Its odour is redolent of fine tobacco, the woodwork in an old church, sandalwood oil, the Wadden Sea at ebb, straw bedding in a zoo or a blend of freshly mown grass, the damp forest smell of a dead fern and violet perfume. Kings and emperors gave it to each other as a sign of supreme exclusivity. It was an essential ingredient of elixirs. Casanova drank it in his chocolate mousse as an aphrodisiac. When it comes to mythical standing, it can hold its own with black truffles and unicorn horn. Scholars racked their brains trying to figure out what it was. It was shit.
The shit of all shits, it ranks right up there with nectar and ambrosia. It is ambergris—grey amber. Not yellow amber, the hardened resin, but the grey amber that is found along distant coastlines (if you’re extraordinarily lucky) and is said to have been vomited by a whale. But it isn’t vomit. It’s poo.
For more than a thousand years, ambergris has been sought after by the poor as a way of getting rich and by the rich as a way of putting on a good show. It’s considered a fragrance from heaven. Yet in its pure form it has no smell at all. Ambergris seizes on other fragrances and gives them a deep lustre. It is still sought by the perfume industry, which pays 15,000 euros a kilo for it. Synthetic amber doesn’t come within miles of the natural product. Shit.
The secret of ambergris was unravelled during the heyday of whaling. Herman Melville was already well aware of it in 1851 when he wrote Moby-Dick. In that tale, Captain Ahab and his crew come across a French ship, the Bouton de Rose, with two rotting whales in tow. The animals had died a natural death and now stink to high heaven. They are, in whalers’ terms, ‘blasted’. Second mate Stubb informs the French captain ‘that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought alongside’, and implores him, if he values his life, to cut the towing cables. The Frenchman falls for it. He’s barely gone before Stubb climbs on top of the smaller of the two whales.
Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat’s crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.
And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another, without at all blending with it for a time.
‘I have it, I have it,’ cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, ‘a purse! a purse!’ Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese; very unctuous and savoury withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist.
Stubb knew where to look for it, and it wasn’t in the head. In every sperm whale there’s a miraculous substance called spermaceti: a clear oil that, when exposed to the air, congeals into a soft white wax that is sold as salve in the pharmacy. For centuries, spermaceti was thought to be the seed of the sperm whale, hence the animal’s name.
Spermaceti could fetch a great deal of money, but not nearly as much as ambergris. To find that you’d have to look in the intestines. Essentially, it’s a big lump of encrusted old shit. The little specks you see in it are the beaks of the squids that the sperm whale has eaten. With its four stomachs, a sperm whale makes quick work of a squid’s soft tissue, but it can’t reduce the hard mouth parts, the eye lenses, and the internal shell. A healthy sperm whale vomits the beaks by the thousands once a week, like an owl vomits its pellets, but if there’s anything wrong with the animal’s valves and sphincters the beaks may pass on from the first stomach to the intestines, where they irritate the wall. As an oyster covers an irritating grain of sand with mother-of-pearl, so the sperm whale encapsulates the beaks in a fatty, cholesterol-rich secretion. The next load of shit gets stuck behind it and also begins to clot. Constipation like that must cause the sperm whale great inconvenience. If it’s lucky it will shit the wad loose in plenty of time, but most of the animals get more and more constipated until their intestine bursts and they die. The body itself feeds the sharks and worms of the ocean, but the lump of ambergris floats to the surface. Its career has only just begun. Fresh from its master, the ambergris is still a pooy lump of tar. In the ocean it doesn’t reach its full maturity for years, sailing on the surface, blown forward by the wind, carried back by the tides, exposed to air, light, salt and waves. Growing smaller and smaller, lighter and smoother, it finally washes up on a distant shore and lies there like a pale stone that’s been through the laundry, waiting for the beachcomber who’s lucky enough to make the discovery of his life and smart enough to recognise it. His nose will be rewarded with a fragrance that makes him think of all sorts of things but is impossible to describe. ‘There is simply nothing else that smells quite like it,’ writes Christopher Kemp in Floating Gold. ‘It is like a single, remote point on a map with no landmarks anywhere by which to find it.’ Actually, ambergris smells like just one thing: ambergris. Only biologists believe they can detect the faint faecal odour; all everyone else smells is money. In 1693, the Dutch East India Company paid the king of Tidore 11,000 dollars for a lump weighing 83 kilos. The lump was exhibited in Amsterdam as a rarity for many years and was finally broken into pieces and sold at auction, ‘so that many persons now alive have been witnesses to it’. A find of exactly the same weight occurred in 2012 in a sperm whale stranded on the Razende Bol, a sandbar off the coast of the Dutch island of Texel. Although ambergris obtained from a sperm whale is less valuable than a loose lump washed up on the beach, the finders from the Ecomare seal sanctuary counted on a take of hundreds of thousands of euros.
Whether shit smells like money or not depends on your nose. While a city nose only lusts after ambergris in the carefully measured form of faecal fragrances known as perfume, a country nose realises that shit doesn’t have to come from a sick sperm whale to be worth money. That nose will take healthy pig muck and cow shit any day. Although crops can live from air and light, they need substances from the soil, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, to build up their cells and their chemical machinery. These are just the substances that cattle would sooner be rid of than rich in. When you forget to enrich the earth with excrement it soon becomes less productive. So the emergence of the mixed farm was almost inevitable: animal manure was used to feed the plants, which the animals then ate in order to make new manure. Manure is no saint, says the farmer, but it performs miracles wherever it lands. And the most divine plants spring forth from the filthiest shit. Barren deserts become fertile soil, depleted fields bear new fruit. In terms of miracles, cow shit and pig muck are in no way inferior to the finest ambergris. The shit that cows and pigs produce is worth more than the capital of all the farm credit banks put together. The value of any farm has always been found in its manure pile and not in its money box.
