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The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894: predictions of 9 feet of manure in cities
- SweetSoftPillow 1y agohttps://youtu.be/w61d-NBqafM?t=34 https://youtu.be/w61d-NBqafM?t=34
- 1659447091 1y ago> More broadly, it is an analogy for supposedly insuperable extrapolated problems being rendered moot by the introduction of new technologies. Here I thought it was going in the direction of fear-mongering NIMBY types exploiting, what I would assume were, the horrors of living through the Great Stink & cholera outbreaks to slow the rapid growth of London at the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
- stefs 1y ago> The reasoning was that more horses are needed to remove the manure, and these horses produce more manure. i think that even then, that's not a problem, as one horse drawn cart can remove a lot more manure than it produces, i.e. a small number of extra horses can remove the excess manure of all horses and the overhead the extra horses introduce is mimimal.
- recursivecaveat 1y agoIf the footprint of the city is large enough, eventually transporting a cart of manure from the center to the edge consumes as many "manure-miles" as it produces. Though that is probably comically large, because as you say: a cart is a pretty big compared to its own horse's output.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoYou don't have to remove to the edge, you have to remove to the closest railway terminal or water port. No city could grow large without one or both of those.
- IAmBroom 1y agoAll Malthusan predictions should be prefixed with "If something doesn't change radically, ..."
- wredcoll 1y agoIsn't that true for, uh, every prediction? I suppose not for biblical prophecies.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoNot all doomsday predictions are Malthusian. Some doomsdays might be possible because things change slowly in one direction in such a way as to inhibit their easy reversal. Some doomsdays might be processes that are incredibly slow, thus precluding rapid change by definition.
- IAmBroom 1y agoAnd that relates to my comment... how?
- perihelions 1y ago/meta (This title should be edited IMO: the "predictions of 9 feet of manure in cities" part is not substantiated, and actually contradicted by, the source article. It's an apocryphal story that didn't actually happen).
- kerblang 1y agoStill, if every automobile owner instead had a horse, would methane emissions due to horse-farting worsen modern climate change or improve it? - Keeping in mind that your horse farts even you're not travelling - And that methane is a good deal worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2
- gwbas1c 1y agoDoubtful: 1: Methane leaves the atmosphere a lot faster than Co2 2: The methane is a result of breaking down food where the carbon was captured from the air by the plants that were the source of the food. 3: (And I'll let you figure out the numbers) You need to calculate the methane to Co2 ratio of the expected release of methane vs Co2. I suspect there is significantly less methane released than (equivalent) Co2 from cars. That being said, who wants to go back to horses? I don't.
- hilbert42 1y agoWhen I was a kid the only horse-drawn vehicle left on the road was the baker's cart. Once my dog came bounding into the house at such speed that he skidded as he rounded the doorway to tell me what he had found. He jumped onto my bed where I was reading a magazine and licked me on the face. I instantly knew what it was.
- devnullbrain 1y agoIt can be quite the canine delicacy
- lotsofpulp 1y agoI don’t allow shoes in the house, so the idea of allowing an animal whose bare feet have touched who knows what outside roam around the house and furniture and bedding is interesting to me. But then I read about getting licked by a dog that had just tasted poop (I think that is the implication here)…
- cogman10 1y agoIf it makes you feel better, horse and cow poop is not like most other animal poop. It's nowhere near as pungent and generally has more of a grassy sort of smell. Fun fact, dried horse/cow poop makes and excellent fire starter. It's loaded with fibers the burn like crazy. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_dung_fuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_dung_fuel
- mc32 1y agoI think some people used the dried variety to ward off moskitoes.
- AdmiralAsshat 1y ago> It's nowhere near as pungent and generally has more of a grassy sort of smell. Oh I dispute that! I grew up in a small town that offered horse-drawn carriage rides for the tourists. You could smell that shit for miles.
- lordnacho 1y agoThis is similar to comments about how supposedly early environment scientists believed we were about to have a cooling crisis before changing their minds. It seems like that was not really the case. At least I don't find much evidence that this was the consensus.
