2. | The Great Horse Manure Crisis Reveals Something Unexpected

Many significant crises we face might need a different approach and can be solved based on a universal pattern

Translation from Estonian: Janina Karemäe

If there were a manual entitled "Crisis Management ABC," the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 occurring in London and New York would certainly be one of the candidates for the best example of the global crisis resolution process throughout the entire history.

If we were to compare the world today and in 1894, we could see that the number and scale of crises have certainly been growing. Therefore, it would be useful to think back to what the problem was then, how it was perceived, what were the ways of finding a solution, and what ultimately happened.

It might be difficult for people today to imagine, but in 1894 everything that took place on the streets was either horse-powered or human-powered. Vehicles and machines came much later. Horses performed the hardest duties, and both New York and London were home to approximately 200,000 horses. Today we might think that horses are cute, but in those times, the situation was much more complicated.

In a day, a horse could produce a bucketload of urine and several bucketloads of manure. In all major cities around the world, streets were - to a greater or lesser degree - covered with wet slush of horse excrement, the stench of which overwhelmed the city. The "cherry on top" was the fact that the life span of overworked horses was around three years, which meant that over 50,000 horses died annually. Since their bodies were massive and there was no machinery to remove them, often the only available solution was to allow the corpses to rot until they could be removed in smaller pieces.

We may say that all today's eco-disasters are just minuscule compared with the reality that people faced then. As with the case of any crisis, scientists calculated the future based on present trends. In 50 years, every street in a city would be buried under three meters of manure, and the cities would be rendered uninhabitable. International conferences were held, and scientists were asked to tackle the problem, but to no avail - there was no reasonable solution.

Today we know that the solution was found quite soon after the problem had culminated. However, it did not come from scientists; instead, the source of the solution was innovation, or rather from cars that were invented through innovation.

Naturally, cars created yet another problem, namely air polluting exhaust gases, but this problem today has mostly been resolved through innovation.

So, what can we learn from history? The first lesson is that if the basis of a problem is a certain level of ignorance (in the given case, the technological incapability), then the problem will stay insurmountable unless we exceed this level of ignorance. In other words: a solution can only stem from innovation that reduces our ignorance.

Secondly, most if not all predictions of scientists were incorrect because they were based on a linear approach, on the assumption that our knowledge and the processes occurring would remain the same throughout times. History has, however, demonstrated that this is not so, and therefore we should perceive any negative predicted scenarios with a grain of salt.

In 1970, when Earth Day was first celebrated, scientists made a multitude of apocalyptic predictions (otherwise, nobody would have noticed them, and we would not remember them today). The main common denominator of all these predictions was that an ecological or another catastrophe was just 10 to 30 years away.

In conclusion, I would also like to point to the fact that the root cause of the horse manure crisis was equine transport. Yet, without equine transport, it would have been impossible to progress to vehicle transport and other technical achievements of today. Therefore, we should regard today's prophets of the apocalypse as people who perhaps have not investigated crises around the world or their dynamics. They are unable to notice that many of the things that might seem like a crisis today could merely be necessary transitionary stages to a solution and then to a new (higher-level) crisis.

On a final note, the word "crisis," which comes from the Greek language, has several meanings. One of them, which many have perhaps overlooked, is this: crisis = possibility.