I learned that as a child. Back then I had a little donkey. Not a real one, but a toy made out of tin—you know, with those lips. When you pulled its tail, it shat out your savings coin by coin. The donkey was based on the fairy tale from the brothers Grimm in which a donkey shits gold coins at the word ‘bricklebrit’. It’s not for nothing that this image remains engraved in the collective memory. For a donkey, money is shit; for a farmer every turd was golden.
For centuries, shit determined the prosperity of the farmer. There was never enough of it. The more shit, the greater the yield. A farmer with more land was richer, mainly because a larger piece of land produced more manure. Air, light and water are generally available in abundance, but nitrogen and phosphorus have always been the restrictive factors, so they were worth money. Those who thoroughly understood that were the English liege lords. Their tenants were usually obliged to pen their flocks of sheep on the lord’s land, so the most important revenues automatically went to him. He who had the power, had the manure; he who had the manure, had the power.
Because everyone used it on their own land, manure was hard to come by in many places, not even for money—until enormous amounts of the stuff were discovered abroad. Bird manure from South America. Guano.
Birds fly. Freed from their ties to the earth, they acknowledge gravity only when it suits them: when they have to shit. Usually they just let everything fall—on creatures like us, shackled to the earth’s surface by the same force that liberates the birds from their burdens. This is hard on our coats and our cars. But the amount of damage pales in comparison to the value of the corrosive excrement. Bird manure contains thirty times more nutritive salts than normal stable manure. Yet collecting all the shit from tits and coots is a pointless task. Better to take note of where the birds gather. The heron colonies of Amsterdam are a good example of how much a bunch of birds can shit when they get together. But even these Amsterdam shit-herons have to acknowledge the superiority of the seagulls, gannets, terns, and pelicans of the tropical coasts.
Europe was given a taste of their potential in 1804 when the explorer Alexander von Humboldt came back with a sample of shit from the Chincha Islands of Peru. The rocks there were covered with a layer of guano that was 200 metres thick in places. Apparently the birds had plenty to eat in the surrounding waters, which were teeming with fish. And whatever excrement landed next to the island was more than enough to keep up the fish population. The shit fed the plankton, the plankton fed the fish, and the birds were bursting with minerals from the fish they ate. The minerals came primarily from the rocks on which the birds nested, which were slowly being washed away by the sea. But the shit on the rocks accumulated because there was too little rain to rinse it off. In the sun the shit became mummified. It mixed with seaweed, fish remains, pebbles, shells, and dead birds to produce the end product: guano.
Beyond South America there were also islands in the Pacific and along the coasts of South Africa where reefs rich in birds were being exploited. In 1856 the united States greedily proclaimed the Guano Islands Act:
Whenever any citizen of the united States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other Government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other Government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the united States.
By 1840, after a hesitant beginning, guano had also become a booming business in Europe. Two years later, 283,300 tonnes were shipped to Liverpool. Farmers were enthusiastic. G. Rijnders, a gentleman farmer at Groot Zeedijk in Groningen, concluded by way of experiment that one tonne of guano was as effective a fertiliser as 30 tonnes of horse, cow or pig manure and much cheaper to import than night soil from the big city. It was considerably more difficult to find people who were willing to harvest the guano in those remote regions. On Midway, one of the islands that the uS had confiscated under the Guano Islands Act, the few inhabitants complained of having the feeling that they were living in a birdcage, ‘except there’s no one here to change the sand’. Elsewhere even the sailors refused to go ashore. Their eyes had started bleeding from the ammonia vapours. To meet the demand for guano, natives were recruited and coolies brought in. In Caesar’s Passage, which takes place in around 1864, Andrew Smyth paints a picture that might have been taken from Dante’s Inferno:
The Chinese labourers work on the sheer cliff faces of white guano, digging and bagging amid the dust and overpowering smell of the deposits. Each gang was worked by an overseer with a twenty-foot whip which was used skilfully and instinctively, without thought or mercy. Many of the coolies threw themselves into the sea rather than continue with the hopeless misery of their situation.
The best guano doesn’t come from birds but from bats. Bats live by the hundreds of thousands in caves, the floors of which are eventually covered with a layer of shit several metres thick. A century ago in America, special bat towers were built to make the harvesting easier. Dr Campbell’s Bat Roost, built in 1918 in San Antonio, Texas, yielded 2000 kilograms of guano shat by 250,000 to 500,000 guano bats (Tadarida brasiliensis). The good Dr Campbell’s main objective was combatting the malaria mosquito. And indeed, the incidence of malaria around the tower did decline. But when the manure at the site was examined in 1926 it was found that the bats had not eaten any mosquitoes. Malaria had disappeared even without the presence of bats. The towers were not worth maintaining for their manure alone, and they fell into disrepair. The finest memorial to the keeping of bats is, curiously enough, in Limburg in the Netherlands. Still standing on the De Bedelaar country estate is the bat tower of Eugène Dubois, once world famous as the discoverer of Java Man. The tower is probably the only shithouse in the entire country that has been declared a national monument.
