Home Object Activities Contact Who's Who How to Join NSF How to support NSF What's on
Nature and Society June-July 2006 edition Book Review: Fouling the Nest: human filth and pollution By Cedric A Mims Sheriff Press 2006. 214 pp. $30 from Smiths Books, Canberra, or from the author: 20 Wells Gardens, Griffith ACT 2603. This book, by friend and contemporary of NSF patron Frank Fenner, is ‘the strange story of human skin scales, sweat, and corpses, of sewage, rubbish and pollution’. As a microbiologist, Cedric Mims admits that he loves ‘dirt and filth’. Unfortunately, this reviewer has a weaker stomach and after reading the early chapters on foreskins, placentas, various bodily smells and secretions, foetuses, saliva, urine, faeces, vomit, and farts, just about had her head in a bucket. Nevertheless, the early chapters are a mine of information on all the things one never talked about at the dinner table. For instance, he discusses how we might deal with the millions of new corpses that we have each year. He suggests an environmentally friendly corpse disposal machine – the compostorium – that involves first a macerator and then a giant fermentation tank. Microbes would digest the macerated fragments yielding methane to power the plant and fertiliser rich in nitrogen and phosphorous. Not for my dear Mother, I thought, and no doubt others will feel the same, despite the idea’s excellent environmental attributes! After the chapters on the things we discard from our bodies, or the bodies themselves, the book moves onto the man-made materials we discard and the effects on the environment. And the effect on the environment is not at all good. The present state of the planet, he writes, justifies the greatest concern. We are causing enormous damage to the Earth’s ecosystems. As the 2004 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment noted, human activity has changed ecosystems more extensively in the past 50 years than at any time in human history. Mims deals at length with our most significant ‘discard’: greenhouse gases. He looks at the effects of global warming on the environment and what we might do about it, the most obvious strategy being to cut back on fossil fuels. Not easy, of course, given rising demand from China and India as well as in already industrialised countries. He covers the various options in renewable energy as well as nuclear fission and fusion. His discussion of the latter was reasonable but he failed to mention the critical statistic, namely, that the energy payback time for nuclear power stations is 40 years, even though they might be able to develop ‘clean’ power within 8-10 years of a decision to build. In a short discussion on the role of environmental degradation in the collapse of various societies, Mims starts to gather momentum on the issue of population growth. Then, in his final chapter, he writes: ‘… the fundamental problem, so often not addressed, is human numbers. There are already too many of us, and we cannot continue to multiply… ‘The greatest departure from the planet’s natural ecological restraints has been the increase in human numbers to far beyond carrying capacity. The increase was made possible at first by agriculture and second by the use of fossil fuels for energy. Both eventually result in the destruction of nature’s ecosystems.’ Mims warns that the three horsemen of the apocalypse - famine, war and pestilence - may yet take a hand in our fate. Within 20 years, there will be less than a hectare of arable land per person in the world and climate change will cause agricultural productivity to falter, raising the spectre of famine. Wars may break out over competition for space, food and goods. But the most likely horseman, he argues, is pestilence. A change in HIV to make it spread by droplets, or a new and virulent form of influenza - either could devastate our crowded species. We should heed Mims’ warning: he was, after all, once Professor of Microbiology at Guys Hospital Medical School. In its relatively small size and comprehensive overview of the problems confronting us, it is somewhat reminiscent of Ronald Wright’s Short History of Progress. As a scientist, Mims writes well for the lay reader. The book, however, could have done with an editor to pick up minor mistakes in fact and punctuation. Recommended. Jenny Goldie June-July 2006 edition accessible here
|