supply of clean energy. She even reveals the wonders of Japanese 'washlets'—'a generic word for a high-function toilet'—especially the warm toilet seat manufactured by Toto. With $4.2 billion in sales in 2006, Toto has entranced the Japanese . . . The Big Necessity is a valuable and often entertaining, if somewhat dismal, account of the travails of human waste disposal."—Anna Sklar, Los Angeles Times
"Let's get the cover-blurb pander out of the way up front: If you buy just one book about human feces this year, make sure it's Rose George's The Big Necessity. Most people older than 9 prefer not to think much about the organic amalgam the American sanitation industry, in an excellent example of corporate euphemism, calls bio-solids. (Other, more poetic cultures prefer night soil; Rose George's English compatriots once called it 'gunge.' The author herself typically uses the sturdy old s-word. The Big Necessity is nothing if not frank.) Yet George's lucid, intrepid book of globe-spanning reportage not only sustains this apparently mundane subject for 304 pages, but it also leaves a reader both outraged and unexpectedly inspired. Night soil will never seem the same again. First, of course, George must overcome the natural reflex to laugh at her subject. The Big Necessity isn't exactly dour—prepare to discover the She-Pee female urinal and a latrine-emptying device called the Gulper—but, as George establishes, gunge is serious business. After all, certain prerequisites underlie civilized human life, and police, fire and espresso service all come after sanitation. Rome built its Cloaca Maxima in about 600 B.C.; without it there never would have been an empire. George lays out a shocking indictment of what we've accomplished since then . . . [George] makes an engaging and hardheaded guide, the kind of reporter who doesn't mind recounting her own urinary experiences in rural China. In the far-flung and unplumbed corners of a very septic world, she discovers a welter of solutions to the planet's s-word dilemma. She introduces Indian toilet entrepreneurs, South African cleanliness evangelists, Tanzania's Gulper inventors and China's impressive biogas digesters, handy devices that ferment human and animal waste into heating, cooking and lighting fuel. These efforts are as diverse as the places they serve, but the successful ones share a few common characteristics: They're low tech, decentralized, cheap and grassroots. The most promising, like biogas, transform a liability into an asset. (In contrast to these earthy undertakings, George's enthusiasm for Japan's scary computerized super-toilets is a bit unseemly. Just what we all need: another home appliance we can't fix. Long live the ballcock, that handy little mechanism that fills the water tank in your flush toilet.) The Big Necessity connects one of the oldest problems in human life (man's gotta eat, and man's gotta—well, you know) with a future likely to fall somewhere between the high-industrial grandeur underneath
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #222415 in Books
- Published on: 2008-10-14
- Released on: 2008-10-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780805082715
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. With irreverence and pungent detail, George (A Life Removed) breaks the embarrassed silence over the economic, political, social and environmental problems of human waste disposal. Full of fascinating facts about the evolution of material culture as influenced by changing mores of disgust and decency (the popularity of high-heeled shoes dates back to the time when chamber pots were emptied into the streets)—the book shows how even advanced technology doesn't always meet basic needs: using toilet paper is shockingly unhygienic and millions of government-built latrines in developing countries have been turned into goat sheds and spare rooms due to poor design, a lack of regular water supply or simply because the subsidized (and expensive) cement and stone structures are often more appealing than the village huts. George explores how discussions on the importance of clean drinking water and the eradication of infectious diseases euphemistically address how to handle human waste. From the depths of the world's oldest surviving urban sewers in to Japan's robo-toilet revolution, George leads an intrepid, erudite and entertaining journey through the public consequences of this most private behavior. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School—London and New York sewer tunnels, Japan's robotic toilet industry, farming innovations in China, and the politics of public sanitation in India—past and present—are treated with forthright investigation, sensitivity to intercultural relations and experiences, and high good humor. The effects of urban living on people who don't have sufficient human-waste disposal systems include not only diseases, but also social constructions that follow them beyond their portable brick latrines and backside-cleansing tools. The privacy that Westerners have grown to insist on as part of the toileting experience hampers travelers in parts of the world where toilet stalls don't have doors, let alone where toilets don't have stalls. George interviewed locals, social reformers, engineers, and bureaucrats in search of filling in the details of the picture she creates, making this a thorough, highly informative, and thought-provoking account. Her writing style is a delight, assuring her a faithful audience even while she discusses topics most commonly left unspoken and unwritten about. Teens may pick this up first for the gross-out factor but will find it a wealth of scientific and political intrigue.—Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Rose George's subject—the global politics of defecation—is both superbly indelicate and morally imperative. With the basic health and dignity of several billion poor people at stake, we need to take s**t seriously in the most literal sense. Human solidarity, as she so passionately demonstrates, begins with the squatting multitudes.”—Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