Even though the guano in the New World was there for the shovel-ling, it had yet to reach the harbours of the Old. Coolies perished miserably while loading the ships, which were wrecked as they rounded Cape Horn. Was there no extra manure to be found in Europe itself? Where in Europe could you find such concentrations of shit-producing animals as on the rocks of the sea birds and the bat caves of America? Of course: in the cities. That’s where human beings were packed together cheek by jowl. No colony of birds or bats could match the shit-producing capacity of the human masses of London and Paris in the nineteenth century. In 1871 a Native Guano Company was founded to capitalise on the anuses of the British. In the Leisure Hour of 1885, the initiative was supported by a fierce appeal:
European nations send fleets to the New World to bring over costly guano, while neglecting wealth at home. It is not pleasant to think of the sewerage of a great city: but to the eye of science, when opened, this uncleanness means green grain and flowery meadows; it means thyme and marjoram and all fragrant herbs; it means sweet-smelling hay and golden harvests; it means bread on your table and meat in your larder; it means warm blood in your veins; it means health, and joy, and life! The fertilising of the fields becomes the nourishment of men.
With approval Victor Hugo writes in Les Misérables:
Paris throws into the water every year twenty-five millions of francs! This is no metaphorical statement, but simple truth. How, and in what fashion? By night and by day. With what purpose? With no purpose. With what thought? With no thought. To do what? To do nothing. By what agency? By the sewerage of the city.
Sewers are insane. That became clear to me when I was living in student digs without a proper toilet. You could pee in the sink, but for shitting you had to leave the room, which my girlfriend was unwilling to do. She shat on an old newspaper, which she neatly folded up afterwards and tossed into the rubbish bin. That was something I never dared, and now it’s no longer necessary. But of course my girlfriend was right. Tossing your waste in the bin is more logical than sending it into the environment with a tank full of valuable clean water through kilometres of pipe, polluting everything it comes in contact with along the way. The fact that the sewers today no longer flow into waterways or seas is great for the waterway or sea, but it does nothing to reduce the insanity or the insane amount of work involved. When the shit gets to the purification plant between the toilet and the waterway or sea it undergoes all sorts of technical contortions to separate it once again from the water. The water can be used to flush away new shit; the old shit is incinerated along with the household refuse.
Rubbish should be separated at the source. I obediently set aside my old paper, metal, garden waste and leftover paint in order to throw them into the appropriate bins at the recycling station in the city of Weesp. But there’s no bin for my shit. Nobody wants it. Whatever became of the days when the dunny-can man came to pick up your excrement? What kind of madness is it, to withhold from the economy a source of energy that is many times more nutrient-rich than cow manure? This may end up being very costly to the West. In the East they’re not so crazy. All through the centuries, both the Chinese and the Japanese empires were built on men’s and women’s shit.
Until the rapid urbanisation of the twenty-first century, more than 90 per cent of all the human faeces in China ended up in the fields. Every turd counted as one more. But you couldn’t just squeeze out another one whenever you needed it. Your family did everything they could, too. Even travellers’ excrement was looked on longingly. In Aux Etats de Jersey (1853), Pierre Leroux tells the story of how he and eleven other French travellers in Macau saw a ‘smiling, vigorous Chinaman’ approach their innkeeper to engage in negotiations. A translator explained to Leroux what was going on:
What he is doing here is that he comes to buy the niao and fenn of your lordships. The niao and the fenn are more valuable than yellow gold. They feed the yellow crops that make man grow. Yellow gold only makes the hair grow white.
The innkeeper didn’t get as much for the excrement from the twelve Frenchmen as he did for that of the six previous guests. But they were Englishmen.
The great Tien gave the English singular faculties. One Englishman can fertilise a field that feeds a whole family. An Englishman is an animal that is always eating and is eating mainly meat. Happy are those on whose property they deposit their bounty. My father, who was a noted gardener, asserted that it took three pigs to match an Englishman, and that eight Portuguese were barely comparable…
The prestige of human manure reached a high point during the Cultural Revolution. According to Mao, your turd did not belong to you but to your entire commune. Your comrades dragged your excrement around, and you dragged theirs. As Ralph Lewin reports, ‘As I can attest from personal experience, a pair of sewage-filled buckets, carried on a yoke over the shoulders, is no mean burden.’ Fortunately he didn’t have to lug it very far. ‘My Chinese hosts were afraid I might spill some of the valuable contents.’
The extent to which the use of one’s own manure is culturally linked was shown by anthropologist Sjaak van der Geest during the sixties, when the Chinese built the railway between Tanzania and Zambia. In accordance with custom, they fertilised their little gardens with their own excrement, much to the horror of the local Africans. ‘The good yields from the Chinese gardens were not enough to change their minds.’ This aversion to human shit has not worked in Africa’s favour. At one time there was little need for manure in Africa because every time the soil became depleted you could burn the next bit of forest to the ground. But all this has changed with overpopulation. Fortifying the emaciated continent with cow manure hasn’t worked due to a lack of cattle, which in turn is connected to the depleted grazing land.
What do all those tribes from the West, the North, and the South have against their own human manure? Is it that it’s dirty? Cow manure is dirty, too, yet we spread it on our crops with a whistle on our lips. The taboo has less to do with shit than with its human origins. The shit from a member of your own kind is taboo, just as the meat of your own kind is taboo. The aversion to shit and the aversion to cannibalism are based on the same thing: fear. Fear of disease. And that is not groundless: you have the most to fear from your own kind because they house the same evil. This was proven once again in 1959, when a mysterious trembling sickness was discovered among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. The victims had all eaten the brains of their deceased fellow tribesmen during tribal rituals. In doing so they ingested a prion (infectious protein) that attacked the central nervous system and in most cases caused death within a year. This disease of human flesh is nothing compared with the epidemics unleashed by human faeces. For cholera bacilli and other pathogens, polluted drinking water is the fastest way to travel from backside to mouth and to backside again.
