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In The Big Necessity,' Rose George lays bare the heavy cost of our waste
Journalist Rose George has done what you and I will never do: travel the world just to study human waste. And the weight of information that she brings to her book, "The Big Necessity," is astonishing:
Eighty percent of the world's illness is caused by fecal matter, George reports. Diarrhea -- usually caused by feces-contaminated food or water -- kills a child every 15 seconds. Ninety percent of the world's sewage ends up untreated in oceans, rivers and lakes.
Some 2.6 billion people don't have toilets, the device that geneticist Gary Ruvkun believes is the single biggest variable in increasing human life span.
Mahatma Gandhi himself declared that sanitation was more important than independence.
But "The Big Necessity" is not just a book of facts, the kind you can leave by the john. Complex concepts and technologies are at stake. What is the best procedure to create and use biogas and biosolids? Why are there so many disparate theories about sewage treatment? What sorts of influences do cultures play? Is a flush toilet actually the answer for everyone, everywhere? (No, it's not.)
George, educated at Oxford University and the University of Pennsylvania, is diligent. She goes directly to where the problems are and talks with people who are trying their best to manage human waste in dire circumstances.
She spends time in the slums of Africa and India and talks with farmers in China who spray their crops with untreated human waste. The United States is no bed of roses, either.
"The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the nation's infrastructure every few years," George writes. "In 2000, wastewater infrastructures got a D. By 2005, it was a D-minus."
Another section looks at our use of biosolids as fertilizer.
"Class A may be biosolid's public face, but most of the three million dry tons of sludge applied to American farmland is Class B, whose face is uglier," she writes....