Is it all horse manure?

Hello Everyone  
I was amused to read an article by Stephen Davies the academic director at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.  The article said that about a hundred years ago social commentators were complaining that life had become desperate about the great horse-manure crisis.  Davies noted that in the Times of London in 1894, it was estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure!

In the nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily needs. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses.

The problem was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Thus, the streets in those times were covered by horse manure which attracted flies, which when dried was blown everywhere.

In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.

The problem was overwhelming. The larger and richer a city became, the more horses it needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. As well, these horses had to be stabled, using up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.

The great crisis vanished within three years of the conference when millions of horses were replaced by motor vehicles. Even though horses were a problem, in the background inventors and entrepreneurs such as Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford were developing a solution. The price of horse-drawn transport rose steadily along with the cost of feeding and housing horses…this created strong incentives for people to find alternatives.

This story points out the difficulty of predicting the future.  It also inspires hope. We humans are such creative beings that I am sure solutions to some of our greatest problems already exists and we are on the cusp of embracing them.

Live! Laugh! Love!  Hope!

 Roz Roz Townsend   www.roztownsend.com

Declinology ~ are we in decline?

Hello everyone and welcome to my little corner of the world

There has been a lot written about the symptoms of decay and decadence in Western culture.  An Australian documentary  Decadence: Decline of the Western World even goes as far as saying that Western civilisation peaked in 1969 – the year Russians and Americans reached out beyond earth.

Some sobering symptoms are grabbing attention.  Symptoms such as high suicide rates, high consumption of anti-depressants, disintegrating families, uninspiring leadership, obsession with money  and consumption are a few of the obvious ones.

It is little wonder then that yet a new word declinology has been created to brand this school of thought.  Declinology is the advocacy of the belief that one's society is in decline.

The symptom of this new way of thinking that really caught my attention was highlighted by Jacinta Dunn.   She points out that “just before the fall of the Roman Empire, they were all dining on lark’s tongue and nightingale hearts”. 

Not that I have eaten lark or nightingale but I know that much of Western civilisation is obsessed with food.  The incredible number of television programs about food, the books about food and dieting and the pages of major tabloids devoted to food and alcohol consumption are all testimony to this.

Yet I was impressed by a family who live in the bush and are trying to be totally sustainable.   They grow all their own food.  Their vegetable garden, chicken and other livestock take up virtually all of their time.  For this family, at the self sustainability level, the obsession with food production is also obvious.  The difference though is that Western civilisation’s obsession seems to be with consumption and processing of food whereas at the sustainability level it was about the production and nurturing of food sources.

It certainly is an indication of the ‘quality’ of life that some people have that they can devote so much of their time to how and where they will consume their food.

Unfortunately much food is wasted.  In 2011, 1.3 billion tons of food,  about one third of global food production, are lost or wasted annually.  Loss and wastage occur at every stage of food supply chain.   In low-income countries most loss occurs during production, while in developed countries much food – about 100 kilograms (220 lb) per person and year – is wasted at the consumption stage.

We can be aware and responsible for the huge environmental consequences of such waste .  Scarce water resources are wasted and unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions are generated through wasted production and decomposition in landfills.  For example,the methane that decomposing food produces has a greenhouse gas equivalency twenty-five times higher than carbon dioxide.

Where does your time and energy go with food?  Are you favouring  the production or consumption?  Are you part of society on the decline or is your focus on responsible production? 

Live! Love! Laugh!

Roz Townsend  roz@roztownsend.com