Human excrement is scary, but that’s no reason to throw it away. It’s better to tame it. Turn it into real manure. Manure is tamed shit. To turn a wolf into a dog you have to domesticate it, and to turn shit into manure you have to compost it. This involves letting the creatures you fear do all the work: bacteria, fungi, worms and other tiny beasties. They turn scary excrement to beloved manure. And while they’re at it, they clear away the malicious relatives. The only thing you have to do to get them working is to mix the shit with other organic rubbish and put it in a heap. In no time at all, the temperature in the heap will rise to levels that no normal pathogen can tolerate. But certain microbes can tolerate it. As true thermophiles they actually thrive at temperatures of sixty or seventy degrees Celsius, which they themselves have generated by their activities. After a few weeks there may be some worm eggs that are still alive, at the most. The thermophile bacteria are past their prime by then and ordinary bacteria take over, helped by mites, fungi and insects. If you let the heap sit for one or two years, you end up with the most scrumptious food a plant could ever want.
‘The Lord giveth,’ the church teaches, ‘and we make of it what we will.’
To keep from having to take every turd to the compost heap as soon as it’s deposited, you collect your shit at the bottom of your compost toilet. These come in all shapes and sizes. Not all of them reach the temperature required to kill pathogens, however. One that does is the Humanure toilet developed by pioneer Joseph Jenkins. Instead of being flushed away, every portion of excrement is covered with a layer of peat or sawdust. When the reservoir is full, the contents are moved to the actual compost heap, located elsewhere. After one or two years you can enjoy the satisfaction of eating tomatoes that are self-pooed, as it were. Not all of Jenkins’s guests have been able to appreciate this, however:
A young English couple was visiting me one summer after I had been compositing humanure for about six years. One evening, as dinner was being prepared, the couple suddenly understood the horrible reality of their situation: the food they were about to eat was recycled human shit. When this fact abruptly dawned upon them, it seemed to set off an instinctive alarm, possible inherited directly from Queen Victoria. ‘We don’t want to eat shit!’ they informed me, rather distressed (that’s an exact quote), as if in preparing dinner I had simply set a steaming turd in front of them with a knife, fork and napkin.
The English couple are not alone. Most people don’t see the value in their own excrement. Yet this is nothing compared with the human muck on which the mediaeval cities and the Chinese Empire flourished. But if you were to fill up a bucket with your shit today you’d have a hard time getting anyone to buy it. If shit is the currency by which the value of agriculture is expressed, then its exchange rate has plummeted drastically. It all began with the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), who discovered that crops grow quite nicely without organic fertiliser. Mother Earth does not possess any magical life force; a plant will thrive just as well in a vase with the proper saline solution as it does on well-fertilised humus. So farmers were no longer at the mercy of human or animal faecal capacity. Dunghills made way for sacks of artificial fertiliser. In 1850 the first crops were fertilised with superphosphate, a salt you could mine like coal. Phosphate is good for the growth of plants. It supplies them with building materials and stimulates the absorption of solar energy. You need potassium for the synthesis of carbohydrates, which constitute the bulk of beets and potatoes. Potassium became cheaply available in around 1860 as a waste product of the salt mining process. But the most urgent need was for nitrogen. The ammonium sulphate that was released as a by-product in the production of coke after 1890 couldn’t keep up with the demand, even though nitrogen is almost omnipresent. Four-fifths of the air we breathe consists of nitrogen. The problem is that our crops cannot extract it from the air as a gas (N2). A plant doesn’t inhale nitrogen, it drinks it, with its roots. But that means the nitrogen has to be available in soluble form. The only life forms that can convert insoluble nitrogen gas into soluble nitrogen salts are certain kinds of bacteria. Fortunately the soil is crawling with them. The bacteria themselves can’t be seen with the naked eye, but you can see the little tubers on the roots of peas and beans in which they live. If you plough these plants under you’ll be extracting the nitrogen from the air, which you can use as food for other crops. But a natural process like this can’t keep up with the hunger of modern agriculture. Now it was all a matter of waiting for a trick to come along by which the work of the bacteria could be done in a chemical factory.
It didn’t take long. The First World War broke out. The need of food for friends was surpassed by the need of explosives against enemies. The best explosive, TNT (trinitrotoluene), consists chiefly of nitrogen salts. Back then the main source of these salts was still guano. The First World War was in danger of being fought with bird shit. Scientists from either side searched for other sources, but the battle was finally won by the Germans, thanks to the chemist Fritz Haber (1868–1934). In 1908 he succeeded in combining nitrogen (N) with hydrogen (H) to produce ammonia (NH3). Not long afterwards, Carl Bosch (1874–1940) invented a reactor chamber in which you could do this on a grand scale and make as much ammonia as you wanted, the raw material for artificial fertiliser and bombs. A global famine due to a shortage of nitrogen was averted, and a world war could be staged in all its intensity.
After the First World War, Haber was no longer welcome in France, which had suffered terribly from his TNT. Nor was he welcome in Germany, since he was Jewish. Physicist Max Planck tried to put in a good word for him with Hitler, but to no avail. ‘If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the liquidation of modern science,’ Hitler answered, ‘we’ll just have to go a couple of years without science.’ After fleeing to Switzerland, Haber saw his discovery result in millions of victims for a second time. Yet he himself lives on in the public memory as ‘the man who made bread from the air’. The Haber-Bosch process is still the most important source of nitrogen for our crops, even more important than all the land bacteria in the world. One-third of the world’s population is fed thanks to Haber’s ideas.
