Great course at the London Consortium entitled Shit & Civilization:
Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit. Civilization means living in cities and cities are confronted, in a way more dispersed settlements are not, with heaps of garbage and ordure.
The point being that to become civilized the population of these cities have to band together to deal with all the shit they produce. This rings pretty true with me. When I was a bin man for a couple of weeks last summer it definitely felt like one of the most important jobs I’d done in a long time, and also the most egalitarian. Everyone has garbage and it all needs to be collected. Certainty, some people have more garbage than others and there’s a qualitative distinction between the garbage of different class stratas, but at the end of the day it all goes in the same truck and then into the same land fill pit (or recycling centre, depending on how forward thinking your council is). The same would apply to sewage – some may shit in plastic loos while others in toilets plated with gold but at the end of the day it all mixes up in the same place. Think about it next time you’re driving past a sewage treatment plant – here we are all equal.
No wonder people don’t like talking about it.
(link via Boing Boing)