The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis (13 page)

The centuries-long pivot that followed that devastating time relied on animals for labor and manure and clover for its nitrogen-fixing magic. The system at the time had been to rotate crops and fallow in a three-year sequence. One year, a farmer would plant his field with a winter cereal such as wheat, barley, or rye. The next year, he would switch to a spring cereal, such as oats, peas, or beans. In the third year, he would allow grass to grow back as fodder for animals. Manure from livestock grazing on the grass replaced the nitrogen lost from the soil in the cereal crops. In this system, a third of the fields were fallow at any given time.

The three-field system produced more food for people than the earlier two-field system. The latter, which had alternated one year of cereal with one year of grass, had left half the land fallow at any one time. The three-field system had become feasible in northern Europe a few centuries earlier as the number of livestock had increased and the extra manure could more quickly replace the lost nitrogen in fallow years. But devoting one-third of the fields to a grass fallow was still a high price: it meant there was yet an opening to boost the amount of food a farmer could produce.

A major break from the pattern came with the famous Norfolk four-course system of the mid-eighteenth century. The critical element was clover, introduced to England from the Netherlands. Nitrogen-fixing clover could replace the grass fallow. The Norfolk system, named for the English county where the system was first developed, rotated plots on a four-year cycle of winter wheat, turnips, barley, and clover. Clover meant more fodder and nitrogen-enriched soils. Turnips meant more winter feed for livestock, more meat, and more manure. Charles Townshend, known by his title as the Second Viscount Townshend, a
British statesmen and secretary of state in the early eighteenth century, became a key advocate for this system after he retired from politics. He had turned his attention to farming on his estate, earning the name Turnip Townshend for his enthusiasm for the new Norfolk system. Yields of cereal crops soared in England, a combined result of nitrogen-enriching clover and manure, tools for deeper plowing, more livestock for manure and labor, and new seeds that increased edible portions of the harvest along with other agricultural improvements. The impact was so colossal that the period is termed the agricultural revolution.

The result of the revolution was a surplus of food. Whether the surplus spurred England’s industrial revolution of the eighteenth century or the other way around is impossible to say. Whether the times truly ushered in an abrupt revolution or a slower evolution is
also a debatable point. But there’s no doubt that surplus food was available to feed the growing cities and the human laborers who worked the machines of the textile mills and other factories. The growing industries meant greater demand for the surplus food, which in turn created incentives for farmers to produce more. Multiple factors collided to push people from the countryside and pull them to cities. The prosperous wool industry caused wealthy landowners to build fences around their property to raise sheep, so that other manure-producing animals could no longer roam freely to graze on their property. Many of the peasants, lacking land where their own animals could graze, had to move to the cities. People stripped forests bare for timber to build ships and fuel to burn in kilns and hearths. The short supply of wood caused people to search for coal, which became the industrial revolution’s driving force.

With coal-powered steam engines, cities grew even more, as textile factories were no longer confined to places near water that served as a source of power. Steam locomotives could transport food and goods between cities and countryside. Energy from burning coal—essentially the dead remains of trees and leafy plants that many hundreds
of millions of years ago captured the energy of the sun—was now powering the machines of the factories, while food produced in the countryside was supplying the energy for the laborers of the factories. All of these factors worked hand in hand to set the course of the expanding cities, of the factories, and of England’s tectonic shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy. The revolution was on. The ratchet had turned. The shift to nitrogen-fixing clover and the manure and muscle power of domestic animals in the fields had led to a massive change in society. There was no going back.

Despite the ratchet, famine and hunger were still in the realm of possibility, as they had been in northern Europe’s fourteenth-century Great Famine and still are today. At the end of the eighteenth century, drought struck across England. Wheat crops were below average in 1794 and failed again in 1795. The British government’s records of crop returns, for example, reported that in the county of Devon, an acre yielded 14 bushels of wheat in 1794 and 10.5 in 1795, compared to an average
yield in other years of 18. A dearth of food followed the bad harvests, along with price gouging for staple grains. The French wars and raging inflation added to the problem of soaring prices. With prices for wheat, barley, and oats two to three times higher than in the three preceding decades, food riots and violence against farmers, grain dealers, and magistrates were common in the drought years. Harvests were good in 1796 but turned bad again in 1799, setting off another wave of riots and violence.

This broad sweep through the end of the eighteenth century highlights the struggles of civilizations with the conundrums of settled life. The details of the knowledge that accumulated in ancient China and Europe played out in different ways in different places around the world, but the ecological challenges to keep soils fertile and supplement human energy were the same. The frequent famines and the struggle to use every bit of waste to recycle nutrients are reminders that these
conundrums are not easily solved. Populations increased and cities grew with surpluses, locking civilizations into producing enough food to feed those who were not doing the farming. Aberrant weather may have precipitated the hatchets that fell in northern Europe’s fourteenth-century famine and England’s late eighteenth-century food riots, but weather was not the only force in play. Markets and politics combined to escalate the crises. Due to markets and politics, there was not enough surplus for these populations to make it through the lean times, and often no way for the hungry to get the food that was stored.

The medieval pivots that followed the Great Famine and led to the industrial revolution evolved slowly, but the times were hardly as static as the conventional view of history suggests. It’s impossible to know who precisely first had the idea to recycle night-soil, or strap a collar on a horse. It was probably someone whose name has disappeared into history. Peasants must have tried new ways to manipulate the planetary machinery. Regardless, ideas that worked spread and took hold. Our species’ trademark of accumulating knowledge through trial-and-error and sharing new knowledge was in play. People had no other choice but to try to resolve the conundrums within their available means.