You’ve got to keep the customers satisfied. No one has to go hungry anymore for want of nitrogen, or to mess about with cow manure and human muck. But living happily ever after continues to evade us. Artificial fertiliser is a Trojan horse. While manure used to be a source of income, today’s fertiliser has to be paid for. And making bread from the air requires an enormous amount of energy: the Haber-Bosch process only works above 500°C and at a pressure of hundreds of atmospheres. Not only that, but once it’s in the soil artificial manure does bad things as well as good. A lot of it leaches into the ground water, where it contaminates the environment and threatens the water supply. Nor does artificial manure do everything that natural manure does, not by a long shot. A sack of salt doesn’t have the structure of farmyard or human manure, which releases its nutrients gradually and provides a good home for insects, fungi, worms and other life forms that improve the structure of the soil. The little turds left by earwigs and centipedes also produce manure that’s just as good as the cow pats covering their heads, and their farts provide aeration. A beaker of saline solution may be just as effective in the laboratory, but in the garden only organic fertiliser can preserve the soil from depletion and crumbling over the long term. The flowers in the garden of Mr and Mrs Pratt even asked for it, according to cabaret artist Jasperina de Jong:
Mr Pratt and Mrs Pratt,
We want fertiliser, no problem with that,
But potassium sulphate? It makes us recoil
Since slowly but surely it ruins the soil,
Listen, we beg you, and open your eyes,
Only natural manure is healthy and wise,
If not from the cow, then at least from the cat,
Mr Pratt and Mrs Pratt.
What says the perennial species?
‘I want faeces.’
What says the rose in the garden of the señorita?
‘I want excreta.’
What says the lily so chaste?
‘I want solid waste.’
And what about the crocus so young?
‘Oh, how I yearn for good honest dung,’
Glorious dung, glorious dung.
Mr Pratt and Mrs Pratt
We demand fertiliser, no problem with that,
But potassium sulphate? Are you still unaware
That it harms our well-being and poisons the air.
It’s downright insulting, a blight to our eyes,
Only natural manure is healthy and wise,
If not from the cow then from where you last sat,
Mr Pratt and Mrs Pratt.
You can tell what artificial fertiliser does to the soil by looking at the worms. In a healthy pasture, there are as many kilos of worms living under the ground as there are kilos of cows living above it. They’re trifling little creatures at first glance, good enough to serve as food for blackbirds or bait for fishing. But not too shabby for Charles Darwin. He devoted his life to them. It wasn’t his theory of evolution that occupied him the longest, but his study of worms: from 1837, when he gave his first lecture on them, until shortly before his death in 1881, when his last and most charming book came out, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. ‘It may be doubted,’ he wrote, ‘whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world.’ Earthworms have not inherited the earth, as we humans have; they have created it. With shit. Like a living tube, a worm regularly squeezes out the contents of its intestines from below the surface of the field in the form of the well-known little piles of pasta. Although such a pile weighs only ten grams, all the earthworms taken together excrete five kilos per square metre a year. And it’s excellent manure. It contains much more nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium than five kilos of ordinary soil. By shitting, the earthworms make the minerals from the soil available to the plants. Aristotle called them ‘the intestines of the earth’, and for very good reason. If you’re a farmer or gardener and you want to harvest healthy crops, you’d be well advised not to fertilise the plants but to feed the worms.
With his study of worms, Darwin validated his idea that small changes can have great consequences over the long term. Bite by bite, shit by shit, all the soil of a forest or field makes its way through the intestines of the worms once every three years. The forest path you walk on, the field on which your cauliflower is grown, all the stuff we call earth, is brown for a reason. It’s shit, shit from earthworms and from all those other animals who have to work outside without the benefit of facilities. They cover everything with it. At one point Darwin scattered fragments of lime about as evenly as he could, and twenty-nine years later he found them at a depth of dozens of centimetres. Entire houses can disappear over the course of time. Even the colossal stones of Stonehenge were buried by worms. Archaeologists have their hands full trying to recover Roman villas that have been completely obliterated by faeces. At such an excavation in Surrey, Darwin saw worms burying stones that had just been uncovered. If you look at it this way, the entire country is one big dung hill. And in the sea it’s even worse. There’s not a toilet in sight, not even a tree to pee against. Fish, shrimp, sea cucumbers, jellyfish and mussels—not to mention whales—release all their filth right into the water, and this goes on day in and day out, year in and year out, eon after eon.
The earth that you cherish turns out to be worm poo, the sea where you spend your holidays is filled with fish piss. What we call the environment is nothing but the excretions of plants and animals. Mother Nature is hopelessly incontinent. Yet nature rarely stinks. In fact, people go out into the countryside just to get a bit of fresh air. If it starts smelling like shit, you can be sure you’re about to come upon a pasture or field. There’s just too much manure out there these days. The plants can’t handle it. In the Netherlands alone, with its small surface area, the crops have 70 billion kilos of manure to process per year. That’s 28,000 Olympic swimming pools full. What the plants don’t want anymore stays in the soil and contaminates the life there. Bacteria—nitrogen-fixing or not—give up the ghost, nematodes cash in their chips, earthworms turn pale and move on to better climes. Instead of the 500 earthworms per square metre that occupy good soil, artificially fertilised ground has only from five to fifty earthworms in the same space. Abandoned tunnels collapse, plant roots get stuck, the soil slams shut, yields decline. The government tries to contain the flood of manure. The result: the farmer takes a wife, with a manure quota. He ploughs even deeper. But his best ploughing team, the worms, are gone.
