I’ve come across this quote from Winston Churchill:
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
How far back can we go with sanitation? Well, there were sewers some 5000 years ago in the city of Moenjodaro (now a World Heritage Site) in present-day Sindh province, Pakistan – see Moenjodaro: A 5,000-year-old Legacy by Khurshid Hasan Shaikh and Syed M. Ashfaque (published by UNESCO, 1981), and Water supply and sewage disposal at Mohenjo-Daro by M. Jansen (World Archaeology 1989, 21 (2), 177−192).
So how much farther forward are we likely to see? Well, clearly not 5000 years, maybe 50 years at best. What are we likely to see? A highly urbanized world, for sure, probably a highly ‘periurbanized’ world. With what sanitation? Well, hopefully by then the world will have come to its senses and simplified sewerage with be the urban/periurban norm. Sewers in the past, simplified sewers in the future. But we shouldn’t wait for the future: we need to start installing simplified sewerage on a very large scale now. When are we going to realise this?
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.