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89 CHAPTER FOUR The City First, refuse is primarily an urban blight. Agrarian societies throughout history have successfully avoided solid-waste pollution; cities and towns have faced the gravest dangers. —Melosi, Garbage in the Cities Garbage has befouled settlements since their inception. The price of stability and security in the form of permanent dwellings and fortifications was the relinquishment of the highly efficacious nomadic technique of waste management. When stifled by his waste, the nomad simply picks up and shifts on. Settlement implies accumulation, in numbers of people, their possessions, and also their waste. Accumulation, in turn, implies a concentration of matter, which beyond a certain point becomes problematic . The problems arise due to the exclusive nature of all excessive phenomena that tends to suppress the conditions of possibility of other phenomena. Historical records testify to the all-pervasive presence of refuse in premodern cities, the sight and stench of which could not be ignored. The same circumstances hold today for the reckoned one billion people worldwide who inhabit urban slums lacking sewer systems and organized waste collection. In terms of sheer quantity, more human beings now endure the allegedly inhuman conditions of cities prior to the twentieth century than at any other given time in history. There can be no doubt that garbage posed a host of problems and even dangers to the premodern city. Householders of Rome and Troy, for instance, periodically had to raise their roofs to reclaim the headroom of their homes stolen by the steady accretion of refuse strewn underfoot. Although a problem for all cities, garbage did not become a crisis until it met the modern, industrial megalopolis. The Greek word krisis means decision, and its English equivalent connotes a moment of decisive import, a turning point of some sort or other. A revolution in garbage occurred with the scientific discovery of germs. Previous to the acceptance of the germ theory, garbage was considered a nuisance, perhaps an offense, but it subsequently became a menace. The seeds of this revolution were already planted in the forerunner of germs: the miasmic theory of disease. This hypothesis linked human disease and, by extension, mortality to fetid collections of filth. If wastes were allowed to collect and fester, they would sooner or later begin to exhale gases noxious to human health. Waste per se was not yet held responsible for spreading disease, but rather its neglected decomposition. Sanitation—a word rooted in the Latin sanus, meaning health—still had fundamentally to do with apparent cleanliness and order. It still possessed an aesthetic element. Sanitation did not yet mean sterilization. A healthy denizen of industrialized culture, I do not for a moment wish to dismiss the verifiable gains that modern scientific sanitation has won for human longevity, survival past infancy, and general well-being. Yet one can be both grateful for the gains and at the same time wary of the manner of their attainment, so long as this wariness aims at the amelioration , not the condemnation, of the situation. Science itself has begun to suspect that its obsession with sterilization, vaccination, and the constant manipulation of the biosphere may produce less than salubrious results. So-called super germs, super weeds, and super bacteria have burst onto the medical and agriculture scenes. These new strains have, thanks to our predilection for excess, developed resistance to the very chemicals originally created to combat their predecessors. Besides, it turns out that a certain level of exposure to dirt and germs keeps the human immune system strong. The critique here applies not per se to the modern attempt to improve our lot. It confines itself to the unthinking dogmatism, extremism, and even arrogance so often attached to it. With the popular acceptance of the germ theory toward the end of the nineteenth century, waste itself, and not just its neglect, was implicated in crimes against humanity. The postulation of invisible germs transformed the perception of rejected articles. Now no matter what its size and apparent condition, waste was considered a hothouse teeming with potential diseases. As remarked with respect to food in the previous chapter, from our perspective of modern science, germs represent nature’s last stand. They menace human health because they elude human control, and the metaphysical will to power dictates that whatsoever cannot be tamed must be destroyed. This dictate forced sterilization on sanitation; mere cleanliness and order fell short of the metaphysical aspiration for supernatural existence. Since waste harbored nature in the invisible form of germs, waste...

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