- colechristensen 1y agoGenerally overstated and repeated by folks with an agenda these days, but yes there were some concerns about cooling particularly one or two steps away from actual research. And there were some periods of slight cooling in the 20th century and in the north atlantic there was the "little ice age" for a few hundred years depending on who you ask. There wasn't a consensus and science isn't a democracy where the most popular idea wins. Global climate ideas and modeling are very new and if you go back to the 70s or the 20s "consensus" isn't what you're looking for, nobody should have been particularly sure of anything as there wasn't enough information available.
- psunavy03 1y agoDon't we usually find that most of the times people predict some disaster befalling society due to the exponential growth of something, it ends up hitting a limiting factor that stops the exponential growth?
- jtbayly 1y agoOr human ingenuity solves the problem because of the economic and other incentives that build up. None of the fear-mongering ever seems to come true.
- rsynnott 1y ago> fear-mongering I mean, "bad things will happen if we don't fix the thing" is not fearmongering if, after the thing is fixed, bad things don't happen.
- jtbayly 1y agoI'm talking about the declarations of inevitable disaster. Malthus was just wrong.
- wredcoll 1y agoWere people "fear-mongering" when they said we should probably update the 2digit date storage during 1999? Like, sometimes people say there will be an issue and then people actually take action to fix it before we all die.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoHow can one analyze this? Actually reaching the stage of some essential resource exhaustion leads to war, starvation, or other event that causes the society to no longer exist, and thus you are left with survivorship bias by studying the ones that remain. But also, merely surviving is not the problem trying to be avoided. It’s all the decrease in quality of life on the way to adapting to the scarcity of the resource (which very well could mean thinning the herd) that is the issue.
- Lendal 1y agoThe article describes it as a "useful analogy" but doesn't specify in what way it's useful. Seems the manner in which it's useful depends on your worldview or even your intelligence. Does it mean that predictions of crisis are all equally valid or worthless? Or does it mean that we should question how the conclusion was reached, or that we should require some minimum standard of scientific consensus before publishing such predictions?
- BurningFrog 1y agoIt's kinda amazing that when horses were replaced by cars, air quality in cities probably improved!
- bob1029 1y agoI find it unlikely that early cars were an improvement over horses with regard to air quality. The catalytic converter wasn't available at commercial scale until 1973.
- dredmorbius 1y agoLead was the bigger problem. Introduced in the 1920s. (Tetraethyl lead was identified as an additive in 1921, its commercial production lagged by a few years, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead>.)
- BurningFrog 1y agoI wasn't around, but my understanding is that whole cities stank of horse shit & piss. Aside from the unpleasantness, that's a health hazard of it's own.
- dredmorbius 1y agoThe specific cited quote may be a myth, but I'm pretty certain I'd first encountered the concept in the 1980s, most likely reading through Garrett Hardin's essays (of "Tragedy of the Commons" fame, and some subsequent notoriety). Hardin does quote a contemporaneous (late 19th / early 20th century) source, and specifically the word "mud", which was, much as "fog", a euphemism. As "London Fog" actually described London smog in many instances, mud referred to excrement, largely (though not entirely) of equine origin. And yes, the idea was developed that continued urban growth would hit limits based on quartering, feeding, and mucking out huge horse populations which were required for local transport. It was electric omnibuses, cable cars, and trolleys which first provided a local alternative point-to-point-ish transportation network. Eventually autonomously-powered vehicles (automobiles) addressed the problem. It's worth noting that the situation wasn't purely solved. We outsourced one problem (animal-based drayage with concomitant feed and waste issues) with another (fossil-fuel based transport, with its own sourcing and effluent characteristics). Already by the mid-1800s it had been recognised that fossil fuels (coal, in particular) were a finite resource, and the first intimations of the global consequences of their use at scale (global warming) were coming into focus. Laughing or sneering at the concern, regardless of the merits of any given citation or reference shows a distinct lack of greater awareness.