Do Flush Toilets Have Politics? Anthropocenic Reflections

Abstract

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the anthropocene as a new geological era, a new age of overwhelming human influence on the Earth’s ecosystems, starting with the rise of the modern industrial world. In this paper, I argue that one of the best ways to capture this global turning point in human-environment relations is to look at the development of the modern flush toilet and the wider waterborne system of waste disposal supporting its operation. Without really thinking about it, we have come to assume that this system of waste disposal is one of the basic requirements of an urban setting and one of the symbols of an advanced society. Yet, it is not clear that dumping excreta into any convenient body of water is the best way to handle local and global sanitation problems. We assume that flushing and forgetting rid us of the problem, when we have only compounded it by moving it to another place. Drawing on historical and anthropological research on the origins and the spread of the flush toilet globally, this paper calls for the need to reconsider standard accounts of the rise of modern sewage systems.