Rose George (1) (1969–)

As a typical Westerner ( I think) I had never thought about dirty latrines, or even "bush squatting" as anything more than a nasty inconvenience of traveling in developing countries. But George points out the great hazards to human health posed by ...poop. While the tone is often humorous, the subject is serious, and George provides an easy to read, interesting overview of the problems of human waste and safe drinking water. She visits India, China and Tanzania, among other places, to show more describe and analyze a variety of attempted solutions. The general conclusion of the book seems to be that this is a problem we can't afford to ignore, but that may have differing solutions in different places. Our Western solution (which is currently seen as the "gold standard") of washing waste away by mixing it with clean drinking water, seems wasteful to me after reading about the variety of other options being explored. show less

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Book Report: The crapper. The toilet. The convenience. The Porcelain God. Of them all, it's the last one that's the most correct. We should worship the waste-disposal vessel in every American home, because it and the infrastructure that supports it, invisibly to the end users, make modern life as clean, comfortable, and healthy as possible.

Rose George has done us all the service of surveying the world's various systems and non-systems of waste disposal. She reports show more from the front lines of poop removal all over the planet, and let me just say that, after reading her reports, I am profoundly grateful to her that I now know what I do, without having to go and see and experience and smell all the things she did.

An entire caste of women exist in India who make a living scooping poop. Not dog poop, either. A whole continent, Africa, has dams and irrigation canals and other water control systems, and vanishingly small numbers of waste-disposal plants; water-borne illnesses, usually code for “fecal bacteria contaminated water”, kill millions there.

Aid donors don't want to pay for sewerage systems. Not glamourous enough. Local authorities don't know what to demand. The populace doesn't know there's another possibility. So generation after generation after generation gets sick, most often dies young, and all for the lack of a few lousy billions spent on treating human waste.

Billions, to a country like this one with an annual income in the multi-trillions, ought not to be a big deal. Wouldn't be, either, if we hadn't spent several trillion bombing people who did nothing at all to us. Had to use the Chinese sugar daddy's credit card to do it, too. Now our grandkids will be lucky if they get clean water, since the asshole elite spent all that borrowed money on doing nothing worthwhile.

My Review: Oh dear, I'm off on my anti-conservative ranting again. Sorry. This book made me madder'n a swatted wasp. It makes me want to hurl when I read about the idiot Wall Street banks and bankers whimpering about their taxes, and how poorly they're spent on things like roads and bridges and health care and schools. Next up, and I am dead serious about this, next up is clean water. Privatize it, like the English did! Like we did with cable and phones! (How much more do you spend now on your phone than you did 30 years ago? I found an old bill from May 1984...$25. Now, over $200. Inflation doesn't account for but about half that increase.)

So when dysentery carries off your 90-year-old mother or your grandbaby, conservative voters, do not even think about complaining. YOU DID IT. show less

My cousin A. (who is a kind and generous person, a sterling example of the apple falling far, far away from the family tree) once complimented me on my willingness to address problems. Well, I said, what gets done when we ignore things?

This book makes me feel like I've spent my life willfully blind. HOW IS IT THAT I'VE NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT POO?

Sad-faced celebrities talk about helping people obtain access to water and helping girls get menstrual supplies so they can go to school -- what they show more mean (sayeth George) is that the girls' school toilets are filled with shit. There is shit on the floor and shit in the sinks; plastic bags are available for wiping, and the bags are left in a pile. This isn't about lazy people who can't be bothered to flush, it's a structural problem: almost no one has a flush toilet. Hundreds of thousands of people use latrines. The unlucky people use a bucket. The really unfortunate don't have that much.

People don't like talking about shit. It's gross and it smells bad and it's embarrassing. So until very recently, there existed no global organization to deal hands-on (as it were) with our global problem -- which makes things worse. Human shit brings disease: cholera, dysentery, typhus, worms of all sorts. I mean, you know about Typhoid Mary; she inadvertently killed any number of people because she had crappy (sorry) toilet access. (And then she was locked up for the rest of her life, a convenient scapegoat for a problem she hadn't really caused, and couldn't fix.)

Cleaning up human shit is human work. Specifically, it is women's work. (Even in our first-world countries, yes. Who changes the most diapers? Who cleans the most bedpans?) My cold, jaded heart feels a sneaking suspicion that the sexism in the division of labor, moreso than the act of the labor itself, is the real reason why shit is shameful, hidden, unspeakable, and ignored in favor of "more important" topics. But what is more important than the basics (she asks, rhetorically)? And how much more basic than shit can you get?

We're embarrassed to talk about it. Maybe we should be embarrassed to ignore it. show less

This is the compelling and interesting story of how those big steel boxes, shipping containers, you see on trains and trucks make their way across the oceans.

George was given the unique opportunity to take passage on the Maersk Kendal on a voyage from Felixstowe, UK to Singapore. It’s a trip that took her to points of call in Europe, through the Suez Canal (dubbed by all crews passing through as the “Marlboro Canal” for the copious amounts of said cigarette passed out as bribes there), show more and through pirate infested waters.