“In Rose George’s hometown in England, impoverished immigrants took up residence in the new public latrines. (‘Fighting over the more spacious disabled cubicle was fierce.’) Which is worse? Living in a toilet or living without one? George bravely—and sometimes literally—submerges herself in the tragedy and occasional comedy of global sanitation. Sludge, biogas, New York City sewage: I ate it up and wanted more! The most unforgettable book to pass through the publishing pipeline in years.”—Mary Roach, author of Stiff
"This fascinating, wise, and scrupulously drawn portrait of the world and its waste will last long as a seriously important book. Like a literary treatment farm, it manages to turn the completely unpalatable into something utterly irresistible. Rose George, a brave, compassionate, and ceaselessly impeccable reporter—and, when needed, a very funny one too—has performed for us all who care a very great service. A big necessity, indeed."—Simon Winchester, author of The Man Who Loved China
"This engaging, highly readable book puts sanitation in its proper place—as a central challenge in human development. Rose George has tackled this critical topic with insight, wit, and a storyteller’s flair."—Louis Boorstin, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
"Rose George has trolled the gutters of the world for the predictable low-matter and come up with something weirdly spiritual. Worship the porcelain god, revere its ubiquity and protest its absence: George reveals that the act of private and sanitary defecation is the key to health, the wealth of nations, and even civilization itself."—Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain
Customer Reviews
Open Discussion of a Forbidden Topic
What if you learned that a particular problem was causing 80% of the illness in the world and was killing a child every fifteen seconds? Would you want to find out more, and insist that governments and the world do more, to improve the problem? What if you learned that one of the big reasons that governments and the world aren't doing more is that the problem is, well, yucky, and people don't like talking or thinking about it? There are blunter words for the problem, and Rose George uses them; the problem is feces. It is the topic of her book _The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste_ (Metropolitan Books), a sobering and eye-opening account of just how badly the world handles this one great and inevitable problem. Most of the people who read this book will be among the set that uses flush commodes which connect to sewers and treatment plants, considered the tops in fecal disposal. But 2.6 billion people lack not only toilets, but also lack latrines or outhouses or even a bucket. Toilets and sewage treatments have their problems, covered here, but with billions of people who literally have no place to go, feces wind up all over the place, easily getting into food and water and causing misery. George has been to sewers of huge cities, wandered excrement-coated slum streets, experimented with public toilets in rural china, and visited the workers who clean sewers or empty pits. There is humor here (not much of the toilet variety) and well-crafted explanation and description, but it is not overall a pretty picture. If you don't want to think about this problem, that's just the problem.
Toilets, if a culture has them, are only a starting point. In the typical sewage system, the flow is eventually separated into the cleaned liquid effluent which goes back into the water and the solid sludge (more trendily called bio-solids) which is a bit of a problem. It is pretty clean, and naturally would make a good fertilizer, and in the US it does get spread around all over. The problem is that anything goes down our toilets, like unused drugs or heavy metals. Those who worry about the application of such molecules onto our crops are not comforted by the Environmental Protection Agency which says such application is safe. A great deal of George's book is not about people with toilets and sewers. In India, the lowest of the class still held to be Untouchables get an income by collecting feces deposited on the open ground. There are flying toilets or helicopter toilets in Kenya and Tanzania. It's a nice way of describing a disgusting practice: defecate into a plastic bag, then fling the bag to a rooftop or into the alley. George cites the Chinese as being especially innovative and open about sanitation; feces have always gone onto the fields there, but more recently homes have been equipped with biogas digesters providing methane that heats homes and stoves. There are still urban problems, but the government knows how important appearances are. In preparation for the Olympics, holes in the ground were replaced with thousands of lavatories, complete with attendants. In South Africa, kids stay away from school because the toilets are so bad; an official school lavatory might be something rigged up from a car chassis.
