Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem

1. Natural vs. Artificial: “The Right Way to Dispose of Town Sewage”

1 Natural vs. Artificial: “The Right Way to Dispose of Town Sewage”1 At the close of the nineteenth century, prominent physician and sanitarian George Vivian Poore spoke to a London medical society on urban sanitation: “We see the pipes, the engines, the ventilators, the hospitals, and the smoke of the destructor; we hear the incessant thud of steam machinery.” “But,” he continued, contrasting this industrial scene to the healing powers of nature, “we never get a glimpse of the bright side of the matter, the return which Nature inevitably makes to nourish our bodies, gladden our senses, and freshen the air.”2 Describing a scene that might have come out of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Poore was drawing upon a well-established literature contrasting the nineteenth-century industrial and pastoral landscapes of England.3 However, Poore was not describing, like Dickens, the steam engines, smoke, and polluted rivers of the woolen mills, dye factories, and machine shops of England’s industrialized cities. Rather, he was criticizing the industrial nature of the sanitary apparatus itself. Sanitarians were responding to the health problems and river and air pollution caused by industrialization by building their own industrial apparatus: vast networks of sewers and pumping plants, huge furnaces for incinerating the sewage of cities, giant schemes to treat sewage with the products of England’s expanding chemical industry (figure 1.1). Other sanitary scientists and engineers, however, saw industrialization of the sanitary apparatus as a necessary response to the impact of urbanization and industrialization itself. “The requirements of civilized man have created certain artificial conditions which can only be met by corresponding artificial treatment,” wrote a correspondent to the Times, also in 1898. Unlike Poore, though, these sanitarians did not see the solution as pitting the industrial against the natural. Rather, they proposed a hybrid solution, in which the natural processes of purification advocated by Poore would be put to work in concentrated form. In creating their solution to the sanitation problem, these writers advocated for the recently developed processes of biological sewage treatment, in which “the law of nature need not be transgressed or departed from.”4 Rather nature would be used, improved upon, sped up, and intensi fied. Biological sewage treatment, as envisioned by writers like these, combined the Figure 1.1 “The smoke of the destructor.” This 1898 advertisement appeared in a sanitary engineering textbook, showing the industrial nature of the sanitary apparatus at the close of the nineteenth century. Destructors were used to incinerate both refuse and sewage sludge. Source: William H. Maxwell, The Removal and Disposal of Town Refuse (London: Sanitary Publishing Company, 1898) Natural vs. Artificial 3 artificial and the natural to create a new form of nature, the industrial ecosystem. From the sewage farms and irrigation of the mid-nineteenth century, to the septic tanks and bacterial filters of the 1890s, and the activated sludge process of 1914, sanitary scientists and engineers created ecosystems where the microbial purification of a “natural” soil became progressively intensified and simplified, in a word, industrialized. The new sewage treatment schemes of the late nineteenth century relied on the biological action of bacteria and other organisms. But sanitary scientists and engineers of the period did not, at first, necessarily consider these biological processes to be natural. In contrast to what was regarded as “natural” treatment of sewage by the soil, biological sewage treatment was originally considered “artificial.” Because of the perceived importance of naturalness to sewage treatment schemes, biology had to undergo a cultural and scientific process of naturalization.5 During the late 1880s, scientific research and sanitary rhetoric had so naturalized biological treatment that by the early 1900s it was widely considered natural. Critical to this transformation was the application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to understanding the ecology of sewage treatment processes. At the same time, however, sewage scientists denatured biological treatment through a drive for increasing industrialization of the process, characterized by biological intensification, simplification, and control. The shift from a natural to an industrial ecosystem was a process of denaturing—of removing the natural elements of an ecosystem and replacing them with elements that would allow the simplification and intensification of the biological process. Denaturing was an essential characteristic of industrialization in general, because nature, with all its variability, was an obstacle to mechanization. To take...