The huge container ships are the product of a 1956 innovation, the standardized shipping container, which started to revolutionize shipping in the late 1960s. It reduced the percentage of an item’s price that represents shipping costs from 25 percent to 2.5 percent. It destroyed the influence of dockworkers. Whereas it would take days to unload cargo from even a medium size ship in pre-container days, even the largest container ship can be unloaded in less than a day. It also destroyed local jobs. It’s cheaper to ship fish caught off the coast of Scotland to China to have them filleted and ship them back rather than hire Scotsmen to do the filleting.

The crews of the container ships don’t know or care what are in the containers unless it’s toxic, flammable, or needs refrigeration.

Neither, for that matter, do port authorities. In the wake of 9/11, the US pushed an international protocol, the Secure Freight Initiative for cargo inspection. Implemented in 2007, it sought to inspect every container being received in the US. By 2013, it had managed, at best, five percent in Hong Kong. It still seems merely a security bureaucrat’s dream.

And sometimes the containers fall off the ship or have their contents pilfered in in port.

The ships themselves are crewed by small numbers of people with Filipinos being the predominant nationality. They work cheap – sometimes way cheaper than the official books maintained for the International Transport Worker’s Federation indicate. And they speak English. Attempts have been made to institute stripped down English dialects, Maritime English and Seaspeak, but they are little used.

That contributes to a sense of isolation among the multinational crews, not really alleviated by the onboard gyms, certainly not alleviated by the poor food. Crews, at least in 2013 (the situation seems to have improved lately), had no internet or phone access, their emails routed through the captain for transmission. They spend their off deck hours in their spartan furnished berths.

One of the narrative side trips George takes is to the Seafarer’s Center in Immingham, UK. It is one of many religious organizations tending to ships’ crews throughout the world. These days, in line with the general decline in church attendance, their church services are taken advantage of less than the cheap SIM cards, batteries, and warm clothing they provide. A popular item is cheap souvenirs for families back home, evidence of visits the seafarers never made. A crewmember on a container ship may spend as little as two hours in port after months at sea. A particularly poignant story is told of the crew of one ship who simply wanted, in their short time on land, to walk barefoot on grass for an hour. (For Maersk employees, there’s no drinking on ship or on shore.)

The sea is, of course, a hostile environment, and George discusses the various unpleasant things that can happen to the human body adrift in a lifeboat. The mariner code of honor – that those in peril are assisted no matter how much expense incurred in missed berthing slots or fuel or time – is fraying. Captain Glenn Wostenholme of the Maersk Kendal, a man with more than 40 years at sea, won a medal for rescuing part of the crew of a Thai cargo ship in 2007. Of the five ships in the area when a distress call was put out, one simply ignored it. Two said they would answer the call and didn’t.

There are few consequences for ignoring this code even though it is actually a legal obligation under an international convention. The legal environment international shipping exists in makes enforcing liability claims against it or labor regulations complicated. Ships fly “flags of convenience” (the Maersk Kendal has a vast cupboard of different flags) and are registered to various countries including some that have no connection to the sea at all. Mongolia is a popular country of registration along with Panama and Liberia. The shipowners may belong to a third country.

And this legal arrangement can not only screw crews over with rickety, unsafe ships and unanswered rescue pleas, companies have been known to simply abandon their crews in port with no money when they go bankrupt or determine they simply don’t want to run a ship anymore. Some stranded crews have been known to take to killing stray dogs for food.

And, of course, there are pirates, particularly Somali pirates at the time of this book. (The Somali piracy problem seems to have lessened in the years since with prosecutions, rare when it was written, being stepped up.) George spends some time with a multi-national force patrolling the vast “high risk area” extending from eastern Africa into the Indian Ocean for pirates.

George is markedly less sympathetic to the pirates than the military people and even Maersk Kendal’s crew are. She quotes fatuous articles from business magazines on the “entrepreneurial model” of Somali piracy which aims at securing hostages for ransom. The navies feel sorry for the Somalis they detain. (Rumors have that the Russian Navy simply blew up Somali pirate vessels along with their crew.) She talked with a man taken hostage by Somalians, and we hear of torture, bad food, and the terror of dealing every day with khat-chewing, gun-waving Somali. We also hear from a highly paid consultant on the intricacies of conducting ransom negotiations with pirates. No one, including George, seems to seriously entertain the idea of simply destroying known pirate bases in Somalia.

Besides tagging along with the pirate patrol, George takes us to a Massachusetts whale watching group to talk about the disruptive effects of maritime traffic, specifically the noise of ships’ propellers, on marine life. Ship’s crews generally like whales and dolphins and are happy to see them and slow their ships down to alleviate the ocean’s noise problem in particularly affected areas. Ship owners, of course, often have other ideas.

George occasionally reaches back into history for fascinating stories and facts. She does that with the lack of respect the merchant marine received in America and Britain during World War Two as well as her chapter on the miseries of being in a lifeboat.

In 1904, Andrew Furuseth, a labor organizer for seafarers, was threatened with jail. His reply was, go ahead, put him in jail. His cell would be bigger than his ship quarters, the food better, and the isolation less than what he would suffer at sea. Captain Wostenholme, near the end of his career, emails his employer,

“You can see how we are really thought of . . . Riffraff that no one really cares about, no matter the lip service paid to our safety and welfare by the likes of owners, flag states . . . We are mere chattels, a human resource, dispensable nonentities.”

George’s book is very slightly dated now but still a fascinating, well-presented account of a life that most of us are fortunate enough to avoid – even though we benefit from “that ninety percent of everything” it delivers to us. show less