The mayhem of the late eighteenth century was the context for the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s famous dire warnings. Malthus argued in a 1798 essay that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce
subsistence for man.” Malthus saw the situation from the lens of the time in which he lived. He was viewing the world from the pinnacle of a ratchet that had resulted from many centuries of increasing yields, which had produced more food, more people, more profit-seeking, bigger cities, and still greater demand for a reliable source of food. Malthus struck a less dismal note in his less-read 1803 revision of his essay, admitting that “though the future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish, yet they are far
from
being entirely disheartening.” Still, he could see the hatchet that waits behind every ratchet.

What Malthus couldn’t see so clearly was the next pivot. Perhaps in the revision between 1798 and 1803 he got an inkling that human ingenuity would once again find solutions to the conundrums of settled life.

5: RATCHETS FROM AFAR

E
NGLAND WAS STILL A NATION OF MOSTLY FARMERS
at the start of the nineteenth century, but the economic engine was rapidly pumping people from the countryside to cities. Calorierich potatoes and other crops from the New World, more manure and more muscle power from more livestock, and Turnip Townshend’s nitrogen-fixing legumes were all adding to the number of mouths that could be fed from the same amount of land. The surplus food from the countryside was fueling laborers in the cities who were turning the cogs of the industrial revolution. By midcentury, more than half the people of England were living in towns and cities. The growing cities added yet another wrinkle to the age-old conundrum of
dwindling soil fertility.

In England before the industrial revolution, “night-men” had the unpleasant task of collecting human waste from homes and carcasses from butcher shops in towns and cities. As was the case in China, they then hauled the nutrient-rich waste back to the countryside, where they sold it to farmers to fertilize the fields. The two-way flow kept the cycle churning between city and countryside and kept the soils fertile for the next crop. As the number of people in the cities climbed, so did the
amount of human excrement. The night-men couldn’t keep up. There was no way for all the waste to return to the countryside, which meant that nitrogen and phosphorus were making a one-way trip to the cities in the form of wheat, barley, meat, milk, and vegetables. The slow leak in the phosphorus cycle was becoming a big, gaping hole. Soils were losing their fertility.

Without the night-men to take away the waste from chamber pots, flush toilets came into vogue. That only made the disposal problem worse. Watered-down excrement, with no pipes to carry it away as is commonplace today, overflowed into street drains, cesspools, and back yards. One can only imagine the filth, stench, and squalor of Charles Dickens’s legendary London. The streets, as he described them in his novel
Oliver Twist
, were “very narrow and muddy, and the air . . .
impregnated with filthy odors.” Despite the city’s stinking, horrid state, politicians gave little priority to the reeking cesspools of London. In 1854, cholera hit the city in the third major outbreak of the nineteenth century. About 1,000 people died every week during the outbreak, some 14,000
in all. At first people thought the foul air was behind the outbreaks. But the visionary London physician Dr. John Snow famously pinpointed the true source of these outbreaks when he traced one of them to a single public water pump on Broad Street. Yet even after he nailed the idea that the disease was coming from water contaminated with human waste, not the fetid air, the local government still dilly-dallied on cleaning up the stinking mess. The problem, it seemed, had not penetrated into the noses or the daily lives of the politicians.

Change finally came in the exceptionally warm summer of 1858, when the “Great Stink” emanating from the excrement-laden Thames River permeated even the House of Commons. A lead editorial in the
London Times
took up the cause, gloating, “We are heartily glad . . . that our legislators should be made to feel in health and comfort the consequences of their own disregard of the public welfare.” The editorialist
added: “A few members . . . bent upon investigating the subject to its very depth, ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a
handkerchief to his nose.” The politicians couldn’t ignore the public hazard much longer. When the project to construct London’s underground sewers was finally finished in 1865, London joined the great Indus Valley civilization and the Greeks and Romans in taking care of this noxious health hazard—all of them had devised water and sewage disposal
systems many centuries earlier. London’s system discharged waste into the Thames, where the river’s flow and the tides could
wash it out to sea.

Sewer systems such as London’s have saved millions, if not billions, of people from cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and other diseases caused by water contaminated with human and animal waste. Lack of sanitation tragically still deprives too many throughout the developing world of a chance at a healthy life. No one would argue that humanity should go back to the days of cesspits and night-soil. But flush toilets and sewers brought their downsides. They shunt away human waste, removing it from the otherwise closed loops of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. What was once a cycle from soil to crops to human waste and back to the soil became a unidirectional flow from soil to rivers and seas. Again, the solution to one problem created yet another. The city became cleaner, but the soils lost their replenishing supply of nutrient-rich night-soil.

The severed cycle was not lost on the thinkers of the day. William Shaw, founder of the London’s Farmer Club, wrote in 1848 that “we are wholly in the dark as to the mine of wealth which may be worked in connection with sewage manure—wealth which is unjustifiably, day by day, suffered
to run to waste.” Victor Hugo had a similar comment on Paris’s one-way sewer system that was depositing waste into the Seine River. “From this spring two results,” he wrote, “the land impoverished, and the water tainted. Hunger arising from the furrow, and
disease from the stream.” Justus von Liebig joined the debate in an essay to the Lord
Mayor of London, arguing “that if a possibility is offered to the farmer to get back, as sewage, those matters which he has carried to the town in the form of corn, meat, and vegetables, and if he gives his field the same, both in quantity and quality, as he took from it, then its fertility may be assured for an
endless number of years.”