The nineteenth century horse manure problem:
Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time.*
The problem of course 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. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. (See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]).
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 did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used 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.
Even though today a more colloquial rendering is common, the original horse manure problem is still with us in the guise of global warming. Since it locates the dwelling place of sin in the inanimate rather than where it belongs in the human heart, it appeals especially to Anglican bishops. Melbourne’s Archbishop Freier recently intoned:
If the [climate] scientists are even partly right, “our children’s children will have to endure a harmful legacy,” Dr Philip Freier, Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne warned last night, in his opening address to the 50th Synod of the Diocese of Melbourne.
The Harold Campings of climate catastrophe had recent cause for celebration (they secretly welcome the doom implicit in global warming) here where Richard Muller pronounced that “Global warming is real”. However, he did rather let the side down in the last two sentences of his article – an unfortunate admission since it was supposedly the point of the study – a blunder noticed here and here:
How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.
It seems anthropogenic global warming may well be nothing but a pile of horse manure after all.
