Down the toilet: a splashy review best not read at the breakfast table.

The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage Jamie Benidickson University of British Columbia Press 432 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780774812917

For some reason the cold seems to release them. As I move through the frigid streets of Toronto, the noisome fumes of the city's underground digestive tract spew up through the sewer covers and grates into the windswept streets above. What would normally be a minor unpleasantness in urban life becomes for me--knowing that I will be writing an appreciation of Jamie Benidickson's The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage--an occasion for reflection on the dirty world that heaves and flows beneath the visible urban landscape.

I remember reading somewhere that without the invention of the elevator there could not have been buildings of more than six or so stories high, and therefore there could not have been modern cities. While Paris gives the lie to that contention, at least in part, there is nevertheless truth in this observation about the role of elevators in modern urban life. Equally, there would be truth in a similar observation on the sewage and water systems of cities; without them, it is difficult to imagine that the dense urban communities we know in the developed world could exist. It is this that Jamie Benidickson writes about, the complex web of pipes and conduits that lie just beneath our feet, bringing us the water of life and carrying away much of humanity's waste.

For Benidickson, the point of entry into this subterranean universe is the toilet. We all flush it several times a day and walk away without giving it a second thought. He has given it more than a second thought and wants us to do the same. And so we do if we read his book. There is a rich, fetid history in that toilet bowl. The author, an environmental lawyer at the University of Ottawa, takes us back in time and charts the evolution of elimination in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Despite the obvious advance in civilization that flushing represents to most of us, this is largely a sorry tale, describing the initially casual and ultimately determined destruction of the natural environment. Describing the use of water--in rivers and streams, in lakes and pipes and ponds, in the ocean itself--to carry away waste, the book is itself just a chapter in the larger story of humankind's destruction of the natural environment--the same shortsighted, unstoppable human impulses, the same convenient accommodation of law to economic progress, the same ambiguous role of science and technological development, the same belated realization of the real costs associated with modern convenience, the same feeling of hopelessness about what we are going to be able to do about it, and how quickly.

Benidickson has gathered an impressive range of information from both sides of the Atlantic, and shows several countries expelling their industrial and domestic waste in remarkably similar ways, and with strikingly similar effects on their rivers, lakes and beaches. He writes in a straightforward, non-technical way; the book speaks without artifice to lay readers and regular citizens about an environmental issue that is only rarely in public view in the developed world. Cast in the shadow by growing public alarm over climate change, particularly in the aftermath of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, water use and water quality tend to take second place in public consciousness, except when something like the tragedy of Walkerton strikes. Jamie Benidickson explains why this is a mistake.

I am surprised, however, that he did not make more of the larger environmental context in which his study of water and sewage fits so well. Both at the beginning and at the end of the manuscript, he speaks briefly of ecosystem integrity, biodiversity and sustainability, and in the closing pages refers to the first, second and third generations of environmental regulation of the post-war period, but much more could have been made of these larger themes and a bigger punch achieved. After all, a man whose other book is about water and the canoe clearly has views about environmental degradation, but, for the most part, Benidickson has kept his passion and his policy ideas in check. The Culture of Flushing is a work of social and economic history with an emphasis on the evolution of environmental law and regulation. It is a serious historical examination of the water and sewage systems of which flushing is a part, sober in tone and very informative in content. But it is not an agenda for reform.

Light-hearted this book ain't. I honestly didn't know what to expect when I opened it. One could imagine an amusing survey of outhouses, water closets, throne rooms and modern bathrooms--the institutional forms western society has elaborated to cloak and accommodate a basic bodily function. That is not what is going on here. This is serious stuff, although occasionally Benidickson's ironic sense of humour pokes through, as when he says "there is more than one way to skin a cat (a proposition I am prepared to take on faith)," or when he characterizes Ontario premier Leslie Frost's exquisite efforts to have it all ways at once, environmentally speaking, as "verbal gymnastics ... of Olympic calibre."

There is, though, I must admit, one poo joke--Winnie the Pooh, that is. Told by a six-year-old who phoned a Calgary call-in show to ask the hosts why Tigger put his head in the toilet. He was looking for Pooh, of course. Being a bear of very little brain myself, I could not resist listing the variety of expressions used to describe what Jamie Benidickson's daughter called the "S--" word. I counted ten different terms, some of them drawn from 19th-century reports the author cites: excreta, fecal matter, human waste, excrement, most disgusting and filthy matter, residuals, manurial resources (my personal favourite), solid refuse, excrementitious deposits (a close second, in my opinion) and simple filth. I may have missed some, but you get the idea. We all get the idea. This is a book you can read at a high or a low level; I have read it at both.

David Cameron is chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He has divided his time between public service and academic life. Among his most recent publications is Street Protests and Fantasy Parks: Globalization, Culture and Society (University of British Columbia Press, 2002), edited with Janice Gross Stein.