Artificial manure encourages cheating. If you want to keep on farming, you’ve got to stick to rules that have been honoured for centuries. If the amount of food you take from the ground is greater than the amount of shit you throw onto it, the crops will shrivel up until there’s nothing left to eat. If the amount of shit is greater than the crops can process, you’ll lose both your yields and your reserves. If the chemical fertiliser factories dig up all the phosphate and burn up the last of the oil in order to extract nitrogen from the air, the food cycle will come to a grinding halt. Even though it once was so easy to keep it well-lubricated. With shit.
That cycle runs on solar energy. It’s not as fast as a cycle that runs on oil or steam. You can only harvest one or two crops a year from the sun. If you really can’t wait until manure turns into fertiliser, fertiliser turns into plants, and plants turn into the food you eat and then shit out again, you can magically extract the energy from the shit in one fell swoop by setting it alight. That’s what they do in India. Overpopulation and soil depletion there have led to an extreme shortage of wood for cooking. Manure, on the other hand, is available in plentiful supply thanks to the holy cows. As long as the cows are sacred they don’t get slaughtered, and as long as they don’t get slaughtered they shit. In India’s warm climate the cow pats quickly dry into flammable slabs. While a cow in the West is a way of turning inedible grass into food, the cows in India turn incombustible grass into fuel. Only half of the 750 million tonnes of cow manure ends up on the fields; the other half goes up in smoke. This way India saves 100 million tonnes of wood or 50 million tonnes of coal each year.
In India, dried cow pats are peddled as if they were precious cakes. And indeed they are—not for eating, though, but as cooking fuel.
Cooking with manure is done mainly on the steppes, where nomadic tribes travel about with their cattle and there’s little wood to be had. In Tibet they cook with yak or sheep manure, in Mongolia with the manure of oxen, in China with camel dung, and in Arabic countries with donkey droppings. In the modern West there’s little demand for cookers that run on turds. As romantic as it sounds to let your pot simmer on the shit of your girlfriend, your dog or your guinea pig, it’s hygienically unacceptable. Yet plenty of households do derive their energy from manure. Not by burning it, though. To burn something is to combine it with oxygen. The main product of this reaction is carbon dioxide, which we already have much too much of, increasing the greenhouse effect. When there’s no oxygen the manure doesn’t burn—it ferments, just like it does in our large intestine, with the help of anaerobic bacteria. This produces methane. Methane burns very well; it’s the same stuff that’s in natural gas. The manure from one cow provides enough energy for five households; the manure from all the cows in the Netherlands would keep the entire population going. Unfortunately, the yields do not always offset the costs. So why not cook with humanure? Most human manure ends up in the sewer. Purification usually takes place in the well-known open tanks, using lots of oxygen. Although the purification plants look so sophisticated, they don’t do much more than what bacteria have been doing for millions of years: eat whatever there is to eat. All that’s left is sewer sediment—fifteen kilos per person per year—which is burned as rubbish. The problem is that all that sewer water makes the shit too thin. In order to ferment it efficiently you would have to capture it in its dry state, close to the source. It’s still not clear how that would be done technically, but we can be certain that the days of water sewerage are numbered. In the meantime, work is being done to derive energy from urine. The ammonia in our pee can be used to run fuel cells. If everyone in the Netherlands were to participate, we could produce 100,000 megawatt hours, enough for 30,000 households. That’s no more than the production of a mid-sized windmill park. But yellow electricity has at least one advantage: it works when the wind isn’t blowing.
To use shit effectively you would have to collect it, and that is the biggest obstacle. Our entire infrastructure is based on getting rid of our excrement as fast as we can. The main reason used to be because it’s dirty, but later it was because it can make you sick. Yet for centuries faeces and urine were used medicinally. A monument to this is the Dreck-Apotheke (1699) of Christian Paullini, personal physician to the bishop of Münster, with the subtitle that speaks for itself: Wie nemlich mit Koth und Urin fast alle, ja auch die schwerste, gifftigste Kranckheiten, und bezauberte Schäden vom Haupt bisz zum Füssen, inn- und ausserlich, glücklich curiret worden (How in fact almost all diseases and cursed sores, from head to toe, internal and external, even the most serious and most toxic, can happily be cured with shit and urine). The success of scatotherapy is partly based on the idea that you have to fight evil with evil. That filth wins out over cleanliness is an age-old experience; only a filthier filth can beat it. And what’s filthier than piss or shit? You could always find an animal who could shit you back to health. Pigeon shit helped against baldness, and peacock shit against epilepsy. The remedy for all complaints, of course, was primus inter pares: human dung. Not only did it restore you to your old self, according to doctor and natural scientist Martinus Houttuyn in his Natuurlijke historie (1761), but it even kept you young:
A Lady of quite some Distinction, by using this Dung Water, maintained the loveliest Skin and the most beautiful Colour that one could ever wish for until a very advanced Age. Here is an explanation of how she procured a Supply of this water.
This Lady had a young, healthy Servant, who relieved himself in a tin-plated Copper Basin, which had tight-fitting Lid. As soon as he had had his Bowel Movement, he rapidly covered the Basin so that no steam would escape, and, when the Young Man judged that everything had cooled, he carefully collected the liquid that clung to the inside of the Lid, and put it in a Bottle, to be used during the Toilette of his Lady like a precious perfume. This Lady never failed to wash her Face and Hands with it every day, and by this Means she succeeded in maintaining her Beauty for as long as she lived.
