Source : The Star Online, 30th November 2015
By PHILIP HOARE
Most societies are averse to animal waste but in India, cow dung is widely used as cooking fuel. Photo: AFP
It is a
logical result of extinction, so one wonders why no one bothered to do the sum
before: What happened to the world when it lost the cumulative billions of
tonnes of faeces produced by mammoths, sloths and whales?
A new
study from the University of Vermont has shown that the planet has suffered
two-fold from the removal of this biomass. Not only from the lack of diversity
created by the extinctions of ancient megafauna and modern, human-induced
depletions of many species – from seabirds to elephants, and whales – but from
what they once did for our planet by spreading their poo around, redistributing
nutrients and fertilising new growth.
“The
past was a world of giants,” the new paper rhapsodises, evoking an Edenic world
– albeit one full of poo. Dr Joe Roman, co-author of the study, says: “This
once was a world that had 10 times more whales, 20 times more anadromous fish
like salmon, double the number of seabirds, and 10 times more large herbivores
like giant sloths and mastodons and mammoths … this broken global cycle may
weaken ecosystem health, fisheries and agriculture.”
Remove
all that guano and poo from the planet and you are left with a greatly reduced
fertility. The scientists behind the study estimate that the capacity of land
animals to spread nutrients has fallen to 8% below its value before 150 species
of ice age mammals went extinct. Until now, it was thought that animals played
a minor role in the process. But the new study indicates that they acted, en masse,
as a “distribution pump”, fertilising new areas that would otherwise be
unproductive.
The
paper is a follow-up to one that appeared last year, also co-authored by Roman,
which reported the ameliorating effect that whale faeces has on climate change,
fixing carbon in the oceans by fertilising phytoplankton growth.
Last
year’s scientific paper from the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Robert Rocha and
others indicated that in the 20th century alone, nearly three million whales
were killed. The removal of such a vast volume of biomass from the Earth’s
environment has had an incalculable effect. As George Monbiot notes in his book Feral, sperm whales, the
deepest diving of all whales, also stirred up nutrients from the ocean bed.
But the
University of Vermont’s report also speaks to our philosophical attitude to
faeces. Why do we spend billions to get rid of our waste – other than out of a
strange hatred of our own bodily functions? Imagine what all those lost
nutrients could do – not least in generating bio-responsible power.
Our
modern disassociation from poo speaks volumes. In the past, human excrement was
a vital part of the food chain, with “night soil” regularly used to feed the
ground – and thus the plants that we, or our animals, ate. During the 19th century,
the gathering of dog poo for the tanning industry was a specific trade,
somewhat paradoxically known as pure finding.
Imagine,
too, in a pre-combustion engine city the size of London, New York or Paris, the
volume of horse manure being produced each day. Character-istically, the great
horse manure crisis of 1894, when it was predicted that London’s streets would
be overwhelmed by dung – was precipitated by the invention of chemical
fertilisers, thereby creating a whole new set of problems for the environment.
Now we
can barely bring ourselves to mention the subject. But without poo, we would be
nothing. Funny how it takes mass extinction to remind us of that fact. –
Guardian News Service
http://www.star2.com/living/living-environment/2015/11/30/a-new-look-at-poo/
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