[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, your job among other things, one of the biggest aspects of your job is mucking out the stalls of nearly three dozen horses and we just looked it up and that involves among other things clearing away 35 to 50 pounds of shit per horse per day. So, you’re talking almost a ton of poop that you’re hauling away every day.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Also, the shavings that come with it, the hay, the piss.
Rosner: The piss on hay, yeah so the whole thing is well over a ton by hand with a shovel and wheelbarrows. That reminded me of one of the biggest, I don’t know if you could call it ecological, but environmental crises in cities at the beginning of the 20th century which was all the horseshit. They couldn’t deal with it, they didn’t know what to do with it, and the streets were just full of shit. Carol and I are watching this HBO show called The Gilded Age by the guy who did Downton Abbey, which is Manhattan in 1882 and they just left the shit out, they show the street but they don’t show any horseshit but in reality during that era the population of Manhattan since World War II during the day when people come to Manhattan to work is roughly 8 million. So you go back to 1900, we could look it up but I’m not able to right here, you’re probably talking close to a million people in 1900 on the island of Manhattan during a work day. And the number of horses it took to support that; to transport and to deliver shit to them, it’s got to be many tens of thousands, say just to round number, a 1,00,000 thousand horses on the island of Manhattan conserve times a 25th of a ton per horse per day is 4000 tons of shit deposited onto the streets every day and nobody knew what to do about it. I guess as the population continued to grow, which meant the horse population grew, it got worse and worse and it must have been inches deep in most places and the only thing that ended the crisis was cars and other forms of transport but mostly cars. It’s a lot of shit.
There’s a saying that in every breath you take, you’re breathing in a molecule that Napoleon breathed. That’s something else we could look up. It might be a molecule that used to be part of a Napoleon, I don’t know but when you do the calculations of how much shit is produced by… well humans are the most numerous mega fauna on earth right now. Mega fauna is large animals and so eight billion humans times conservatively nearly a kilo of shit per human per day. Now we’re going to go to metric tons; that’s four million metric tons of shit made by humans every day. At least most places have sewage systems that are able to pull the useful shit out of shit. My writing partner and I, for a bit we were going to do for Jimmy Kimmel toward the Hyperion sewage treatment plant down around El Segundo on the coast of L.A; it’s a sewage treatment plant the size of Disneyland and they pull the fertilizery shit out of shit and out of sewage water, they recycle the water and they send the shit up north as fertilizer.
But when you think of how much of our world was at one time shit, how many of the molecules in our bodies were at one time harder turds; it has to be significant. It’s something we could probably look up. There’s a quote ‘ashes to ashes dust to dust’, it’s pretty high so it might be the Bible. In any case it’s not that we’re turning back to dust probably on an aggregate life basis. We’re turning back and forth between shit. We leave a 70-80 kilo body when we die but during our lives we generate close to 20,000 kilos of shit. So, the dust of our bodies is is less than one percent of the of our lifetime totals of shit we extrude.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 