The descriptions of the lack of waste disposal for so much of the world's population are often difficult reading. There are glimmers of hope such as toilet activists like the World Toilet Organization. An Indian activist, after a visit to Madame Tussaud's in London, realized that he could gather toilets from all over the world and make a Toilet Museum which fulfills his goal to "make toilets interesting." There are inventors in different parts of the world who have gadgets to make sanitation cheaper and easier, and the pattern is to avoid patenting them so that they remain anyone's to use or modify without charge. There are politicians (not nearly enough) who are willing to talk about the unmentionable problem. George's book, with vivid descriptions and bright commentary, does the same thing in its way, forcing attention onto a world problem that people foolishly regard as too icky to take seriously.
An entertaining story of toilets
Although I have often read in the bathroom, I never thought to read such an interesting and, dare I say it, entertaining book about defecation and waste removal and treatment.
All humor aside (and I guess its taboo is why one feels compelled to try to be humorous about this subject), this is actually a very serious subject. The author tells us how the creation of sewage systems, and flush toilets, has probably led to a hugh improvement in life expectancy, since fecal related illness was, and remains in most of the world, the biggest killer (especially of little children, the elderly, and the immuno-compromised).
It is astounding to learn that most people don't even have outhouses, but must just squat where they can. The desease ramifications of this simple fact are enormous, and not humorous at all. Suddenly, the reader runs into some very sobering facts.
On a personal level, I don't think I'll ever put grease down the sink again, after reading about those (literally) walls of grease in the sewers. Her walk through a sewer amazed me and, for the first time, I realized that the people that do this work routinely are a bit heroic, putting life and limb at risk for our public health. I do recall that when I lived in Louisville, KY years ago, the sewers exploded when a factory emptied some chemical down the drain. This is very dangerous.
I recommend this book absolutely.
Oh, Excetra!
When I was young and living in very rural farm country and adventuring in the woods or hills and had to take a dump, I did what everyone else did: squatted, made some crap, wiped myself with a few leaves or a handful of grass, and moved on. (If the foregoing language disturbs you, then don't read this book; it's just as graphic, especially in the latter part.)
Now, imagine the teeming, close-living tens of millions in the slums and cities of developing countries--and even growing India--where, today, open defecation (that's the "polite" word, which is not that often used in the book) is the socially acceptable and often economically-necessary thing to do. Because it's cheap. There are no sewer systems, few toilets or even working public or private pit latrines. And where does this excreta go--be it India, Africa, China, Tibet, Mexico and even lesser sanitary places? Into the streets, ponds, rivers, oceans and even drinking water. Multi-tons of it everyday.
In some African countries, Tanzania and Kenya are two examples, the cheapest latrine is a plastic bag: "defecate, wrap, and throw. Anywhere will do, though roofs are a favorite" (pg. 210). Millions upon millions of people world wide have to make a choice when it comes to ridding themselves of excrement: "contaminating the environment or contaminating human settlement" (pg 222).
This book is shocking, but it has to be. Fortunately, in the beginning, the author spares us the worst part of the history (and history-in-the-making) of sanitation by discussing the glories of the sewer systems in Britain and the U.S. Then, she moves to other parts of the world. I began to think to myself, "Why would I want to tourist in certain countries when I could easily step in human feces--yes, it's everywhere (sidewalks, roads, inside public buildings, alleys, et cetera)--and also have no facility to relieve myself? At first, I thought the author must be exaggerating (it can't be THAT bad), but she produces all kinds of evidence: statistics, quotes and her own experiences.
Even in the good ole USA, pharmaceuticals can be found in drinking water: meds for heart disease, mental illness, epilepsy, et cetera. These trace amounts deform frogs and fish. The effect on humans? Not yet known.
The author makes a strong case for prioritizing the subject of removing and using human waste. But few want to talk about it or spend money on it. Hopefully, her book, and others, will enlighten people (politicians, especially).
