[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

ent to the biological significance of commodities, numerous other facets of
political economic theory continually raised the problem of the food supply. The
theories of rent, of the wages fund, and of the falling rate of profit, in addition to
the population principle, all demonstrate political economy s perennial preoccu-
pation with the physiological preconditions of labor and with the extent to which
commodity production and exchange are grounded in transfers of biological
energy. In short, classical political economy had formed itself around an environ-
mental dilemma, in which economic growth would always tend toward an
unbearably pressured agriculture.
Then, in the mid-Victorian decades, the focus on the biological aspects of
political economy both intensified and transformed itself, promising (falsely, it
turned out) some new solutions to the old problems. The sanitary condition of
Britain became a major concern of a group of political economists, who started a
current of thought that ran counter to the orthodox belief in agricultural deple-
tion, rising rents, and a falling rate of profit. The inquiry into  the health of towns
grew directly out of the reform of the Poor Laws through the extraordinary
efforts of the New Poor Law s main architect, who had previously been Jeremy
Bentham s amanuensis, Edwin Chadwick. Throughout the 1840s, 50s, and 60s,
Chadwick and other sanitarians tried to integrate the study of the nation s wealth
with that of its health, and Chadwick devised a scheme that would revolutionize,
he hoped, the ecology of food, by putting the city, hitherto merely a site of food
consumption, at the hub of a reconceived cycle of food production. Chadwick s
ambition was to overcome the Malthusian dilemma by reasserting and also
reimagining the connection between the national economy and its organic
environment, its life-supporting resources. In the Malthusian model, production
and consumption of food were clearly defined opposites; the energy spent on food
production needed to be replaced by food consumption, but the labor became
increasingly arduous while the yield became ever scanter. In the sanitarians
36
Occasional Papers
revision, though, consumption itself created by-products, human and other
animal wastes, that could be used to grow more food; these wastes were concen-
trated in the great towns. Sanitarians intended not only to dispose of the waste,
which caused disease, but also to put it back into the soil, which would in turn
become more fertile. Proposals abounded for returning the organic waste of towns
to the earth for use in further rounds of production, many of them asserting that
the tendency of food to become dearer and scarcer, the organic underpinning of
the falling rate of profit tendency, could be overcome by the proper husbanding of
human waste. Showing the kinship between economic and ecological thought in
this phase, one popular metaphor held that each nation had a God-given capital of
fertilizing elements which generated its food as interest.2 These fertilizing
elements included not only human waste but also (in some proposals) decompos-
ing human bodies. A way had to be found, sanitary reformers argued, to return
this capital to the food-producing earth, for if it were not returned, it would not
pay sufficient interest in calories to keep the population alive. That is, a model of
self-sustaining growth based on the continual recycling of the population s own
remains (the more people, the more waste; the more waste, the more food; the
more food, the more people; etc.) was imagined in response to the Malthusian-
Ricardian theory of diminishing returns. Moreover, the very thing that had seemed
most offensive about the cities the sheer amount of excrement they contained
became newly redemptive.
Chadwick famously wanted to build sewers not only to carry off London s
ordure but also to carry it down the river as manure for use in large-scale agricul-
tural endeavors. Given that London did not even have pressurized water or a
rudimentary sewer network at the time, Chadwick s was a hugely ambitious scheme.
Those who supported it set about making it seem like a practical necessity, largely
by publicizing how much recycling of human and other forms of waste already
took place in the capital and how much wealth it produced. A complementary
tactic was to stress the danger of letting the ordure lie in the city. Although there
was considerable disagreement over how large concentrations of decomposing
matter caused disease, everyone knew that they did. Life s remains had to be kept
in productive circulation, not allowed to wash away in the river or to accumulate
into stagnating pools and suffocating piles. Hence dead and decomposing human
37 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]