THE FORGOTTEN REFORMER WHO MADE CITIES LIVABLE

Edwin Chadwick, revolutionary thinker

By Richard Conniff

This article is excerpted and adapted from “Ending Epidemics: A History of Escape from Contagion” (The MIT Press)

It’s almost impossible now, thank God, to imagine the squalor of London and other supposedly civilized cities in the first half of the 19th century. As the rural poor moved to jobs in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, they overwhelmed the available housing and the adjacent, untended, and often uncovered, cesspools. Entire families commonly huddled together in single rooms, even in windowless basements. Overflowing sewage at times made entire cities feel as if adrift on a sea of human waste.

The result was a second revolution, for urban sanitary reform, and it succeeded largely through the outsize influence of one peculiar man. Edwin Chadwick, now mostly forgotten, was a barrister, journalist, and social reformer. From the early 1830s onward, Chadwick campaigned for the British government to intervene in matters of public health and welfare. He promoted essential urban services, including public water supply and sewerage, street cleaning, and garbage removal. Chadwick’s work transformed the character and well-being of cities not just in Britain but, by example, worldwide. Along the way, he helped to establish the basis for the modern liberal state. “Few men have done so much for their fellow-countrymen as Edwin Chadwick,” biographer R.A. Lewis wrote, “and received in return so little thanks.”

This uncelebrated status is no doubt due both to the lowliness of his chief subject — the disposal of human waste — and to Chadwick’s difficult personality. A sanitarian who was a friend described him in the heroic mode: “firm-set massive build,” “resolute expression,” “nose aquiline,” and “the head altogether large, and to the phrenologist finely developed.”

But photographs from the period show a tall, round-faced figure, in mustache and muttonchops, hair smeared in hanks across his balding scalp, peering out from heavy-lidded eyes with something like disdain. Chadwick made a reputation for prodigious energy, and for his command of the facts of any issue he studied. But he was also humorless and uncompromising toward those who disagreed with him. He made little effort to hide his contempt for aristocratic domination or for foot-dragging by corrupt or indifferent politicians.

He was also a bore, “a really outstanding specimen of bore in an age when the species flourished,” according to the otherwise admiring biography by Lewis. “Mr. Chadwick is not an orator,” a friend acknowledged. “When he first gets up to speak without book he looks an orator, but a few moments dispel the illusion.”

NAMIBIA TAKES A HAMMER TO ITS BELOVED COMMUNITY CONSERVANCIES

Community conservancies have thrived in part by protecting endangered black rhinos (Photo: Getty)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

In the starkly beautiful desert landscape of Namibia, on the southwest coast of Africa, I have followed behind as Khoisan trackers conducted a second-by-second forensic reconstruction of a murder scene. (The victim was a young giraffe pounced on by a leopard half its weight.) I have climbed mountainous red sand dunes to watch beetles doing handstands, so fog off the Atlantic could run down their backs to their mouths. And I have listened as a Namibian wildlife guide snapped off the pipe-like branch of a Euphorbia bush and explained how the nearby rhinos had evolved, in the absence of finer foods, to thrive on its milky, poisonous flesh.

Namibia has always seemed to me to be a wondrous country, and not just for its paradoxical richness of life in a sparse, arid habitat. Its Khoisan people have long regarded themselves as Earth’s oldest humans. (Recent genetic evidence indicates that they may be right.) And the desert is so deeply rooted in the culture that the national rugby team calls itself the “Welwitschias,” after a straggling desert plant that supposedly cannot die, though it looks as though it already has.

What has always seemed particularly wonderful to me is that, after an armed independence movement won Namibia’s freedom from South Africa in 1990, the new nation embraced an extraordinarily humane constitution protecting both the environment and the right of the people to support themselves by sustainable use of the land on which they lived.

Rhino trackers at Desert Rhino Camp in northwest Namibia (Photo: Richard Conniff)

In the starkly beautiful desert landscape of Namibia, on the southwest coast of Africa, I have followed behind as Khoisan trackers conducted a second-by-second forensic reconstruction of a murder scene. (The victim was a young giraffe pounced on by a leopard half its weight.) I have climbed mountainous red sand dunes to watch beetles doing handstands, so fog off the Atlantic could run down their backs to their mouths. And I have listened as a Namibian wildlife guide snapped off the pipe-like branch of a Euphorbia bush and explained how the nearby rhinos had evolved, in the absence of finer foods, to thrive on its milky, poisonous flesh.

The dominant SWAPO political party, formed from the armed independence movement, seemed, when I have visited over the years, to be following through on these commitments. With an area roughly equal to Texas and Louisiana combined, Namibia put more than 20 percent of its land under the control of community conservancies — clusters of subsistence farmers — who began to develop local economies based on wildlife tourism. Another 17 percent of the land area went into national parks. Wildlife populations soared as a result — tripling the elephant population, for instance, and almost doubling the number of mountain zebra, even as wildlife sharply declined elsewhere in Africa.

In a 2014 New York Times article, at the height of the rhino poaching crisis, I described Namibia as “just about the only place on earth to have gotten conservation right for rhinos and, incidentally, a lot of other wildlife.” For its people, too. Conservancy partnerships with tourism lodges and trophy hunting outfitters were already bringing new income to some of Namibia’s poorest and most remote communities. (In a rudimentary office somewhere between Palmwag and Kamanjab, the business manager for the local conservancy once proudly showed me how she totted up that year’s income on an Excel spreadsheet.)

But something has changed in Namibia. (Read the rest of this entry.)

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