The 'Great Manure Crisis' of the 1890s
According to Suskind in his fantastic book from the beginning of the Covid Pandemic, the 'Great Manure Crisis' of the 1890s was quite the boy who cried wolf. But we should expect that anxious boy to rear his head during times of change, the Paul Revere of our childhood fears, “The British Are Coming” may just as well have been “The Bogeyman, the one underneath your bed from your childhood is coming!” Y2K was to be our end. Then the inevitable decline of our civilisation due to overpopulation, till inflation took care of that all by herself (inflation is female in my mind, I don’t know why) In major cities like London and New York, transportation relied heavily on horses. A horse-drawn tram required a team of eight horses. A healthy horse can produce between fifteen and thirty pounds of manure a day. One health officer in Rochester, New York calculated that the city's horses produced enough manure in a year to cover an acre of land to a height of 175 feet. Some people even