Then again, there is the issue of whether our current sewage management practices would be very affected by a switch to a lower energy regime.
Night-soil men, mudlarks, pure-finders, dredgermen, toshers; all are perfectly fine professions for the future, found right in the past.
I've yet to find a copy of Henry Mayhews London Labour and London Poor (originally printed in the mid 1800s), but I think you'll find all the answers right there.
You present an interesting case for how this kind of system would transform itself through to a low-energy regime, though it deals specifically with labour. I'm worried that it refers back to times when, despite the inputs of human capital into a sewage management system, there were still water qualitiy issues that seem to be solvable only by certain types of technological infrastructure apart from manual labour.
Yes, it does refer back "to times when." My point is not that the technological infrastructure was needed -- far from it. The people of Victorian England didn't have enough information about what caused disease to make rational decisions about infrastructure. Aw, fer fricks' sake, they thought bad smell caused plagues!
That doesn't make the main mover and shaker in a future sanitary regime any less manual. As long as we know what manual labour needs to happen, we only need to specify that it happen after we append a price to the job at hand. We only need to combine our sum total knowledge of the job with the needs of the energy-starved future.
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Night-soil men, mudlarks, pure-finders, dredgermen, toshers; all are perfectly fine professions for the future, found right in the past.
I've yet to find a copy of Henry Mayhews London Labour and London Poor (originally printed in the mid 1800s), but I think you'll find all the answers right there.
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That doesn't make the main mover and shaker in a future sanitary regime any less manual. As long as we know what manual labour needs to happen, we only need to specify that it happen after we append a price to the job at hand. We only need to combine our sum total knowledge of the job with the needs of the energy-starved future.
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