*Water 4.0*

That is the new book by David Sedlak and the subtitle is The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource.  I found this consistently interesting, going well beyond the usual anecdotes one finds in the other general “history of water” books.  Here is one bit about Japanese water relations being Coasean in earlier times:

In Japan, human wastes were separated prior to recycling.  Fecal matter was the more valuable commodity, because solids were easier to transport.  In the first stage of the recycling process, landlords sold the feces in their tenants’ cesspools to merchants who were members of a guild that had secured the right to collect the wastes from that part of the city.  The wastes were so valuable that the rent of an apartment would increase if the number of people living in the house, and hence the amount of solid waste produced, decreased.  When it came time to renegotiate the price for the wastes, the guilds sometimes fought with each other for the rights to buy the increasingly valuable fertilizer.

Urine — the less prized waste — was still a marketable commodity.  Because of its lower value, tenants, who owned the rights to their urine, sold it to a group of merchants who were not part of the fecal waste guild.

That discussion, by the way, is drawing upon this S.B. Hanley piece.

Recommended.

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