I appreciated Johnson’s opening to the chapter, with his focus on recycling. London at that time, a city of two million people, had none of the public infrastructure, services, or works we today take for granted. Instead there arose a whole class of different gatherers, scavengers, and waste collectors, operating out of necessity, who scooped up items that alone represented little value but when collected and sold by the pound could return enough for someone to live on. The entrepreneurial spirit (or spirit of desperation) of these unemployed and desperately poor Londoners kept the city cleaner and more efficient then had economic conditions not forced people to eek out a dirty, grueling, dangerous existence collecting and retailing society’s garbage. I though Johnson’s segway from waste recycling at a societal level to recycling at a biological or chemical level a fairly clever way of highlighting the importance of utilizing waste: to do so is a basic function of most successful organisms.
“All nucleated organisms generate calcium as an excess waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated these calcium reserves, and put them to good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons. Your ability to walk upright is due to evolution’s knack for recycling its toxic waste (16).”
Johnson then goes on to note that regardless of the reasons for a population’s density, (London’s population explosion can be attributed to the industrial revolution, whereas humanity’s first confrontation with population explosion, waste management, and disease came during transitions from hunter gatherer to agricultural based societies) without efficient forms of recycling, these forms of life cannot survive long (18).
Johnson also provided an example of how economic realities affected disease control and general cleanliness in the city. Despite the actions of the various waste collectors in London, the city was still filthy. However cesspools and latrines, those cleaned by “night soilers” were somewhat maintained given that the pay was high enough (night soilers would sell the human excrement to farmers outside the city) for many people to engage in the profession. However Johnson notes that as the city expanded, it became increasingly expensive to transport the waste outside the city walls to farms, meaning that the cost for cleaning each cesspit became unaffordable for many families. This is an economic reality, given that the factors of production (transport) had become more expensive, however it had the disastrous effect of allowing disgusting amounts of waste to accumulate, and disease causing bacterial populations to flourish.
The discussion of cholera, and the terror and devastation it caused, is relevant because despite the fact that today with have a significant amount of knowledge about the mechanics and operations of pathogens in our environment, there are massive frontiers of knowledge we have yet to discover. Reading about the dangerous beliefs in London at that time, such as that if water looked clean to the eye it had to be pure, or that disease is the result of moral failings, it prompts one to question how much of our knowledge is truly as factual as we would like it to be.
One thing that bothered me in the reading however, was this little gem of a quote, “to this day, the Netherlands has the highest population density of any country in the world” (16). I immediately questioned the validity of this assertion. How could a country like the Netherlands, a wealthy, highly stable, European country, with an aging population and declining birth rate, rival the population density of say, Bangladesh? When I looked up population density by country, not a single website had Netherlands in even the top ten. Although this doesn’t discredit Steven Johnson’s work, it does to an extent draw doubt to the validity of some of the data he raises, and leads one to believe that he may embellish generously so as to prove a point.
-Jesse Geisler
