Sir, – Fintan O’Toole has again used his illustrious pen to shine a light on a “local” problem and this time on his holiday home location of Ballyvaughan (“Everywhere you look, Ireland has stark physical deficits”, Opinion & Analysis, Weekend Review, August 12th). Untreated human waste goes straight into the coastal waters of Ballyvaughan Bay. The issue concerns the inability of various local authorities over time (apparently centuries) and now Uisce Éireann “to build a wastewater treatment plant with a pumping station and sewer pipes”.
This obvious solution to this life-threatening pollution hides a deeper and more global devastating problem of feeding the world’s population. To see the link between the wastewater and sewerage facilities in a Burren village and global food security, we have to look for interconnections that begin with the urban world of 19th-century London and with the cultivated soils of the earth.
The contemporary toilet and sewer sanitation system that the residents of Ballyvaughan demand today originated in Victorian Britain and especially in London, a technological revolution that was to save millions of lives.
Before this life-saving miracle of the flushing sanitation system, the urban residents “went to the toilet” in designated, confined places – privies, cesspools and middens. When full, these pit latrines were emptied by nightsoil men (subsequently nightsoil became a euphemism for human faeces). This nightsoil was then transported to agricultural fields beyond the city limits and used to manure vegetable gardens and cultivated fields.
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Most cities of the world, but especially those in the East had a very efficient nightsoil system of sanitation and subsequent manuring practices. However, in the 19th century, London’s population grew so much that London became the biggest city in the world, but this population growth undermined the effectiveness of the nightsoil sanitation system, leading to a series of deadly water-borne diseases. In response to this public health crisis, London became the first city in the world to build a sewer hydraulic sanitation system, which converted the nightsoil into sewerage. This newly created sewerage was initially “flushed away” directly into the Thames and later on “downstream” in the same river. It was only in the 1920s that London began to treat its sewerage.
As a result, London and its toilet/sewer sanitation system became the prototype for the world to follow, and now Ballyvaughan is posed to pursue this metropolitan route.
However, is this the correct course of action to take, especially if there is in the background a greater and more fundamentally damaging global problem emerging as a consequence of pumping human waste, even treated, into the waterways of the earth? To unearth this predicament, we have to enter back into the murky world of nightsoil and the subterranean workings of the soil.
With the loss of nightsoil as a fertiliser, industrialising agriculture in Britain initially used guano (bird droppings sourced from coastal Peru) but soon switched to the newly invented chemical fertiliser, which we still use today. Why we need fertiliser is that every crop sown in soil will extract from the soil nutrients that it needs to grow. These soil elements become encased in the plant and when harvested these organic substances are taken away and used by society to make products, especially food items. To continue cultivation, those soil constituents extracted by the crop plants have to be replaced in order to sustain the fertility of the soil for further cultivation. And so, enter the application of industrial chemicals as our contemporary means of overcoming soil deficiencies due to soil depletion. However, this technological and chemical fix comes with a cost, actually many harmful consequences that are not obvious to immediate observation, even in the clear-air environs of the Burren.
High-yielding crops produced by inorganic chemical fertilisers make plants grow faster and bigger, but they have lower levels of certain minerals and nutrients, which unfortunately leads to nutritionally deficient foods. Its products have less anti-oxidants, polyphenols, and enzymes than organic farming because the “chemicalised” soil become depleted of organic matter, and especially microorganisms like microbes that drive the growth mechanism of the soil. Soil deprived of its microbes undergoes a rapid decline in soil structure, and it loses its essential ability to retain water, air, and nutrients. This begins the process of desertification. Since 1972, deserts have expanded by 500 million acres worldwide. The world’s farmers have lost 480 million tons of topsoil, more than all the topsoil on all US farmlands. Accordingly, we need to move not only away from sewerage and chemical fertilisers and seriously look again at nightsoil.
It would be truly groundbreaking if the local disputants could turn their attention not only to the seaward side of Ballyvaughan Bay and thereby look beyond the current solution of flushing away (mostly) treated wastewater into the waters of the bay, but also towards the surrounding lush green fields and create a sanitation system that can simultaneously eliminate the laden excrement of its coastal waters and the chemical saturation of the soils of its Burren fields that encompass the village of Ballyvaughan.
If the sewerage system cannot “cure” both, we have to return to investigate the nightsoil solution return a modern version of “nightsoil” to the cultivated soils of the region and thus restore the “rifted” soil fertility to a condition that it can sustain the residents of not only Ballyvaughan but also those of the world that live beyond the beautiful Bay of Ballyvaughan. – Yours, etc,
Dr EAMONN SLATER,
Dr PATRICIA HEALY-KETTLE,
Soil/Food Research Group,
Department of Sociology,
Maynooth University.