Suspicion remained, however, although less in the countryside than in the city. That difference goes back to antiquity. At that time, the great physician Galen advised against prescribing faeces for medicinal purposes to city dwellers and other fancy folk; such popular remedies would be too strong for ladies from the city and for children. If you were travelling or hunting you had little choice, but by then you were already in the countryside, where the people were hardened and had ‘the character of mules’.
Outside the cities no one ever made such a fuss about poo and shit and manure, even centuries later. They had an odour you could trust. They smelled like good business and healthy soil. It was actually rather pleasant and almost erotic, as Heinrich Heine testifies:
Eine bessre Wärme giebt
Eine Kuhmagd, die verliebt
Uns mit dicken Lippen küsst
Und beträchtlich riecht nach Mist
The warmth a milkmaid gives
Is better yet, her kiss
With lips so full and young
Amidst the smell of dung.
‘This aroma is just what gives the romanticised rendezvous with the milkmaid its special cachet,’ declares Florian Werner in Die Kuh. ‘Although we may not find the smell of cow manure especially pleasant today, let alone titillating, we mustn’t forget that this olfactory note was much more common in the nineteenth century than it is now. Even in the early twentieth century, the participants in a course for dairy product experts who were involved in a blind taste test didn’t find the milk they sampled especially tasty until a pinch of cow manure had been stirred through it. The odour of animal excrement used to be regarded as salubrious, so much so that some sanatoriums had stables at their disposal where sickly city-dwellers could refresh themselves with the healthy smells of country life in order to speed their recovery.’
Whether it’s a ‘smell’ or an ‘odour’, stench is stench. Even in the countryside. Shit repels far more than it attracts; a turd on your doorstep is rarely meant as a sign of welcome. When the first god-denying city-dwellers went beyond the metropolis to live in the strict Calvinist villages of the Netherlands, they could expect to find a load of manure delivered to their door. If it wasn’t the stench then it certainly was the sign of rejection that sent them back to where they came from. But even in the city, manure was the best deterrent for the thorniest situations. Not something rustic like cow manure, of course, but the more cosmopolitan measures that were locally available, in the zoo. In Message to the Rat King, Harry Mulisch recalls how the wildest plans were hatched in Amsterdam to disrupt the marriage of Queen Beatrix to a German. His favourite, he writes, was the plan involving lion manure:
Someone had once heard that horses always bolt whenever they smell lion manure, even though the horses had been tranquilised up to their eyeballs. So the plan was to collect the manure, with the help of the republican lion keepers in the city zoo, and to scatter it along the route to the Westerkerk. Thus the people of Amsterdam would be treated to the sight of a runaway golden coach with Beatrix and Claus inside, their arms thrown around each other’s neck in terror, racing pell-mell down the Rokin, across the Munt, via Rembrandt Square to the Wibautstraat, and then, with bells all a-jingle, towards Motorway 1 and Germany—while we, in the meantime, would be back at Artis paying tribute to the Lion of the Netherlands.
The plan was called off, Mulisch writes, when they heard that the Golden Coach was going to be outfitted with disc brakes. According to student leader Ton Regtien, however, a respectable number of people did climb over the Artis fence in the middle of the night, but in the end no one dared enter the lions’ cage. Whatever the reason was, nothing was ever proven and the question remained: does lion manure really work? Although little research has been conducted so far, the answer is certain: yes. Of course. The only weapon that a horse has recourse to against large predators is its fear. If a horse smells danger, it flees. A horse robbed of its only weapon through training is called a police horse. But the fear that a potential prey feels for predators is never completely gone. Voles avoid the faeces of foxes; cows and sheep won’t touch any grass that smells of panther shit.
If the royal wedding had taken place a few years later, lion manure wouldn’t have been so difficult to procure. By then you could just buy it as a way of keeping strange cats out of your garden. Except it didn’t work. Cats had apparently never heard of lions, and the only one you’d chase away was yourself. Lion shit smelled even worse than cat piss.
American farmers knew how to have fun with manure as a deterrent back when you could still camp everywhere for free. If another horde of hippies or other urban slackers threatened to trample your land underfoot, you could simply start your fertilising a bit earlier and put down a heavier layer. At the same time, the CIA exploited shit’s low approval rating in Vietnam. There they disguised radio transmitters as tiger turds and threw them from the air onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail in order to monitor enemy troop movements, certain that no one would touch the transmitters. Perhaps the CIA had come up with the idea by studying certain moths that are camouflaged as bird droppings, spatters and all, to keep from being eaten.
The ancient Egyptians found more inspiration in the dung beetle, who moves forward pushing its ball of dung. They understood the basic principle of all ecology: the world is round and is held together by shit. Thanks to shit, everything is connected. Shit is of supreme importance, not as the supplier of ambergris or as a substrate for the cultivation of tulips but as the lubricant for the entire ecological mechanism. It is manure that holds nature together and closes the circle of life and death, of eating and being eaten, of parent and child, of past and future—over and over again. The world runs on shit, and Mother Nature knows it. That’s why she never flushes her toilet.
Not when it comes to seas and oceans, that’s for sure. Without shit there would be no life, without life no shit. It rains shit from the anuses of fish, lobsters and dolphins. The heavenly white sand of so many tropical beaches consists of little else but fish poo. Parrotfish nibble on the coral reefs there, and each year they add 100 kilos of beach nourishment per fish out of a torrent of indigestible little bits. In 2013 Dutch researchers found that reef sponges are even more indispensable, if that’s possible. They convert the waste products of living reef coral into sponge poo, the basic food for countless snails, worms and crabs. But even the production of the sponges is a drop in the bucket compared with those trillions and trillions of plankton that treat the deeper levels of the sea to a rain of shit from the energy they’ve collected for them in the sea’s uppermost regions. To estimate the value of the role of shit particles, marine ecologists tell us
it’s handy to see them as organisms; they consist partly of lumps of living cells, they eat and supply nutrients and organic material, and they serve as food for marine animals. So ‘populations’ of poo grains form a dynamic component of marine ecosystems, where they make a quantitatively substantial contribution to the energy flow and the food cycle.
For ordinary people, these heroic achievements of international marine excrement are far beyond their realm of experience. What does astonish them, though, is shit’s popularity as a luxury consumer product. The most expensive coffee in the world, for example, is harvested as dung. Before they’re roasted and ground, the beans of this ‘kopi luwak’ pass through the intestines of a civet. Civets are also known as a luwaks or toddy cats (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), and what they’re mainly interested in is the soft casing of the coffee cherry; they then shit out the pits, which we call coffee beans. Initially this resulted in poor people’s coffee. Because the natives of the Dutch East Indies were prevented by their colonial masters from keeping any of the coffee cherries they picked, they searched for the excrement of the civets that ruled the roost in the plantations like starlings in a cherry orchard. Now it’s Western snobs and gourmets who crave kopi luwak. There are enzymes in the luwak’s gastrointestinal tract that remove the bitter proteins from the beans, which tends to refine the taste and increase the price considerably. A 250-gram pack sells for fifty euros—plus the price your conscience has to pay, since the civets are usually kept in captivity under miserable conditions.
The best coffee is a poo product. The taste of the coffee bean is perfected in the intestines of a luwak.
Before the chemical industry was born, shit and piss were useful raw materials. With shit you could soften leather, make paper or plaster walls. There was nothing like cow manure and straw for filling the spaces in half-timbered houses. After the emergence of chemistry, people considered themselves far above such messing with faeces and urine. Decked out in their white lab coats, chemists like to forget that an element like phosphorus was discovered in urine—and by an alchemist who was searching for the philosopher’s stone. That was in 1669, when urine was still revered by alchemists as ‘the golden stream’. When the stream was evaporated, a liquid appeared that glowed a mysterious green in the vapours of the retort. Phosphorus would continue to be obtained from urine for another century, until it was discovered that much more phosphorus could be found in bones. In our time, phosphorus is simply quarried from phosphate mines and squandered in the sewers. It is estimated that recoverable reserves will be depleted within a hundred years. Prices are already increasing at such a rate that recovering phosphate from urine and excrement is starting to pay off. We’ve come full circle.
Economically and ecologically less important, but no less charming, is the use of shit as a souvenir. You haven’t been to Gunnedah, a town north of Sydney, until you’ve brought home a little sack of koala manure to remember the Koala Capital of the World by. In Alaska you have a choice between earrings, key chains, tie clips and—I kid you not—lip balm, all made from moose faeces. A turd as a memento, you can’t get any more appropriate than that. After all, what is shit but the memory of whatever preceded it? That’s a question that yields both philosophical and biological fruit. A biologist rarely steps in shit, out of sheer respect. What may be a source of irritation to someone else is a source of information to a biologist. He can deduce all sorts of things about the producer of the turd from its shape, consistency and orientation. That’s why biologists usually keep their eyes glued to the ground. Only birdwatchers are willing to make the occasional slip-up.
When animals defecate, they leave long-lasting clues behind that can benefit ecological research. Take all the chetae found in fox poo, for instance. These are the living bristles by which an earthworm wriggles its way through the soil. On the basis of these chetae it was determined that more than a third of the total diet of foxes in the English countryside consists of earthworms. That’s a clear call for modesty, for the fox as well as for the hunters who slander it with insults like ‘chicken thief’. By using genetic techniques you can study a bear’s excrement and find out what it’s eaten, or whether it’s under stress, or what its origins are. When technology proves inadequate, specially trained Labradors help create a profile of a bear’s life without killing it. The dogs track down the bear’s excrement, from which researchers are able to determine the animal’s distribution. If rhinoceroses have to be moved for their own protection, it’s helpful to send out their turds in advance to give the new territory a familiar smell. Researchers on the lookout for eagle shit are assisted by the elegant sunburst lichen (Xanthoria elegans) that grows on it. With its bright colours, this lichen makes it possible to see from great distances where the eagles foul their home rocks in the Arctic. In 2012 a new colony of emperor penguins consisting of 9000 individuals was found in Antarctica in the Princess Ragnhild Coast area. The animals gave themselves away by their excrement, which stood out clearly on the satellite images as brown against the white sea ice.
If you want to make use of shit, no matter how, you have to handle it. And whatever you handle is likely to contaminate you. So faeces researchers can count of being the butt of jokes, and cesspool cleaners are shunned. With shit on your shoes you’re already an outcast. People who write books about shit are regarded with suspicion, and in India those involved in the large-scale collection of human faeces have traditionally been from the very lowest caste.
I wouldn’t know what else to call this other than disgraceful. Until I read about the lecture that Joseph Jenkins gave to six hundred nuns on the subject of his humanure toilet on Earth Day 1995. The nuns themselves had invited him. But why, in God’s name? What did a group of otherworldly nuns have to do with something as worldly as shit? Was it a matter of ecological or religious redemption for them? After the lecture came the opportunity to ask the audience why they were interested in human manure, of all things? Because, they said, they were ‘the Sisters of the Humility of Mary’. For them, defecation was an exercise in humility. As it is for all of us, right?